Northwest Public Television | Gustafson_Leonard
Robert Bauman: We're ready to go. So if we could start by having you say your name and spell your last name for us.
Leonard Gustafson: Okay. You ready?
Bauman: Yep.
Gustafson: Okay. I'm Leonard Gustafson. Last name is spelled G-U-S-T-A-F-S-O-N.
Bauman: All right. And my name's Robert Bauman. And today's date is October 16th, as we clarified, 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start, if we could, by having you tell us when you came to Hanford, what brought you here, how you heard about the place.
Gustafson: Okay.
Bauman: Why you came here.
Gustafson: Well, we do that almost any direction. I knew about the place so for a couple reasons, but the main reason was that some of my fellow chemical engineers from Montana State University had come over a year or two earlier. And so when I finished up at Bozeman and started looking for a job, it seemed like I might take at least a temporary assignment at this wartime installation until I found a real job. So I arrived on October 15th of 1950. It's been a little while ago isn't it? 63 years.
Bauman: Almost your anniversary, yeah.
Gustafson: Went through, I guess, the normal procedures. Found out about what was going on in the plant, and security, and a little bit about how to deal with radioactive materials. And then I was assigned to my first tasks. I was what they called a Supervisor-in-Training, and went into the operations part of the chemical processing department. My first building that I went to was T Plant. The T Plant, the bismuth phosphate separation plant. And about all I did there was so learn how to detect contamination and clean it up. I always tell the story that the operators really loved having these young supervisors-in-training come in, because they could hand them a bucket of acetone, or something like that, and bundle of rags, and a cutie pie—which was our instrument for detecting radiation—and send us out to scrub the deck. In the separation plants, and this was common after the crane operator removes the blocks from the cells, he always leaves a little bit of contamination on the deck. So that's a rather regular job. So I learned how to handle the cutie pie. And how to go through the—how to dress. Put us in our white coveralls and learn how to go through what we called at that time, the SWP, Special Work Permit. It's been called many different things. Anyhow, that started me out. After I believe it was about two months in T Plant, I was assigned to the startup of the REDOX operation. Now the REDOX was the first of the solvent extraction plants. So it was essentially near completion there at the end of 1950, the beginning of 1951. So we went through the final inspection processes and started up. And then I was assigned to one of the four operating shifts that operated that building. This was extremely interesting. It was like a great big pilot plant laboratory, and we chemical engineers essentially had the responsibility for operating. We moved into that plant without having much time for a lot of training and procedural preparation. So in order to at least establish some kind of order beyond simple procedures. The operation was strictly conducted by the engineers, by the supervisors. Each shift had eight shift supervisors and two senior supervisors. And initially all the operation was conducted by the supervisors. The operators were just learning at that stage. After, oh, year or so, the operators were ready to run the plant. We didn't need so many supervisors. So in late 1953, I went out on another rather interesting assignment. Engineering at that time was responsible for inspection. We didn't have anything like quality assurance organizations. So engineering inspectors took care of the required inspection of any materials or equipment that we were ordering from Hanford. I was assigned mostly out in the Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky area, New York. I spent a little over a year. It was a very active thing. Frequently I'd turn in an expense account for seven different locations in a week. So is this about--
Bauman: Yeah, this is great.
Gustafson: --where you want to go? I can cut things pretty short if you'd like.
Bauman: This is great. Keep going.
Gustafson: So anyhow, we got into some fabulous big plants and all this sort of thing. Learned a little more about how to build things. Because some of the time we were actually not only assigned for the final inspections, but we went right through all the manufacturing stages. I returned then to Richland in the beginning of 1955. By that time, the PUREX plant was nearing completion. That was the second of the big solvent extraction plants. So I was assigned for the startup and so on of that plant. My final assignment there was basically I was the operating supervisor for C shift. C shift was one of the four shifts that was responsible for operating the plant. By that time, the operators were pretty well trained, so I had about 18 or 19 operators and two chief operators. And there was one technical man also assigned to the shift. I'd have to look upon that assignment as probably the most responsible job I ever had, starting up and running that plant. The operating group was basically responsible for the main process. The shift crews have the responsibility to run it, unless there were some real serious problem or question, we have to find the answers and go ahead and do it. There were many experiences there, but I was--after a couple years, well, I'd been married in the process there at the end of ‘55. My wife was a teacher and it was getting to the point where shift work was not the most desirable. We'd touch base occasionally. So I moved into one of the engineering groups again in the separations department, process design and development. [UNKNOWN], just one who is still around, managed that group. A good friend. And so I spent a couple years in that work. We were basically responsible for new activities or problem activities that the engineering group was supposed to take care of to support the operations. So after two or three years there, I thought it was about time to see some more of the plant, so I moved on down to the 300 Area, and worked with the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor. So I spent a couple three years there. So that had to be about 1960, 1961, somewhere in there. I didn't get the exact dates. So I went through the startup and operation of the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor. Now this was not associated with plutonium production. This was really in support of the oncoming nuclear industry for power production, for electrical production. And the reason for the PRTR was to demonstrate that plutonium could be used as well as uranium-235 as the fissile fuel for commercial reactors. It was a successful project. And at that time, projects were completed on time and usually under budget. So it was a success as far as I'm concerned. After that plant is operating and they didn't have much need for me around anymore, I moved on out to the 100 Areas. And good friend of mine, Gene Astley, asked me one day what I was doing. I said, well, I guess I'm about ready to do something else. And so he said, well, come on out work for me for a while. So I went out to the 100 Areas, must've been ‘64 or ‘65, and worked largely with so water plant type problems and questions that were going on. Now we're getting into the area where we're getting about ready to--the Cold War was sort of winding up. So production wasn't the number one priority anymore. There were a lot of questions about what was the future of Hanford and so on at that time. So after working a couple three years out there, I guess not quite, I moved on down to the fuels department and worked with Charlie Mathis, the manager of fuels production at that time—this must've been about ‘65. And my main activity there was mostly planning, what are we going to do with the fuels manufacturing plants in the future? So very, very interesting and we worked along with—Roy Nielsen had a group that was overall Hanford planning at that time. So after a couple years there in the fuels department, I actually moved into Roy's group. And so this had to be ‘67, maybe ‘66, I'm not real sure. With that assignment, one of the things that was done at that time the AEC, countrywide, was studying and planning for what to do with the nuclear facilities and how they were going to support commercial electrical power generation. So they had a group down at Oak Ridge that was called the AEC Combined Operational Planning Group. And Hanford, as well as most of the sites, were responsible for providing two or three representatives. So I spent about a year and a half down there. That was in basically ‘68. Of course, that was quite fascinating, because we were looking at the overall AEC complex and what was the future for nuclear power, essentially. One of the things I got involved with were the nuclear power forecasts. I spend a lot of time at headquarters. Frank Baranowski was the head of the production division, essentially responsible for Hanford, Savannah River, Oak Ridge—all of the main production facilities. I spent some time with him every now and then. Very fine fellow. And so after year and half or so there, I felt it was about time to get back home. And we had actually moved the family there, so we moved completely and sold our house and rented in Oak Ridge. So we came back to Richland at I guess the end of ‘69. And one of the big activities at that time was the FFTF. So I again I went with the FFTF project. So I changed, I had been with Douglas United Nuclear, so at that time I went to Battelle who was responsible for the early FFTF bid. My good friends Astley and Condoda, who were the manager an engineering manager, they did not stay with the project. We Indians sort of stayed with it. That was when the AEC—the Milt Shaw years—decided that Battelle was not adequately competent to take on a project like that. They needed somebody with more, I guess, manufacturing and big project experience. So Westinghouse had been assigned to take over that responsibility by the AEC. So I then became a Westinghouse employee. Spent most of the next, I guess, ten years with the FFTF project until it was a complete and operating. By that time we're getting up to 1980 range. So those were interesting times. We had a lot particularly early conflict. The assigning of Westinghouse to take overlooked project didn't really satisfy what Milt Shaw was after. We had a rather severe conflict. Milt Shaw was finally ousted. I still don't know for sure who was the most influential in getting that because the project was floundering. We moved the AEC representatives from Washington, DC. The most closely associated came to Hanford and became essentially the FFTF project office on site. Most of the closely associated Westinghouse staff who had been in Pittsburgh moved to Hanford. And we were able to work over a local table rather than on the phone and at crazy meetings. And the FFTF came together quite well. I think it was very successful project. Perhaps we didn't finish it under budget, but we did well after it was reorganized. It started up and ran very successfully. Too bad that we couldn't find a better use for the plant. Of course, the liquid metal fast breeder program essentially fizzled. Let's see, from that—well, I'm getting pretty well along and I needed something maybe a little different. So I got into a rather, again, what I regard as an interesting assignment. Westinghouse there somewhere close to the period ‘78, ‘79, ‘80, had been assigned to run a nuclear quality assurance program office. And although Westinghouse Hanford was running that office, we were really a part of the AEC, or what became DoE. The work we did the next few years was largely to try and add something, coordinate the quality assurance programs around all of the sites. Lots of travel involved. Lots of lecturing. Lots of QA audits. I ran so many QA audits that I can't remember. Like I tell people, I got into more parts of Savannah River than most of the people who worked there. I think I was involved in at least 30 audits there over the years. This evolved into--that office—let’s see, it finally closed down in ’87, perhaps. And so I came back to a more conventional Hanford-type quality assurance and did that until I retired in ‘90. One of the last projects that I was on there was an SP-100. We were going to do a space reactor. And SP-100 was an interesting project, but it also never came to pass. Amazingly, ended up back in the PRTR building. Because we cleaned out some of the cells in the PRTR building and were going to put in a big vacuum tank there so we could simulate space for running this space reactor. Let's see, where'd I go from there? After I spent a little bit of time with a number of the waste program projects, including our own, and got into a little bit of the early vitrification plant. I retired in, what, December of ‘90. Spent the next three or four years doing part-time consulting. The main thing that I was associated with at that time was another interesting project. The only really commercial chemical reprocessing plant that was built was the West Valley plant, just south of Buffalo, New York. It was a small, but commercial, reprocessing plant. See, most of the reprocessing was shut down in 1970. And of course, that led to a lot of problems here at Hanford. Early '70s. I could go on about that for hours, but-- [LAUGHTER] Let's see. So I spent a lot of time at West Valley. And that was very separate. It didn't hit the newspapers. But that plant was completed. The waste that they had was vitrified into glass. And as far as I know, it's sitting there ready to go wherever. It could be up the mountain, but who knows. It's a good project in many ways.
Bauman: So you've had a long and varied career in many ways. A number of different assignments.
Gustafson: Yes, I think so. I think I was very lucky to see so much.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you a few questions about some of the things you worked on. So you said you worked at both REDOX and PUREX. Could you explain the solvent extraction, and what that means?
Gustafson: Yeah. Well, you know the purpose of our chemical processing, or chemical separation plants here at Hanford, is to take the fuel that has been irradiated in our reactors and extract from that the plutonium. And get the plutonium into a form so it can then go on down to Los Alamos for the bombs. So the chemical reprocessing plants essentially dissolve this uranium metal fuel that had been irradiated in the reactors, and a small amount of the uranium-238 has been converted into plutonium-239. And of course the atomic bombs can use either uranium-235 or plutonium-239 as their fissile source. So these plants are gigantic. They're 1,000 feet long, great big canyon buildings, as we called them. Basically just involve a lot of chemicals running from one end to the other. We start with the fuel and end up with--in the initial separation plants, they ended up with a waste stream that also included the uranium. Now we wanted to recover that uranium, so that early waste from the B and T Plants, as we refer it, these were the early bismuth phosphate separation plants. The waste from those reprocessed to recover the uranium. And the high level elements that we wanted to get rid of were put back into the waste tanks. But in both the REDOX and the PUREX processes, we actually extracted both the plutonium and uranium. So we ended up with two products. So the uranium could be immediately converted into UO-3 and then eventually back in the metal. And the plutonium could be converted into metal so it could be used for the bombs. So kind of an oversimplification there.
Bauman: And so your work there—your position there was operational management?
Gustafson: I was mostly associated with the direct operation. In the 200 Areas, except I said, after my PUREX assignment I was in just what we call the process design and development. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And then you talked about this AEC combined operational planning group that you were part of in the late '60s. And you said, one of questions you were looking at was, what's the future of nuclear power? Did the group come up with any conclusions about that at the time in the late '60s, what the future of nuclear power was?
Gustafson: Well, I think we were quite optimistic about nuclear power at that time. Of course, also what was developing was resistance to nuclear power. So our forecasts were extremely optimistic. And although we did end up finally with about 120 operating power production plants in the United States, far short of what we expected. The government had assumed, basically, I guess, overall responsibility to see that the technology is okay. And in particular, to assure commercial operators that they will have enough enriched uranium to run their plants. Because we didn't need that weapons-type material anymore. But see at Oak Ridge they ended up the producing almost pure U-235 while we were producing pure—or near pure—plutonium-239. So either of those could be used for the bombs. But what happened with the commercial power, we had to use about 3% or 4% U-235. Only slightly enriched. But we still had to use enrichment plants, and the government had all the enrichment plants—basically, like Oak Ridge and the rest of them. And so as far as AEC combined operational planning, their goal was to make sure that nuclear power did what it was supposed to do. Provide us with lots of good economic electric energy. And to a large extent, it has.
Bauman: Hanford, obviously as a site, was a place that emphasized security, secrecy. Were you able to talk about the work you did? Was that something that was allowable given the security secrecy?
Gustafson: Yes, there wasn't a great deal of the security concern. It was mostly what are the resources and what can we do with this combination of government and industry to provide good electricity for the country. Economic.
Bauman: I want to go back to when you first arrived in 1950. What were your first impressions of the place here, of Richland, of the area?
Gustafson: Oh, I don't know. It was a temporary stop. [LAUGHTER] Never expected to spend the next 40 years or so working here. It was a great place, particularly for young single people. We moved into dormitories and there were a lot for fine single people, ambitious, and always wanting to do things. Those were good years. We certainly accepted the security. We were part of what we felt was a very necessary effort. We were in the Cold War. And we had to do a better job than the Russians.
Bauman: How long did you live in the dorms and where did you move to after that?
Gustafson: Well, I didn't actually live too long in the dorms. There were four of us, still good friends of mine, except one of them's gone. But we actually moved out to a small place in West Richland. So a number of the people in the dorms were looking for a little better living conditions. One of the problems with those early dorms—in theory we weren't even supposed to do any cooking in the dorms. So we strictly were going from the dorms to the local cafeteria, or a few commercial places that were opening up in Richland. It was a fascinating time, those early '50s. I got married the end of ‘55, so the first five years of single life and included my year plus when I was offsite, skiing, water skiing. Like my crowd, we were essentially the first water skiers in the Tri-Cities. At that time to find a boat, we had to go to Seattle to get one that we could use for water skiing. There wasn't any Mets Marina at that time. So we sort of started the water skiing in the area. Created the Desert Ski Club which was a snow skiing, but also got in the water skiing. Desert Ski Club still exists. So my close associates, we were sort of the instigators that. All went through our time as officers of the club. It was a big social group. Still is, I think.
Bauman: Richland was a federal town when you first arrived. How did you see that change over time from when you first arrived?
Gustafson: It's kind of hard. We certainly enjoyed our early years. We had a lot more individual responsibility on the jobs. I tell one of my stories, I came in at midnight to take over my shift at PUREX. I was the operating supervisor on C shift. And the operating supervisor on swing shift wasn't there. And I'd been met at the door with an assault mask, all of the crew were. And when I went in the building, the operating supervisor who I was to replace wasn't there, but my boss was. And I never saw him again. So, I guess I tell the story that they didn't really tell me I was captain of the ship. So anyhow, we restarted the plant. And it took us a couple months.
Bauman: And about when would this have been?
Gustafson: Pardon?
Bauman: What time period would this have been in?
Gustafson: When was that?
Bauman: Yeah, roughly.
Gustafson: Well, let's see, I guess that was, must have been early ‘57, right? I'm not exactly sure now. It was a different time. Individuals have a lot of responsibility. And we made a few mistakes, but in general, I think we did a damn good job of operating the plants. And safety and radiological exposure, these were major parts of our responsibility and our concern.
Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you about safety. Obviously, you said it was very—emphasized quite a bit. What sort of precautions did you have to take on your job? And were there ever any incidents when you were working of someone overexposure or anything along those lines?
Gustafson: Well, I think we operated with a lot of what you would probably expect military officers to have as a responsibility. And you know, you were responsible for your job and you--As an operating supervisor of my C shift at PUREX, there wasn't any other group that was responsible for the training of my operators. They were my responsibility. And if we had to send them to some special training, we'd do that. But the basic training was conducted by the supervisor. They assured whether they were qualified and whether they were able to do their job. I guess that's why when my counterpart was ejected, it was a military type operation, I guess. But I think we did a really good job. Safety was a number one concern. Radiological exposure was also a number one concern. And as far as I'm concerned, from everything I've seen, very, very few people suffered from working in our plants.
Bauman: I was going to ask you about President Kennedy came to the site in 1963 to visit. There was a story in the paper, a while back because it was the 50th anniversary of that. I wondered if you have any memories of that?
Gustafson: Oh yeah. Half the plant was out there. And I was there to welcome him as he came in on his helicopter. We were all out there.
Bauman: Anything in particular stand out to you about that day at all?
Gustafson: Well, I don't know. It's what we all expected at that time. There wasn't anything really unusual about this. Although I came out in 1950 saying, this is going to be a very temporary thing, I think we became--[CRYING] We became Hanford. [CRYING] Didn't expect to get emotional.
Bauman: Well, you built a sense of community, it seems like.
Gustafson: Really did. Those were good years. Really good years.
Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you, you talked about a number of different places on site that you worked. Different assignments. Was there one of those that was the most challenging? Or the most difficult? Or maybe one that was the most rewarding?
Gustafson: Well for me, it had to be those first few years with the PUREX plant. I've had a lot of other—what I think—good work assignments over the years. I know of no one who had the variety that I had. Certainly projects likely FFTF, I felt I had a very important role in that. I was one of these so-called cognizant engineers and my system was the main heat transport system. And it included basically the primary and secondary cooling systems. Everything from the reactor on. And the operating conditions for the plant, all of the design events and so on were channeled into that system. So that was a rewarding job, too. And I think we did a good job. As I said, we had a lot of early trouble getting that project going, but finally. So I enjoyed those years. I didn't feel the same individual responsibility that I had with the early time at PUREX.
Bauman: Obviously, Hanford also had the shift from production to a reduced production that you talked about, and then a shift to clean up. I wonder if those sort of mission changes impacted your work and in what ways?
Gustafson: Well, they certainly did. I've been involved in many parts of that. Even during my last few years with generally this overall quality assurance type bit, getting into working with the Washington, DC folks and that sort of thing.
Bauman: And you mentioned when you first came here, you thought it would be a short term.
Gustafson: Oh, yeah.
Bauman: And so for some people was. Some people did come for a short time and left. So why did you stay? I know you had some assigned that took you way to a bunch of other places, but--
Gustafson: Yeah. I don't know. We stayed for lots of reasons. We established a lot of close friendships. And sort of had our crowd of social as well as work relations. And we just became Hanford.
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about yet in terms of your work at Hanford? Or your experiences that you'd like to talk about that you haven't had a chance to talk about yet? Any stories or things that stand out in your mind?
Gustafson: I have so many stories about Hanford that it's kind of hard to come. Of course, many. My operational years, the most direct part of the operations, were the early years. I have a lot of individual things that happened. Some of them were good, some of them weren't. I remember particularly one incident. I don't want to be called a hero, but it was rather exciting. My operator was unloading a caustic car. And he was properly dressed with his shield and so on, but the hose from the railroad car came loose and it ended up spraying up underneath his protective clothing. And I felt that I was sure glad I was there, only about ten feet away. Because he was just kind of yelling with--You know, caustic getting sprayed into your face is not really good. Grabbed a hold of him and we both got under the safety shower was there. And at least he retained most of his sight. So, that was a situation where—just sort of individual kind of exciting happening, certainly was. I had a lot of other things go on. I feel that I had a lot of important tasks at Hanford. As I said, probably my most responsible thing was when I was still pretty young there, and operating the early couple, three years of PUREX as one of the operating supervisors. Had many chances to do so many different things over the years. Let's see, what would be of--It's kind of hard to come up with individual things that you might be interested in.
Bauman: Well, you've already talked about a number. That's been great. So I want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your experiences with us. We appreciate it.
Gustafson: Okay. Thank you.
Victor Vargas: Yeah, we should be good.
Robert Franklin: Ready?
Vargas: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history interview with Ann Roseberry on January 25th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ann about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record can you state and spell your name for us?
Ann Roseberry: Yes. Ann Roseberry. A-N-N R-O-S-E-B-E-R-R-Y.
Franklin: Great. Thank you so much. Tell me how you came to Richland.
Roseberry: Well, I was born here.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: I was conceived here. My folks met after the war. Dad had been active in the Air Force and came here to work for GE. Mom was recruited by General Electric, so she came out from Chicago. When she got here, he was a personnel manager for GE, and he gave her her first day orientation, and promptly asked her out to dinner. So that was 1948.
Franklin: 1948.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: I was going to say that probably wouldn’t fly with the human resources department nowadays.
Roseberry: I’m fairly certain not. So they married in 1950, and I was born in 1951. And just grew up here, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. And where did you live? Or where did your parents live in Richland?
Roseberry: Okay, they lived at 710 Stanton, which was a precut. Stanton is a little two-block street that runs perpendicular to Lee. So we had a two-block walk to Marcus Whitman Elementary.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Yeah, I live on that street, too, as you know.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: So what was it—so you, then, would have been about seven when Richland was privatized.
Roseberry: Yes, yeah.
Franklin: So what do you—what can you recall about those—your early childhood or those early years? Maybe from your own experiences or what your parents told you about that early Cold War era, government-owned era of Richland?
Roseberry: Yeah. Well, in regard to the 1958, I remember Mom and Dad talking about showing me a piece of paper that they were buying the house. As a seven-year-old, it wasn’t terrifically meaningful to me, but I understood that it was to them. That same year, my youngest sister was born and we added a room onto our house, the precut. So those actually have more primacy in my recollection than the thing that meant more to Mom and Dad.
Franklin: Sure.
Roseberry: But I do remember that. And I probably, at the time, said—because children do—oh, how much does the house cost? And Mom would have replied, we don’t ask those questions, dear. So just one little example of a culture of secrecy that I’ll—yeah. We—I guess my elementary school years, in some way were both peaceful—the idyllic, small town family life—but punctuated by the air raid drills, where we would get under our desks or go out into the hall and line up against the hall in a sort of a crouching position. Or now what we would call pose-of-a-child in yoga. But as flat on the ground and as taking up as least space as we could.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Did you ever do the kind of drills with the evacuation routes, where the families would drive out to a spot in the desert?
Roseberry: Yeah. We did once, but the school children were bussed. So as we were—I actually have a fairly strong recollection of that, because it was terrifying. That I was alone on the bus. And I remember counting on my fingers, where’s Mom, where’s Dad, where are my sisters? Trying to sort of get a mental picture of where they were. Because even though we knew it was a drill, we were in a bus by ourselves being driven somewhere. So, we never went out as a family in our car.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: What did your mother do for GE?
Roseberry: She came out—her training was as an x-ray technician. So, she came out and—I won’t get all the timing of this right, but at one point, she worked for early Kadlec. And then went out to the Project and she was x-raying samples. What they were samples of, I’m not clear. But samples. But inanimate samples. I remember her talking about her work environment and that the badges, they were also radiation detectors and would indicate when the human body had had enough. But she said that she also had frequent x-rays of her hands. And she said that—the term was hot—hot hands—when she had hot hands, it meant that she had had enough radiation and she had to not do that work for a while. So.
Franklin: Radiation from the handling the samples, or radiation from the x-rays?
Roseberry: I think from the samples. There are a lot of things where—we were raised in a culture of don’t ask questions. So often, if I would have asked a question, she would have said, well, they were samples. And that would have been the end of the discussion. So, rocks, pieces of equipment, I don’t know. But something that for some reason she was x-raying, but they would have been giving radioactivity, yeah.
Franklin: Hmm. Do you know where your mother worked on the Site? Did she talk about the Area? Do you know if she worked at 300, 200?
Roseberry: I don’t know. When Dad was out onsite, he was at 200-West.
Franklin: Oh, because he was still personnel manager at that time, or--?
Roseberry: Well, I don’t think so. When we would ask him what his job was, he would just say a manager. And that’s really all I know. In probably the last maybe 10 or 15 years of his working career, he was transferred into the Federal Building. And what he said then was that he was writing or editing technical reports. And he did have a master’s in English, so that’s credible. But I don’t actually know that that’s what he was doing. In the earlier years, it was just, I’m a manager. So questions like that, that a child would ask, we were given an answer and we just accepted the answer.
Franklin: Sure, sure. Did he have any other technical training, besides a master’s in English? Did he have any training that would fit to be more site-specific? Like, production-specific?
Roseberry: I don’t think so. When he was talking about the later years and technical reports, he made the comment that scientists and engineers, their work often needed editing by someone who had a better understanding of the English language. So—and he was a published author; he was a skilled writer. So all of this is very credible to me, but I just don’t really know that he was doing that from the ‘50s through the ‘80s.
Franklin: What kinds of work did he publish or write?
Roseberry: Fiction, primarily. Fiction. He had a book that came out right before Pearl Harbor, Bobbs-Merrill, and he had just started on the author promotion tour when Pearl Harbor was bombed. So pretty much the next day he went and signed up and served stateside in—it was then the Army Air Corps, because he had had an injury. And almost literally to his dying day, that—he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t gone overseas. He felt that he hadn’t really quite done what he should, because he hadn’t been overseas. But then after retirement, he published a couple more fiction books and wrote some family histories, but mostly it was—he was a fiction writer, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. You mentioned that your mother talked about her work environment. Did she ever talk about the gender makeup of her environment, or her experience of a woman working out onsite?
Roseberry: She talked about a couple of men who she worked with right in her unit. And very warmly. Very—it clearly was a comfortable work environment for her. I’m interpreting from what she said that they were older than she was. She was in her mid-20s and very cute. But a very modest woman. Raised in the Midwest, small town in Iowa. So her comments came across as if they were avuncular or fatherly to her—warm, but not anything uncomfortable for her. Yeah. So that’s about all of her comments. I know she was back and forth between Kadlec and the Site during those years. She would have worked roughly from 1948 to 1951. I was born in March of ’51, and possibly she had to quit work before that because she was working with radiation.
Franklin: Are you the oldest?
Roseberry: I’m the oldest.
Franklin: Okay, so after you were born, she stopped working to be your full-time—
Roseberry: Yeah. There were three of us, so she stayed home until the year I turned 13, I believe. And then she went back to work part-time x-ray at the Richland Clinic, which is no longer a clinic. But—and then she worked through until retirement.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Can you tell me about growing up in the prefab neighborhood? Because it’s slightly—from what I understand they’re slightly different than the Alphabet House neighborhoods in terms of not only the character of the houses but the income levels of the residents.
Roseberry: Yeah. We were—some of what I will tell you, to give a caveat, is my recollection. And I was a child at the time, so I had my own lens. But in our particular neighborhood, which is to say the one block, every person who lived in that neighborhood had a family member employed at the Project or at the Site. And in those years, it was all the men. The women were home. So across the street was an electrician, next door was Hanford Patrol, next door the other side, was—I don’t know what he did; I know he was a craftsworker. So in our block, all the other families were crafts families, except for ours. That was a very strong distinction, was—you were management or you were the crafts. And what I was told was that in our part of town, there was a conscious desire to mix within a neighborhood so that there would be some management people and some crafts people. In the block up, where you live, we didn’t know as many people. One of the high school teachers lived there at the time. It was close enough that we were allowed to trick-or-treat there. But we—within our own block, we were in and out of houses and borrowing a cup of sugar, and that kind of thing. But it was a very small one-block neighborhood for us.
Franklin: Interesting. How long did your parents live in that house?
Roseberry: Mm. From 1950 until 2013.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Roseberry: Yeah. My dad died at the end of 2004. And Mom stayed in the house until 2013. She had a series of falls. And after the last one, she said, I think it’s time for me to move. So we got that to happen, but—and she was—she had three other friends from the early days who at that time were still living in their homes. Only one with her husband; the other women had been widowed. But for her, this was not an unusual situation, that you would move into a house and you would live there your whole life. At some point, when I was in late elementary school, I know that Dad got a promotion at work. And this would have been before 1958. And so at that time, he was offered the chance to move to a different neighborhood to what would have been considered a nicer house. I remember our talking about that, and I just spoke right up and said, well, I don’t want to move. I like my school. I like my neighborhood. And so he didn’t accept the move. And I don’t remember now where it was. I just remember that to me it seemed really silly. Well, this was our house. Why would we move? This was home, yeah.
Franklin: Do you know if the—you had mentioned that separation between trades—crafts people and managerial. Do you know if that ever caused any tension with neighbors and things like that?
Roseberry: Yes. Not in our neighborhood, not among—this was a neighborhood where in the summer, Dad would cook hamburgers outside on the fireplace he built, and the neighbors would come over and have hamburgers. Or they’d come over and have watermelon, or they’d come over for the fireworks. So none of that happened there. But in the school environment, very much so. There were times where it would come up within the schoolroom. And fairly laterally, I want to say the early ‘60s—at any rate, there was a significant strike out at the Project and another one threatened. That was the time I remember most clearly that there were enough people out on strike that management were being placed in various locations. So Dad was driving a bus during that time. The buses came right into the neighborhoods, so he had a half-a-block walk to get the bus that took him to work. And I remember very distinctly getting into it a little bit with another girl. So—might have been fifth grade—I don’t remember the year, but there were lines drawn. Because her father was in the crafts and he was also—had some position of responsibility in one of the unions. And we didn’t fight, and we weren’t enemies, but we were just never close again. It wasn’t—this discussion happened and the lines were drawn, and we never quite managed to get back across again. But there were some neighborhoods—there were some neighborhoods in the ranch houses where the mix of people who lived there was such that, yeah, it was an issue in the neighborhood. In one case, a family—the same family where the father had quite position of responsibility, and the neighborhood lived across the street from a family where the father was a high-ranking PR person for the Project. And you felt it. You felt it; it wasn’t fighting, but it was tension, I mean—yeah.
Franklin: Sure. Do you remember what that series of labor movements was about?
Roseberry: I do not.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: I do not. And I wish that—because the memory is so clear, I’ve wished that I’d gone back to research it to find out what it was. I remember Dad saying that his concern or management’s concern was that this would be a disruptive enough situation that we would lose—we would no longer have federal funding. And so the other thing that’s unclear to me now is, the strike would have been against the contractor. But of course, all of the contractor money was federal money. So there was real concern that jobs would be lost. I do remember that.
Franklin: Did you ever—given that up until Richland was privatized, you had to work for Hanford to live in Richland—did you ever lose friends or notice people—had people that you knew that left during that time because they lost their jobs at Hanford?
Roseberry: No. And that is a really interesting question to me. I don’t remember ever losing any friends for that reason. And I don’t remember until high school that families were moving in from some of the other secret cities or Savannah River. I remember a family coming in from Savannah River. It isn’t that it didn’t happen. I don’t remember it, and there was no one in my close circle who left. And I really don’t remember much influx. My high school years would have been ’66 to ’69. And there were several families that I remember then.
Franklin: Did you go to Richland High School?
Roseberry: Mr. Franklin, that would be Col High.
Franklin: Col High. Sorry.
Roseberry: That would be Col High. This is essential for accuracy. Yeah. Marcus Whitman, Carmichael, and then Col High.
Franklin: Col High, right. You’ll have to forgive me.
Roseberry: I do forgive you, but I will correct you, of course, because this is so important.
Franklin: Point taken. Would that be the Col High Bombers?
Roseberry: Yes, that would be the Col High Bombers.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: And how long—then did you leave Richland shortly after graduating?
Roseberry: Mm-hm. I left in the fall of ’69. I went to Cheney for my undergrad degree, and went through in three years because I had two sisters behind me. Then went to Michigan for my library master’s and then came back and my first job was in Yakima. So—
Franklin: I’m wondering if—you may have been too young for this next question, but I’d like to see what—if you remember. You know, Richland, up until the mid-60s or late-60s was primarily, almost exclusively white.
Roseberry: Yes.
Franklin: Due to housing restrictions on African Americans and other minorities, they had to live in East Pasco. And although African Americans were employed by the Hanford Project, they couldn’t live in Richland—
Roseberry: Houses—right, right.
Franklin: --at that time. So I’m wondering if you could speak to that, having observed—or if you observed discrimination or any civil rights attempts to address it.
Roseberry: Yeah. So in elementary school, at my elementary school at Marcus Whitman, there were two African American families who had children in the school. In second grade, I had a birthday party, and I’d invited people from school. And I remember this very clearly. We had added on the living room, so we’d set up card tables in the living room. And I had invited my friend Kathy Baker. And she didn’t come. And I remember going to the front door watching for her, and wondering why she wasn’t coming to the party. The Baker family is African American. Her mother is still here, Mrs. Baker. I remember—and I asked Mom, why didn’t Kathy come to the party? And in some way, Mom would have said, maybe she didn’t feel comfortable because she’s—in those days, we would have said Negro. And that wasn’t disrespectful. Sorry, I remember this really clearly. And it just made me so sad. She was almost my best friend, and she didn’t feel she could come to my birthday party. My folks were very—whatever opinions they might have had to the contrary, we were raised that race was not an issue. It was not a matter of discussion; it wasn’t—it was an irrelevant thing. I look back now—hold on, I’ll get hold of myself. I look back now and I think of family names that we would have heard. But in our family, nobody ever said, this name tells you that their family came from Russia or Ireland or Germany or—that was not a—we didn’t know to make those connections. It just wasn’t discussed. So, the issue of race was, it just, it wasn’t present in the way we were raised. I didn’t really question in grade school that there were only two families. When I got to junior high, as it was then, I remember two Hispanic families being added. That was at Carmichael. And I may be forgetting somebody. By high school, another African American family and a Chinese family. But at one time—and I’m not sure I could do it right now—but I counted that in my growing up years, we had nine families of color in Richland. So we had some African American families, one Chinese family, and I think maybe by high school three Hispanic families. But I didn’t know that was unusual. I just didn’t know that was unusual.
Franklin: Sure. The children—the African American children that you went to elementary school with, they were allowed to live—the family was allowed to live in Richland?
Roseberry: Mm-hmm, yeah. The Bakers lived over—it’s an area of town just on the other side of Duportail. I’m so bad with directions. There was a little market there, Dietrich’s Market, that’s now Minute Mart or something. But they lived in that neighborhood. And I think Mrs. Baker is still in the family house from those days, too.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Roseberry: Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah.
Franklin: Great. Thank you. Do you remember any later civil—like, any of the later civil rights actions in Kennewick and Pasco, or did you not—have you not connected much with—
Roseberry: I was not—no, I was not connected. We didn’t really have any family friends in Pasco or Kennewick. One exception, a friend of my dad’s in Kennewick on Canal Drive. But the world was very small. You knew people from school, where parents of other children—more strongly in elementary school of course, and then you knew people from your church. And in the people I knew, everybody went to church. Everybody belonged to a church and they went to church. And so we belonged to Central, to CUP. So, that’s how I met children from other parts of town, because I would meet at church. But we didn’t—in the early days, very actively encouraged to stay in Richland. Shop in Richland, go to a doctor in Richland. Not go out to dinner in Richland because there really weren’t many options. But you lived in Richland, you did your business in Richland, and you socialized in Richland. After 1958, I suspect the message wasn’t quite so strong. But still strong.
Franklin: Probably because it had been ingrained.
Roseberry: It had been ingrained, uh-huh. And there was still—even after Richland re-formed as a First Class City, all of that secrecy and deliberate attempt at isolation was still very present. Because we were in a very strong part of the Cold War. So the secrecy did not—and the fear—did not go away once Richland re-formed as a city. But no, I was unaware of those. In high school, a man named Duke Mitchell, who has come back—homecoming king? Anyway, one of those dances where someone is king and queen and there’s an election, and he was. So in some ways, you could say that this community was not—
Franklin: And I’m sorry, who was this?
Roseberry: Duke Mitchell.
Franklin: Is that CJ’s son?
Roseberry: CJ’s oldest, yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: So he had a very strong position of leadership in the high school. Liked and respected. I couldn’t really answer adequately about how it felt or how it was. I can report that, yeah, he was held in acclaim. He was class president, too. I—once I left, I left. I just remember strongly that he was very well-liked and respected. And certainly one of the first things I did when I came back to Richland to be the library manager here was to look him up and say, I need you on the library board. But he could speak to that better than I can.
Franklin: Okay. Did you ever feel—you talked a bit about the duck-and-cover drills that made you kind of feel the fear of being separated. What about later, as you grew up and entered adolescence or early adulthood and knew more about what was being produced at Hanford. Did your feelings toward—what were your feelings toward Hanford? Did they change at all from when you first found out about what was being made there and--?
Roseberry: I never went negative. Partly that is because my dad was—even postwar, he felt that the work that was being done there was patriotic. He still felt that it was protecting the United States. A personal characteristic of his was loyalty. So, he would have valued, in a patriotic way, and defended the Project until the day he died. So that did not occur for me. And I was never afraid in a way that you would be about something that you could do something about it. When we were very young, and maybe into pre-adolescence, I remember that he would try to teach us from the ground what planes were overhead so that we could identify them. Because it was, plane: Russia is going to bomb us. That was our default response. I got as far as being able to distinguish between a small plane, like a Piper Cub, or a B-52, or a jet. I never got—but even those distinctions, if you were—I’m the eldest. I was, I mean, day one, take care of your sisters. So I’m out on the street with my sisters, maybe walking over to the school grounds to play, and a plane goes overhead. And first I look up, try to decide if they’re in danger or not, and then look down, okay, there they are; they’re safe. And it’s not something that woke me up in the middle of the night, or I had emotional problems with. It was just part of where we were. And, again, how did we know that that wasn’t everywhere? So, learn to distinguish. But it was actually pre-adolescent. It was third grade, and we were being taught about the half-life of plutonium. I would say that my strengths have always been on the verbal, not the quantitative side. But even in third grade, I could do the numbers on that and realize that no amount of duck-and-cover was going to save any of us if we were—nuclear bomb fell. But that was, for me, a little bit like, huh. Okay, well, maybe we’ll get bombed, and maybe we won’t. So it wasn’t a fear moment; it was like, hmm, do you guys think we can’t do these numbers and figure it out? But it was really more a moment of clarity than fear. And we just never—living in Richland and reading only the local paper—although Mom and Dad always subscribed to the Spokesman Review, so we did have a paper that wasn’t local. Lots of magazines. But having very limited even television access, news like that just didn’t show up here. And it just—if we weren’t hearing it at home, and we weren’t hearing it at school, we just wouldn’t have heard anything anti. Really, the first time I kind of went, oh, people are upset about this was at Cheney, so that’s late ‘60s, early ‘70s. I took a class called environmental geography. Anyway, one of the field trips was here to Hanford; another was to some of the bunker silver mines in north Idaho where there was, in fact, damage from something that was manmade. And so then I started getting it. But not here. Not here.
Franklin: Thank you. Did the neighborhood or Richland change perceptibly after it became a First Class City to you? Did you notice any changes?
Roseberry: Mm-mm. Not to me.
Franklin: Did the fabric of—or I guess, did the fabric of the neighborhood change while you lived there after it incorporated?
Roseberry: Very little. I think that from 1951 to 1969, on our side of the street, the house at the corner of whatever that is and the house at the corner of Stanton and Lee, those houses had changed out once in 18 years. I don’t think any of the others had by the time I left to go to Cheney. In the mid- to late-‘70s, there were some deaths on the street and some houses changed out. But I think just those two. And those were precuts, the much smaller house. So the one up by Lee, that changed out pretty quickly. They needed a larger house. And the one on the other end, it was retirement or something. But only those two, yeah.
Franklin: When did you come back to Richland?
Roseberry: I came back on May 15th of 2006. That was my—I got here on May 14th. I threw stuff in my car, drove to Mom’s, unloaded the car and started that Monday. And May 16th—I remember it very clearly because May 16th was the day of the bond election for the new library building. And it passed. So those dates are just really clear for me. Yeah.
Franklin: Right. And since that time you’ve been working at the Richland Public Library.
Roseberry: Mm-hm, yeah.
Franklin: Tell me about your involvement in promoting Hanford history and that kind of thing.
Roseberry: Oh! Okay. Well, I really started with meeting Ron Kathren—Dr. Ron Kathren. He has been, for a long time, a library supporter. And I met him on May 16th—the evening of May 16th. The polls had just closed; it had been declared that the bond had passed, and we were walking out to the parking lot together. And I offered him a carrot, my go-to snack, and he accepted. So pretty much it was friendship at first sight. And he started coming into the library and just chatting with me. He’s an excellent teacher among other things. And there was something about his love of Richland and the value he places on the scientific work that had been done here that just—it created or it caught a spark in me. And then I just started thinking about it more and thinking about my parents’ generation having been pioneers of a sort. And this is no disrespect to the people who were here farming at all. But they left the Midwest, the East Coast, and they came out probably on trains and got off to a desert that had no trees. They moved into tents, or if they were lucky, trailers, and then barracks, essentially—dorms. They did work that they had no idea what they were doing. And in the early days, they couldn’t tell their families where they were, what was going on. They just seem extraordinarily brave to me. So the environmental situation that they had to deal with—against—and the work they were doing created this bonding among them that is really phenomenal. They feel that at some level they all care about each other, still. Because they were on this great adventure and venture. Then the more I learned about the science and technology and creativity and innovation that went into that, I just got fascinated. Just got fascinated. And the people who made that choice and stayed, they have a strength that I think is uncommon. And they were—we now look at that and we talk about the effects of an atomic bomb and nuclear waste, which—I’m not stepping away from that. But for them, to have been doing something that they thought was not only very important but maybe vital to the survival of the country. If you can just understand that mindset. I just admire them very much. And they’re a generation that did not complain. Did not complain. You still—no matter how much you probe with my 92- almost 93-year-old mother, she will not complain. She will not say anything bad or—she just won’t. And that’s very, very common among her friends. So I just—I think the combination of the science, but also the creativity that fueled that science, I think that’s what it was. Just started fascinating me. And I also, as a librarian, I understand that the kind of history we have here is singular. We’ll find similarities with Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, but there are three secret cities in this country. Arguably three secret cities in the world. We’re not regular. And I kind of started embracing being weird and finding the ties that we do have with those other secret cities at every possible level: the level of education, the fact that we still expect our garbage to be picked up in certain ways, that we are used to a very sturdy, robust infrastructure—we just have a lot in common. It seemed to me from a history point of view that there was some pretty important history stuff. As the public librarian part of my job—not just my interest, my job—was to collect the stuff, to protect it, to wait for WSU to be ready to have the Hanford History Project, so we could have a real, live, professional archives. And I don’t know, it just—somehow out of respect and admiration, it started being important to me.
Franklin: Great.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: What would you like—I think you’ve already covered this somewhat, but I’d like to ask it again. What would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War and what was done here during the Cold War?
Roseberry: Wow. Respect the science. Respect the creativity. Respect the strength of the people who were here. I might say plan ahead. One of the stories Dad told was—so, context. We were in Portland. My husband and I were living in Portland, and each year in Portland, Nagasaki Day is not celebrated, but noted.
Franklin: And why is that?
Roseberry: The people draw chalk outlines of bodies on the ground in memory of what was left after that bomb, that there would be sort of a—just a charred outline on the ground, because the body had been so thoroughly incinerated, that’s all that was left.
Franklin: Sure, sure. I—sorry, but why Portland? Or why does that happen? Is there a special reason? Is it like a sister city relationship?
Roseberry: I don’t know. I just—from having lived in Portland for 30 years, I would say, that’s just Portland. I don’t have a good—I don’t have a good answer for that.
Franklin: Sure, sure. I was just wondering if there was a deeper connection.
Roseberry: Not that I know of.
Franklin: Okay, sorry.
Roseberry: But at any rate, Mom and Dad were in town, and we were walking, downtown Portland in the city hall area. Dad asked what they were, and unthinkingly, I told him the truth. Never seen him so angry. Never saw him as angry as that. He was saying, we were saving lives, we were saving American lives. Very, very, very angry. When he calmed down a little, I said, you know, people are concerned about the waste, Dad. This aside, there’s a legitimate concern about the nuclear waste. And the reason I laugh, you’ll understand, is he said, well, for Pete’s sakes. They only built those tanks to last 20 years and look how long they’ve lasted! So for future generations, I would say, maybe a 20-year tank for nuclear waste when we already understood the aforementioned half-life—maybe add that element into your future planning, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, 20 years, the life of radioactive material: not a really good match there.
Franklin: Some disconnect, perhaps, between science and then the administrative side of--
Roseberry: Exactly, exactly.
Franklin: --of legacy waste commitment.
Roseberry: And the difference between getting federal funding to, in their hope, finish a war, end a war, and in their hopes, defend the United States, and—oh, huh, yeah, well, now we want to fund something else. We don’t want to fund this. So it’s pretty big picture, but, yeah.
Franklin: Oh, hey, we’re going to need a lot more money for many hundreds of years to come to manage the—
Roseberry: Right, yeah.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s a tough sell.
Roseberry: it’s a tough sell. It’s a tough sell. Garbage cleanup. It’s a tough sell.
Franklin: Yeah, it is. Everybody wants it, but nobody wants to do it.
Roseberry: But nobody wants to do it. So, yeah, I guess, not a question I’ve thought about, but probably that’s what I’d say.
Franklin: Great. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you wanted to talk about?
Roseberry: I don’t know. I have said—maybe a little bit about the hierarchy in Richland, because from a point of view, it has the worst of a military reservation, an academic community, and a company town, where in those environments, at some level hierarchy is all. So even in the later years—I think this is changing—but the division, if you will, between management and crafts or the trades. I think, I hope, that Richland has grown so much, benefitting from people who weren’t born here, that some of that is being mitigated, but—and feel free to eliminate this if it’s in somebody else’s story. But GESA Federal Credit Union was GE Supervisors’ Association. And my dad was one of the founders of that. I have his passbook; it’s number four. But it was only for supervisors, period. Period. So about a year later, I think—I think GESA was founded in 1954, I think. At any rate, approximately a year later, HAPO was founded. So if you were not a GE manager, you could still join a credit union. And now both of them are very, very strong, very community-minded. But lines like that were drawn. And there were some sort of informal, unspoken rules about what kind of car you could drive, according to your status at the Project. And so my dad, not being a scientist or an engineer, was maybe sort of middle. So we had—growing up we had Dodges, kind of a medium. And then, at one point, I was gone, but he got another promotion and he and Mom bought an Oldsmobile, because that was okay. Whereas when I was in grade school and junior high, that—there were people above him in the hierarchy who drove Oldsmobiles. And so that—there’s some big car stuff in this community that sometimes is at the base of—people who weren’t born here or grew up here, they observe things, but they can’t decode them. And there’s no way in the world they would ever be able to decode them. The other thing where there was a hierarchy—and I don’t know that I really have an opinion about it—but certainly, in second grade, I remember actively and clearly, we were given standardized tests. So starting in second grade, we were tracked, according to what they called ability. So in second grade, we took the Stanford-Binet, which was considered a measurement of IQ. And so the result of that, partly, was that even though when I graduated high school—that would be Col High, yeah—I graduated high school, 676 people in the graduating class, but I only really knew a fraction of them. Because even in grade school, we were ability-tracked. That continued through junior high and certainly at high school, there was advanced this and honors this. The focus on academic ability—very, very strong here. So I think for children who were perceived to fall into that, you could not have had better college prep. You could not have. We—my first formal researched-with-citations research project was in fourth grade. We were writing from very early on. We were being taught research skills from very early on. And when I left and went to Cheney, I found that that was not the norm. So the school system here is very, very focused on that. And I benefited from it; my sisters benefited from it. So, I just—I have this niggling sense that that could have been improved or fine-tuned, but because I benefited from it, I wouldn’t be a very credible voice on that. But the whole concept of hierarchy: just so strong here, yeah.
Franklin: And you think still to this day?
Roseberry: To a certain extent. I think more so in the people who are still here who were here in the very early days. Which now would be the ‘50s, because I think most of the people who would have gotten here early ‘40s to build the Project, they’re gone. And the people who arrived just post-war, like my folks, they’re dwindling, you know. They’re dwindling. But the people who came early-ish, I mean strongly in the Cold War era, like in the ‘50s, a little bit. Because that was the Project environment.
Franklin: Right, and there’s a real difference to authority, too, among those. And kind of a—one thing I’ve noticed is a belief in corporate benevolence, and that you’ll be taken care of with—the hard work and things will be rewarded in a corporate environment. That struck me as more present here, I think, due to the nature of the contractor relationship.
Roseberry: I think so, I think so. That—so for that generation, they had world-shaking events, okay? My folks lived through the Depression. My folks both were of an age to understand what Pearl Harbor meant. But I might suggest that my generation, the Boomer generation, had the first conviction that there was not only not corporate benevolence, there was not government benevolence. The World War II generation, they were patriotic. They were responding to those calls from President Roosevelt. My generation, particularly here, learned very early that, um, duck-and-cover wasn’t going to work. That there remains a question, many questions, about the assassination of President Kennedy. That the Vietnam War was not exactly about protecting democracy. So I agree. There’s more acceptance, respect for an authority figure, yeah.
Franklin: Yeah.
Roseberry: Yeah, I think so.
Franklin: Even—you mentioned some big events and kind of betraying of trust. I’d like to ask you about how you think maybe people’s reactions to the Green Run fall into that. Because that happened pretty early on in ’49. But a purposeful release of dangerous material that seems to be accepted by the community as something that happened and maybe shouldn’t have, but did nonetheless. But to outsiders is shocking.
Roseberry: It’s shocking.
Franklin: And a betrayal of trust, because it’s not a corporate—it’s the government. It’s supposed to be—
Roseberry: Right, yeah. And I did not know about that until after I came back in 2006.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Roseberry: None—information about the Project, any of the science, any of the politics—not in the Richland school system. Not there. And in our family, not discussed. Ever. Ever, ever. So I did not know that.
Franklin: Sure. I forgot to ask: did you go to see President Kennedy?
Roseberry: Yes.
Franklin: Or did your family go to see President Kennedy? What was your—what do you remember about that day?
Roseberry: Okay. So, it was very hot and windy and dusty. And we were out in the middle of the desert, okay? However, we were just thrilled beyond any belief. He was—and just my family—but he was a beloved president. People did trust him. They followed him. People—I don’t think during his presidency, you would ever have heard him referred to as Kennedy. It always would have been President Kennedy or the President. Always, always. And partly that was then. But he, as a person and a president, people liked him, they cared about him. Here, we were so—we so completely understood that we were isolated, that that was on purpose, that for someone that important to come here was just—it was amazing. It was just amazing. And we were just thrilled. We all had to submit a security clearance paperwork. Mom just handed to me the papers for my youngest sister who was about seven, yeah. So I remember filling this out—no, she wasn’t even seven. She was more like five, she was more like five. So I filled it out, and there was a space called Membership in Subversive Organizations. And, you know, I thought about—I took this really seriously, and—
Franklin: And that was a voluntary thing that you would fill out, or that’s--?
Roseberry: No, we would not be allowed onsite.
Franklin: No, I mean, that was a form given to someone to fill out, so they would trust that you were being honest about your membership in a subversive organization?
Roseberry: Right, right.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: And I put in that, yes, the only organization she was part of was the CUP Sunday school. But she was a member of that organization. But, I mean, what, to express rye amusement at the vagaries of life, but filling out a security clearance form for a little tiny girl, but we did, and we took it seriously. So we went as a family—I think I got off track, but we went as a family, and it was a big deal. But it was windy, and the wind was blowing up the sand. And it was hot. And the helicopter came in and blew up more sand. But, no, we were just thrilled. Just thrilled. The most important, the most famous person we had ever seen. And, oh, it was big. It was big, yeah.
Franklin: Cool. Well, did you have anything else you wanted to add?
Roseberry: I can’t think—you know, Robert, I could go on for a long time, but that’s—you’ll talk to other people and they’ll either confirm or deny, and—
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Roseberry: But you know, so much was family-centered. And then your school and then your church. Those were the circles. Oh, I guess just one other note and then you should probably just turn the equipment off, but—I don’t know if you’ve heard this or not, but Richland did not appear on any maps or on any road signs. So that piece of understanding that we were secret and that the government didn’t want people to be able to get here, they didn’t want people to know where we were or what was going on. That was—there was just sort of this combination of you just sort of accepted it, and then you’d say, hmm, I wonder why that isn’t true of Pasco and Kennewick. But even a question like that, the answer would be, well, Richland is different.
Franklin: Yeah.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: Well, thank you Ann. I really appreciated your talking today.
Roseberry: You’re welcome. Oh, I’m really happy to. I’m sorry the Kathy Baker story got me.
Franklin: No, it’s okay. I appreciate it.
Roseberry: But you know, it’s funny, we were so young, but I just remember I just kept going to the front door, watching, where’s Kathy? Where’s Kathy?
Camera man: Whenever you’re-
Robert Franklin: Ready?
Camera man: We’re ready for you, yeah. Do your thing.
Franklin: Okay, let’s, yeah, let’s go. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Barbara Brown Taylor on January 6th, 2017. The interview is being conducted at Clark Place in Moscow, Idaho. I will be talking with Barbara about her experiences growing up at the Hanford Site and her father’s experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Barbara Brown Taylor: Barbara Brown Taylor. B-A-R-B-A-R-A, B-R-O-W-N, T-A-Y-L-O-R, no hyphens.
Franklin: Great, thank you. So let’s start from the beginning. How did you come to the Hanford Site?
Taylor: In 1943, my father was hired from a company—wait a minute, take that off. In 1943, my father was hired to be the landscape architect in a new city. What an exciting thing for a landscape architect, what kind of an exciting job! We came from Illinois. I don’t know if he was the sole architect, but I do remember some of the things he did. That’s how I came here.
Franklin: And how old were you when you came?
Taylor: I was eight.
Franklin: And so the city that you’re talking about, that would have been Richland?
Taylor: Richland.
Franklin: Richland, Washington.
Taylor: And we didn’t know, of course, what it was. It was just a new city in the desert, had something to do with the war.
Franklin: Were the Alphabet Houses being constructed at that point-
Taylor: Yes.
Franklin: Or did you arrive before—okay.
Taylor: Well, he arrived in ’43.
Franklin: Right.
Taylor: The houses were being built. And my mother and brother and I lived on a farm in Illinois until my father wrote to us and said, the house is ready. So at that time, you signed up for a house, the men did the work there. As soon as it was ready, you could bring your family. It didn’t have any glass in the windows, but it was ready.
Franklin: Wow. That seems like a pretty crucial component of—
Taylor: My mother thought so. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah, especially with the winds that would blow.
Taylor: Absolutely, absolutely. It was covered with dust.
Franklin: So your father, then, would have worked with Albin Pherson, the head architect for the—
Taylor: I assume so. He didn’t talk about the people he worked with. I never met another landscape architect there. He was very busy all the time, because he had a crew that supplied the grass seed and rented—not rented, lent out the lawn mowers and shovels and all sorts of things. As I remember him saying, there was an instruction sheet, which he put out. Somehow the government decided you couldn’t just have a city built on sand with nothing in the yards. Maybe you couldn’t keep people there. I don’t know the reason. But they hired these crews of men who worked on supplying the needs to do a lawn. And as I remember it, you had to have a lawn. If you couldn’t do it with what the city gave you free, then you had to pay somebody to put your lawn in. Because after a certain amount of time, you had to have a lawn.
Franklin: Mm.
Taylor: Not necessarily flowers, just you had to have grass.
Franklin: You had to have grass. What other kinds of work did your father do besides planning out yards and lawns and things like that?
Taylor: Well, he did that for churches and schools. There were only two churches, a Catholic church and a Protestant church. The government built two churches. That was it. And he would landscape those. Any public buildings that needed it—library—there were a few things like that. It was very sketchy and basic at the beginning.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: So I think he landscaped whatever was there. I think that’s why they brought him.
Franklin: Tell me about growing up in wartime Richland. Where did you go to school, did you go to church, you know, what was the atmosphere like there?
Taylor: Well, I was eight. And we came here in June, and September was the first day of school. And I went to Lewis and Clark Grade School, which was right up the street of Locke. I lived on Casey Street in an A house. I walked up to school. And that first day, the teacher said, I want to know where all of you are from. Give your name and tell us where you came from. So one at a time, we got up, gave our names. I said Illinois. One of my new friends said New Jersey. Somebody else said Texas, somebody else said Colorado. And I thought at the time, I don’t think this has ever happened before. I don’t think the first day of school, people are from somewhere else. And I’ve always remembered that, how interesting that was to see all those new kids make new friends. When you’re a kid, as long as you’re with your parents and you feel love in a family, it’s great to have new adventures. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think my mother liked it at all! But, you know. That’s one thing. The first year, perhaps a little longer, but the first year, there were no telephones in homes. And as I recall, if the wife was going to have a baby, they would issue her a phone for the period just before she had the baby. So she could call the doctor, her husband at work, whatever. But the minute she had the baby, they came and took the phone out. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER]
Taylor: And there was a phone that first summer on many telephone poles. The kind that just hangs up. You could go there and make a call, free. But you had to find one to do that, because there just wasn’t that accessibility to phones.
Franklin: How would you know who to call? Would you get an operator when you—
Taylor: You’d get an operator, of course. You always got an operator in those days.
Franklin: Sure, and then they would connect you to another telephone on a pole on a different street? Or how would—
Taylor: No, no, you probably wouldn’t get a call back. I don’t remember ever walking down the street and hearing a phone ring. [LAUGHTER] It was an out kind of thing. Let’s say you wanted to call your grandmother in Illinois or something. You might get to use it.
Franklin: Oh, okay, I see. It wasn’t an in-town—
Taylor: No, not really. I don’t think so.
Franklin: And what did your mother do?
Taylor: My mother was a homemaker, but she had been a registered nurse. And she went back to that when I grew up and was off to college.
Franklin: And were your parents still in Richland at the time?
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Taylor: Here’s the thing. I don’t think that the government intended to keep the city. As I remember, we were going to live there as long as we needed to. When the war was over, you’d all go back to wherever you came from or somewhere else. But they didn’t build that city to keep. The wood was not the best, the floors were pine and splintered. Those little prefabs—I didn’t live in one, but they were tiny.
Franklin: I live in one.
Taylor: So you know.
Franklin: They’re very tiny.
Taylor: You know what I mean. They were built out of cardboard—I mean plywood. Plywood was new in those days. And they built them so fast that I remember going to that school up the street, to Lewis and Clark, that first year. And there’d be one when I’d go to school, and when I came back there’d be three.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Taylor: So during the day I was going to school, the men were slapping those things together. It was interesting [LAUGHTER] seeing, ooh, we have a new house, we have a new house.
Franklin: What do you think your mother did not like about living—you mentioned that she wasn’t too happy about moving there?
Taylor: Oh, she was from Illinois—they were. And Illinois is a green, beautiful state with woods. And Richland was sand. It was sand. So when we moved in, there was no glass in the windows, which they said they’d put in pretty soon. And the yard was all sand. My mother would look out the window with no glass in it, and almost cry. I was eight, and I looked out the window and saw the little girl next door playing in the sand in front of our house. And I remember yelling out the window to her, stop playing in our yard! Stop digging our yard! She was digging a hole in our yard. And my mother put her head against the wall and said, Barbara, we don’t have a yard! [LAUGHTER] Which was very true; we didn’t. As soon as the work really got going with planting the grass everywhere, I remember my father going out—there were things called tract houses, which had been there before the Hanford place was built. Some of them were abandoned, because the government had bought them. They were abandoned, and here were rose bushes and lilac bushes and things that people had had in their yards. Since it now belonged to the government, my father had permission to go and get them. And he would. He took his trailer and he went out there and dug them up himself and brought them in and put some of them at the libraries, and some of them at the churches, whatever. That was one reason we had nice shrubs. Because he would do that.
Franklin: Where was your father stationed during those war years?
Taylor: Where did he live?
Franklin: Where did he work, where was his office, where did he work out of? Or was he just kind of a roving—
Taylor: No, it wasn’t freelance in any way. There were government buildings. There was probably a landscaping building with a parking lot full of lawnmowers. One of his crew was in charge of the lawnmowers. They were probably locked or fenced or something. He had some kind of a building, maybe a hutment—I don’t know what kind it was. I didn’t see him at work. I saw the results of his work.
Franklin: Yeah.
Taylor: And he also had trucks and drove around in a truck and worked out of his truck, too. The crews, of course, did the work. He was the manager at the time, after he landscaped all the buildings and how they were going to look, ultimately. And he turned the papers over to his supervisors, and they did the work.
Franklin: How did your father get started with landscaping architecture?
Taylor: Well, at the University of Illinois, just before I was born, he graduated in the architecture department, which at that time had the landscape architecture program in it. So he really was an architect with a specialty in landscape architecture. He was just out of college in 1929 when the Masters Tournament golf course was being built. He was very fortunate to know a man named Bobby Jones who designed the—he was an architect, designed the Masters Tournament—built the course. And he hired a bunch of just-out-of-college men like my father. My father and mother had just gotten married. They went to Augusta, Georgia, and my father worked on that golf course. He did some of the—what’s that white part?
Franklin: Sand trap?
Taylor: Sand trap.
Franklin: I’m not much of a golfer.
Taylor: He worked on the sand traps, designing them. And had little models—plaster of Paris models. I wish I had one today, because we always had them around the house. Which my father had gotten when the thing was built. Then they didn’t need those anymore. So he had done that for a few years. By the way, the Masters Tournament golf course was built in 1929. My father told me the money to build it was in escrow. The people who had given the money to build this beautiful golf course had their money tied up in a way that the stock market couldn’t touch it. So that’s why they could build such a beautiful thing in 1929.
Franklin: I see.
Taylor: And ’30, I think. Anyway, that’s what he did. Then during the war, he had a harder time because who was landscaping anything? Not very many people. And he got a job with the government in the CCC program—he was a supervisor in Illinois in the woods where they had workers that were building roads and bridges and beautiful little stone—what do you call that? Well, stone bridges, I guess. And I remember those days, I was very little, like four or five. But I remember that he would take me to the woods and show me what he was doing. So he had that job, and that was a very steady job, because the CCC supported a lot of people during those days. That would have been the ‘30s. Then when the war came along, there were some military plants. One was at Kankakee, and we were there for a year or two, where my father was in charge of all the grounds for the whole plant. I think it was at that time that he was approached to come to Richland. Because they were building Hanford. And they had to build the city, even if they weren’t going to keep it. They had to build it. And hired him to do it. There weren’t that many landscape architects in those days.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: So I think the word must have gotten out that there was one available.
Franklin: And how long—so your father, did he stay working for Hanford, for the government after the war ended?
Taylor: Yes. A lot of people stayed. I don’t think that the government people understood the idea of a sense of place, where people make their home somewhere and they’re very reluctant to let go of it, even if it has pine floors and is not very up-to-date with everything. Their kids were now in school. They had a job. And it was far enough from the cities—some people liked that, and wanted to stay. It’s right on the edge of the Columbia River, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. So, my father joined them and wherever there was a job that he could get—because he also had many drafting skills and things like that. There was also a program called the as-built program. I think that was in the ‘50s. But Hanford had been thrown up so fast that there hadn’t been good blueprints of what they did. They hired my dad to run a little office with lots of blueprint machines. And he and some other people would go out and look at the buildings and draw, you know, make sketches of what was really there.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: The measurements and all that. And then the idea was now the government knows. Now the firetrucks can go to the right place. Because there were places nobody knew what they were, you know?
Franklin: Sure. Yeah, no, I’ve heard of that program before. And, like you said, it was very necessary.
Taylor: It was very useful, very useful. Then, about that time, 1955, ’56, people were building golf courses again. They hadn’t been all through the war. I don’t think there was one built—but I don’t know that. But they were building them, and Richland wanted to have a golf course and Kennewick wanted to have a golf course—just nine holes. And they hired my dad to design these. Interestingly enough, my father was very generous, and he accepted the jobs even though they weren’t going to pay him. They agreed to give him memberships in the clubs to cover what they should have given him for a salary. [LAUGHTER] Because that’s all they had to offer. And he wanted to see golf courses there. So he built one in Kennewick, and he built one in Richland. He also built Columbia Park, which is all along the river, maybe one of the longest parks in Washington. I don’t know.
Franklin: Really?
Taylor: But it’s very long, and it’s very narrow—some places only 20 feet.
Franklin: Mm-hm. And when you say built it, he—
Taylor: Designed it. He had a good arrangement there, because a lot of the woodsy part—he was very fond of Russian olive trees. And a lot of those were already there, all along the river. So all he had to do was built driveways and parking spots, camping spots, and smooth out the rough places. Make a road—because there’s a road the whole length of it.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s a very widely used park in town. It’s a great park.
Taylor: He loved doing that. I don’t know what they paid him for that. Much later, he built the Memorial Gardens, along the west edge of Richland, which is a cemetery. I have a picture in there of my parents. They gave them a pair of plots instead of paying them. Because they didn’t have the money to pay them. My father wanted a cemetery there. So, I think he was very generous. He was very community-minded. He was on the Benton County Planning Commission for many years. Encouraging parks, encouraging more and more landscaping and making it a more livable town. It needed to be kept up; the work that was done at the beginning needed to be continued, because there were a lot of people who lived there. And he could see the need for that. He told me once, if you live in a desert, you need twice as many trees. And I don’t think everyone agreed with that. Some of the businessmen thought, there’s some land; we’ll build on it. But my father hoped he could get parks in there. And he had to go through the council—Benton County Council—to get those parks approved.
Franklin: Sure. How long—did your parents stay in Richland for the rest of their lives?
Taylor: They did.
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: They did. I wanted to tell you that my father died of liver cancer. And we always thought it was the plant. Because when he was in the as-built program, he had to go and inspect the buildings. And one day, he came home and told my mother that the little badge he had to wear had gone off. Lit up, made a noise, and that meant he had been overexposed to something. They had taken him into a safe room, made him shower, given him different clothes, sent him to the doctor. And within a year, he was dead. He had liver cancer. And he never drank. We knew it was not that kind of thing.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: And a lot of people had that happen. It hasn’t been added up, I don’t think. But there were a lot of people like that.
Franklin: Sure. And what year did he pass away?
Taylor: 1966.
Franklin: 1966.
Taylor: He was 64 years old.
Franklin: Oh, okay. And you mentioned that you had grown up there and then eventually went to college. What year did you leave Richland to go to—
Taylor: 1953.
Franklin: Okay. Right. So I’m wondering if you could tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Did you stay in that same A house for the time that you were there?
Taylor: Yes, yes, until I went to college and got married a year or so later. My parents lived in that house. And then it became possible for residents to buy houses.
Franklin: Right, in 1958.
Taylor: They could buy the ones they were in and they could also buy ones nobody wanted. So they bought theirs. And they bought a little one on the other side of town as an investment, which they rented out. A lot of people did that.
Franklin: Right, right. I wonder if you could tell me about what you remember about the coming of the commercial—like the Uptown and kind of how Richland transitioned a little bit after the war. To start to become more of a normal town, but still totally government-owned and controlled.
Taylor: Yes, I can tell you that. I thought Uptown was great. There was a theater there! There were stores there, which we hadn’t had much of before. My father was very busy trying to get a park in the spot where that was. And writing things for the Tri-City Herald. And going to the Benton County meetings, trying to encourage a park in that spot. It was quite near a school and the school had a big yard. But there was George Washington Way, was right between where he wanted the park, where Uptown is. And the businessmen just, you know, they had the power and they got it. I always enjoyed it, because I was just a kid. I was in high school at that time.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: Didn’t realize how ahead of his time my father was. Because he loved trees, he loved building a better environment for people. Considered himself a conservationist. Also considered himself an urban planner, because that’s right in that—he didn’t have degrees in that. But I don’t know that there were degrees at that time. He just built on his education as he went along and did a lot in those fields.
Franklin: Do you remember the day when people found out about what had been produced at Hanford, or what was being produced at Hanford?
Taylor: Well, I was nine.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: What did I know? I was nine. I saw—we took the Walla Walla Union Bulletin paper. I was sitting on the front lawn, and the paper came. And said something like, the war is over. It was our bomb. Something like that.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And I looked at it. With my nine-year-old understanding, I thought, does this mean we’re leaving? Does this mean the end of Richland? Of course, I didn’t know. I remember that paper, I just don’t remember the exact words of the headline. My parents kept it for a long time, and a lot of people did—kept that newspaper that came out. And of course, I didn’t know what the place was for anyway, except something about the war. And we had lived at Kankakee, and that was something about the war. But my father didn’t seem like the kind of person that would be working in chemistry or in physics or anything like that. By the way, my father grew up in a Quaker family.
Franklin: Oh.
Taylor: And he was very pacifist.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: I think he would not have been in any kind of a job that had to do with hurting people. But he didn’t know what it was for. He didn’t know it was a terrible bomb that was being built. And he had a good job. I mean, coming out of the Depression, if you could get a good job, you took it.
Franklin: Right, right, yeah. No questions asked. What do you remember about civil defense? Drills and things like that in kind of the early part of the Cold War?
Taylor: Well, I remember getting under the desk. I don’t remember much other than that.
Franklin: Did you ever feel any fear or anxiety about living so close to Hanford, something that might have been a potential target in the case of aggression?
Taylor: No. I think a lot of kids might have. But my parents were not the kind to let us worry. And years later, my mother told me, Barbara, we didn’t know that America was going to win. We had no idea. We had been through the First World War, we had been through the Depression. We knew bad things could happen. And here was the country fighting on two fronts, two parts of the world. We were not having you worry. Because we never knew whether we would win. So we didn’t tell you much. When the newspaper came, we got it, we read it, we read the cartoons to you. You listened to Charlie McCarthy, and the Great Gildersleeve. All those humorous shows, Jack Benny. All those things that never touched on the war.
Franklin: What about later, though, during the Cold War? When you would have been in high school or starting to get a little bit older and maybe hearing more about the kind of conflicts that the US was involved in?
Taylor: Well, I did have an interesting situation. After I married, my husband joined the Army, because there was a draft. And his grades were not as high as they should have been. He was going to Eastern, to college—Eastern Washington College in Cheney. His grades were not as good as they could have been, so he decided to join. Because they promised him an electronics job. He didn’t have to a frontline military person.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And he wanted to be in electronics. So he joined in 1957. And our little boy was born in ’59. I went to Germany a few months after that. My father said, don’t take that baby over there. Because he had been through the Second World War and he knew how bad things could be. And there was a wall.
Franklin: Right.
Taylor: And there were all those things. And we were--I don’t know how many miles from the wall he was. And he didn’t want me to go. That was one of the few times I ever saw him cry. So we went, we stayed there two years, had a wonderful time going to places even though we didn’t have any money. But it was dangerous. The Army told us, you must keep several days’ worth of diapers, food, clothes, all your papers—you must keep them in one place. Because some morning, a truck may pull up in front of your house—an Army truck. And they’ll say, come and bring your things. And we had to get in the truck—they warned us this might happen—and we’ll drive to France. They had places of protection and more food and care for the children and all that. But it’ll be in France.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: If something happens with the wall.
Franklin: Do you think your parents might have felt anxiety during the Cold War, living in Hanford in kind of a—I mean, now knowing what was being produced there and that it might have been a target for retaliation?
Taylor: Well, they never said so. They never said so; they didn’t want to worry us. That’s the kind of parents they were. They protected their children. I think there were a lot of young people who had parents like that. I don’t remember anybody saying they were scared.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: They were busy going to school. We never felt like we didn’t have a future.
Franklin: Did you ever come back to Richland? I’m assuming you probably would’ve come back to visit your family, but did you ever come back to live there again?
Taylor: Yes, my husband and our children came back to live there for a short time when he got out of the Army, he happened to be—it was 19-early-60s and it was hard to get jobs. He got a job there inspecting pipes. The kind of pipes that had nuclear things going through them. And they were welded. He got jobs inspecting the welding. He didn’t like that kind of thing, and so he went on and did other things. He had a degree in industrial arts. He did some drafting for a while. And then he became a police officer in Pullman.
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: So that’s how we ended up back in Pullman and raised our kids there. So I only went back to Richland a few years. Wanted to go back to Pullman. I really had a good time in college there, and I liked having a university. There wasn’t any Tri-Cities center at that time—Tri-Cities branch.
Franklin: Sure. And then you mentioned that you worked at WSU as well.
Taylor: 27 years, yeah. From 1967 to 1995. From 1967 to 1995, I was a full-time secretary at WSU. And felt very good about it. I loved working at a university. I went to school along with it, which was great because I had not quite finished college. And so I took a lot of classes.
Franklin: Is there anything else that you’d like to—that we haven’t touched on, that you’d like to talk about? About your father or Hanford or Richland or your own life?
Taylor: Well, Richland was a very safe place for children at that time. As I look back, I didn’t appreciate that. We could get on our bicycles and ride anywhere in town as long as we were home for dinner. We could go to friends’, we could go to school, we could be in summer programs. They always had summer activities for the kids. And I think a lot of the amenities that a city has, even though it was a small town—actually we called it a village. It was known as a village. But I loved that. The freedom. And now, of course, you can’t just tell a kid, just be home for dinner. But they did. I could go to the movies on Saturday. There were two theaters and they had double features all the time. I always felt free to do whatever. I think it felt safe to do that. Another reason might have been we were very middle class. I never saw a black child when I was in school.
Franklin: Sure, because African Americans weren’t allowed to live in Richland.
Taylor: They were not allowed to work there. I don’t think that was an open policy, but they didn’t. They lived in Pasco.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: And they were not really given jobs at Hanford. I didn’t know about different races. I was a child. It was a middle class town, and you had to have a job to have a house.
Franklin: Sure. And everybody worked for the same employer.
Taylor: Absolutely, at the beginning, they did. Everybody did. I remember my mother saying when they first moved there, rent was $27 a month. And it was an A house. $27 a month. Which was very reasonable for the time.
Franklin: Well, that included pretty much full service, too, right?
Taylor: I think so.
Franklin: The government delivered coal and--
Taylor: Water.
Franklin: Changed the light bulbs, and—
Taylor: I don’t remember that part. I think my father probably would have done a lot of those little things, but—
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: I think they probably would. But I remember the electricity and the water were included.
Franklin: Richland has such a unique history of being this government constructed and owned town for 15 years. And I’ve always found it interesting to hear people’s experiences, like yours, about how safe and free they felt in a town that was so entirely unique in terms of its—like you said, it was middle class. Everyone who was there had a certain income—
Taylor: Had a job!
Franklin: They had a job. But the government also owned and controlled who could live in that community. So it’s a community of safety, but it seems to be of not the traditional freedoms that we associate with any other kind of community or anything like that. It’s always stuck out to me, in looking at Richland.
Taylor: Well, perhaps an adult would see that. To me it was just feeling safe.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: I don’t know that I felt unsafe in Illinois. I was in the kind of family that were very caring, that always put our care first. I had very good parents.
Franklin: I’ve had—a couple other times when I’ve interviewed people that have grown up in Richland, one thing that they’ve mentioned is that at some point they were struck how there were no old people, really.
Taylor: Yes, yes.
Franklin: And I wonder if you could talk—was there a moment when you realized that everybody was either children or young adults for the most part?
Taylor: The only people who were there who were old were grandmothers and grandfathers who came to visit or lived with them. I mean, really. I was aware of that. Very much so.
Franklin: And so did anyone in your extended family ever come to Richland to visit? Or how did you keep in touch with them, with that barrier there?
Taylor: Well, in those days you only talked on the phone if somebody died. You didn’t call the family back east, wherever it was. Because it cost money. And you just didn’t do it. There were letters that you would write and then send one to one member of the family, and they would send it to another, and they would send it to another. In that sort of round robin thing. I knew other families that did that. But my grandmother—my grandfather had died young. My grandmother had no money. In those days, a woman might be a housewife, a homemaker, a farmer’s wife, and end up with nothing.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: No income, no savings. She had two daughters. So she would travel by train from Illinois to stay with my aunt for a while. And then to Washington to stay with my parents for a while.
Franklin: Okay.
Taylor: That was common in those days, that an older person would live with you. I had lots of people I knew whose grandmother lived with them, or grandfather lived with them. Or Uncle Joe who was just not quite right. Families took in family. That was not unusual.
Franklin: Right, to have a multigenerational household.
Taylor: Right.
Franklin: Like that.
Taylor: So I thought it was perfectly natural. And it was natural. I got to know my grandmother very well and learn things from her that I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t lived with us.
Franklin: Sure, sure. Well, and a lot of families, psychologists and a lot of research points to that being very beneficial, too.
Taylor: Right.
Franklin: And it’s how most of the world lives.
Taylor: She had no money, absolutely none.
Franklin: Sure, sure.
Taylor: My parents paid everything.
Franklin: Because she wouldn’t have had a job.
Taylor: I don’t think she ever had a job except butter and eggs.
Franklin: Well, she worked, certainly, right, and probably worked very hard.
Taylor: Oh, she worked on the farm, I’m sure. But it’s not the kind of work that was paid. And that would have been before social security. Because that started just about the time I was born.
Franklin: Right. And even then, women got much less than men did.
Taylor: And still do.
Franklin: Yes. [LAUGHTER] What would you like future generations to know about growing up in Richland during World War II and the Cold War? And about the work that your father did?
Taylor: Well, I think the jobs our parents had—especially fathers, because most women were homemakers. I think that meant a lot to kids. I wouldn’t say that it was a caste system, but I was very aware that a girl named Betsey had a father who was a doctor, and they had a nicer house. I don’t know how the housing worked, but all those number houses, they had one of the better houses that was a single-family house, and on a hill, and just nicer. And I was a little jealous that my family wasn’t that wealthy that they could have a better house. So that’s very normal for kids, I think, to be aware of where their family is in the scheme of things.
Franklin: Mm-hm.
Taylor: I came from the Midwest. I thought my parents were middle class, middle-educated. They both had degrees, but not graduate degrees. We lived in an average house. I was very middle. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what else to say. But there were people who had a little more money. They were managers, they were doctors, they were professionals. And I think we were aware of that. And I think they were aware of that, the kind of cliques. High schools have those.
Franklin: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: You know, that’s all there is to it. There’s always going to be the athletes and the wealthier kids and the smarter kids and whatever. But I graduated from Columbia High School in 1953 as Barbara Brown. I loved high school. We had choruses, we had bands; we had various kinds of activities like that. And I was in the choir for four years and loved it. Just loved it. There was a teacher named Harley Stell, S-T-E-L-L. And it’s Harley. He was hired right out of college, about 1950, to start a music program, a vocal music program, and he did. Trios, chorus—I think it was called a chorus. And I sang with them and made some really good friends with them for four years. We sang at graduation. I’ll never forget that. Which was a wonderful experience. He added a lot to the school. Because music is an enrichment that students need.
Franklin: Yes.
Taylor: So they started with very basic classes. Just first to eighth grade, and then they kept adding these things. Which is what all towns do, but it was starting, as I was in high school, starting to be a normal town. And people stayed because this is where their roots were now. I think that was quite a shock to the government, that we wanted to buy our houses. We wanted to stay there.
Franklin: Right, because like you’d mentioned earlier, the community was from all over the country.
Taylor: That’s right.
Franklin: And no one knew anyone else when they came.
Taylor: But that’s a sociological fact.
Franklin: Sure.
Taylor: I think, as I said, a sense of place. A sense that this is where we are, let’s stay here and do the best we can with what we’ve got.
Franklin: Right, right. Yeah, that’s really fascinating. Thank you. Well, I just want to thank you for interviewing with us. As someone who lives in Richland, I’d like to thank you for your father’s work—
Taylor: Thank you.
Franklin: For bringing green and trees and things to Richland. Because it helps break up the heat and the sage brush.
Taylor: Well, it’s a pile of sand. That’s what it was to begin with.
Franklin: Yeah.
Taylor: We had terrible windstorms. We had a fire one year way out in the desert. And I remember that everybody—cars came through the streets and said everybody move to the east side of town, down by the river.
Franklin: Wow.
Taylor: That was frightening.
Franklin: Yeah, I bet.
Taylor: But this fire was going faster than a man could run.
Franklin: Wow.
Taylor: It was coming from the big hills over there, the Rattlesnake hills. It came pretty close. I remember that very well; I must have been ten, something like that. I remember that the wind used to cut your legs. Girls wore dresses then; they didn’t wear pants like they do now. Walking home from school, the wind and the sand would cut your legs. Little tiny cuts. And you’d feel like to go hide behind a tree, but you’ve got to go home.
Franklin: Right. Wow.
Taylor: And that was really painful.
Franklin: I bet.
Taylor: They said there was something called a jackalope out in the desert. Nobody ever saw one.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Usually just taxidermists make those.
Taylor: With big ears. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well, Barbara, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Taylor: I want this to be about my dad. So please emphasize that.
Northwest Public Television | Taylor_Diane_Bob
Man one: Okay
Robert Bauman: All right. Good to go?
Man one: You ready?
Man two: We're ready to go.
Bauman: Okay. All right, well, we'll get started. And I'm going to start first by having each of you say your name for us. Make sure we have that on there. So go ahead.
Bob Taylor: My name is Bob Taylor.
Bauman: All right.
Dianne Taylor: And I'm Dianne Taylor.
Bauman: And Dianne is spelled with two Ns?
Dianne Taylor: Two Ns, yes.
Bauman: Okay, great. And my name's Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And today is June 10th of 2015. And so, if we could start maybe, start, Bob, maybe, with if you could tell us a little bit about your family and how they ended up coming to the Tri-Cities area and when that happened.
Bob Taylor: My father was employed by the US federal prison system. He went to work as a guard at McNeil Island in 1934 for the Department of Prisons, the US Bureau of Prisons--there, I'm finally saying that correctly. And he started off as a guard and was employed at McNeil Island from 1934 actually until he retired in 1955. But the real story to talk about is how I happen to be sitting here. And in the early stages of the creation of the Manhattan Project and what was developing here with the acquisition of all the lands for Hanford, very early in that process, the US Army went to the Bureau of Prisons and contracted for a minimum security type prison camp to be constructed here in the Richland area. The purpose of that being the minimum security prisoners would be farming the lands and the orchards that were being acquired by the Manhattan Project, but would have no men available to take care of the fields and the orchards. And so the Bureau of Prisons contracted with the Department of the Army on behalf of the Manhattan Project to maintain those fields out in Vernita, White Bluffs, all in this area. And they agreed—they, the Department of the Army--agreed to build a, what they call, prison camp. It turned out to be right out on the bend of the Yakima River right near Horn Rapids Dam. And they constructed buildings, facilities, kitchens, dining areas, administration buildings, and the facilities to house and support approximately 250 federal prisoners who were brought in in early 1944 to take care of the agricultural needs of this area. And my father, who was at that point then had been with the federal prison at McNeil Island and had become a senior guard, was chosen to come over here and become superintendent of this camp. The name of the camp is Columbia Camp. And that's a little story in itself. The people in Washington, DC, were out here and didn't quite know the geography. They knew the Columbia River was here somewhere nearby, and even though the Yakima is a much smaller river, they didn't realize it. And so they named this federal prison camp Columbia Camp simply because they were on a river and they thought they were on the Columbia River. That's how it came to have the name Columbia Camp. Anyway, they started bringing the prisoners in in early 1944. And as I say, they typically for the next three and a half years, had about 250 prisoners on site at any given time. I think the number in the various information files I have, there were probably more like 700 prisoners rotated through this area. But the facilities were actually to hold about 250. So my dad took over as superintendent of the prison camp. He came here in early 1944, and initially they had—and I have many pictures of the whole camp, the buildings, and also the housing—there were initially 16 Quonset huts that were built out there for the initial officers and their families to move. At the time he came, those were the first. We moved in here actually on D Day, 1944, June 6th, in the middle of a major windstorm. And my mother who was born and raised in Western Washington, to arrive here in those kind of conditions—I don’t have to say that we had no air conditioning, and fans weren't even really very available. We moved into a Quonset hut. We ultimately, by the next spring, they—the Army, the prison—built eight more fancy housing. They brought in prefabs, the basic 609 square foot prefab that everybody in Richland is familiar with, of which there are still hundreds of them. That was the new fancy housing, and my dad as superintendent was able to claim the first one in the row next to the administration building. So in the next spring, then, we moved into a prefab. Again, I have lots of pictures, family pictures, of our housing. The kids, we were bused into Richland. Initially we all went to Sacajawea the first year we were there. And then when Jefferson grade school opened in the fall of '45, we all went there, switched over to there. We had a couple of older kids—family, kids in the camp—that went to high school at what was then called Columbia High School. My mother was a teacher, actually ended up teaching at Columbia High School part of the time that we were here. So as families living at Columbia Camp, we were bused into town, pretty much bused back home. And we played. As kids we played in the heat of the summer and cold in the winter and just pretty much in the desert surrounding the camp out there. The camp itself existed from early 1943. In early 1947, they started—they, again, the US Bureau of Prisons and the US Army--started writing back and forth corresponding about the continued need for the maintenance of the orchards and the fields and ultimately decided that it wasn't necessary anymore. And some of those fields ultimately were left to go, and others were maintained I guess in other ways. In the files that I have, my dad's files, I've got a tremendous amount of correspondence between he and the officials in Washington, DC. The Department of Army, I've got synopsis of what all was done during those period of years. I have interesting files about prisoners and some of their experiences in managing them as agricultural workers, how they got them to work every day, how they kept them fed every day. There's a lot of material in the files that I have of my dad's about that sort of thing. There's a lot of information about the contract itself between the US Army and the Federal Bureau of Prisons as far as payment of fees and expenses and also the type of crops that were harvested in volume and in prices and that sort of thing. It makes for very fascinating reading to have this kind of information available to me about what went on out there. Then ultimately in the fall of 1947, I think we were about the last to leave as a family. We left in November of '47. And basically the place was abandoned. I have, again in the files, there's information about dismantling the camp and sending knives and forks to Leavenworth and dishes to somewhere in Arizona. So there's a lot of very detailed information about the camp. But the long and the short of it is that the camp existed for those three and a half, almost four years. And very, very, very few people anywhere even know about it. The families, the other families, were rotated to different jobs. Three or four of the families went back to McNeil Island. Others went to Arizona, Leavenworth—other federal prison camps. And everybody just went their own way, and nobody was left here to even be a historian for what all went on. And thanks to my mother, who keeps all these documents and records and letters, and even—there’s a lot of letters between my father and my mother when he first came over here, where he's giving examples of daily life here in Richland in 1944 that are just fascinating reading. And the cost of a rental house that the government was charging for people and the cost to buy a refrigerator, things like that. So it's really fun for us to be able to come and sort of make some of this information available as to what Columbia Camp was all about over many, many, many years in Richland, because nobody was here to contradict that statement. A lot of people said, oh, it was a prisoner war camp. And ultimately, finally, that got changed. There was some documentation. At the present time, out at the day camp, there's a kiosk out there with a few pictures and a commentary posted out there, a little parking lot that you can drive to that gives just an extremely brief summary of what Columbia Camp was. There's a picture of a man, a far distant picture of a man standing in front of the administration building. Cannot guarantee it, but I think it—I'm pretty sure it's my dad. He was the superintendent of the camp, so his picture's out there in that kiosk for anybody that wants to go out there and look. But that's what Columbia Camp in a nutshell was all about. We have many, many, many pictures of the camp, the buildings, the dormitory buildings, the kitchen, the administration building, the power plant, the steam plant. And then we ourselves have taken pictures recently from some of those same positions, including the foundation of the steam plant that we've got so we can supplement a lot of what I've been talking about. Well, everything that I've been talking about we can supplement with pictures, and letters, and documents, and correspondence, and files.
Dianne Taylor: Memories.
Bauman: Yeah, right. So really interesting, and so first of all, let me confirm that there are still rumors out there. I've had students tell me, wasn't there a prisoner of war camp?
Dianne Taylor: Really?
Bauman: Oh, yeah.
Bob Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bauman: Or, wasn't a Japanese internment camp here?
Bob Taylor: That's what--
Bauman: No.
Dianne Taylor: Mm-mm.
Bauman: So this is great to--one great thing about interviewing you is to clarify that for people as well.
Dianne Taylor: One of the things that I'd like to bring in, because we didn't know about this for so long. Dad would not talk about his prison experiences. He was a loving, wonderful, wonderful father and grandfather and wonderful father-in-law. But this was never discussed. It wasn't until he died and I'm going through all of their things because Bob's an only child that I find all of this stuff. So Bob's mother's in a nursing home. She's quite elderly. We find this stuff. We get so excited over these pictures. Of course, she thought we were crazy to move to Richland anyway because her memories are not the Richland it is today. So we went, took all these pictures. And all she did was she took them from me, put them down in her purse. And I said, well, Mom, this is exciting. We found all dad's stuff, and we want to talk about it. No, it's secret. She would not talk about it. It was secret. And this is in 19--when did she die?
Bob Taylor: Well, this was in 1995, I think, that we--
Dianne Taylor: It was so ingrained in her, the secrecy of their lives, that even after all that time, she couldn't talk to us. So we took the pictures. I said, mom, I've got to have the pictures. And we took them back. But I think that's when it really hit me what their lives must have been like living here at that time.
Bauman: Right, that even that, which was only tangentially connected to Hanford--
Bob Taylor: Exactly.
Dianne Taylor: Yes. Yeah.
Bauman: Was very secret, right?
Dianne Taylor: Yeah, absolutely.
Bauman: So let me ask you a few questions. So first of all, what was your father's name?
Bob Taylor: Harold E. Taylor.
Bauman: Harold Taylor, okay. And your mother's name?
Bob Taylor: Doris C. Taylor.
Bauman: Okay. And so it was the three of you when you--well, your father came initially, and then you and your mother came.
Bob Taylor: Right, in June.
Bauman: In June of '44. And you mentioned the dust storm.
Bob Taylor: Termination wind.
Bauman: So, and you said that it could hold about 250 prisoners at the camp at once.
Bob Taylor: Yes.
Bauman: So it was minimum security. So what sorts of--but they were federal prisoners.
Bob Taylor: They were.
Bauman: So what sorts of crimes would these men have committed?
Bob Taylor: The vast majority of federal prisoners were not necessarily minimum security, but they were white collar crimes. In some cases bank robbers would sometimes fit into the category, depends on the nature of the individual. But bank robbers weren't necessarily restricted from ever being in the so-called minimum security camps. And, see, we went back to McNeil Island, where my dad then took over the minimum security part of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. And so some of these same prisoners went with us back over there. That's kind of an aside, but it's part of explaining to you, or answering your question about minimum security and who qualified. I'll finish that answer first. A lot of them were conscientious objectors. And in fact there's correspondence in the files where prisoners would be sent here to Columbia Camp, but they were always—the conscientious objectors—they were always being monitored, talked to, perhaps convinced that it would be to their best interest if they would revoke their claim to being a conscientious objector and go back and join the Army and basically reinvent themselves in society. And there's a few prisoners did that. We've even got in those boxes, we've got a couple letters that one or two of them wrote to my dad personally thanking him. He's gone back, he's gone in the Army. He feels better about himself. So we've even got that kind of stuff in the file. Anyway, then, just as an interesting aside, when you talk about minimum security versus the hardcore inside the walls type, like at McNeil Island, state prisoners—murders, that sort of thing—of course they're maximum security. But any white collar crime, including—might not sound like white color crime—but bank robbery, that sort of thing, there can be any number of--
Dianne Taylor: In those days.
Bob Taylor:--forgers. There can be any number of kind of people that aren't really hardcore criminals, but they've made mistakes. They've done things bad. But they know that they're decent people. And these are the people that, even on McNeil Island, again, same as here, they would stay in a minimum security area and do the weeding, doing the gardening, doing the orchards, doing the fields, like over there like they were doing here. My dad, as superintendent of the camp at McNeil, we had kind of a beautiful estate, ranch home estate with about an acre and a half of rockeries and gardens and rose trellises. And we had five--as a kid, I never mowed the yard. I had five prisoners that—we did, the family did—that took care of our yard and our place. It was kind of a strange childhood that I had. But that's what minimum security means, that they could be trusted. They were called trustees, as a matter of fact.
Bauman: And so about how large of a staff was there working at the camp?
Bob Taylor: Here at Columbia Camp, there were 24. 24 with families, and then there were another ten to 12 that lived in Prosser, Benton City, some of them right here in Richland that would come to work. So there was less than 40 total staff, 24 of whom were on site with families.
Dianne Taylor: Tell him the story that you were telling me about Dad writing a note about getting these guys to come in on Sunday for roll call.
Bob Taylor: Oh, it was one of the notes, one of the memorandums to his officers in the files that I read. It's something to the effect—no, I guess it was a memo to the entire camp, to the prisoners and the officers. And it's just kind of a tongue-in-cheek, that it seems to be hard to get prisoners to make bed call or duty call or account for themselves on the weekends. And it was just kind of an interesting, the way he wrote that even on the weekends, they still, after all, are prisoners and have to account for themselves. They actually only had I think it was three escapes. Nobody actually ever fully totally escaped. They had three that walked away, but they were caught along the river on the way to Benton City. So that was part of the minimum security idea is that they weren't particularly threats. They knew they just needed to serve their time and get out. And so they weren't trying to break out.
Dianne Taylor: And where could they go? That's the desert. There's no transportation. That's one of the stories Dad did tell me about two of the guys walking to Benton City. And of course they didn't get there because there's nowhere to hide.
Bauman: And so how old were you then when you came here?
Bob Taylor: My birthday's in July, so I was six years old when we moved here in June. And as I said, it was D-Day. And then just turned seven in July, and then I was ten when we left in late '47.
Bauman: Okay. And so what was that like as someone roughly between the ages of seven and ten living out here in the camp in initially a Quonset hut? Is that right?
Bob Taylor: Initially in Quonset hut and then in a prefab. Well, first of all, six-to-ten-year-olds don't really think about hot and cold. The only thing that we were ever really cautioned about by our parents is it's a little problematic to go running around in the desert barefooted. There were rattlesnakes. Never got bit by one. Saw a few. But we had the swimming hole right there at the bend of the river for summertime, spent a lot of time in the swimming. The pictures you can see the two rows of Quonset huts. It was kind of, I call it a parkway, which wasn't necessarily what you would call a bunch of grass in 1944. But nevertheless, there was a grassy strip, two street, two roads for cars, and the Quonset huts and in the middle grassy strip that that's where we played our soccer and mostly soccer that we played there as kids. And we were either in the river, out there in that strip, or just wandering out in the desert barefoot. And with our bicycles, there's a picture I've got showing me standing beside a tree that was very near our house that I crashed into and cut my head open. That sort of thing as living here as a kid. We were typical kids, even though we were--in fact, my entire life growing up was always subject to prison service. We lived on McNeil Island, which was, when we went back, I mean, my grade school and my high school years, I went to school in Lakewood Tacoma, Clover Park High School. But we still lived on the island. We had to catch a prison launch back and forth every day. As kids growing up, none of us ever had the typical life experience of just walking to the store, walking to the theater. We didn't live on Swift and could walk down to the Village—to the theater. We never had those kind of experiences. Speaking of the theater, we did get to come into town. Our parents would carpool or whatever, and we'd come into town to the Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix movies on Saturday afternoon at the Village Theater here in Richland. But it was never anything we could ride our bike to or walk to.
Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, about getting into town and how often you were able to do that. And what was the town of Richland like? What sorts of memories do you have?
Bob Taylor: Well, I mean, you've got all the pictures as a historian. You know what Richland basically looked like in 1944, 1945. It was like that. I mean, we came into school. The first year I said we went to Sacajawea. The second year, we from then on went to Jefferson. We would become friends with kids in the class and do things with kids in the class, but it was always more difficult. I was in Cub Scouts. My dad would have to drive in to make separate arrangements to go, and to some of the other kids out there as well, to come in to the Cub Scout meetings. One of my memories, and I'm not sure why, but one of my memories was one of the girls’ parents had--and I don't quite understand it now, but her parents had—I can't say they owned, but maybe they did—a large enough piece of ground that she could ride her horses. And I remember some of us—and it was like right here. It was straight north from Jefferson that we would come out of town, although not very far, and ride horses out here in the open prairie. And it might have been right here. I don't know. But we were able to socialize to some degree with the kids in town. But again, one of the things that I have to say, it's like my mother. Even as kids, talked about secrecy. We were instilled with absolutely every bit of that, just like the adults. We absolutely were. And it was just a way of life, so we didn't question it. We didn't try to violate it. We just--everything was secret.
Bauman: So you didn't talk to anyone about the camp at all really?
Bob Taylor: Just that we lived out there. And that was all.
Bauman: Right. So did you know what Hanford was, what was going on?
Bob Taylor: No, not until the bomb was dropped and the paper headline right here in Richland. That's when we knew what was going on. The road now as you go out there is not the same road it was then. What is Horn Rapids Road, which comes across—wherever we are—comes across, that was the road that we came in on. So we came in a little further north into Richland than we do now, where the intersection is. And so right at that corner right there was the beginning of the trailer camp where so many people were living and so many of the kids in school with me were living in the trailer camp. And there was a wire fence along the road, and so we just knew we were outside the fence, and something was going on on the other side of the fence. But we didn't know what it was—until the article came out in the paper.
Bauman: You mentioned, so, the prisoners, would they get transported, then to different fields--
Bob Taylor: They were bused.
Bauman: --to different farms then?
Bob Taylor: There were like, I think as I recall in reading the files, there were sometimes as many as ten different gangs or groups, for lack of a better term, that were bused out to the various sites. And that's part of what's in my dad's files is just the logistics of taking--they called it dinner then--lunch out to feed everybody at lunchtime, and just the difficulties of that sort of thing in running this prison camp. Because some of them out in Vernita, for instance, they basically had to leave with the lunch service right after breakfast to get it out there. Because the road, the road was not great going out to Vernita from here. The road that we drive now and think nothing of was basically just a dirt road in those days going out there. Because the road, the paved road, bent south and went to Benton City when you go out that way. So yeah, there were a number of different orchards. I can remember clearly the—what are now all the Richland ranches on Cottonwood and Birch and Cedar, all those where all the Richland ranches were ultimately built in 1948. All of that was cherry orchards. And we always had one or two crews harvesting the cherries, for instance, right here in town. And a couple times my dad brought me out and actually I helped them pick cherries. So that's just one of my memories is picking cherries in what is now that major housing part of Richland.
Bauman: Right. Now, so, in 1947, when the camp closed and you left, I assume maybe your mother was probably happy about going back to the west side? [LAUGHTER]
Bob Taylor: Extremely, yes, extremely happy to get back to the cool west side, yes.
Dianne Taylor: She was a tiny, tiny, lovely lady, a teacher. Heart and soul a teacher, and totally supportive of Bob's father. But she wasn't happy to be here at all. [LAUGHTER] And she was very, very happy when they finally left.
Bauman: You mentioned she taught at Columbia High School.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah.
Bauman: What did she teach?
Bob Taylor: English, primarily English. And she was in charge of the journalism one school year.
Dianne Taylor: She had to quit teaching, though, because of her duties as--and the words are official hostess of the camp, which is really interesting. She organized bridge activities, social activities, to keep the wives that were thrown out here in the middle of the desert happy. Because of course they weren't working, very many of them. So she worked that first year at Hanford, and then she quit and was kept busy keeping activities going on for the women and children.
Bauman: That’s very interesting. Were there a lot of children around your age you were able to play with?
Bob Taylor: I'm trying to remember. There were, of my own specific age that were my closest friends, there were seven of us that were either within one grade one way or the other. I think there were some older kids that came into high school. Our bus—I think there were about a total of 12 or 14 of us rode the bus into town. There certainly weren't two kids in every household of the 24 officers that worked there. Some of them were more senior and kids were grown and gone.
Bauman: So did you have your own bus, then, that would just take a group of kids from the camp?
Bob Taylor: I guess, yeah, we must have, that there was just a bus that came out and got us and took us back into town. There was nobody else to pick up. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And do you remember how you felt about first of all coming here? Do you have any memories of that, and then when you left in 1947?
Bob Taylor: I certainly had no--at age six, everything in the world was exciting to me. I think I mentioned earlier heat and wind, that sort of thing didn't really mean much of anything to me. I have no recollection of being upset about being here, other than knowing that my mother was upset about being here. I liked it here. I had good friends. I was kind of disappointed to go back to McNeil Island. Three of my closest friends at camp that were out there too--let's see, Kenny and Jerry and—
Dianne Taylor: Were they out there then?
Bob Taylor: Yeah. There were, I think, five of us actually went back to McNeil Island. So, at least I wasn't--had my friends going back there with me, which made it better. And then we had a very--from a prefab in the desert, we went back to a fairly palatial estate that we lived on because of my dad's position, so I liked that. And then that next year I started junior high at Clover Park. And so starting then I went back to--I rode the boat to Steilacoom and caught the bus to school. And then I was off on a whole ‘nother part of my life. I think I'd say I was probably happy to be leaving, but not the way my mother was happy to be leaving.
Dianne Taylor: Well, I think it was a pretty idyllic childhood for kids like this. They've got the free reign of the desert, within reason. They've got the swimming pool. Nobody was worrying about jumping into the Yakima River. And they had friends, and they'd go into the movies. We've got a picture of Bob--we think it's Bob--with his buddies. There was a picture in Richland years ago at the post office there was a little museum.
Bauman: A kind of display.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah. And there's a picture of the kids outside the Uptown--not the Uptown, the old Village Theater. And we're pretty sure he's there. But the stories he would tell me, running around, riding their bikes, it was--
Bob Taylor: I just think of it as fun and unique. I really do.
Dianne Taylor: What about the stories about Dad and the baseball field? They had a baseball field there for the prisoners, for their recreation.
Bauman: Oh, at the camp.
Bob Taylor: Well, that was their big activity on the weekends. They had a very nice ball field. Again, there's pictures of it outside of the administration building. And my dad was a good guy. For somebody in 1934 to survive starting as a prison guard at McNeil Island, those were tough times. Those were really tough times. I don't mean living as a family, my mom and dad. I mean just as a human being who felt some degree of emotion about people. Prison guards anywhere in any prison in 1934 were really tough, mean guys. They had to be. But when he came over here, he really--and it shows in his correspondence--he really had a lot of humanity and caring. And he ran a really great camp here and has lots of letters saying so from people, from superiors. What started me on that was just her idea about the baseball. He wanted to make sure that they had sporting activities to do things with over the weekend.
Bauman: Recreation and entertainment.
Bob Taylor: Yeah.
Bauman: I find it very interesting neither of your parents really talked about this stuff, but they kept--
Dianne Taylor: Yeah, oh yeah.
Bauman: --the photos and the documents that you didn't even know.
Bob Taylor: Yeah. We didn't realize they had all that.
Dianne Taylor: And Dad would talk about it a little bit. It wasn't like he never talked about it. But he told me the story one time about the prisoners escaping, and he talked some of these things. But it wasn't something that you talked about very much. It was once in a while. I mean, like every few years there'd be a comment. But Mom didn't talk about it at all, other than the teaching, which of course she loved to be a teacher and loved doing that. But it was a very, very quiet non-discussed part of their lives.
Bauman: Are there any other either events or things that happened that were humorous or special things, memories that stand out in your mind about your years here?
Bob Taylor: One of my major memories actually was the very first summer we were here. And three or four six-year-old boys never, ever, ever, ever got in trouble. But for some reason, we chose to go into the crawl space underneath our Quonset hut. I mean, there was no foundation in the sense you’d think of a foundation. But there was a raised floor and so there was space under there with snakes and bugs and spiders. And my parents never specifically told me, don't ever go down there. You'd sort of think that was understood. But three of us, one hot, hot, hot day, we thought, well, it was just boiling hot outside. It was boiling hot in the Quonset hut. Those things are not fit for human habitation without air conditioning. And so we got the smart idea it might be cooler down there in the crawl space. So we got down in the crawl space, and then for some reason some guards--I say guards—some of the men came around doing some kind of a check of the housing. I don't know what they were necessarily—but here we were, little boys where we were pretty sure we weren't supposed to be, and the adult men walking around sounded like we just knew they were looking specifically for us to get us in trouble. That's kind of silly, really, but it was a big thing for me as six years old to be down there where I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be and knew what kind of trouble I was going to be in when they found us. The other thing is the coming into the shows in the afternoon and standing in the line outside the theater. And, as I say, Tom Mix, and Hopalong Cassidy, and whoever else, the Saturday afternoon shows at the theater. I remember going to those a lot.
Dianne Taylor: One of the fun things that we go out to there. We hadn't been there for a few years, out to the camp. It's just kind of fun to walk around and realize what was there--the families, the men—brought together from all over the country for one purpose. And they fulfilled their purpose and kept the orchards going and the fields, and then they left. And to me there's a lot of kind of neat spirit and ghost—ghost isn't the right word. But there's a sense that there was something really interesting, good happening here—good or bad depending on the way you looked at it. But it's just an interesting place to go and walk around out there. You should do it sometime.
Bauman: Yeah. And a unique place.
Dianne Taylor: Very unique, very unique. And it's fun to walk around, and we think we found the kitchen. So I'm thinking about the guy making the good cinnamon rolls. He was there. And you think you found where Dad—where the office was.
Bob Taylor: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can identify where the administration building was. But the various cement foundations or partial foundations that are still out there can pretty well match up with the pictures that we have from back then.
Bauman: Well, great. Maybe this might be a good time, then, to sort of end this part, unless there's something we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to in this part of the--
Bob Taylor: Well, I've covered the things that I certainly, the bullet points that I had in mind that I wanted to cover. There's probably always more things to talk about. Part of it is sitting and having the box and going through and pulling a piece of paper might remind me to say something else. But I feel comfortable right now in saying that anybody watching this interview is going to know a whole lot more about what Columbia Camp was about than they knew before. And that's the main point of what we're trying to accomplish here.
Dianne Taylor: There were no fences at Columbia Camp.
Bob Taylor: Right.
Dianne Taylor: There were no fences.
Bob Taylor: Right.
Bauman: Right. And these were all male prisoners, right?
Bob Taylor: Oh yeah.
Bauman: Yeah, well, maybe this would be a good time to end this part, and then we can look at some of the photos and have you comment some of those.
Dianne Taylor: I wish that they had shared it with--Bob's mom and dad had shared it with us sooner, because there would be so many more stories and so much more understanding.
Man one: Okay, so I'm going to give this. Why was it located--I mean, I know it was located for the orchard support and stuff. But why where it was? Ever hear why it was located?
Bob Taylor: I don't specifically know, other than it was near Hanford. It was on the river, which helped with the infrastructure. It was away from this burgeoning 1,500 population big town of Richland.
Man one: And yet kind of remote.
Bob Taylor: And kind of remote. I mean, it was remote for those days.
Bauman: Like you said, escaping was tricky because--
Bob Taylor: Yeah, it was far enough.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah.
Man one: It was Alcatraz in its own way.
Dianne Taylor: Well, it was. It was, because it was--I mean, can you just imagine being out there and trying to escape? And how are you going to get water? It's the true desert.
Bob Taylor: I guess the real answer is, if you realize that Hanford took everything from here north and they weren't going to go across the river, and here's Richland, and down there is Benton City, and this is the Yakima winding out there and just kind of a nice little bend in the river of the Yakima.
Bauman: I love that they call it Columbia Camp even though it's not--
Dianne Taylor: Isn't that funny?
Man one: I know, it's great. Close enough.
Bauman: They didn't know their geography very well.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah. We know it wasn't Bob's father because there were guys from Washington out here long before that. But it's kind of interesting.
Man two: Well, [INAUDIBLE] will bring that light around, put it behind that camera if it'll reach. If it won't I'll bring--or just unplug it and I'll move this cord.
Dianne Taylor: What you doing?
Bob Taylor: Just got one minor issue. I'm just seeing if anything's--
Dianne Taylor: Yeah, this guy had no clue what it's like to be raised in the city, because he started--
Man one: The stories that you tell remind me of this other guy I knew that had grown up--his father was in the Navy. And he grew up on Midway, I think. Midway or Wake Island where it was a mile this way, and it was two miles that way, and that was it.
Bob Taylor: Yeah.
Man one: And as a kid, he loved it. Down at the beach, having a good time, going to the movies, all he wanted, soda pop and all that stuff. But the parents were going crazy.
[LAUGHTER]
Bob Taylor: Oh yeah.
Dianne Taylor: Well, when we got this little note from Bob's mother--there's pictures in there of the women of the camp. And if you watched at all the Manhattan Project TV show that was on for a while, these gals are—it's the same women.
Northwest Public Television | Bush_Bob
Robert Bauman: I’m going to have you start just by saying your name, first.
Robert Bush: Okay, my name is Bob Bush.
Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman, and we're conducting this interview with Robert, or Bob, Bush on July 17 of 2013. And we're having this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And so I'd like to start just by having you talk about how and when you arrived at Hanford. What brought you here?
Bush: Okay. During World War II, I was overseas. My parents were in the area, both of them working. My brother was also here in Pasco High School. When I came home from the service to Southern Idaho, Korean War broke out. Wages were frozen, and so I was looking to better myself. And I applied by mail. I was interviewed by telephone. And I came up here in 1951 to the accounting department, General Electric Company. They were the sole contractor. And for 15 years, in construction and engineering accounting, which was separate from plant operations at that time. And from there, my accounting career followed its path through several successive contractors. From GE to ITT, Atlantic Richfield, to Rockwell, and finally with Westinghouse. When I retired, I was with Westinghouse for one month.
Bauman: You said your parents were here during the war. When did they come out?
Bush: It was '43. 1943 and '44, my mother worked for the original postmaster of Richland, Ed Peddicord. And my dad was a carpenter. Built some of the first government houses called the Letter Homes. They were here about two years, I think. And then they went back to Idaho, I believe.
Bauman: Okay. And what part of Idaho?
Bush: Twin Falls, Idaho. Where I graduated from high school.
Bauman: Okay. What were your first impressions upon arriving in the Tri-Cities?
Bush: That's kind of interesting, Bob. Because I came up ahead of my wife and two--year-and-a-half old, and three-and-a-half-year-old sons. About two weeks ahead of them. And so I found a Liberty trailers to rent—the housing was nonexistent. And I found a Liberty trailer, which means it had no running water, no bathroom. It was like a camping trailer, basically. I sent for them. A brother-in-law who had graduated from high school went directly into the Korean War. He drove them up as far as Huntington. I went on a bus to Huntington and met them, came back. And as we came onto the Umatilla side, and I said, that's Washington. Well, there was no green and everybody was disappointed. But that's the first impression. I mean, there wasn't a bridge over the river in Umatilla. It was a ferry. So you drove around the horn at Wallula. Things were just really different.
Bauman: So you said you had a trailer. Where was--
Bush: In Pasco on a front yard of an old pioneer home, where Lewis Street crosses 10th. That was the end on Lewis Street at 10th. And from there west was called Indiana. And there was about three homes on there. And it just quit. And roughly across from the present day Pasco School Administration Building, which was a Sears building. Across the street there was where this home was. I mean, things have just—in the whole area—have changed so much.
Bauman: And how long did you live there then?
Bush: Until I was called for housing in Richland, which was six months. That was in June, no air conditioning. And finally got into an apartment building, a one-bedroom before with two little boys that slept in the same crib. It was still, basically, wartime conditions. Weren't any appliances for sale and you had to stand in line to get a refrigerator. It was a different world. But we were young, so we could take it.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And was this in Richland then, the apartment?
Bush: No, that was in Pasco. After that trailer, that was only about two weeks. And then we want into this apartment, the one-bedroom. Then we moved next door to a two-bedroom in a five-plex. And then in December, six months later, I got the first--I got a housing call from the housing office in Richland, which sat where the present day police station sits. And the lady offered me—she said, you could have it Saturday. It was a prefab. It had already been worn and pulled out. And I kind of hesitated. I said, I've already got something in Pasco. Well, she said, I could let you have a brand new apartment. That apartment was brand new. It was so clean. My wife, who was very fastidious, she didn't even have to clean cupboards. And the apartments have now been torn down by Kadlec for that newest building. And in fact, this morning I just went by and took a picture of Goethals Street, which is vacated. And it was quite a pleasant move to come out of a trailer into—a non-air-conditioned cinder block building apartment into a nice, brand new apartment with air conditioning, full basement, and close to work. And at that time, my office was downtown in the so-called 700 Area, which is basically where the Federal Building is--where the Bank of America is was the police station. And that's Knight Street, I believe. From there north to Swift, and from Jadwin west to Stevens where the Tastee Freeze was, that was the 700 Area confines. Probably about 22 buildings in there. The original thing prior to computers, everything was manual bookkeeping or accounting with ledgers. And they came out with a McBee Keysort cards, and it was called electronic data processing. It was spaghetti wire with holes in the boards, that type of thing. That building had to be a special airlock building. And that's the Spencer Kenney Building beside the Gesa Building. That building is built especially to house equipment. And they just went from there. And I moved around my office. And after 15 years, I went into what they call operations. I was onsite services, which—did that for 17 years. And that was probably the better part of--second better job that I had, I guess. The transportation and everything, onsite support services. The whole point there. That job took me all over the plant. I established inventories. I took some of the first inventories of construction workers' supplies and tools and shop equipment, rolling stock. My name was Mud. They thought so much of me they gave me a desk in the corner of a big lunchroom. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So you did work at various places then?
Bush: Yes. Well, yes. My very first location was in North Richland, then called North Richland Camp, where the bus lot was--the maintenance shops. I'm trying to establish a point up there—what's over there today? There's a big sand dune on your left going by the automotive shops, past the bus lot, where the bus lot was. Opposite that sand dune on the other side of Stevens was a bunch of one-story temporary buildings. That was North Richland Camp. And that's where my first accounting job was there for two or three years. I had been there—I came there in June. And in January of '52, had 22 people along in my department that I worked in. I was a junior clerk at that time. Took me four years to get onto the management roles, but I did. But anyhow, in that room they came in there six months later. After I'd only been here six months, AEC, predecessor to the OA. The AEC has taken over more management, more responsibility. So we're going to be laying off a lot of people. I had only been here six months. And so others grabbed straws and went different places. I always said either I was too ignorant or lucky, I don't know what. But I just sat still and it panned out for the better. I didn't get laid off. I moved from there. But I went downtown to the 703 Building, which stood where the Federal Building is now. There's a building to the rear that the city owns called 703. That was the fourth wing. 703 was the frame construction, the three floors. And the later years, they added a fourth wing out of block building. Made it more permanent. That's why it's still standing today. Now, that was my second location. And then I got on the management role in '55, which meant I went exempt and no more pay for overtime. And went out to White Bluffs site—town site, and that's where the minor construction was located. Minor construction, it's the construction people that are specially trained in SWP, radiological construction work, as opposed to run-of-the-mill construction. And they're the ones that had never had any accounting at all for any equipment, supplies, materials or otherwise. And that's where I had the lunchroom office experience. It so happened that they established--I brought an inventory procedure and established that first inventory during a strike. We had to cut government-owned tool boxes. But still, the workers thought they were private. And we had to cut locks in order to take inventory. And then we feared for our lives when they came back. Pretty rough day sometimes.
Bauman: What timeframe would that have been you were out?
Bush: That was 1955 to '56. A couple of years there, and then another person took over from there and I went into budgeting at that point, from accounting to budgeting. And I did that for--until 1963. And then I moved out to the so-called bus lot, which it was. 105 buses and all that. And I was out there for 17 pleasant years, budgeting, billing rate—Because we were the supplier of all plant services. So we had billing rates to the reactors, and the separations, and the fuel prep, and--whoever. The AEC, everything. We billed them, just as if we were like plumbing jobs. And that I enjoyed. That was probably my most productive period. And from similar work to that, I moved over—Let’s see, I was around when the Federal Building was built, but I didn't get into it. That was built in '69. I didn't get down there until 1980. Went down there a couple of years. And then they moved us out to Hanford Square where Battelle Boulevard intersection is. And I was there--I retired from that location in 1977. My wife and I retired the same week. I've been retired 26 years now at the end of this month.
Bauman: Was your wife working at the Hanford Site as well?
Bush: She worked after the kids were grown, like most stay-at-home moms do. She stayed until the daughter was of age, and then she went to work for a credit union, which was the government credit union, which was merged later on with Gesa. But that was an interesting job. They worked two hours a day, three days a week. Because it was all hand done, no mechanization. And then she got a job offer from the department in the central stores and purchasing department. She worked there eight years. In 1986, the income tax law changed a lot of things for all of us, effective in 1987. It meant that partial vesting was--IRS has to rule on all things like that. And that meant that if you had 10 years to vest pensions, once you pass the 50% point, whatever the vesting period is, then you were partially vested. And so she had 8 years out of 10. So she got 80%. But she had only worked eight years, so it wasn't a very large accumulation. Because I got my full. Of course, I'd been here 37 years I think it was, however that works out. 36.
Bauman: I want to go back and ask you—when you were talking earlier about that period in '55, '56 when you were working out at White Bluffs town site. You mentioned radiological construction?
Bush: Oh, that—those construction workers worked under what they called SWP, Special Work Permit, which meant radiological. They had to wear--the clothing was called SWP clothing then. Today, they call it something else. But they worked under those conditions, so therefore they were subject to different rules. Whereas, construction workers on brand new construction weren’t then—they didn't have any of that to contend with. But once a plant went operational, it became radiologically SWP. This is not an anti-union thing. It's just a demonstration of how things were in those days. They had some old buses that--the original buses in town were called Green Hornets. And they were small. They had chrome bars that went right across the middle of your back. And for 35 miles, that was not very comfortable. When they got the newer buses that you see today, like Greyhound has for instance, they relegated those to the construction workers at White Bluffs. Well, since GE guys worked up at White Bluffs, we had to ride those, too. So all the office workers in the warehouse--GE employees rode one bus. The electricians rode another bus. Pipe fitters rode another bus, even though there were only two or three of them. It was really a segmented-type thing. As close to anything radiological that I came to when I conducting one of those physical inventories—we would be out--all of the construction materials were stored outdoors on the ground. I mean, like stainless steel. 308 stainless steel was pretty high-priced stuff. But the sheets were stored outside on pallets. Well, one sheet is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we had to lay down on the ground and count the sheets to do the inventory. This one day—the only time I came close to any contamination, we went back and boarded the buses that evening from White Bluffs. And we saw the guys on the dock there chipping with a chisel and hammer. That meant they were chipping out flakes of contamination. So we asked what was going on. They said, well, we're next door to F and H Areas. And F Area had coughed out something they said. And so I said, well, my crew was outside today on the ground. And if they coughed out because all the--some construction workers could drive their cars. That's the only people. Plant operations people all had to ride buses. No parking lots. So anyhow, those cars were all impounded. Had tape around them. They couldn't go home. And some of the guys, they had to take off their shoes, leave them, and be issued safety shoes in lieu of it. And I said, well, we were on the ground, too. So they proceeded to take us all off the bus and surveyed us with a wand. And they only found a few flakes on our back. And so we were allowed to go home. But that's as close as I ever came to getting contaminated. It's still scary.
Bauman: Yeah. Obviously, Hanford, a site where security was prominent--
Bush: Very tight security, yeah. I was telling the young lady here that across the roadway on Stevens, as you near the 300 Area, there was a real wide barricade, probably eight lanes that you had to go through. And everybody had to stop, including buses. And the guard would get on the bus, walk down the aisle, and check every badge. And at that time, AEC had their own security airplanes. That was the purpose of the Richland Airport was for AEC security in the beginning. They had a couple Piper Cub-type airplanes. And one day we're on a bus going out to work in the morning. And all of a sudden, a plane just zoomed on by. Somebody had run the barricade. The plane goes out, lands in front of them, stops them, and that's how they got apprehended. Another incident of security, yeah, that's the subject? Many years later now, after 1963, and I'm in the transportation assignment. Airspace was off limits to all airplanes over Hanford because they had army artillery guarding it in the Cold War and all that. And a private plane had violated the space. And the AEC planes had forced it down. And once they're down, they can't ever take off. So after a week or so, they sent a lowboy trailer out there, loaded the small airplane on it, proceeded to come down what's the highway and now Stevens. And down where Stevens today, 240 and all that intersection is, there was only two lanes on the road then, not six. But at that juncture there, there was a blinking light. And they had to turn right to go to the Richland Airport. And this guy, the truck driver pulling this low-boy, he had never pulled an airplane before. And he didn't allow for that pull. Well, that blinking light clipped off a wing. And then he got time off. It was not really his fault, that pilot in the beginning. But there's a lot of—I guess full of interesting stories like that on security.
Bauman: Great. Did you have special security clearance to work at Hanford at the time?
Bush: Which?
Bauman: Any special security clearance?
Bush: Oh, yeah. I had Q clearance, which there's one higher than that, that's top secret. But Q clearance meant you could go into any and all areas. And because the nature of my job, I had that my whole time I was out there. Once you have it, they would tend not to take it away from you because it's quite expensive investigation to get it in the first place. I might mention something interesting in that regard. When I first came to work in 1951, why, the PSQ is Personnel Security Questionnaire. And it's about 25 pages long. And you had to memorize it, because every five years, you had to update it. Well anyhow, I filled that out, and you give references. And I have, in the Twin Falls area, a farmer that had been a neighbor farmer in Nebraska, where I was born, to my parents. I gave him as a reference because he had known me all my life. And that would be higher points. About a year or two later--I guess probably a year later I had gone back down to Twin Falls to visit the in-laws and I went and saw this farmer, family friend. The first thing he said to me, Bobby, what in the world did you do? [LAUGHTER] The FBI had come out to his farm and piled on the questions. And I hadn't told him ahead of time I'd given a reference. So they really did very, very tight security. It's probably tighter than it was when I was in the Air Corps.
Bauman: You mentioned riding a bus out to work.
Bush: Yeah, everybody rode it, except those few construction workers in that minor construction area. They were permitted their cars. I don't know why, but no one else drove cars on the plant. Everybody rode on the bus. The bus fare was--of course, it was subsidized. It was a plant operation, like anything else is. To make the liability insurance legal, they charged a nickel each way on the bus, which later on got changed to a dollar or something. But many of the years, we'd ride the bus 30, 35, or 40 miles to work for a nickel. The nickel was just to make it legal. From those old green buses, they came up with some--I forget what they're called. More like Greyhound buses. And then in 1963, the year I went out to the transportation, they bought a fleet of Flxibles. And that's F-L-X. There's no E in it. That's the same kind of flat-nosed bus that the bus lines used today. And they were coaches, not buses. They had storage underneath. And so we had quite a suggestion system on the plant. And you would get monetary award or mention. And somebody said, well, instead of running mail carrier cars delivering mail to all the stops on the whole plant, load the mail onto the now available storage bins on these buses. And that was a pretty good suggestion award, monetarily, to somebody. And they did that. Took it out to a central mail station out there, and then dispatched it.
Bauman: You mentioned different contractors you worked for over the years--
Bush: Uh-huh. The story behind that for the record is that General Elec--well, DuPont built the plant. That's who my dad worked for. And GE came in '46, I believe. And they were here until the group I was in--they phased out in groups. I was the last group to go out. [COUGH] Excuse me, in 196--'66. When the GE phased out, they had a dollar a year contract. Like Henry Kaiser and rest of them did during the war, for the good of the country. But they trained an awful lot of people in the infancy field of nuclear engineering. General Electric trained all those people here and then they opened up the turnkey operations in San Jose and Japan. But anyhow, AEC was still AEC at that point. And then, their wise decision--instead of one contractor, they would have nine. And so there were--the reactors was one. Separation plant was another. Fuel preparation at 300 Area was another. The laboratories, which is today basically Battelle. Site services. The company doctors formed a foundation called Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which is the MDs that gave the annual exams. And the computer end, it was now getting into the infancy of that, computer sciences corps, we had the first contracts on that. So all together, there were nine contractors. And the portion that I was with went to ITT. They bid, came in and bid. I helped conduct tours of the facility for the bidders. Because I knew all about it and knew the ins and outs on some of the monetary parts that their accounting people would have questions on. We'd walk through shops and all that. Well, anyhow, ITT got the site support--site services. And we had that for five years. And austerity set in in the '70s. Well, '70. They said, we got to get site services' budget down to less than $10 million. And it probably was 13 or 14, I don't remember now. So my boss and another analyst, like myself, sequestered--talk about sequester. We sequestered ourselves in the then new Federal Building for about a week. Almost 20 hours a day, whittling and whittling and working on a budget. And there was only one conclusion. We had to cut everything in half. Went through all that sweat. Went up with our president, Tom Leddy, went upstairs to an AEC finance office, presented our whole case. And the man turns around and says, well, it doesn't make any difference, Tom. Your contract's not renewed anyhow. And so now, Atlantic Richfield, an existing contractor for 200 Areas, somehow the separations plant contractor that is an oil company owned, can all of a sudden manage a site service. And so they did absorb us. But politics were still around in those days. And there were three of us analysts. One had got transferred by ITT up to the new line--newly established Distant Early Warning Line from Russia up to Alaska. So that left two of us. And we waited around. We waited around and never got an offer. And they said, no, we can do it all without you. We don't need you. How come it took so many people anyhow? On a Friday afternoon, the man that I did budgets for saw me in a restroom. He said, you got an offer yet? I said, no, no. I'm working under the table with somebody else. Well, he says, if they don't hire you, I'm going to hire you. And so he went downtown, and about 4 o'clock, I got a call from the man that told me they didn't need us. Said they'd been kind of thinking. So I went over Atlantic Richfield under those. [AUDIO CUTS OUT] And so I'm not mad, not knocking—knocking them, that's just the way things were. And then Rockwell came to town. When they laid off everybody on B-2, I'm trying to think of other--in the community, something might be of interest for the history project. Back into the '50s. Those same green buses, they had, oh, four or five of them that ran in town like a modified transit system. I don't think they had that many riders, but it did. And also, the plant buses ran what they called shuttle routes. And those buses went into Richland on probably six routes and drove around the neighborhoods and picked up workers on the three shifts. And that's why up in the ranch house district, there was the bypass you'll see between homes. The pathways that go clear through lots. Blocks were so long that they had to provide a quicker route to the bus stops. Now, those rides were free because they were shuttle buses. When you got out to the bus lot, you paid your nickel, or a pass, whatever it was.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you about accounting in terms of equipment practices. Were there a lot of changes during the time you worked at the Hanford site? Computer technology come in and change things?
Bush: Oh, yeah. For sure. In the beginning, as I mentioned earlier, all accounting was open ledgers and hand posted. Adding machine tapes at the end of the day trying to balance them all out. And we had that until--let's see. 1970s—I think it was 1977, we got our very first taste of it. Every other desk in a group of about 20 people in cost accounting that I was in. There was cost accounting, general accounting, and so on, property management. But anyhow, we had about 20 people. Every other desk had a monitor. Well, they referred to them as a computer. But they were just the monitor. And down at the end of our building was one printer. And everything was on floppy disk. Every program was on a floppy disk. Nothing was built-in because it was just the infancy. The big computers were down in the Federal Building. And a sub-basement below the basement was specially built for that. But back to our office. Across the hall from us, we had two small computers that are--to me, they're about the size of portable sewing machines. And I can't even remember the names of them because they don't exist today but they were the computer locally. So we wanted to run our work order system, we would phone down to the guy down at the other end of the building, insert the floppy disk from work system and wait. Well, I've got somebody's inventory. You have to wait. Because there's only one place to load up down there. So finally, you would put the floppy disk in. And then, you'd run it, which meant it'd run through it and print. But then you'd have to say, now print it. And they got one printer for the whole building. And so it's pretty interesting. Whereas today, I've got a laptop that I can virtually do everything with. But we graduated from hand posted ledgers right into computers. We didn't have anything in between. All of the reports that came out, came out on--referred to as IBM runs because everything was IBM. It was on paper that's about 18 inches wide with all these little perf marks on it to feed it. And you'd get one report and it would be about that thick. It was not that much information, but it's just so much printing. It's even hard to remember after 26 years how antiquated that is compared to today. But prior to that, it wasn't even the PCs. They called everything a PC. Or, was PC compatible. Because prior to that, the only electronic data processing nickname was spaghetti wire. I'm not very conversant in it, but it was some kind of a board that had a bunch of holes in it. They put wires in it and that went to certain things. But all it did was sort things. It didn't actually calculate them.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the community of Richland. What was that like in the 1950s? I know it was a government--
Bush: In the town? I guess I didn't cover that area. Everything—all houses were owned by government. We rented them. My wife and I and family, we came after the days of free everything. When the coal was free--all the furnaces were coal fed. Some people would convert them later on to oil. But anyhow, they were coal burning. However you got the coal, whether it was government days or you bought the coal from the courtyard, which is down at the end of what's now Wellsian Way. There was a coal yard where that lumber yard is. And that's why those railroad tracks that are abandoned and rundown, that's where the coal cars came in. And I can add something a little bit later about coal cars and the plant. But anyhow, we rented from the government. For example, that brand new apartment that I mentioned moving onto first was a two-bedroom, full basement. Steam heated because--I'll digress a little bit. All the downtown 700 Area, including the Catholic church, central church, the hospital, all 700 Area, including those new apartments, and all downtown shopping area were steam heated by a steam plant, which was located where the back door of the post office is today in that small parking lot. And that one plant furnished steam for everything. Well, back to this new apartment. The steam pipes ran through this full basement. And our kids played—there wasn't any yards. There was just apartments. And they would play in the basement because they were quite small. But they can remember today the pop, pop, pop in those steam pipes. And the rent for that two-bedroom apartment was higher than any other house in town. It was $77 a month. And the reason it was $77 instead of $70 was because it included $7 for electricity. Nobody had electricity meters yet. Even in that new place. So when they did put in electricity meters in all homes later, which had to be—during that time, the year we were there, which is December '51 to December of '52, sometime in that period of time they put the meters in. They took off $7 off the rent because now we're going to pay—and their theory is it was $5 for a one-bedroom place, whatever it was. $7 for a two-bedroom and $10 for a three-bedroom for electricity in those days. And nobody had electric heat, of course. And then, later on they put in water meters. And again, they had to come into your home, invade your home, and put in something. So it was strictly government prior to—well, another—and when I lived in the rental, if something went wrong with the plumbing, they would send out a plumber, but you paid for it, though. But later on when I went to the tall two-story, three-bedroom duplex houses, or called A houses, that was our first house after that apartment. And as I remember, I think the rent was--they had rent districts with low, medium, and high in the more desirable parts of town. And we were on Hop Street across from uptown district where Hunt Street is and Jefferson Park. And I think our rent for that was like $47 because it was not a brand new apartment. And later on, we—I was on the housing list. And you applied and months or years later, you'd rotate up to move into a nicer place or a different location. But in the meantime, up came an F house, which is a two-story single family, kind of a Cape Cod-looking type of house. And that came up on the housing list. However, the caveat was that you had to cash out the present owner who had made some improvements. He had converted the coal to oil, they put in a clothesline, which nobody had clotheslines, and something else. So cashed him out for—I believe it was $750. And if I do that, I could have it, so I did. We lived in that place for 19 years. Our daughter grew up there and got married out of that home. And that's the only home she ever knew. [LAUGHTER] And we were there until 1977 when the real estate market in Richland was—this is community wide. The housing prices were moving 18% a year, about 1.5% a month. And I thought well, I don't need to be setting still. I mean, if I cash out here, and went on. So we sold that home. I listed it. Calder, my father, was very ill. We were going to Spokane. I listed it. A man came by, looked it out. What were you asking? I said, oh, about 17. He shook his head. And I said, too high? He says, no, 27,000. [LAUGHTER] Just to show you how bad things were. And so it sold right away. What are you going to do now? And I said, well. Would you want to try a mobile home? I know a jewel. And in those days, real estate men did not sell mobile homes. But this couple had bought their first house from him, or something. And it was somebody retiring out of postal, wanted to go back to Montana. Never smoked in it, never had any pets in it, no kids. It was the Cadillac of mobile homes. We were there two years, but that was long enough. Then we moved into the house that I'm still in. I'm widowed now for five years. The house we're in now, we've lived in that longer than in any other place. [LAUGHTER] But the community just has changed so drastically. South Richland. People say today they live in South Richland. We lived in South Richland, which was south of the downtown shopping district to the Yakima Bridge. That was South Richland. What is now South Richland out there was Kennewick Highlands. So it depends on who you're talking to today.
Bauman: Yeah. Do you remember any special community events, parades, any of those sorts of things during the '50s and '60s?
Bush: Community events?
Bauman: Yeah.
Bush: Yep. Back in GE days, they had Atomic Frontier Days. And they were a big thing. Had beauty queens in it, rode in the float, and all that. Down at the—[COUGH] excuse me. For Atomic Frontier Days down at the lower end of Lee Boulevard, which is still the same shape today. They set up booths all on there. And it was a really big event. Before we had the hydro races even. People look back fondly on that. Talking about community, again, my mother, I said, worked for the post office, which—it stood on the corner of Knight Street, where it touches George Washington Way. There's some kind of a lawyer office building there today. And the old post office is the Knights of Columbus building on the bypass highway. But she would have to take the mail and go over to where the Red Lion Motel is today, at the Desert Inn, a frame building, winged out basically the same. And that was referred to as the transient quarters. And that was for upper management that were going through and it wasn't really a public motel, per se. But she would have mail for these big wigs over there. So she would have to go over there and have a badge to even go in the front door of that Desert Inn. Talking about badges, something humorous on that. We didn't wear things around our neck in the beginning because it was like a little pocket-sized bill fold. It was a little black bill that had your pass, your badge in it. And at every building you went into, you just pulled it out, flashed it to the guard. It usually was a lady security employee. There were guards in the building, but the person on the desk was a security clerk. But you'd just automatically—you’d open it like that and flag and put it back in your pocket. Every building you went into. Downtown, 700 Area, that first building I've referred to. One day I went into a restaurant and I just did that automatically [LAUGHTER] because it's just so automatic. Then they graduated to having the thing around your neck. And then also, if you worked in the outer areas, you had to wear a radiation badge in addition to your security badge. There was two types and one of them was a flat. And I don't know the difference. One's for beta and one's for alpha. I don't know. And one of them was a pencil shaped. And that's what they called it. And the other one was a flat badge, which was carried in something around your neck. And in all the areas I worked, and the places I described laying on the ground that happened and all that, my RAMs, they call it, never accumulated in my working life to be a danger. I had some, of course. Everybody does in the background. But I never accumulated to a danger point. There were people, some smart aleck people that would take their badge and hold it over a source at work so they could get some time off. Because if you got--what was the phrase? Anyhow, if they got contaminated, they put them on a beefsteak diet. And they stayed home. And they come every day and took a urine sample and all that stuff. But they had a life of riley. So that was nice. But the guys got canned that did that. But they would purposely expose their pencil so they could stay home.
Bauman: So did all employees have those, either the pencil or--
Bush: Only those that worked in reactor and separations areas, yeah. I mentioned these departments. Actually, the first department is Fuel Preparations Department, FPD. The present—the 300 Area--most of the buildings have now been torn down that you don't even see them there. But the north half roughly was fuels preparation department headed for the reactors. They took uranium and encapsulated it in cans, like can of peas in just so many words. And the south half of that 300 Area was a laboratory area, the predecessor of Battelle. So the fuel was prepared there. And it was machined and canned and sent as nickname slugs to the reactors. Then, the reactors loaded into all those little tubes. And then from the reactors, they come out the backside into those cooling pods and all that. And transported in casks to the 200 Areas, which are the separated area, separations. And the reactor area on the face side was not that dangerous. The 200 Areas only work on what they called the canyons, PUREX and REDOX, and those kind of buildings. But those cells were very, very hot. But you had to be measured no matter where you were. One of our site services was a decontamination laundry, called the laundry. And all clothing--I mentioned to you before SWP. Well, SWP, radiologic exposure employees wore whites. Carpenters and truck drivers and all that that didn't work around reactors wore blues. And so they were sorted. And we had different billing rates for that laundry because the blues only had to be laundered and dried. Whereas the others had to be laundered, dried, and decontaminated, checked in separate washing machines. And then workers wore—in the beginning, wore World War II-style gas masks for our air supply before they invented a moon-type suit. [LAUGHTER] But they wore gas masks. And the mask would come back to this mask station, which was part of the laundry. And they took the masks, and they'd take away the cartridge. They'd put the mask in dishwasher machines, in racks. That's how they would wash them. And then they would get them a new filter and package them up. Sanitize them and package them up like medical supplies would be in. I can't think of any other unusual operation out there like that.
Bauman: I want to change gears just a little bit. President Kennedy visited the site in 1963.
Bush: Yep, 1963.
Bauman: I was wondering--
Bush: When they did that, they let all the schools out. And for the first time, non-workers were allowed to go in cars out there. It was a grand traffic jam, but it was quite a deal. And he landed his Air Force plane up at Moses Lake—at Larson airbase at Ephrata, whichever you want to call it. And then helicoptered. And of course, like it is today, there were three or four helicopters. And you don't know which one he's on and all that bit. And here, everyone is gathered out the N Reactor area, which is a dual-purpose reactor. They captured the heat from the reactor, put it through a pipe through a fence to the predecessor to Energy Northwest, which was called Whoops. This was a big deal, a dual-purpose reactor. And N stood for new reactor, really. Anyhow, he comes in and they got a low-boy trailer. They fixed up down in the shops where I worked—my office was. And then built a podium just precisely for the President with him emblem and the whole bit. So I was privy to get to see some things like that. But anyhow, that was the stage. And it was a long low-boy, so it accommodated all the senators and all the local—Sam Volpentest, the guy credited with HAMMER, those type of people. Glen Lee from the Tri-City Herald, you name it. So the helicopter comes in, blows dust over everybody. But anyhow, my wife and kids and all schools were brought out there. And I don't know how many thousand people were out there in the desert. And you could see President Kennedy. He got up on the stage. You get close enough, you could get pictures. Then, that same year in November, he got assassinated. So that was a busy year.
Bauman: Do you remember any other special events with dignitaries like that? Or other--
Bush: Well, I could go way back to World War II. I wasn't here, but I have a family connection on it. All over United States, they had war bond drives for various reasons to help. Build a ship, build an airplane. The one that happened here is not the only one. But they took so much money out of all the paycheck of Hanford workers, which included my dad as a carpenter. And the money they collected bought the B-17 Bomber, which was named Day's Pay. And that bomber—they had a bomber out here, a B-17, so that people could see it, but it wasn't the same one. On the Richland High School wall there's a mural. And that's a rendition by a famous artist of Day's Pay in formation. And so I can say that my parents contributed to that. And that's the story behind that one bomber. Every worker out there, construction or operations, they donated a day's pay.
Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging part of your job working at the Hanford site?
Bush: As an accounting person, my most challenging part was learning government-ese. [LAUGHTER] How to deal. And in that vein, that took a long time. But once you learn it, there is a way in the US government, period. As I'm sure there is in certain corporations. Later on, when I mentioned that I went down to the federal building for my--finally got located in that building, there was another fellow and I were old timers in accounting. And that year, they had five college grads, accounting grads come in. They hired five at one time. And they ran them by Marv and I for exposure. This is how things are done. This is how the contacts are. And our basic job was to squire these young fellows around and introduce them to certain counterparts and now DOE. Now, this is how you make appointments with them. This is what you do. This is what you never do. And likewise, with senior management. And it paid off because of those five, all four of them became managers or supervisors, and one of them became my manager within two years. Today, that same man is the comptroller at Savannah River Plant. [LAUGHTER] And so I like to feel that I contributed to them being—partially to them being successful. And so that's a reward. But probably the most difficult thing coming from a private—I worked for Colorado Mill and Elevator, which means I worked at a flour mill district office as a bookkeeper. And that's a small town deal in Twin Falls. To come to work for the government where some of your family despises you because you work for the government, but you had to fight that as well as learn how the government operates.
Bauman: You mentioned earlier, you were talking about coal being used for heat in Richland. You also said you wanted to talk about coal fires going up at the site.
Bush: Oh, what?
Bauman: Coal fires?
Bush: Oh, yeah. Interestingly, the midway power station, substation at midway, is one of the reasons they built Hanford where they did because the Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and an electricity producer—a major producer. And they put the midway substation down there. That basically was built to furnish huge amounts of power to Hanford, for the reactors, everything. Which in total—because I processed vouchers, I know it was 32 megs. Which today doesn't sound like much, but the whole plant bill was 32 megs when everything was operating. But if the power were interrupted, they had to have a backup. So every area had a huge diesel-powered--like water pumps, where they could pump the water from the river instead of by electrically. They had to be able to pump it because it was critical. Because all the water for the whole plant was taken in at intake water plants near the reactors along the river. The 200 Area water is piped to them in a huge line as raw water until it gets to their place. The backup is these coal-fired steam plants, is what I was trying to say. It got about 30-some cars of coal a day rolled through Richland past the cemetery. In the beginning, the railroad came down from the north, from Vantage area down along the Columbia River. There's a railroad bridge across the river, Beverly I think it is. And it came down to below the 100-B Reactor area. That's where the line ended. And then a plant had its own railway incidentally. It had a 285 mile-long rail line, high line and low line. Then, they built--in 1950, the year before I came, they built the line that we see today that comes from Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car Columbia Center into Richland, by the cemetery. And it ends at the old bus lot area, where that railroad car rebuilding outfit is now, there is a roundhouse that it's rectangular in shape. But some 30 cars of coal a day came in here to supply because those plants were—they actually operated the steam plants. They didn't start them up from cold. They just ran constantly.
Bauman: I wonder if you could provide sort of an overall assessment of how Hanford was as a place to work. What was it like as a place to work?
Bush: It was a great place for me. I came out of an area that was the agriculturally-oriented. And the Korean War started. Wages were frozen, you weren't going to go anywhere. I came up here and I got a new start, like pioneers did. I visualized that's what farming pioneers did the same thing. And it opened up a whole field for me, a big corporate field. And it's just been a great place to work. And it was not dangerous to me. I'm not afraid to drink the water here. I'm asked by a nephew in Hermiston constantly, how do you drink the water? And I said, well, it comes out of the river. How can it come out of the river and that plume’s out there? There's so many false stories around here. But working at Hanford, I think, by and large, almost all employees would tell you the same thing. It was a great place to work. The pay was decent. Maybe you didn't get rich, but it was decent. It's in a nice area to live in. When we came back in the '50s, or in the '40s, and before that even of course, shopping was pretty much nonexistent. They went to Yakima, or Spokane, or Walla Walla. That I didn’t—we didn't experience that too much by 1951 because by that time, the Uptown shopping district was built. And there was a men's store. And there was four women's stores. Because GE was the prime contractor, there was an appliance dealer that handled GE-Hotpoint appliances. We got employee discounts when we worked for GE. We also got 10% gasoline discount when we worked for Atlantic Richfield Hanford. But we just grew with the times. And it's just such an entirely different area now than it was. Just the world is different, too.
Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about? Is there anything you would like to talk about that we haven't talked about yet?
Bush: Now really, work-wise at Hanford, I think I’ve pretty well-covered it. I'll repeat myself. My first 15 years was construction engineering accounting, which is an entirely different field than operations accounting. Operations accounting concerns itself with the reactors and separations and the site services that support them. But I learned a lot by working at Hanford. My family, three adult children live here, are retired here. My oldest son went on Medicare this year. [LAUGHTER] And that kind of puts you in your place quickly. But it's been a good enough place that they stayed in the area. And of the six granddaughters, grandchildren, four of them are in the area. And that's kind of characteristic with a lot of the Tri-City families. They stay or come back.
Bauman: Well, Bob, I'd like to thank you very much for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate it.
Bush: It's been my pleasure.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Robert Ferguson on December 21st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Bob Ferguson: Yes. Robert, R-O-B-E-R-T. Louis, L-O-U-I-S. Ferguson, F-E-R-G-U-S-O-N.
Franklin: Great, thanks. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work at the Hanford Site.
Ferguson: Well, I was in the Army. I had spent three years in the Army and I was at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. And a friend of mine stopped by that was sort of at the end of my obligation, and his father had worked here. His name was Fred Boleros. And he told me about GE here at Hanford. So, it was my first job when I applied when I left the Army, was with GE at Hanford. They accepted my application, and that’s how I happened to come to Hanford.
Franklin: Okay. And what was the job that you applied for?
Ferguson: Well, I came under a program called the—[LAUGHTER]—bear with me.
Franklin: That’s okay.
Ferguson: Can you cut, can we cut, or you’ll cut?
Franklin: We can edit.
Ferguson: We’ll edit?
Franklin: After the fact, yes.
Ferguson: Okay.
Emma Rice: Tech grad something?
Ferguson: Yeah. The tech grad program. It was the tech grad program. It was a program to—for GE to find out what your interest was as well as their interest in you. So, anyway, I signed up for that, and I had three assignments with that. One in operation, one in reactor physics, and one in radiation testing. My permanent job—my first permanent job with GE was as a reactor physicist at C Reactor. But we did physics work—at each of the reactors, there was an onsite physicist and an onsite engineer. We rotated to all of the different eight reactors in the course of our assignments during relief work. But I was permanently assigned to C Reactor—C Reactor Physicist.
Franklin: C Reactor?
Ferguson: C Reactor.
Franklin: Okay, and where is that located in relation to B, D and F?
Ferguson: Well, as you probably know, the first reactors were B, D and F. And then HDR and then H, and then C Reactor in K-East and K-West. So C Reactor was one of the newer reactors, before the K-East and K-West design. And it was collocated with B Reactor in what was called the BC Area. They were right next door to each other.
Franklin: Okay. And was that based off of the same design as the B Reactor?
Ferguson: It was a different design. Higher power level and a little different fuel design. And because it had a higher power level, it had also a higher flow rate.
Franklin: Of water?
Ferguson: Of water, right.
Franklin: Great. And how long did you work as a reactor operator?
Ferguson: Physicist.
Franklin: Reactor physicist, sorry.
Ferguson: Right. Well, actually I was asked—I guess because of my interest in operation—I was asked by GE management to go into their management program, which was an accelerated management program. And so that took me into operations. And so to accelerate the learning process, they had a school in the evening that they sent us to. But also, we had supplemental crews. For each of the shifts, there was a supplemental crew that went from each of the reactors, in the case of outages or in the case of startups, where they needed extra people. So you learned in the supplemental crews, all of the operation of all of the reactors in a very short period of time. So from there, then, I was assigned as a shift supervisor at B Reactor. So I was an operating supervisor at B Reactor. In fact, I was the youngest of shift supervisor that GE had at the time.
Franklin: Oh, wow. Where were the classes held for the management program?
Ferguson: Well, there were two kinds of classes. There were—WSU had—actually there were—WSU and some of the other western universities had a program here. But they were technical programs, and then GE in the same facilities, in what—the old barracks area, near where the DOE headquarters is now, the RL headquarters, in that area. But they no longer exist. They were in huts.
Franklin: Oh, okay, Quonset huts.
Ferguson: Quonset huts, yeah, yeah.
Franklin: World War II—
Ferguson: Right.
Franklin: Had you gone through any other—before you took the tech grad program with GE, had you had any training in nuclear physics or anything?
Ferguson: Well, I had a degree in physics, and I’d also spent a year at Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama in guided missiles. So, there was a lot of related work in the guided missile field to the nuclear field as well.
Franklin: And were you in the Army because of the Korean War?
Ferguson: No, I went into the Army from—I was graduated. Went to Gonzaga University and graduated in ROTC, and had a commission. And because I signed up for the guided missile program, I had a three-year commitment then, rather than just two years of active duty.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferguson: But it was—we were on alert in my junior year of the Korean War. And then the Korean War, fortunately, was over in my last year. So, I was able to miss that.
Franklin: Yeah. Can you describe the B Reactor as a place to work?
Ferguson: Well, it was—actually, a fascinating facility. I don’t know, perhaps, if you’ve been there.
Franklin: I’ve been able to take the public tours.
Ferguson: But the operation of the reactors were fascinating. You can picture that there’s eight reactors operating 24/7, seven days a week. At that time, there was pressure for more plutonium for the Cold War. It was during that period of time when there was a lot of tension with Russia. It preceded, actually, the Cuban Missile Crisis by a few years. But anyway, there was intense pressure for production, so we were—GE was very sensitive about the time operating efficiency of the reactors and the power level of the reactors. B Reactor, when it was first designed was designed for 250 megawatts. And when I was last in the control room, we were operating over 2,000 megawatts. We used to—in order to get more power, we used to—Bonneville would lower water from under the dams so our inlet temperature was lower. The operation of the reactors—they went once through the reactors, and so they had to keep the outlet temperature below boiling. And so you wanted the maximum delta t across the reactor, you could get so the lower the inlet temperature, the higher the power level you could get, maintaining a safe margin in the outlet temperature. But also at that time, we were experimenting—I participated both in the physics side as well as the operations side—in the use of flattening of the pile. And by flattening, I mean flattening the flux so you could get more power level, or better distribution and more production, in any one cycle. And so we used—we experimented with splines, which were boron designed things that would go under the process tubes, and you could jack them in actually from the front face of the reactor in order to flatten the flux of the reactors. We also did poisoning at that time of the reactor. A temporary poisoning, so we could start the reactors up at a higher power level. Because the operation of the reactors was very complicated, because you had different temperature coefficients that affected the reactivity of the reactor. So you had a positive graphite temperature, but that was—the graphite would heat up over time. And so that would increase the reactivity, and you had a negative temperature coefficient—fast reactor coefficient. And then the coefficients would change as the amount of plutonium occurred in the reactor. And so the operation of the reactors were really dictated by the design coefficients, but, more importantly, by the discovery of xenon and iodine, which shut the reactors down when Fermi was here. That was—they didn’t even know about the xenon absorption of neutrons at that time. And so when the reactor was first started, it shut down. And they had originally—perhaps you’ve heard this story, that originally the reactor was designed for about 1,500 process tubes. But then DuPont doubled it to 2,004 in order to—for safety margins—and they needed all of that safety margins to override the xenon. But anyway, when you’re at steady state operation, and then you shut the reactor down, then the buildup of iodine that then decays into xenon, and xenon is a poison. So if you were operating at full power and the reactor scrammed, you had a very short period of time in order to bring the reactor up to power level. Otherwise, you were down for 30-hour outage. So that meant that you lost production during that period. So we basically devised what we called quickie plans. This was especially true—we were experiencing a lot of ruptures at that time because we were pushing the envelope of the design of the fuel. It would rupture, and then we’d have to get rid of that, because they’d been once through on the water, the radioactive material would go directly into the river. So anyway, when we had a rupture, we would need to get it out of the reactor. But you only had a few minutes. At that time because of the power levels we were operating at, we only had about 15 minutes to recover. And that meant planning a crew in the rear and the front, and alerting the people in the powerhouse, because you had to bring the water pressure down. But you had to keep plenty of water on the tubes, because otherwise the temperature—outlet temperature would be very high. So you had a very difficult time to valve on the front. So I would go—I would basically stay in the control room and have a supervisor in the front and rear. And then when we shut the reactor down, we would do all of this valving, kick the rupture out, and then restart. And you’d have to restart the reactors to about two-thirds of the power that you were at, otherwise you’d go sub-critical, and you’d be down. So it was a very delicate challenge to start it up to a power level that you could—without running out of rods, then, because also the higher power level, the more reactivity you had. So, it was a—it’s something that I learned in physics, because that’s what the physicist did. He calculated all these transients. So when I went into operations, it was sort of natural for me to be able to manage this kind of thing.
Franklin: Interesting. And so—that’s also, like, kind of real-world application of all of that physics that you had learned, right?
Ferguson: Right.
Franklin: How did—I think it’s hard for people who—especially younger people—to imagine doing all of that without digital technology. It’s always been something that’s really fascinated me. And I’m wondering if you could speak to that or if you’ve ever thought about that at all, that the kinds of—maybe you could talk a little bit about the kinds of equipment you had to work with, and the limitations of using the analog readouts in the control room.
Ferguson: Well, that’s a very good question. The reactors had to be operated when you started them up—what we called a blind startup, because we didn’t have instruments that told us how subcritical we were. So, you had to—the physicist would calculate the reactivity coefficients for the operation, and depending upon the precursor operation, would determine exactly what the startup conditions were. But because we couldn’t measure the subcritical condition of the reactor, we had—we pulled to about—well, it’s called 100n hours subcritical, then pulled into that. But we had people at a PC manually, if you can imagine, manually counting the count rate as we approached criticality. Because if you pull too many rods out, you can get into a fast period, which will shut you down. So we had to do all this manually. And you probably, having seen the control room—you had 2,004 process tubes. Each one of those tubes was monitored for pressure on the inlet and temperature on the outlet. But those gauges had to be manually moved and adjusted by a crew in the front of that panel—the panellette, that whole 2,004 panel in the control room, right to the right of the control panel. Anyway, you had a whole group of people on startup in ladder-like things that would roll those gauges, instrument man on the rear, but he had to keep the gauges within a range, or you’d trip. So as the water pressure came up, you had to roll all of those. But this was all done manually. And then we had ways of—we had devices that calculated the power level, but it was very deceptive. So those of us that had been trained in physics could basically do a lot of those calculations in our head on the power level. Because what I’ve experienced—I’m sure others did, too—that if an instrument failed, say a flow instrument failed on one side of the reactor, it would indicate you’re only at half of the power level that you’re actually at. So you needed to look at other instruments, and you learned to look—like there was an instrument called a Beckman instrument, which monitored the radioactivity on the rear face. So by walking the control room and looking at all these different instruments, you could check one against the other. But it was all very, very, very, manual. And we did our physics calculations on Marchant calculators, you know, the calculators you punch.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Ferguson: We did all our physics calculations on those at that time. And they were just introducing the IBM 650. GE had a computing facility where we would punch the cards and get some central computing for some of the physics work that we did. And that’s also where they kept track of the production in the reactors. If you could imagine keeping track of eight reactors with 2,004 tubes—there were more than that in the K reactors—but the six older reactors. And keeping the production in each one of those tubes was a function of the flow through that tube and the reactivity and the temperature of each one of those tubes. So you had to keep track of how much plutonium was being produced, because if you leave the fuel in too long, the buildup of plutonium-240 builds up. And so weapons-grade plutonium is about 6% to 10%. So we were operating at getting really pure weapons-grade plutonium. Something below the—at least 10% of 240, because it was—in the early design of the bombs, they found that if plutonium-240 spontaneously fissions, it creates a background. And if it’s too high, it’ll get a premature detonation of the bomb beforehand. So that’s why we had to manage the production. And that’s why there were frequent shutdowns. Unlike commercial reactors, where you operate a long time. And that’s why people confuse—plutonium that’s produced in commercial reactors has a high 240 content which is not good for weapons.
Franklin: Oh, interesting, okay. So you’re saying—I just want to paraphrase so that I can make sure I understand. So you’re saying that it was the nature of the weapons process that the fuel would only be in there for a short period of time in order to get—and it’s plutonium-240—which one is the--
Ferguson: Is low. 239 is the weapons grade.
Franklin: 239 is the weapons-grade.
Ferguson: And 240 is the low grade.
Franklin: Right, so that you wouldn’t build up too much 240. So—
Ferguson: And that required a frequent charge and discharge of the reactors.
Franklin: Right, so in some way, then, the energy reactors by nature are just not really meant for weapons.
Ferguson: They’re the opposite of that. You want them to run. The Energy Northwest reactor which I was responsible for building—it was called BNP2 at the time. But they recently set a record of running for over two years without a shutdown.
Franklin: Because you also want—when you’re producing energy, you want a reliable output of energy—
Ferguson: Right, fixed, right.
Franklin: You don’t want to be starting and stopping and have that kind of fluctuation in the grid.
Ferguson: Right.
Franklin: That’s really—I think that’s a good basic point to have established for anyone who’s doing research on that.
Ferguson: But an interesting subset of your question about instrumentation. Rickover, in the nuclear navy, who relied on analog instrumentation and ways of measuring things. Because he wanted people to really run the reactor all the time. He didn’t want any risk of that. So it was a transitional period in the nuclear business. And some of the instrumentation that was designed to detect neutrons was very new at the time. Even the badges that we wore, at that time, did not detect neutrons, both fast and slow. And so we had to do experiments on the front face of the reactors to be able to predict what dosage you’d get from neutrons, rather than alpha, beta, and gamma. Because it was not known then exactly the biological effect of neutrons on the human body.
Franklin: Given that the reactors ran, most of the time they had 24-hour shifts, I’m wondering if you can describe to me kind of an average day as a nuclear physicist operating the B Reactor.
Ferguson: Well, it depends—well, let me answer that by, when you—at that time, you couldn’t drive your car out to the Site. So you came to the 700 Area, and there was a—lights up there that indicated which reactors were running. And that told you, if you were a supplemental crew, which reactor to go to. But anyway, to answer your question, if the reactor is operating normally at full power, it’s very—typically, you’d go in and you had about a 15- to 20-minute transfer process from one crew to the other. We kept a detailed log of the activities during our shift. You’d do a—we would typically do a count of the uranium slugs that were stored in the front face so that we’d keep materials accountability. So we would make sure that from shift to shift, there was a transfer of accountability for the slugs that were there. There was a transfer of any ongoing activity that would be taking place. But during normal operation, we had two operators in the control room and then a chief operator. And then the other operators would be picking fuel up out of the basins. That was all done by hand. If you’ve seen the reactor, the fuel would come out, go down in chutes. But all of those fuel elements had to be picked up by hand through the water—through 20 feet of water, put in the buckets, and then those buckets would be transferred under water over to a station where the railcar would come in from the 200 Area, all underwater. And then that bucket that contained the radioactive slugs would be, then, taken by railcar over to the 200 Area where it would be reprocessed. So, that—typically, then, you’d do maintenance work that could be done when the reactor was running. And then you had a daily routine of walking through the whole reactor. It’s very interesting; you could—Robert, you could tell, after you’d been there for a while, by the sounds if things were okay. If there was a shrill sound where the water pressure coming through, the water flowing through the reactors, and all of the different fans had different sounds. So you walked the reactor—always walked, went to the rear—in the rear of the building is a little place with a lead glass shield that you could look through to see the rear face. So you’d check the rear face for any anomalies, for leakage, or anything like that. And then you’d have your—we always had a health physicist on each shift. He had his rounds to check on the radiation levels in different areas. And different areas were controlled depending on whether there was radioactive material or contamination in the area. We had step-off pads, where you’d go from one area to another. Dual step-off pads, if you had a highly contaminated area. And the people—some of the crew would sort laundry as well. Because we went through a lot of laundry, because you had to change into what we called SWPs, special material when you came on shift. So anyway that would be rather routine. Now, during an outage, or during a startup, then you have a beehive of activity. The place that we—the shift supervisor had total control and authority over the running of the reactor. So even the manager and other people that were there for startup, they would have to leave, because of the intensity of the operation during startup. So, if it were an outage, you went into—you were doing charge/discharge. So you have a front face crew and a rear face crew, and you’re doing a lot of physical work. The charging machines would—you’d have to load them up by hand—load the slugs by hand. So it was—it’s hard to explain the level of activity that was going on during an outage. Because we would have maintenance. We would have some maintenance on the process tubes that had to be removed because they were leaking. So we’d have to—the maintenance people would come in and remove those. So it was very, very, very—it’s like a huge manufacturing operation.
Franklin: Right.
Ferguson: But a lot by hand. So the dichotomy between—you’ve got a very sophisticated—you get no sound from the reactor itself but a lot of sound from everything that runs the reactor.
Franklin: The water and the electronics and everything.
Ferguson: Right. And the reactors were cooled by—inerted by gas by helium and carbon dioxide. And so one of the auxiliary rooms was a place where you controlled mixture of the helium and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the reactor. Because you could change the reactivity by changing the temperature of the graphite. You could heat it up with CO2 and cool it off with helium.
Franklin: Interesting. So how long did you work as a reactor physicist—nuclear physicist and shift operator?
Ferguson: Well, nominally about two years as a physicist and about two years as an operating supervisor. So it was about 50/50 while I was here. I’ll tell you, interesting story. Probably we don’t want to put it on television, but—on September 27th, 1960, I was—it was a Tuesday, and I was starting the reactor up. And I got a call that my wife’s water had broken and she was on the way to the Kadlec Hospital to deliver our second girl. So it was the first time in history a reactor went critical the same time a woman went critical. [LAUGHTER] I could tell you exactly where I was standing in that reactor out there when that happened. I’ll always remember that. And Kadlec Hospital at that time was just Quonset huts, as well.
Franklin: Right, yeah, wow. Thanks for sharing. [LAUGHTER] Where did you—I’m assuming you guys lived in Richland while you worked out at Site, right?
Ferguson: Right, yeah.
Franklin: And so you lived in Richland during—so you would have lived in Richland, then, while it was a government town and then also during the transition.
Ferguson: When we first came here, the government owned the town, and we lived in a B—I was going to say B Reactor. [LAUGHTER] Okay. We lived on Kimball—1524 Kimball in a duplex.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferguson: And then the second home here was a ranch house. But then, while we were there they sold. And when we were first here, GE provided coal. We had coal for our heat and lightbulbs. Those were all provided. I think we paid $47 a month rent at that time. And then the town was sold off. And our neighbors had the right to buy the B house.
Franklin: Because they had been there longer than you?
Ferguson: They were one of the original occupants. And so then we rented from them. So we were here during that transition.
Franklin: Can you describe that transition? What you remember, or your thoughts on it?
Ferguson: Well, it was very interesting. When we first came here, there was—and one of the reasons that the road system is the way it is is because of the security in the town. There was only one road in at the time and one road out. And that’s the way—you had to be cleared in order to live and work in Richland during that time. And so we—you know, we had a bus system that picked us up. We had a—during that time as well, those of us that worked in radiation levels, every month we’d have our urine sampled. And so the people that worked there set their bottle out by the front door to be picked up and monitored. So then as the town—after the town was sold off, then, there was more interest in changing the—upgrading the buildings, painting, and more things like that. So you could see the evolution from a government-owned town to private ownership. More and more attention to yards and things like that. So we—my wife and I—my family experienced that transition. And we left—came here in 1957. I left here in ‘61 to go to Argonne. And then we came back in 1972, and the town had totally changed, then. When we came back, we looked at a couple of houses in Meadow Springs and the realtor told us it would be pretty iffy to buy there, because that may not go. And there was a dirt road at that time between that and Columbia Center. Columbia Center didn’t exist when we were first here. We came back, and here’s Columbia Center. So having left here and come back, we’ve seen this transformation of the Tri-Cities. Rather remarkable.
Franklin: Right. And how come you left Richland in ’61?
Ferguson: Well, actually I was in the control room of B Reactor when we heard about an accident in Idaho called the SL-1 accident.
Franklin: I’ve heard about that.
Ferguson: It was a military accident that killed three military people. Anyway, it’s kind of a long story, but I’ll make it pretty short. Part of the accident investigation indicated that there was no one AEC organization responsible. The reactor was designed at Argonne in Chicago at Argonne National Lab, but built and operated by the Army at Idaho. And they Idaho office wasn’t responsible; Chicago wasn’t responsible for making sure. So anyway, I was recruited by AEC to go to work up with the AEC to set up the safety program for what was then called the Second Round reactors. These were commercial reactors that were built to encourage the development—commercial development of nuclear power. But Argonne had a lot of reactors at the time, both at Idaho, as well as at Argonne. Both thermal reactors, research reactors and fast reactors. And so anyway, I was recruited because they were looking for people with actual physics and operations experience to work in safety. And so, shortly after I was there, I was sent to Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology for an accelerated program in state-of-the-art safety. But then we—anyway, then we did a review of all the reactors under Chicago. And those were reactors at Idaho, reactors at Santa Susana in California, Atomics International reactors. And then we had commercial reactors at Piqua, Ohio and Hallam, Nebraska. And—oh, there were two other ones, anyway, that were funded by the AEC, but privately owned. But the safety responsibility was the AEC. So anyway I went back there because of the emergence of the need for people with actual operating experience. There were only two places: that was Savannah River and here at Hanford.
Franklin: Right. And up until that time, you had not worked with commercial reactors; you’d only worked on production.
Ferguson: Yeah, there were no—no, that’s correct.
Franklin: So can you describe that transition? How was that for you? Even though you would have had operating experience, like we talked about earlier, the operation of the commercial reactor is almost opposite. The purposes are very different. And so I’m wondering if you can describe that transition.
Ferguson: Well, it’s also a cultural transition. And one of the difficulties in the development of commercial nuclear power was because of this cultural issue. Some of the utilities were oversold on the ease with which nuclear power could be used to produce electricity. And so they didn’t understand the need for the training and the quality assurance and the rigorous of operation. And that led to some accidents in the early days, because the utilities really were not sensitive to that. Admiral Rickover was even worried that the private sector, the commercial sector, was not able to manage nuclear. And he was afraid that they would have accidents. And that’s why he built and operated Shippingport, which was one of the first commercial reactors, but it was built by the Navy. But anyway, it was a cultural change. And after the SL-1 accident, it was really a wakeup call even within the AEC for the need for rigorous oversight, rigorous design review, design construction, and operation. The need for safety at all of those areas from the time you procure a piece of equipment, to its built, to its put in operation, and then maintained. All of that was new to the industry. So I actually lived through that transition, I guess, if you would call it that. Because GE was—and DuPont were very rigorous in their safety. Very rigorous. Because people didn’t really know much about nuclear power at that time, or nuclear energy.
Franklin: So you’re saying some of that safety-consciousness kind of came over from the folks involved in production, who then went on to commercial.
Ferguson: Right.
Franklin: I’ve—when talking to people similar to yourself who’ve been in the industry, very familiar with nuclear production and power, I’ve often heard that the nuclear industry is one of the most tightly regulated and safe industries, or focused with safety. And I’m wondering how you feel about that statement, how you would respond to that.
Ferguson: Well, it is, because of the potential or the risk. Even though the commercial, there has been no deaths in the commercial nuclear industry in the United States, the potential is there as well. I can just give you a little feel for that. Three Mile Island was a very bad accident, but nobody was hurt. I was there. I was—fifth day of the accident, I was in the control room of Three Mile Island. It was really a bad accident, but nobody got hurt. On the other hand, I was at Chernobyl after that accident. That was a very, very bad accident. A lot of people were killed in that accident. People don’t really understand that—going back to your question about the rigorous safety requirements—Russia did not have a requirement for containment for their reactors. So, Chernobyl had no containment. You couldn’t build and operate that kind of a reactor in the United States. So, one of the issues that emerges from the rigorous safety criteria is the difficulty in transition to new instrumentation, for instance. Because you had very prescriptive regulatory requirements, it was more difficult, basically, to introduce new design, new equipment. And it’s one of the difficulties of the nuclear industry, unlike cars where you’re changing them often, it’s very expensive to build one. And then it’s hard, as innovation and changes take place, it’s hard to introduce those in the course of the licensing. So our licensing system has changed somewhat. You used to have to have two permits for commercial reactor. A permit to build it, and then another permit to operate it. Now those are combined into one, because you wouldn’t want to spend all the money to build a reactor and then not be able to run it. And for the antinuclear community, they used that as a way to stop the operation—or the startup of a lot of reactors. That caused a lot of expense, too. So anyway, it’s been a dynamic change, but not as rapid as your iPhone and changes like that, which can be made very quickly.
Franklin: Wow, thank you. Really illuminating. I really like that you mention that there was a cultural transition into the commercial reactor, and I assume, there, you’re talking about dealing with utility companies, but I’m also wondering, was there—did you also work with—because you mentioned fast reactors. Did you also work with scientists and people from the university side of operations when you moved into commercial power?
Ferguson: Oh, yes.
Franklin: And was that also part of the cultural shift?
Ferguson: Well, for instance, going into Argonne—Argonne was where the nuclear technology started. I mean, Argonne came from Fermi’s work in Chicago, basically. All of those scientists went to work at Argonne. And they didn’t like to be—scientists don’t like to be regulated or overseen. And so that’s the reason that the reactor—many of the reactors that Argonne worked with were put in Idaho, in a remote area, where you could do a lot of experimentation away from a big city. So that’s where the series of reactors called the BORAX Reactors, where you could actually explode them—pull into a fast period and cause a prompt critical. But you could do that in Idaho because it was so remote. But anyway, it was always a certain amount of tension between research. And one of the current issues right now, there is so much regulation in commercial reactors, it’s hard to introduce any new technology. For instance, Bill Gates is investing in a reactor being designed in China. And he would do that here, but he went to the NRC and it’d take him 24 years to get a permit just to build it here. So, the rigorous licensing process also inhibits development of new technologies. And we don’t really today have a good answer for that. We need to have an intermediate step where you can work on new reactor designs that are not ready for commercial operation yet but need to be run. Because unless you can do experimental work, you can’t develop anything new.
Franklin: But that experimental work is held up by the regulations—
Ferguson: Of the regulations, right.
Franklin: Do you think the public has an inadequate understanding of nuclear technology in general, and nuclear power specifically?
Ferguson: Well, there’s a lot of work has been done with respect to why people fear nuclear which is really very safe, statistically. The probability of being hurt by a nuclear accident is essentially zero. Yet, people will get in their car and they’ll drive their car. So there’s a lot of psychological fear. And a lot of that fear, we think, comes from the use of nuclear technology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, the notion of equating weapons with nuclear power. And that has continued to this day, because many people don’t understand here at Hanford the difference between commercial waste and waste from both the Second World War and the Cold War. It’s a very different issue, but people think of it all as one. And one of the problems is that with the evolution of the organization that manages that. I mean, I worked, when I was head of the FFTF project, I worked for the AEC, I worked for ERDA, and I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the same job. And so you can understand then. And that—the weapons program is still in the Department of Energy. I’m a big advocate of removing it, because—and removing the waste from the commercial—to create a separation. As long as they’re managed together, how do you expect the average person to believe that they’re not one in the same thing? Or that the issues are not one in the same thing. So that fear of nuclear is real. And there’s been a lot of work done about why people fear it when it is not really unsafe. And generally you find that the people that work with nuclear are very comfortable with it. And the farther away you get, the more fear there is. For instance, here at Hanford, people are very used to working with it. We have clean water. You go over to Seattle, they want to tell us how to—why to be afraid here at Hanford. Well, we live here. We drink the water, we eat the fish. We’re not fearful of it, because we’ve lived with it. We know it. So a lot of that is proximity.
Franklin: Yeah, thank you, I appreciate you expanding on that. It does give it a troubled reputation, doesn’t it? Since the birth of nuclear energy is related to death and bombings and then was a very visible part of our very large stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Ferguson: And it still is a threat with the proliferation. And it’s a huge threat.
Franklin: And to have a peaceful arm of that, though, I think to some people maybe they confuse both heads of that same—
Ferguson: That’s not unnatural that they would do that. The other thing that’s happened, you know, we had—Three Mile Island happened right after Jane Fonda’s movie, The China Syndrome. And then we had Chernobyl. And then we had the accident in Japan. So these big accidents get a lot of publicity. And there’s a lot of fear that comes from the reporting of that, which isn’t always accurate. Because the nature of reporting is to make things dramatic. And so it gets dramatized in the public. So it probably will take generations to—people to address that.
Franklin: Right. Because certainly our current—where we get our current energy from is also a problematic source of energy, in terms of its political and human and environmental costs.
Ferguson: Right. The irony is that 20%, nominally, 20% of our electricity comes from nuclear. 70% of the carbon-free generation—70% comes from nuclear. And so there is no way the country can ever meet its goal of carbon emissions without a greater use of nuclear power. Because solar and wind are both intermittent. You can’t store them. For instance, if you had to rely on them during the cold weather we just had—we had no sun, it was cold. Where would you get your energy? Where would you get your energy? And the other thing that people really don’t understand is that both wind and solar are nuclear energy. Their source is nuclear energy from the sun. The sun—and the earth gets all of its energy from radiation from the sun. Yet people don’t think of that radiation as bad radiation. They think of that as good radiation. And other radiation, from nuclear power, is bad radiation.
Franklin: Interesting, I don’t think I ever thought of it quite like that before. But it’s very true.
Ferguson: All of the weather comes from absorption of energy from the sun in the oceans, creates the wind, picks up the moisture, delivers it. That’s where we get our hydro power. Solar power—all of that is nuclear energy from the sun. The sun is our source of nuclear energy.
Franklin: Well, even in a way then oil is also from the sun, because it’s decomposed carbon matter—
Ferguson: Originally—
Franklin: Originally.
Ferguson: No, really, it preceded the sun in the sense that it was a part of matter when it was created at the Big Bang.
Franklin: True. So I’d like to go back—tell me about coming back to Richland to work on the FFTF. What brought you back from Argonne to Hanford?
Ferguson: Well, the people—the assistant manager at Argonne for the AEC I had worked with there—and he became the manager of the Richland Operations Office. And then another fellow I had worked with there, Alex Fremling, became his deputy. And so they asked me to come back. They were having a lot of difficulty with the management of the contracts here. And I’d had a lot of experience in project management at Argonne in both high energy physics and reactor projects, and a lot of experience in contracting. So anyway, I came back and I was originally head of contracts. And then shortly after that I was made technical director for the Site. That was at a period when—or at a time, in 1972, when 106-T leak occurred. That was the 105,000-gallon leak that really was the first major leak of radioactive material from the tanks. And it’s the first time the public then became aware of the real problem here at Hanford. And so I was on the investigating committee for that event. And we went back to—Dixy Lee Ray was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and then subsequently our governor. But we asked for a supplemental appropriation--$20 million supplemental appropriation to start building double-shell tanks. So that’s when we started building the double-shell tanks, thinking that there would be a solution fairly soon. And I can take you all the way back to when I was with GE, I did some—one of my jobs there, I measured some—the radiation level in some of the tanks, because as early as that time, GE was concerned about leaking tanks. Because the radioactive material in the tanks stratifies. The radiation level is different and it creates a temperature stress in the tanks. So we were—as early as then, we were worried about tanks leaking. Now—that was 1958, ’59. Here we are in 2016 and we’ve got leaky tanks and no solution. [LAUGHTER] Not much progress.
Franklin: Sadly no.
Ferguson: Anyway then FFTF was in trouble from a cost and schedule standpoint. So I was asked to set up the FFTF Project Office. And the manager of Richland went back to Washington, and he became head of nuclear energy in Washington. His deputy became manager here—Alex Fremling became manager here and so they—we’d all worked together. And so they asked me to set up the FFTF Project Office.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferguson: And that’s when—in 1973—I stayed here until 1978 and then Jim Schlesinger, the chairman of—Secretary of Energy for DOE asked me to go back and take over the nuclear program in Washington.
Franklin: And what do you feel like you got accomplished from ’73 to ’78 on the FFTF Project Office?
Ferguson: We built the most remarkable fast reactor test facilities that’s ever been built. At the time that I was asked to take it over, there was a member of the—Bill Anders—who was the astronaut that went around the moon the first time. Anyway, he was a member of the AEC. But he helped me get the project office set up based on the way NASA set up their offices: decentralized. But he told me that the FFTF was far more difficult technical job than putting a man on the moon. So the development of the technology that we developed and demonstrated with FFTF was really incredible. And a lot of that technology’s now being given to Japan—to China—for their new development program. A lot of the sodium technology, the fast reactor technology. So we accomplished a lot. But it didn’t—and then it got killed. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right, right, it did. I wonder if you could talk about that. What happened to the FFTF?
Ferguson: Well, at the time FFTF was built, the policy of the United States and the Atomic Energy Commission was to reprocess and have breeder reactors. And so that you would take the fuel from commercial reactors, reprocess it, take the plutonium out of it, use that plutonium for fuel for fast reactors. So essentially, by using fast reactors, you have basically an unlimited supply of energy. So that was the policy when FFTF was built. Clinch River was to be a commercial demonstration plant at Clinch River in Tennessee. Clinch River was killed when Carter came in. Carter killed the breeder program because he thought that—first of all, he didn’t think nuclear was going to be here to stay, and he didn’t want to—thought reprocessing would facilitate the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Because when you do reprocess, you can use that same technology to extract plutonium for weapons. So it was killed for that reason. And Carter was pushing coal at the time, saying we had, essentially, an abundant supply of coal. And so he thought that nuclear really wasn’t going to—it was a last resort, as he put it. Because of our lack of reprocessing, we have influenced the design of Yucca Mountain for the deep geologic storage. Because at the time that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 was set up, there was a conflict between those that wanted to reprocess and those that didn’t want to reprocess. So Yucca Mountain is designed for retrievability. It’s designed for permanent storage of defense waste, but retrievability of commercial waste. So at some date in the future, it could be reprocessed. Because about 90% of the energy value is still in fuel once it’s discharged from a commercial reactor. So anyway, that decision has affected a lot of subsequent issues that the country has faced.
Franklin: How come the program didn’t come back under Reagan?
Ferguson: Well, in January of 1982, I was asked to participate in a—that’s when Reagan was president, and George Bush, Sr. was his vice president. And he called a meeting that I was invited to, to discuss what was going on in nuclear at that time. And at the time, I was head of WPPSS. And the cost estimate—this was post-Three-Mile Island. The cost estimate for plants was going up, they were having delays. And so Reagan called this meeting from executives to find out what could be done with nuclear. Well, as a result of that meeting, then, we were instrumental in getting the Nuclear Waste Policy Act started which he then proposed as a way of dealing with commercial nuclear fuel. Because up until that time, there was no solution to commercial nuclear fuel. So—and there still isn’t.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Ferguson: There still isn’t. Because Obama killed—or tried to kill the Yucca Mountain project. But we stopped him from doing that. I was one of the principals—law suit that the courts ruled that he didn’t have the authority to do that. But he stopped it. So now there is no solution, yet, to what to do with commercial fuel. So commercial fuel is now stored all over the United States at all of the reactors.
Franklin: Right, right. How did you become involved with the WPPSS project?
Ferguson: Well, I was recruited out of Washington.
Franklin: So you’re just back and forth from here to Washington and then back.
Ferguson: Well, people that had known about my success in building FFTF and turning that around—and it turns out Senator Jackson was one of those. And so when I was recruited, I’d been in the government 20 years, and I was still pretty young. I didn’t want to leave the government, because I had no retirement. I wasn’t old enough to retire. Anyway, Senator Jackson told me that if I would come out and solve the WPPSS problem, he would make sure I got back in the government. Well, a long story short, I came out and I did solve, I think, the WPPSS problem. But I also had open heart surgery and ruined my health and then Senator Jackson died. So I never went back into the government. He died and I never had a pension. So—[LAUGHTER] so that’s what WPPSS did to me! But anyway, I was recruited—going back to your question—there was a national recruitment because of the difficulties WPPSS was having building the plants.
Franklin: And how long did you work at WPPSS for?
Ferguson: Three years, ’80 to ’83.
Franklin: Okay. And what did you do after that?
Ferguson: I started up a company, R.L. Ferguson and Associates, a consulting company. And we sold that to SAIC. And then I started up another company, Nouveau Tech. And we acquired a nuclear waste facility that’s out here, now it’s called PermaFix Northwest. We acquired that out of bankruptcy from ATG. And then in 2007, I sold that to PermaFix. And since then, I’ve been writing books and consulting.
Franklin: So you’re still not retired.
Ferguson: No. I’m still consulting.
Franklin: Still consulting. But still on—
Ferguson: And I’ve written two books on the nuclear waste issue, so—
Franklin: Okay, great. Well, which two books are those?
Ferguson: Nuclear Waste in Your Backyard: Who’s to Blame and What to Do About It. And the first one was called—I can’t remember the name of it. Something about Obama and Reid wasting money. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Ah. Tell me about your involvement with the Tri-Cities Nuclear Industrial Council, TRICNIC, which later became TRIDEC.
Ferguson: Well, after I left WPPSS, I was asked to be the chair of TRICNIC. Because I was kind of in a period when I was trying to recover for my health. And so Sam Volpentest was the executive vice president, and Glen Lee was publisher of the paper then, and Bob Philips was the president. And they would ask me to be the president of TRICNIC. And then because of the need to diversify the economy in the Tri-Cities, we merged TRICNIC with the Tri-City Chamber, and that became then TRIDEC. And so I was the first president and chair of TRIDEC, when it was formed. And Sam stayed on until his death. He worked up until he died. And then Gary Petersen took over his place to head up the Hanford part of TRICNIC.
Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about working with Sam Volpentest.
Ferguson: There’s been a whole book written about that. [LAUGHTER] Did you read it? The godfather?
Franklin: I have, yeah, The Community Godfather by C. Mark Smith.
Ferguson: Much of my life is in there.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferguson: [LAUGHTER] But anyway, no, yeah, he was one of those remarkable people that you know in your lifetime. He worked right up until he died. I told a story at his funeral—a eulogy—I said, you know, the clock was set right after 5:00 because he wanted to put in a final shift before he died. [LAUGHTER] So he died right after 5:00. [LAUGHTER] But Sam was very devoted to the Tri-Cities and the economic development of the Tri-Cities and spent his whole life on behalf. But he was probably largely responsible for my—or one of the reasons for taking over WPPSS, because he was close to Senator Jackson. I had worked with him in the community on FFTF as well. When I took over FFTF, we not only—the prior head of the nuclear in Washington had testified it would be completed for $187 million. But we didn’t—not only couldn’t you complete it, we ran out of money that year. And Sam was instrumental in TRIDEC—or TRICNIC was instrumental in getting a supplemental appropriation to keep FFTF. That’s one of its early, early almost-deaths. So I started working with Sam in the community at that time. So then when I left WPPSS, I was asked to get more involved.
Franklin: Great. I’m wondering if you can remember or can tell me about any kind of notable events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you were working out there. I think you would have been gone for the JFK visit, which was in ’63, but if there were any other—
Ferguson: Right, I was at Argonne then.
Franklin: But if there were any other notable events or incidents that happened at Hanford while you worked there.
Ferguson: Oh. Other than the leak? 106-T leak?
Franklin: Pretty notable. Or maybe in general in Tri-Cities history, or any—did you ever go to any of the Atomic Frontier Days parades or anything like that?
Ferguson: No, I didn’t, no. I’m trying to think of—well, 10,000 people marched in support of keeping WNP-1 alive. Have you ever seen that picture?
Franklin: Yes.
Ferguson: 10,000 people, can you imagine that?
Franklin: Yes, yeah, that’s—
Ferguson: Supporting nuclear power? Where else in the country could you do that?
Franklin: Not too many places.
Ferguson: Well, I’m trying to think, what--?
Franklin: It’s okay if you don’t.
Ferguson: I really—I can’t.
Franklin: It’s one of my stock questions.
Ferguson: Oh, okay.
Franklin: You know, in case something pops up.
Ferguson: Right.
Franklin: So, I guess—let me look over this.
Ferguson: Probably told you more than you want to know!
Franklin: Yeah, we’ve covered quite a bit. And I just have kind of one last question that’s kind of a wrap-up question. But I’m wondering what you would like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland in the Cold War.
Ferguson: Well, I think it would be very important, and I think it’s even important for this generation to understand the circumstances under which people operated the reactors. There’s been a lot of public criticism about the fact that we discharged waste into the ground. And people just, I think, don’t understand the pressures and the circumstances. The major thing people should understand is that Hanford was very carefully chosen because of the potential risk of an accident or even discharge of radioactive material. The selection of Hanford is unique in the location. The 200 Area, it’s unique in the sense that under the site is a layer of caliche, it’s like cement. Overlaying on that is sand. And they looked up on this as basically a way to hold up the radioactive material and they put it in the ground. And so it wasn’t just people being careless or anything like that. There were the pressures and unknowns. People didn’t know a lot about nuclear, but there was an incredible safety record in spite of all of that. So anyway, I think the big disappointment I have is that the waste hasn’t been take care of, and it’s mostly a political issue than a technical issue. It could have been taken care of a long time ago, but it’s terrible. It’s an issue that has become politicized.
Franklin: Right. Because sites with smaller amounts of waste have been able to encapsulate—begin or even in some cases finish encapsulation programs like West Valley, Savannah River—have been able to deal.
Ferguson: And most of our waste out here doesn’t really have to be vitrified, either. It’s high activity, because of where it came from, by law. It came from reprocessing. But it’s high-level waste, but it’s low-activity waste. And so if you remove the cesium from it, you could basically secure the waste in a cementaceous form and send it to Texas. About 80% of the waste could be done and we wouldn’t even have to build a vit plant. So it’s been—the design of the Vit Plant was wrong from the beginning. The Hanford waste is unique from a lot of different wastes, in that it’s such a mixture of so many different kinds—it’s not homogeneous. So the design of the Vit Plant, rather than have multiple facilities to treat separate kinds of waste, they basically have a pre-treatment plant where they want to treat all of the waste to make it in a consistent form to feed into the melter. Well, the pre-treatment plant is what’s stopping everything. So there’s been a lot of—you know, I’ve lived through about three or four different starts of the Vit Plant. So, I’ve seen it, and it’s very frustrating to see how political it has become, and a lack of science-based decisions that are made.
Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen some of the bumper stickers, I forget exactly what they say, but I’ll paraphrase here: Vitrification in 2007, or Hanford Vit Plant. You know, 2007 or 2004. And then we’re—it’s 2016 and we’re still waiting.
Ferguson: Still waiting. Still no—
Franklin: Perhaps—as you said, perhaps for a plant that is not the best approach—
Ferguson: Right.
Franklin: --to the problem. Well—
Ferguson: Sam Volpentest predicted before he died that the Vit Plant would never be built because of the cost. And now you’re seeing it being questioned because of the cost. People are saying, why do we have to spend this kind of money? Because it’s—about $3 billion comes here every year for Hanford, including Battelle. But it’s a huge amount of money. It’s like the WPPSS plants. People used to say, well, we have to build them no matter what. Well, they got too expensive and the need for power went away, and so they didn’t get built. So there comes a price when things are not affordable. And there’s not really a risk to the river. The waste needs to be treated and cleaned up, but there’s no risk, really. There’s no health risk. The flow of the river is so great, any material gets in there is so diluted you can’t even detect it. But that’s not a solution. Right after 106-T, Battelle did some studies for us, just what-if studies. And we said, what if all the waste went in the Columbia River? Well, downstream, it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s so dilute. Not that that’s—I’m not advocating that at all. But it just shows you that the risk to the health and safety of the public is not—does not demand what we’re doing with the waste out there. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken care of. I’m just—because at one time Sam and I faced some members of Congress who wanted to put a fence around Hanford and not do anything with it. Just leave it there. [LAUGHTER] So, anyway. I’ve been there, done it.
Franklin: So at least we’re away from that solution.
Ferguson: Well, I hope we’re not going back there. But when the price gets so high, people away from here and the demand for money in the budget gets so tremendous, it’s—strange things can happen.
Franklin: They sure can.
[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well, Bob, thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us today.
Ferguson: Okay, Robert.
Franklin: I really appreciated it.
Ferguson: I hope I didn’t cover too much for you.
Franklin: You did a great job; we touched on a lot of really great things. So thank you.
Ferguson: Okay.
Franklin: All right.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Barnett on July 13th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Daniel Barnett about his experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford site. So the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where you were born and what year.
Daniel Barnett: I was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1938—August 13th.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And when the war started, my dad was working for the Harbor Patrol in Seattle as a patrolman. He heard that they were hiring over here, so he came over here and they hired him almost instantly because he already had the security clearance and everything.
Franklin: Ah.
Barnett: So he called my mom and told her that he had a job over here and to get herself packed, because he was gonna get her. But when she moved here, she couldn’t move to Richland. It wasn’t even on the map at that time. They took it off the map and everything. She had to move to Prosser.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And later on when they finally got a prefab built, we moved into a prefab at 1011 Sanford.
Franklin: Where was your father from? Was he from Washington?
Barnett: He was from Oregon. All my family is from Oregon except for me. My dad said he couldn’t get across the border fast enough.
Franklin: So being from—what drew him to Hanford? Was it the pay?
Barnett: I think so. Well, he was originally—he worked at a plywood plant, then he went to work for Harbor Patrol. He had asthma, which the wet climate apparently irritated. So he had a chance to get over here, so he moved over here.
Franklin: Okay. So the climate played a—
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --big factor and wanted the dry and the sunshine.
Barnett: Well, probably the pay, too, because the pay was good for those times.
Franklin: Right. And how long did your family live in Prosser before you moved?
Barnett: We were there about a year, I think. I don’t remember truthfully—I was only about five when we moved there. And I was there probably about a year. I just vaguely remember moving to Prosser.
Franklin: Right. Okay. And you moved—so you came over in 1944—
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --right? And so you would have moved to Richland in 1944? About there?
Barnett: Oh—I think we actually—Dad came over, I think in ’43. A year later, in ’44 we moved over.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: Because I remember ’45 when they announced the war—dropping the bomb on Japan, and Mom told Dad when he come home, I know what you’ve been guarding! [LAUGHTER] Because he didn’t even know what he was guarding at the time.
Franklin: Right. Wow. Did your dad talk about his work much? Or maybe [INAUDIBLE]
Barnett: He worked as a patrolman until they sold the town and then he became a painter.
Franklin: A painter?
Barnett: Yeah, he was an artist so then he became a painter and painted the houses and the buildings in Richland. Because when the government owned Richland, if you had a paint job needed done on the house, you called them and they come in and painted it. You didn’t hire somebody from a company to paint it. The government did it.
Franklin: And was he a patrolman onsite the entire time until they sold the town?
Barnett: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. Was he assigned to a specific area, or--?
Barnett: No, just general patrol. He talked about patrolling the fences, taking their Jeeps and going down the length of the fences and checking them out, and all that sort of stuff. But just a general patrolman, not any special area.
Franklin: Okay. And you said that your—what did your mother do when she first got here?
Barnett: Oh, she was just a housewife. She eventually went to work as a waitress. And then finally she got on to work at Hanford. She worked with Battelle for about 29 years as a lab tech.
Franklin: Oh, wow. Do you know which lab she worked in?
Barnett: Well, she did—where they did testing on the animals. Though at that time they were testing marijuana on chimpanzees and different types of animals. She did the test work on the meat from the animals.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Barnett: So I don’t know exactly—it was—again, probably wasn’t supposed to be told, so she didn’t say much about it.
Franklin: Did she have any schooling beyond—
Barnett: Just high school.
Franklin: Just high school. And what about your father, did he--?
Barnett: He was just high school.
Franklin: Just high school as well. Where did your mother waitress at?
Barnett: Well, the first place she had was O’Malley’s Drug Store which now is a—what do you call it? A Tojo Gym? Where they teach different martial arts?
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: It’s down on Williams, right off of Williams. That’s what it is now.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: O’Malley’s Drug Store eventually closed, moved up to Kadlec. And a lady bought it from him, and now she’s down there on George Washington Way.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And right by O’Malley’s Drug Store used to be a Mayfair market. So I sold newspapers out at the lunch halls at Hanford. Sold—well, I don’t remember—but I think it was the Columbia Basin News to start out, because that was the first newspaper of the Tri-Cities, was the Columbia Basin News. Then they bought them out and became the Tri-City Herald. But I remember selling—give you an idea, you can figure out how much time, because I remember one of the headlines was—one of the union leaders had been arrested by the government. And I don’t even remember who it was, it’s been so long ago. But I remember that was one of the headlines of one of the newspapers.
Franklin: What about—do you remember the Richland Villager at all? That was a local paper.
Barnett: Yeah, but it wasn’t very much. It was very small.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I delivered the Seattle P-I.
Franklin: Seattle P-I?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay. And you said your mother started waitressing at Malley? At O’Malley’s or Malley’s?
Barnett: At O’Malley’s.
Franklin: O’Malley’s. And then did she waitress anywhere else in Richland?
Barnett: Not that I know of. From there she went out to Hanford.
Franklin: And that was when pharmacies or drug stores as we know them now, they used to have lunch counters.
Barnett: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Right. And so they would go there and they were more of like a café-slash-pharmacy.
Barnett: Yeah. The one up on Thayer, I think it was Densow’s at that time. That had a heyday lunch counter in it, coffee shop. It closed up and now I think it’s just pharmacy.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Barnett: But where the south end—what do you call it? You know when you get down here, you sit and try to remember things and you get kind of jumbled up—Salvation Army building is now on Thayer was originally the Mayfair Market.
Franklin: Okay. And what did they sell there?
Barnett: Well, that was the grocery store.
Franklin: Grocery store, okay. Do you remember—so you said you moved into—what was the address on Sanford?
Barnett: 1011 Sanford.
Franklin: And do you remember what kind of prefabricated house it was?
Barnett: It was three-bedroom.
Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab, okay.
Barnett: No, I think it was two-bedroom, because my sister was just a little baby then.
Franklin: Okay. And did you share a room with your sister?
Barnett: Probably with my brother.
Franklin: Oh, so how many siblings—
Barnett: Had three kids. I had an older brother. We were about five years apart.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So an older brother, you, and then a younger sister.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And then how long did you live at 1011 Sanford?
Barnett: I don’t really remember, but it must have been three or four years, because as soon as they got the A houses built, we had a chance to move into one. And we moved immediately to one. Because we had three kids, and a prefab’s kind of tight for three kids.
Franklin: Yeah, yeah. I live in a two-bedroom prefab. And it’s—with just my wife, and it’s pretty—
Barnett: Well you know why they’re called prefabs.
Franklin: Tell me.
Barnett: They were built by a company, brought in in two sections and then put together. They were prefabricated.
Franklin: Yeah, the prefabricated engineering company out of Portland.
Barnett: And nobody could figure out why they put that little square door in the back other than to throw the garbage out it. I don’t know—have you ever heard of Dupus Boomer?
Franklin: Yes.
Barnett: He made some cartoons about that backdoor.
Franklin: Right, and that the rooves had a tendency to fly away.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And they had to put—
Barnett: Well, in 1955, they did. They had two of them blow off.
Franklin: Yeah, those are great cartoons.
Barnett: Like “Pa wants a bathtub.” [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Which schools did you go to?
Barnett: Well, the first school I went was Carmichael. And that was probably a mile-and-a-half away. We walked to school. Nobody thought anything about it. There wasn’t any buses. There was a bus system in Richland, but it was run by the government. It was a little old bus that you could pick up in two places in Richland to go downtown and go to a movie and come back. But no buses hauled you to school. There was high school buses that hauled people. They picked them up in the Horse Heaven Hills on farms and brought them to Hanford—I mean to Col High—it’s Hanford now. But, no, I walked to school real regular, didn’t think about it, nobody had any panic about walking to school. Everybody did it because it’s normal.
Franklin: And do you remember—so you would have been going to—was it Carmichael—growing up right in the early Cold War. What do you remember about civil defense? Duck-and-cover, air raids.
Barnett: I don’t remember doing that.
Franklin: Really?
Barnett: I don’t know whether we did or not, but I don’t remember doing that.
Franklin: Do you remember knowing what was being made at Hanford? Did you ever have any fear—how real did the Cold War seem to you?
Barnett: Well, the Cold War affected me quite a bit because I was in eight years during the Cold War—in the Air Force.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: The security was a lot tighter. I mean, there was—you couldn’t go out to Hanford without having your security badge checked. Now you can drive clear to the Area and before you go in the Area have your badge checked.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But then, there was a badge check when you got on the buses, the badge check, when you got out to your area, and then again they checked your badges when you left the area.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So it was—the security was real tight.
Franklin: Mm-hmm. But what about when you were growing up, when you were a kid in school? Did you ever have any special fear or pride in what was being made at Hanford?
Barnett: Nope. It was—like I said, nobody knew what they were doing out there until they dropped the bomb. Then they found out they’d been protecting part of the atomic bomb.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But I had no fears about it. I went down the irrigation ditch—there used to be an irrigation ditch that ran through town that started—it had two, three ponds on Wellsian Way that were the settling ponds for Richland’s water system. And we used to go there and swim in them. One of the ponds they eventually made a juvenile fishing pond. And the irrigation ditch runs from there, clear down to where the hospital is, down in front of the hospital, several ponds down through the hospital and then under—well, through the Uptown district, one of them went through the Uptown district, and one went to the Columbia River. And wasn’t until ’48 that they finally put a pump in there, because in ’48 when they built the dam—they built the dike, rather—the irrigation ditches plugged up. So they had to put up a pump station in so they could pump the water irrigation ditch up into the river. We used to fish in that. We used to go down there and slide down—slide over where the pump was, because it was all slick and slimy. We’d put on an old pair of jeans and go down there and slide into the water. I mean, that’s things kids then. Nowadays they wouldn’t even think about it. My mother told me when I could swim 25 feet, I could go in the river by myself. Mainly because you didn’t go to the river too often in the winter; you went in the summer. And there’s not a place in the Yakima, if you can swim 25 feet, you can’t get back to the shore. So I spent all my—most weekends and spare time at the Yakima River playing around.
Franklin: Wow. What about—maybe you could talk a little bit about the growth of Richland and kind of the building of some of the major hallmarks, like the Uptown and the—
Barnett: Well, the Uptown was built—the rest of it closed up, but originally the Uptown—as you come into Uptown off to the left—that was a big theater. And we used to have a big matinee. The Spudnut’s shop has always been there. I can remember going to the movie on a Saturday and the lineup for the movie—I think it was 20 cents for a movie then. But it was clear past the Spudnut shop. We used to watch the owner there making the Spudnuts while we were waiting to get into the movies.
Franklin: Has that been in its same location--
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --in the mall?
Barnett: Spudnut’s has been there ever since it started. They originally were out there in Kennewick. If you go in there and pick up their menu, they have a little story about where they started. They started out there in the Wye.
Franklin: That’s great. And what else about it? Because Richland kind of developed out towards--
Barnett: Well, Newberry’s was on the other end of the Uptown district. That was kind of a department store type. I think the only one I saw was about 15 years ago, and that was in the Dalles, Oregon. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. The downtown district, every year we had different contests for the kids. They had marble shooting contests and bubblegum blowing contests—all kind of contests to keep the kids’ interest.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: At that time, the—what is it? The Allied Arts, or was that in the Atomic Frontier Days?
Franklin: Can you talk maybe a little bit about the Atomic Frontier—do you remember going to the parades?
Barnett: Yeah. They had a lot of the old western movie stars come to the Atomic Frontier Days.
Franklin: Like—do you remember any names in particular?
Barnett: No, I don’t. Like I say, a kid doesn’t retain names like that. He hears them and doesn’t retain them. But my dad, apparently, knew a couple of them, so he visited with them. It started out as just a celebration of Hanford and stuff. And then it worked into the Allied Arts show.
Franklin: Okay. And do you remember any particulars of those celebrations, like the parade—the floats, or—
Barnett: Well, there wasn’t any parade. There wasn’t any parade, and where Howard Amon Park is, there used to be a swimming pool. You know where it makes a turnaround? Well, there off to the right there used to be a swimming pool. And right now, they still got the old children’s swimming pool there, but then there was a regular swimming pool in the water. And in 1948 when the big flood came, it filled up full of water and they ended up breaking it up and burying it and building the Howard Prout pool. But we used to go down there and swim just about every day. And we’d go to the other end of the park and pick peaches, because it used to be a peach orchard. Because there were orchards all over town. Where Jason Lee was—the old Jason Lee—that was a cherry orchard. Where Densow is, that was a cherry orchard. Carmichael had an orchard. There was orchards all over town. Because this was an agriculture district at the time the government bought it and moved in.
Franklin: Were you in any clubs or—
Barnett: I was a boy scouts.
Franklin: --organizations? Boy Scouts?
Barnett: Yeah. We had—one that sticks in my mind the most was we had one of our young scouts drowned at the Uptown. That’s the one I mentioned. He went on an inner tube, fell in the water and drowned. That was in ’48. And actually, the water where the hospital was, the irrigation ditch you got there, that was 15-foot deep at that time.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: That backed up so much, they—that’s when they built what they called the America Mile, the dike. They called all the earthmovers from Hanford out to Richland to build that dike. Because when they started, the water was lapping over the edge to go into the houses. And they poured that thing in about 24 hours.
Franklin: Wow, that’s amazing.
Barnett: Now, the George Washington Way was closed to all civilian traffic, and these great big earthmovers were just going down the road, 30, 40 miles an hour.
Franklin: Wow. What other kinds of activities did you do in Boy Scouts?
Barnett: Oh, built models. Car models. You whittle them out, put the wheels on them, all that, have races with them. Went on trips. Just normal Boy Scout stuff. Got a little more sophisticated, but just the normal Boy Scout stuff then.
Franklin: Right. And so after you went to Carmichael, did you then go to Richland High?
Barnett: Col High.
Franklin: Col High?
Barnett: [LAUGHTER] It was Col High then.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: They changed the name because there was a Col High downstream on the Columbia that had had the name before Richland High was called Col High. So they changed it to Richland High instead of Col High.
Franklin: Oh. But was the mascot always still the—
Barnett: All the bomber.
Franklin: --bombers? Okay. So the Col High Bombers?
Barnett: Yup.
Franklin: Okay. And when did you graduate high school?
Barnett: 1957.
Franklin: And then what did you do?
Barnett: I went in the Air Force. I think about two months after I got out and I went in the Air Force. I already spent 27 months in the National Guards. I got in the National Guards when I was 16, and when I went to sign up for the Air Force, the squadron commander of the National Guards was—he got shook up because he enlisted me when I was 16. [LAUGHTER] So they changed the date on my discharge papers from the National Guards. So according to my discharge papers from the National Guards, I’m 78 right now.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: Those days, they did things like that, nobody thought anything about it.
Franklin: Wow, yeah.
Barnett: Because if you were warm they took you into the military then.
Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] And what did you—describe your time in the Air Force.
Barnett: Well, of course there was basic training. The first place I went was Westover, Massachusetts—that’s Springfield, Massachusetts. And that was a total culture shock for me, because I grew up in a comparatively small city. And Springfield then had over 100,000 people in it.
Franklin: Right, and I guess, too, at this point you would have completely grown up when Richland was a government—
Barnett: Yup.
Franklin: --still was all government space.
Barnett: Yup, they sold it while I was in the Air Force.
Franklin: Can—actually I guess maybe we can back up a little bit. What strikes you, maybe looking back on that, or—
Barnett: I watched them build the Alphabet Houses. And there wasn’t one or two people on the houses; there was five or six building these houses. And they seemed to go up overnight. One of the things that I don’t know is fact or not, but knowing the government it probably was—is they were supposed to build half basements for a coal fire furnace, a coal bin, and two tubs, and place for a washing machine. The contractors screwed up on some of them and built a full basement. And the government found out about it and made them go back in and seal half the basement with dirt. [LAUGHTER] Typical government.
Franklin: Were your—granted you were a kid at this point, but was your sense—were people happy—
Barnett: Oh yeah!
Franklin: living in a government-controlled and -owned town?
Barnett: Nobody thought anything about it. There was very little crime. Because at that time, there was only about two, three ways to get out of Richland. So there was nobody causing any big deal. And if you got in a whole bunch of trouble—you didn’t live in Richland unless you worked at Hanford. And if your kids got into too much trouble, they told the parents, you calm them down or go find another job. So it was stopped.
Franklin: Right. Did you—was Richland mostly a white community at that time? Right? Were there any other—
Barnett: Yeah, there was—one, I think there was only one black community in Richland—Norris Brown. And I think they lived in Putnam.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I remember we had a basketball game in Sunnyside. And Sunnyside wasn’t gonna let them play on their court. And we told them, fine, we’ll just get up and leave. So we all started to get up and leave and they finally broke it and gave in and let them play on the basketball court.
Franklin: How did you know this family? Did you go to school together?
Barnett: Yeah, I went to school with them.
Franklin: Oh okay, and did you play basketball?
Barnett: No! I’m not a sports—I had my first surgery on my knee when I was about 13, so—
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Barnett: I’ve never played any sports. My sporting then was hunting and fishing.
Franklin: But you kind of heard about this story?
Barnett: Oh, yeah. We all know them. Went to basketball games. Then there was sock hops and at noon they taught dancing in the lunchrooms for kids that wanted to learn how to dance.
Franklin: So do you know what the patriarch of that family would have done at Hanford to be able to earn a place at Hanford? Because mostly from what I’ve heard, mostly African Americans had to live in Pasco.
Barnett: Yeah, because they wouldn’t let them live in Richland—I mean Kennewick.
Franklin: Yeah, in Kennewick. So how did—do you know any particulars as to how that family was able to live in Richland?
Barnett: I think it’s just that the government—that they had to be equal on them, and they just hired them and they went to work out there. I don’t know any particulars on it, but that’s basic what it was.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: They were in a government town, and there was no way that anybody could refuse—and there was nobody that complained about it.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: Again, the government controlled it. They said, if you don’t like it, goodbye.
Franklin: Right. And they would—they called the government for pretty much anything you needed on the house, right? For coal?
Barnett: Right. Lightbulbs, chains, coal. But coal was delivered once a—I don’t know whether it was once a month or once a week. But coal was automatically delivered. And like I say, if there was anything major done, you called the housing department. They came in and fixed it.
Franklin: I think sometimes for outsiders looking in, it’s kind of striking to hear about the government completely owning this town and controlling the lives of the people and having that much control on people’s freedoms and responsibility. But from the people I’ve talked to who grow up in Richland, they have very fond memories of it.
Barnett: Yeah, there was no restrictions on the normal freedoms. There was restriction on if your kids got into trouble, because, like I said, the patrol would go up to the person that had the kids that were causing the problem and said you either straighten your kids out or you go and find another job. Which, to me, made common sense. And so it was actually pretty decent.
Franklin: Did you ever get any sense from your parents that they felt, maybe, restricted, not being able to own their own home or do any of their own repairs, or did they just—
Barnett: No, not then. I think—that was just after the Depression—I think they were just happy to be able to get a home.
Franklin: Right. Interesting. Because, you know, for some people looking outside, you could look at that level of government control—because we have these big debates about the role of the government in society today, and it’s kind of interesting to hear about it.
Barnett: Well, there was no control where the government come in and said, you do this and you do that and you do this. As long as you didn’t get into trouble and you did your job, and were a normal person, there was nobody ever complained about it. I remember I was back behind where the Racquet Club is. I was hunting ground squirrels with a .22 one day. And at that time, nobody had any problems with it. And one of the Richland patrol people came and picked me up and brought me back to the patrol station. And he called my dad. My dad come in and he says, what’s wrong? He says, we caught your boy shooting .22s at such-and-such area. He said, well, is he aiming at the road? Said, no. Said, did he shoot it at anybody? Said, no. Then what the hell are you bothering me about? I mean, that’s just how it was in those times. It wasn’t any of this, oh my god, he’s got a gun. It just was normal. Because I had my first rifle when I was about—I must have been about eight years old. And we used to go out and go rabbit hunting.
Franklin: Did you ever spend much time in Kennewick or Pasco—in either of those--?
Barnett: Not really. My wife was born in Pasco.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I never spent much time in it because I had no reason to. I mean, it wasn’t the case of I was afraid to or wary about it—just I had no reason to. All, everything I needed was in Richland or around the Richland area.
Franklin: Why did you first have to get surgery on your knee at 13?
Barnett: Well, my knee locked. I didn’t find out until about 25 years later that the doctor had actually not fixed it. Because what they found out was there was a meniscus cartilage—you know in your knee? And mine was oblong and it had broke in half. And it had slipped between the joint and it had locked my knee so I couldn’t straighten it out. So I’d have to pick it up, lay it across the other leg, and pull it and pop it back out. But that was the first—I was accident prone. I had a radical mastoid when I was about 15. By the time I got out of high school, I probably had 100 stitches in me. I mean, if it happened, I did it and got it happened to me. I was playing baseball, jumped over a fence, and landed on a guard rake with the thongs up—four thongs in one of my foot.
Franklin: Ouch.
Barnett: Weird things like that are always happening to me. One time, when I was in school, I reached up to open a door and a kid slammed it and put my hand through the window, sliced across this way. And I looked at it, bleeding, and I closed it up and went to the nurse’s office. The nurse got all panicky. She called my mom, and I could hear my mom say over the phone real loud, again?! And the nurse must’ve thought she was the hard-heartest old lady there ever was, but my mother was just used to it.
Franklin: Yeah, right.
Barnett: And I didn’t do things out of the way to have it happen, just—if it’s gonna be an odd thing, it happened.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So I kind of, like I say, with all this mess I got with my knee now, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome, a lot of it. I don’t—I get frustrated with it, because I love to garden and I can’t garden anymore. But I don’t get worried or depressed about it, because it’s there and nothing I can do about it, so just live with it.
Franklin: Right. So jump back ahead now. So you said you moved to Springfield in the Air Force for basic training, and that was—
Barnett: No, I was—San Antonio for basic training, and then to Springfield.
Franklin: And that was a big culture shock.
Barnett: Oh, yeah. I mean, I drove a vehicle and drove into town to haul officers into town. And here is a town with 100,000 people and I’d never been in anything bigger than Richland, Washington. So you can imagine the shock it was, being in that kind of traffic.
Franklin: Right. And then where did you go after that?
Barnett: Well, I was there for about a year-and-a-half, two years. Then I went to Thule, Greenland.
Franklin: Interesting.
Barnett: Top of the world.
Franklin: Yeah. And what were you—was that for the—weren’t there bombers stationed—
Barnett: No, they had the fueling planes there. Yes, they had SAC planes all over the world at that time. But at Thule they had the KC-135s and the KC-97s that were fueling planes.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So we were there to support them.
Franklin: And those were there to refuel the—
Barnett: The B-52s.
Franklin: --the B-52s that were carrying weapons in case of--
Barnett: Yup, because there was one from every base in the world in the air 24 hours a day.
Franklin: Right. And can you talk—what was that like, to be in—and was the base separated from any other communities in Greenland, or did you--
Barnett: It was a base of its own. There were no other communities besides Thule, that’s it.
Franklin: And how long were you there?
Barnett: Year.
Franklin: And what was that like?
Barnett: Well, it’s an interesting place to visit, but you don’t want to live there permanently. [LAUGHTER] Let’s put it that way. They have permafrost which is—oh, I guess about two foot down. So in the spring there are all these little beautiful tundra flowers—yellows and whites and all that. And then when they’re gone it’s just green grass and that’s it. And when they went to put a pole in the ground, they put a can—a barrel of oil in the ground, and light the oil, and then dig around that barrel. Because that’s the only way to get down past the permafrost. Because permafrost is almost like concrete.
Franklin: Yes, yeah. I’m from Alaska originally, and so I’m very familiar with permafrost. So after Greenland, where did you go?
Barnett: Went to Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Franklin: And where is that?
Barnett: Idaho, Washington.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of close to--
Barnett: Yeah, out in Mountain Home. They had B-47s then at Mountain Home.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I figured out that they actually phased out B-47s because they were built before the B-52s and they figured the B-47s weren't worth keeping around.
Franklin: And what did you do in the Air Force?
Barnett: I drove. I drove every kind of vehicle you can think of.
Franklin: Oh, really?
Barnett: Yeah. When I moved to Fairchild from Mountain Home, I was trained to tow B-52s in the back, in the hangars.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: With a five-ton Yuke. Four-wheel drive, five ton, and you had wing walkers on the outside that would guide you, and you would back this thing up, this big B-52 into a hangar.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: They would pull it down to a fueling station or whatever.
Franklin: Cool. And then when did you come back to Richland?
Barnett: 1965. I got out to Richland and we moved to--I can't remember the address, but it was on Marshall. We moved to a house on Marshall.
Franklin: Was it an Alphabet House, or was it a--
Barnett: Yeah, it was an Alphabet House. I remember it most because the neighbors had a monkey. And the monkey kept stealing my daughter's candy from her. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So you said--wait, so by this point you had a family?
Barnett: Yeah, I had--I adopted my oldest boy and I had two children.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: They were all born at Fairchild.
Franklin: Okay. And a wife, I presume?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And what did your wife do in Richland?
Barnett: She was just a mother. But we divorced in about '70. And then I remarried.
Franklin: Okay. And what did you do when you came back to Richland?
Barnett: Anything I could. I worked at O'Malley's Drug Store for a while. I worked at his house--O'Malley's house, leveled his backyard. I worked at Walter's Grape Juice, I worked at Bell Furniture, I worked at—at that time, it was originally called the Mart, at that big building right next to the Federal Building. At one time, that was a big--what would you call it? They had a cafeteria and a grocery store and all the other—kind of like Walmart.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: It was called the Mart at that time. And I worked there in the clippers that they washed the dishes with. And then I went to work for the bowling alley, Atomic Lanes, which was right there where the Jacks and Sons Tavern is. That was a community center and a bowling alley there. And I worked there for about a month, and then they went automatic. So, about that time, I was just about ready to get out—finish high school. And I don't think I had any other job after that, and I went in the Air Force.
Franklin: Oh, so--I'm sorry. When you came back to Richland, what did you do? So in 1965.
Barnett: Oh, I did everything then. You name it, I took a job. Before—I'm sorry, I got it backwards. Before I went in the Air Force, there wasn't many jobs for people in the—who were kids in Richland. And I worked the bowling alley and I worked down at a dry cleaning outfit. But when I come back to Richland, that's when I had all these other jobs. I worked all these other jobs to keep supplied for the family.
Franklin: How had Richland changed in the eight years since you had been gone?
Barnett: Well, the Uptown district had--the Newberry's had left. And there was a Safeway store right next to the theater. Right now I think it's a—I don't know, some kind of a multi shop deal. And both of the stores that were there originally are gone. They're now all antique stores.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So it was—when it was built, it was the first big complex for going shopping in Tri-Cities.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And after they built that, they built Highlands. And that was another big complex for shopping. So I worked everything I could, and 19--oh, what was it? [SIGH] About '67 or '68, I went to work at Hanford. I finally got on with them. Because I'd been applying at Hanford for three years. And I finally got to work with them. I won't mention how I got to work for them, because to me, it's kind of a ridiculous deal, and I don't know whether it was prejudice or not. Well, I'll go ahead.
Franklin: I was gonna say, now you've got my interest.
Barnett: I was--how I'd shop for a job, I'd go out and fill out an employment application, and I'd just distribute--go out all over town and fill out employment applications. And every week, I'd go back and check them. Well, one time, I was filling out an appointment application, and one of the guys I knew, I met him, and he said, hey, there's a new employment office over there at the new Whitaker School. And you might check it out. So I went over there and checked it out and signed up. And three days later, Hanford called me for a job. And I found out that that originally was a minority employment office.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: So I've always had the feeling that somebody didn't look at the records right. They didn't see the C. [LAUGHTER] Because I didn't get hired until I went to there and did an application. Because the government was required to hire a certain number of minority--
Franklin: Right. Well, but you did get hired.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford?
Barnett: Well, I can say as little as possible, like everybody else. [LAUGHTER] That's a common joke. Of course, it took me about--I couldn't understand it. It took me about three months to get a security clearance. When I was in SAC, I had a Secret clearance. Both my folks worked at Hanford, they had Secret clearance. But it still took me about three months to get a security clearance. And all the time, since I've been on the Air Force, I've lived in Richland, I never could understand the government—why they wasted so much money on a security clearance for me. But when I got out there, I started as a process operator. And started at B Plant. And there was no training at that time. I mean, when you went into a radiation zone, one of the guys that was experienced took you with him. And you dressed like he did, hoping he knew what he was doing, because that's how you dressed. And that's how you learned to dress right. So I started out going into the canyon--I don't know if you knew what the canyons were—okay? We went into the canyons and I helped mixed chemicals in the chemical gallery. And that's where I think I really screwed up my knees, because I can remember—remember, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome--I remember throwing a hundred-pound sack of chemicals on my shoulder and going up three flights of stairs with them, rather than wait for the elevator. Young and dumb, indestructible. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Actually, maybe for those who might be watching this who might not be as familiar with some of this stuff as I am, can you describe the canyon?
Barnett: Well, the canyon was—well, like I say, the building was about 150-foot wide and about 800-foot long. And it was four stories deep and there was just one--the reason they call it canyon was because it was a gigantic canyon. It went the full length of the building, and they had huge cranes that moved different stuff so they could process the atomic waste. Because in B Plant, they process the nuclear waste. They ship it down to B Plant and we go through chemical stuff to separate the strontium and cesium from it. And that would be sent to the encapsulation plant. That was built about—oh, six years after I went to work at B Plant. They closed up after I'd been there for ten years, and I went to work for Encapsulation Building. But the canyon is an immensely big, empty storage building, really what it is. And I don't know how—or what they're gonna do with them now, because there is some radiation there that you wouldn't believe how hot it was. We took samples of radiation behind lead shields, and then they were so hot that they ended up having the crane pick up the samples and dispose of them, because we couldn't move them.
Franklin: Wow. Did you—and so when you came back, your father was no longer working at Hanford, right?
Barnett: Yeah, he was still working at Hanford.
Franklin: Oh, was he still working—so you guys worked at Hanford at the same time.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Oh, wow, that's really interesting. So can you tell me a little bit more about what a—describe in a little more detail the job of a process operator?
Barnett: Well, real basically, we were what you might call nuclear janitors.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We clean up the messes that pipe fitters or millwrights or electricians made. We process all the chemical--mixed all the chemicals and processed—did all the processing of separating the strontium and cesium from the nuclear waste and ship them to tank farms. And that was basically what our main job was. We had a few major accidents. Now it'd be all over the world, about how bad it was and all that. But we just went about our business cleaning it up and went on our job. None of us got an overdose of radiation. We relied on our radiation monitors and they were good radiation monitors. If we were getting too much, they yanked us out of there real quick. So we didn't even think about it. It wasn't the case of being scared of it or anything else. It's like your hazardous wastes that they got, like coming from the hospital, where they work in an x-ray lab, they throw all the gloves and stuff and that. That's called mixed hazardous waste. Well, you could take a bath in that and not get any radiation on you. But according to what the public knew, those things are really highly radioactive boxes. And I think the biggest problem the government had is they didn't tell the people enough about what was really going on after the war was over.
Franklin: Oh. Really?
Barnett: Yeah, because there would have been less worry about things that were going on then, if they would have known. Because if you don't know anything about radiation, and you hear somebody mentions something is irradiated, you get all panicky about it. The expression for radiation out there was, you get a crap up. You get a crap up, you scrub it off and go about your business. Now, they panic and take you to town and do all that sort of stuff. There, we just scrubbed it off and went about our business.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And I never worried about it.
Franklin: Okay. So you said you were a process separator at B Plant. And then you went to the Canyon, and what did you do--
Barnett: Well, I didn't go to the Canyon, I went to 225-B, the Encapsulation Building.
Franklin; 225-B, the Encapsulation Building.
Barnett: That's where they encapsulated the strontium and cesium.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We all did a multitude of jobs. We worked on the cells, processing the strontium and cesium. And we worked behind the cells in mixing chemicals and we worked from when they loaded the chemicals for shipment for a long period of time when they were shipping cesium to the radiation plant for irradiating medical waste. And that ended when the guy was what they called recycling the cesium capsules too much. They get real hot. I mean, temperature-wise. And he was setting it in the water for a period of time and taking it out of water and cooling them off and stashing them back in the water. Well, one of them leaked.
Franklin: Ooh.
Barnett: And so they ended up, the whole place had to have all those capsules moved back. So that was a big fiasco. And again, it wasn't our fault. It was the guy doing the work was stupid enough to not check and see what he was doing.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And that's usually what happens with most—any of the radiation. And if you work with radiation, it's not the guy doing the work, it's somebody that's stupid and doesn't check what he's doing, doesn't follow regulations that causes the problem.
Franklin: So did you have any other jobs at Hanford? Or what--
Barnett: I don't know, you ever heard of McCluskey?
Franklin: Yeah.
Barnett: Well, I was over there when we cleaned—for five weeks cleaning up that building.
Franklin: Really?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Were you there at the time of the accident--
Barnett: No, no.
Franklin: --or part of the cleanup for that?
Barnett: Afterwards. They were trying to clean up the rooms so they could go in there and get things squared away. And we spent five weeks there. And to tell you how screwball the government can be, the last week-and-a-half we were there, we finally told our supervisor, look, all of worked on this radiation for 15, 20 years. We know how to clean it up. Quit telling us what to do. Let us go in there and clean it up and we'll get it cleaned up for you in no time at all. So they took a chance. And what they did is we ragged all along the bottom of the building, and we took water fire extinguishers. Because it's americium, and americium is a powder substance, it floats real easy. But it's water soluble--it'll run down with water. So we went in there and sprayed the walls with it real heavy. Then wiped everything down, moved everything that was movable, bagged it up in plastic bags and moved it out. And inside of a week, we had it down to mask only. Before then, we were wearing three pairs of plastic and cooling air and fresh air.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: And we cleaned it up in a week-and-a-half because they didn't want the people that knew what they were doing doing it. And that's the biggest problem with the government: they've always got the bureaucracy up here that knows what's going on, but they never ask the poor guy that’s doing all the work what's going on. I think you've seen that numerous times. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I think so. [LAUGHTER] Wow, that's really fascinating. So how long total did you work at Hanford?
Barnett: 30 years.
Franklin: 30 years.
Barnett: I had to take a medical retirement in '98.
Franklin: '98. So then you were there, then, kind of from the shift from production to cleanup. Right? The production and shutdown.
Barnett: No, when I left they were just getting ready to start cleaning things up.
Franklin: Okay, so can you maybe talk about the shift from production to shutdown? How did that affect your job?
Barnett: Well, I really didn't get in on any of the cleanup, because I left before they did. But I talked to a number of the guys out there that I worked with that were in the cleanup. The biggest problem they had is they put such a limit on chemicals they could use to do cleanup that they had to use things that they claim were not environmentally safe. They had to void all that--like Tide. They wouldn't even let us use Tide to wash the walls down. Now, you use Tide in washing machines. [LAUGHTER] Come on, give me a break. That's a hazardous chemical? And I guess it took them quite a while to get the thing cleaned up. Because, like I say, they didn't start cleaning it up until after I left.
Franklin: Right. So what did you do in the shutdown era? Like after '87, from '87 to '98? What was your job primarily?
Barnett: They didn't shut down--they shut B Plant down, but they didn't shut 2-and-a-quarter down. 2-and-a-quarter was still processing strontium and cesium.
Franklin: Oh, okay, so then you kept in the waste encapsulation.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Can you describe a little bit more the process of waste encapsulation?
Barnett: Well, strontium is not soluble--not water soluble. And strontium is. And what they had--they had a special process--I don't know exactly the process. I just know what we did. You would take a mixed chemicals with the cesium and you would dissolve it and then you would heat it up to--I think--800 degrees into a liquid. And then you had a machine we called a tilt-pour which would pour seven capsules at a time full of cesium. And then you'd take these capsules and you'd put a sensoring disc in them to make them airtight. And then you'd weld a cap onto that. That'd be welded by a machine. And most then it was computerized. Then that was decontaminated until it was clean. And then it was put into another capsule, and that capsule was also—put a lid on it, but it was soldered on—welded on. And that was moved into the pool cells. Pool cells are 13-foot deep. What you had is a special hole built into the wall with water that you would shove that capsule through. And then the guy on the other side in the pool cell would grab the capsule and pull it out. And he would go to the pool cell that he's designated to go to, and he would shove it through a hole in the wall. And somebody on the other side would grab it and pull it and then you'd put it into its spot. So it was quite a process. And the fear was--you couldn't get that capsule within five feet of the top. Because if you did, you'd get a high radiation alarm. They’d read millions of rads on those capsules. They were hot, no two ways about it. And one thing I've always wondered is why does cesium glow blue when you turn the lights out?
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: You turn the lights out in the pool cell, and all these cesium capsules will glow blue. And I've never--I've had somebody say it's something about the speed of light and all that. But I'd like to know the real reason it does that.
Franklin: That sounds kind of strangely beautiful.
Barnett: It was. It's a blue glow all along the bottom. The strontium doesn't. Strontium is not water soluble and it doesn't glow at all. In fact, I got some strontium in me one time when I had a tape when one of the manipulators--I don't know if I didn't mention--all the work was done from the outside with the manipulators. You know what manipulators are.
Franklin: Right, yeah.
Barnett: Okay, and all the capsulation, all of the work was done with manipulators from the outside. And it was amazing what some of those guys could do. They could take a little bottle about so big with a little bitty top and they could pick up that bottle, hold it here, and took up the other--the cap with the lid and put it on it.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: I was never that good with it, but there some guys out there who got real expertise with that. It just takes a lot of work to learn to use those things.
Franklin: I bet.
Barnett: That's one reason my hand's tore up--my hand just didn't take it so much.
Franklin: And you said you got strontium on your hand?
Barnett: Yeah, I got--I couldn't handle manipulators good because my hand was falling apart on me. So I took all the decontamination of the manipulator. Because that's--a manipulator has to be pulled after so many--I think it's so many weeks, the Mylar coating on it starts deteriorating. So it has to be pulled, decontaminated, and new Mylar sheath put on it. And I was in there decontaminating one of the manipulators, and one of the—well, they were trying new bands that controlled the grips. And one of them broke and sliced my hand. And I got some strontium in my finger. It was about 700 counts. I wasn't too worried about it. But they took me to town and went on all government roads, documented and everything and brought me back. I couldn't work with radiation for about three months until that thing finally deteriorated--worked out of the body.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: But I didn't worry about it. It wasn't enough to do any harm.
Franklin: Wow, that's really--
Barnett: See, that's the difference between working with the stuff and knowing what it does, and not working with the stuff.
Franklin: Right. Right, I've heard a lot of similar things about--
Barnett: It's like chemicals. I'd rather work at a radiation plant than at a chemical plant. Because if you have good radiation monitors, you're not gonna get an overdose of radiation. But with a chemical plant, look what they have out there now. A guy gets a whiff of chemicals, they all go panic about it.
Franklin: Yeah, I see where you're--I see your point. So you said--earlier when you said you would put the cesium in the pools—cesium cans, you couldn't get them too close to something, because they'd get too hot. Sorry--can you--
Barnett: No, it wasn't too close--they're in--oh, it probably was a--well, what would you call it? It was like a cabinet with holes in it. You would drop these in there. And they're spaced out. You couldn't pull them too high.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: If you pulled them sometimes when you're getting ready to transfer them to the pool cell, they would hydroplane and come up. And if you pulled them too fast, they would come up and you'd get a high radiation alarm. You’d just drop it back down and it'd go off.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: That's what it was.
Franklin: I got--okay. I gotcha. So--
Barnett: It only takes one time, you remember not to do that anymore. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I bet. So even though your area—your work didn't change much when most of the plans ordered to shut down. You still probably worked with a lot of people whose jobs might have changed--
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --during shutdown. Can you talk about that transition between process--?
Barnett: Well, I talked with some of the guys and they were talking about how much work it took to get things cleaned up. Like the area behind the pool cells, that had to be completely decontaminated. And we finally got it down to where it was just one pair and no masks. That took a lot of work. Decontaminating just takes a lot of hand-scrubbing. I mean, it's not a case of, you can put something there and pick it up and get rid of it. You got a scrub a lot of places until it's gone. It takes a lot of work. And I talked to one fella, and he said that they had all the cells that were down to clean—and what they consider clean is no radiation in them. And it is hard for me to believe, because some of those cells were really hot. But I never got a chance on the cleanup.
Franklin: How was--so when Hanford was shifting over, how was this change explained by management, or some of the--how was it conveyed, or how did the community take it?
Barnett: Management never explained anything to anybody. [LAUGHTER] I don't remember hearing the community complaining about anything, because most of the guys worked out there, and they knew what was going on. So there was no big panic about it. It wasn't the case where some guys didn't work here, they were told this was going on and got all excited because they didn’t know what was going on. Most people knew what was going on. So there was no big panic that I remember.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We didn't panic with radiation, because we had good radiation monitors.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And that makes a big difference when you're working around radiation.
Franklin: So being in waste encapsulation, how did other events--other nuclear accidents around the country or around the world, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, kind of affect how your job or how--
Barnett: It made us see how ridiculous--because Three Mile Island actually worked. It was [UNKNOWN] what it was built for. And the moderation they got--radiation they got was not as much as you get flying from here to Denver City. Because you get more radiation from the sun than you do from—what the people at Three Mile Island got. But they blew it up so big, because so many years the government kept radiation such a secret. And that's the reason there's so much panic whenever they say radiation. Of course, there's been some real bad accidents. That one in Japan—that was a horrible thing. But as far as Hanford goes, most of the people that worked at Hanford don't—I guess they're not working around radiation anymore; it's all chemicals. Because they're getting—they get the chemicals and to me, that's the management's problem. Because they're doing something wrong in taking care of the people. The people are doing what they're told to do. If management is telling them, hey, you got to wear this, and they're not wearing it, then that's their problem—that’s the worker's problem. But when the management doesn't do anything about it, that's their problem—that’s management's problem. And I think from what I've heard and read, most of this is a managerial problem. It's not a case that the worker is going out of his way to ignore any safety concerns.
Franklin: Right. What about the accident in Chernobyl? How did that--did that affect your job, or--
Barnett: Yeah, it affected it because they shut down N Reactor. And N Reactor, up until then, was as safe as any reactor in the country. It had so many safety pieces on it that you could darn near slam a door and make it shut down. But they shut it down because it was something like Chernobyl. And that's where the big effect was.
Franklin: How did--oh, how did security policies change over time? Did they change with the different contractors or in response to different events?
Barnett: No, the security’s main thing was basically the same. You had the security guards at like 200 East—well, they left the security guards that you couldn’t get out to Hanford without a security clearance. But that quit because they had the buses, and that stopped. And they had the security guards checking the buses and stuff as you went through. And then typical government, they started screaming about, oh, we're burning too much gas. We can't afford gas! So we'll shut the buses down. [LAUGHTER] So everybody had to drive out. But the guards at the gate checked your badges, checked your cars. If there was anything in it--you couldn’t take cameras or anything like that out there. If the guard knew you, he checked you out whether he knew you or not, because he had to make sure your wife didn't leave a camera sitting in your backseat you didn't know about.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: Which happened on occasion.
Franklin: Right, I bet. How did your job change with the different contractors coming in? Did it change much, or did you--
Barnett: Well, every contractor that came in, the engineers thought they were gonna remake the world. They would come up with some plan that they saw on a schematic and say, this is the way we want to do it. And we'd tell them point blank, it won't work. We've tried it that way. And they say, oh yes, it will! So we'd spend $50,000 in parts and stuff to put this together, and then it didn't work. And then they went around, well, why didn't it work? Well. The only one I ever saw that was a decent engineer is when he'd draw up a plan to do something, he would go to the millwrights, he would go to the operators, he'd go to the instrument techs and ask them to look at it and see if there's anything that needs done on it. And he had never had any problems. But these that come straight out of school and thought they could reinvent the world were a pain in the butt to us because they cost money and time.
Franklin: Do you remember who that good engineer was?
Barnett: He left. I don't remember who he was. But he left and went to work for a big company some place.
Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you remember President Nixon's visit in--I think it was 1970 or 1971?
Barnett: I might have. I didn't see him. I don't worry about politics.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Barnett: He didn't do our place any good or any bad. Just a big political statement.
Franklin: How did the Tri-Cities change from when you came back in 1968 until today? What kind of strikes you as major changes?
Barnett: Well, there seem to be more, you might say, petty crimes. There wasn't as much as there was before--there was more than there was before, I should say. But the city maintained its equilibrium about the same, because the people have been here for 20 years, and then they sold the city to the town. There was no big change in the government. The police stayed the same. The biggest change was you had to call a painter if you wanted your house painted. And they sold the houses to the people, and that was the biggest change.
Franklin: How about, though, since—from when you came back in 1968 until today? Has there been any--has the community changed at all?
Barnett: Well, a lot of the businesses have left Richland. They moved out Columbia Center area, or up there in that area. We don't have--you got to go to Columbia Center to find a business. There's a few still there. There's Home Depot and stuff like that down there, Big Lots. But there's not as many as there used to be. And mostly antique shops or stereo shops.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But there's always the Spudnut. It's always been there.
Franklin: There is always the Spudnuts, yeah. They're good too. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about?
Barnett: Well, us kids had different ways of playing that nowadays they would just panic about it. We used to have BB gun fights. We’d put on leather jackets and extra pair of Levi's and a hat and go into these orchards like where Densow's was and we'd have BB gun fights. And you haven't really lived until you've had your butt shot by a BB. [LAUGHTER] But nowadays there'd be some big panic about it that you're gonna shoot an eye out. Well, nobody ever shot an eye out because we made sure that we didn't shoot towards the head. [LAUGHTER] When they were building the houses, that's what was amazing, how fast they put these houses up. It wasn't a week or so to get a house started--it was almost a week and they had the thing almost done. And we used to go to different houses and have clod fights. Things like that that you don't dare do nowadays.
Franklin: When you had what kind of fights?
Barnett: Clod fights. Clodded earth. We'd get behind stuff and throw clods at each other. And the snow then was two, three foot deep. Because I remember building snow forts in my yard three foot high and never have to go to the yard to get snow. So there has been a big change in the weather. And the shelterbelt, that made a big difference, because I remember when we had sandstorms--not dust storms, sandstorms. And my dad would pull his car up in front of the house to keep the sand from blasting the side of the car off--the paint. So there's been big changes. The shelterbelt was one thing the government put in that actually worked. It’s kind of surprising. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That's great. Is there anything else? Anything else you'd like to talk about?
Barnett: Well, not really. Just that the area behind--you know, in West Richland at that time used to be Heminger City and Enterprise. They were two cities then.
Franklin: Okay, tell me, were those cities that predated the Hanford Project?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay, and how big were there?
Barnett: Oh, they were just little communities. It was just one run into the other. There was one called Enterprise, one was called--what did I just say?
Franklin: Something city.
Barnett: Heminger City.
Franklin: Heminger City.
Barnett: One of the elections went out for voting, they had one of the places that you went to was called Enterprise.
Franklin: And how long did those communities last after Hanford came?
Barnett: Not very long. I can remember Dad going out to the first town—first little town was Heminger City. And that was right where Cline's computer shop is, it was automobile shop there. And those were all owned by one group--one person. I think it was--Herricks was the name. And she had a little taco stand in one of the places. And OK Tire Shop had part of the one building that they sold tires and did car repair out of. So it was a slow change in West Richland. We had a feed store for a while. But Hanford went on strike and our feed store went down the tubes. They used to have what they called parking lot critter sells. People would bring all their animals, little animals that they wanted to sell in cages. And we would sell them for them and get 10% of the interest. It was a pretty good deal, because a lot of people had pet rabbits and stuff like that and they wanted to get rid of them. Usually had them at the un-boat races. You heard of the un-boat races?
Franklin: Why don't you tell me?
Barnett: The un-boat races? You ever heard of them?
Franklin: Why don't you tell me?
Barnett: Well, the un-boat race was you went up to the Horn Rapids Dam, and you put something in. It could not be a boat. It could be a bath tub, it could be inner tubes--it could be anything that you could see above that would float and it could not be called--it was called un-boat race. And there was a prize that they got down towards the bridge that crosses the Yakima there on George Washington Way. Got down about that far, there was a prize who got there first. But they ended up cutting that out because people left too much stuff—garbage alongside the road. They wouldn’t pick it up and take it with them when they were done with it. But that was a lot of fun. We used to stand up on the ridge. Always started about May. And we'd stand there and watch people come down the river on these un-boats. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That sounds really fun. Anyone else have anything? Okay, well, Dan, thank you so much for talking to us today. I learned a lot of great stuff about Richland and waste encapsulation. I really appreciate it.
Barnett: Okay.
Northwest Public Television | Hansen_Edith
Woman one: Always ready.
Man one: [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
Woman one: Sounds like my father-in-law.
Woman two: [LAUGHTER] We won’t go there, then.
Woman one: [LAUGHTER]
Robert Bauman: All right?
Man one: Nothing wrong in there. Feel free.
Bauman: All right. Okay. We're going to get started if that's okay. Can we start by having you say your name first and spell it for us?
Edith Hansen: Oh. Right now?
Bauman: Yes. Yeah.
Hansen: My name is Edith Hansen, and E-D-I-T-H, H-A-N-S-E-N.
Bauman: Okay. Thank you. And today's date is August 28 of 2013. And we're doing this interview on the campus of Washington State University--
Hansen: I'm a little hard hearing.
Bauman: Okay. Should I scoot closer? Yeah?
Man one: Yeah, absolutely.
Bauman: Okay. I'll scoot closer, if that's all right. How's that? Is this going to be better? Are you going to be better--?
Hansen: Yeah.
Bauman: Okay, great. So let's start by just having you talk about your family and how and when they came to the area here.
Hansen: Well, I wanted to start back--[LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Go ahead.
Hansen: And in 1875, this was nothing but a cattle range. And there were just--nobody lived here, just a person who had a lot of cattle. And he was the postmaster for the whole area. And in 1878, Ben Rosencrance bought him out, or bought out the area around the mouth of the Yakima River. And he was a stock man, too. And he bought the 16 sections at $0.50 an acre. In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad completed their line from Spokane to Ainsworth. And Ainsworth was what they called Pasco at that time. Now the Federal Homestead laws were established in 1888. Now Ben and his wife married on November the 3rd, 1880, in Pendleton. And their honeymoon was the ride from Pendleton to the ranch.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Hansen: And they operated a stock ranch. And if they wanted any groceries, they had to go to Walla Walla for store. Coffee they bought in 50-pound sacks. And they went about once a year. And fabric was $0.05 a yard, and they bought it by the bolt. [LAUGHTER] And the missus--that was her honeymoon. [LAUGHTER] And there was no house. I don't know just what kind of a structure they lived in, but it was pretty minimum. And she never saw another white woman for six months. Now he--when that law went through, the Federal Homestead law went through, he filed for 1,700 acres. And he had timber claims and mineral claims. And [LAUGHTER] he just signed up for everything. Well, one man was unhappy with him and didn't think that that was fair because there was no timber in this area. And so he rode his horse over to Walla Walla to protest. [LAUGHTER] Well, Rosencrance found out that he was going over there and report him to the authorities because there was no forest--there wasn't no trees. So they went down to the river, and they dug up a bunch of willows and transplanted them. [LAUGHTER] And I don't know what kind of a housing arrangement they had, but it wasn't much. But they moved it up there and put those willow trees in there. [LAUGHTER] And they called that their forest. Anyway. [LAUGHTER] Oh, she washed clothes and draped them over the sagebrush. [LAUGHTER] They didn't have any clothes lines or anything. And so but anyway, they were set for when the authorities came down to see their forest, they could see the willow trees. And I never did hear just what kind of housing they had. But it was pretty minimum. Now after they'd been here a while, she said they should have a school. And she talked Mr. and Mrs. Harry Van Horn to come and homestead. And they picked out some land that they didn't build, or they gave it to them. I don't know. But anyway, she talked them into coming here because Mrs. Van Horn was a school teacher. And she thought there should be a school teacher in this area. And she was paid $1 a day to be a teacher. And the kids all came of their own expense, either with a wagon or a sled. In the wintertime they used a sled and came to her house. And they would bring their own chair or stool--whatever they were going to sit on [LAUGHTER] because she didn't have things for them to sit on while she was teaching them. Let's see. Oh, in 1883, the railroad was building the railroad bridge across the Columbia. And they had a lot of people here come in for construction of this bridge. It was a pretty big deal to put this bridge clear across the Columbia. And they were noted for gambling and saloons. And Pasco got a really bad reputation. [LAUGHTER] My mother's grandfather over in Germany heard about it. [LAUGHTER] And they didn't want him to raise his family near that Pasco [LAUGHTER] wild town. And now there was a family, and that was Amy and Alex McNeil. And they came in 1883, and they wanted to build a house with lumber. And they had to go to Bickleton to get lumber. There was nobody selling house lumber. But they built their house. And what they did were they were panning for gold. And by this time now, they could buy groceries in Ainsworth or Pasco--I mean all one place. But they didn't have to go to Walla Walla for their groceries anymore. Now the Clements came in early, too. That was an early family. And their daughter was married to a Bauer, and he died. But that's when the Clements settled in this area. Let's see. Oh, the post office was established in Richland in 1905. And in 1903, the Timmermans came here. And there was a--Walter Timmerman is the one who ran the ferry from Pasco to Richland. And his father and his uncle came and helped him set up the line over. So they had a ferry at that time. And they had rates to ride on the ferry. If you had sheep, they were $0.01 a sheep. [LAUGHTER] If you were having pack animals, they were $0.25 for a ride. If a person road on a horse, that was $0.50 from Pasco to Richland. And then a team in a wagon or a buggy was $1. And then later on they had automobiles and trucks. And they were $1 each. Now those were some of the earliest families that settled in this area. Now my grandfather Bremer was living in Seattle. And the only work he could get in Seattle was down on the waterfront. And so every morning, he would get up and go down to the waterfront and hope that somebody was unloading a ship or loading a ship. And that's where all the men were. And my grandfather quite often got work because he was a big man and strong. And that's what they wanted to load these ships up or to unload them. But he hated that rain. And standing in that rain, sometimes for quite a while before somebody chose him to work for them, was real disgusting. And so he read in the newspaper that there was a man over in Kennewick, and he wanted his family, who were living in Seattle. They had a wagon. They had a team and eight children. And they advertised for a driver. Now there was a really bad winter that winter. And there was no highway. And of course, there were no restaurants and no cafes or anything built along the way. And so they had the eight children in this wagon. And of course I imagine some of those older boys probably were walking because [LAUGHTER] I don't know that the team could handle everybody in the wagon. But anyway--and they had to stop and cook their meals for those kids and themselves. So Grandpa said he would do that. He wanted to see what was over here in eastern Washington. And so they started off. And he didn't keep a diary, or didn't write down just what they did every day. But the winter had been really bad. And the snow was melting, and it was making streams across the trail. And so they would have to stop and shovel in dirt so they could get the wagon through. And then once in a while there were trees that were down. And they had to cut limbs off and drag those tree limbs and get the road clear so they could get that wagon through. I don’t know how--it would've been interesting if he could have told us how long it took them. But you know, you have to feed those kids three times a day and then fixing the road on your way over--it wasn't easy. And then when he got up to the pass and he came over the pass, all the area around Ellensburg and that area, the farmers were out, and they were farming. And the sun was shining, and they were getting ready for crops and things. He said, this is heaven. [LAUGHTER] He's never going back to Seattle! [LAUGHTER] And things went much better once they got over the hill. And they got that family delivered to Kennewick. And then he got a hold of his wife, probably--I don't know whether they had telephones or not. But maybe they just wrote. But anyway, he got hold of her and said, you're going to buy tickets on the railroad, and you're coming in to Kennewick, and I'll pick you up in Kennewick. So then they came to Kennewick. And about that time, Rosencrance, the man who had bought all that land, he wanted to get some irrigation going because he knew this was good land and all he needed was water. So he put in the water wheel. And that was in 1894 that they built that water wheel. And Grandpa got a job on finishing it up. It was in construction when he arrived. But he worked to finish it up and then get the water--I don't believe I put down how much. But anyway--oh, what happened to my pictures that I brought?
Bauman: Oh, they're right here. I'll bring them. Oh, it’s okay.
Hansen: Thank you. Hmm. Now you've probably all seen the picture of the water wheel. That was the first irrigation in this area. And well, this is the original picture. And my mom had that. And a lot of people borrowed that, and they've enlarged it. And they're all over. You've probably seen a half a dozen pictures. But the people, when they enlarged it, they took all the people off. And I have here a list of all the people who are standing on this bridge. And by that time, my grandmother and her kids were all standing on the bridge. It was 16 feet wide and 32 feet high. And it had a capacity of 320 gallons per revolution. And so it dipped down in the water and get this 320 gallons and lift it up to the top and then put it into a ditch. And the ditch would take it to the farmers that were going to use it.
Bauman: And where was the water wheel?
Hansen: Now they quit being in the lady's house for school. There were more people moving into town--moving into the area and buying farms. And so they built a school. And it was located out--well, now the highway from Kennewick to Richland, just before you get the turnoff to Richland, it was in that area. And my mom went to that school. And they had school from October ‘til March because the kids worked in the fields the rest of the time. But they could be spared during the winter months. And if they got any kids that were graduating from 7th or 8th grade, then the school—I mean the state would send tests from Olympia. And they had to take those tests and see if they'd learned at this little country school enough to be ready for high school. Now about this time, there was a Thad Grosscup, who was a lawyer in Seattle. And somehow, he found out that this was really good country and good farming country. And so he was a lawyer for big railroads over there in Seattle and he had quite a bit of money. He bought 1,800 acres. It's about eight or nine miles out of Richland. And he wanted to build a canal. And I don't know who built that dam, whether he built that dam or whether—but anyway, the dam created the water to go in the ditch. And so he had people out there building this ditch because he wanted to irrigate those 1,800 acres. And my grandfather and his boys went out to make this ditch and to help with it--get this farm going. And my mother went to cook for the people that were working on this place--the farm. Now the railroad bridge was finished in 1889. And before that--before 1889, they didn't have a way to get the railroad cars from the Pasco area across the Columbia. And so they used a steam ferry. They'd run a few cars on the steam ferry, go across the river, put them off, come back and get some more. And so you could see that it was a real aggravation for the railroad [LAUGHTER] to move a whole train that way, but they did it. But then they finally got that bridge finished. And then they could run the cars across the Columbia. And that was a big deal. Now about this time, there were so many farmers coming in and buying up land, and, well, all along. And we were in Yakima County at this time. And Yakima County said, we're getting too big--too many people. And so we're going to divide it. And so they broke off a piece on the lower end here. And they were going to—they kind of thought of Benton. But they said they couldn't do that because the post office said, you can't--well, it was Benton for a couple of months. We became Benton County, and then they tried--anyway, the state said you couldn't have, because they had another section, and it was too close. And they said you couldn't name it that. But anyway, they had quite a time. They named it three different times. But it finally became Benton County. Let's see. Oh, in 1907, they decided that this was a good place to raise pheasants and quail. And so they brought in starters and turned them loose. And nobody was supposed to shoot them in 1907. But in 1908, they said there'd be foul for them to shoot. Now 1907 was the first automobile in the area. And the population had doubled. And they had more kids in the school. So they put in a second floor in the schoolhouse. In 1908, they got telephone service. In 1909, that was the first Richland Bank. And in 1912, they built the new high school. Now Amon came in about this time. And he bought most of the land from Rosencrance. Rosencrance had been running cattle and stuff. And Rosencrance is the one that built the big wheel and started the irrigation. And when that irrigation got started, why, then people came in to farm. And finally in 1905, they decided they could call it Benton County. [LAUGHTER] They had quite a time on the name. And there was a man named Raditz. And my grandfather was Bremer, and they built a hotel in Richland. And it had 20 rooms, and it was 30 by 60 foot. And they had a feed stable and a hardware store, and a post office was in the grocery store. And they bought bonds for a new schoolhouse. And the river traffic was lively. And they had daily service from Kennewick to Priest Rapids. Let's see. Amon bought Rosencrance out and sold ranches and stuff. And--oh, wrote my notes in a hurry and can't even read my notes.
Bauman: It's okay.
Hansen: [LAUGHTER] Anyway, Richland was growing. And I have a picture here of Richland about that time. And this was the John Dam Grocery store. And this was Murray's Hardware store. And this was Van’s, which was a confectionary--sold pop and ice cream in a little store. Now let's see. I think when Amon bought out Rosencrance, that was the end of the water wheel. They didn't use it after that. Amon, he went for gas pumps. I think I read we got our telephone in 1908, and the Richland Bank in '10. I think I read that. Now in 1915, oh, my dad came in here from Iowa. And of course, he wanted to farm and wanted to be with farms. So he got a job out at the Grosscup's ranch. Grosscup was the lawyer over in Seattle. And he had a son, but he wasn't a farmer. He came over here and lived [LAUGHTER] kind of to keep him out of his father's hair in Seattle. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, my dad got a job with him. And so he wasn't too long till he was managing the work crew that were farming out there. And Mom—they had asked her when they got the ditch built and all this farming under control, they asked her to stay on as cook. So she was the cook, and they built quite a large house for all the employees that were working with them. Thad and his family had a nice home. And Thad didn't do any farming. He just kind of--he was there. [LAUGHTER] He was out of the hair of the people in Seattle. But my dad was running the farm, and my mom was cooking for all these. And they got married. And they lived on in the big building. They had quite a few people working for them--working there. Now my dad worked for Grosscup for a number of years. And then he finally bought a piece of property. He bought, I think it was 60 acres. And then he started farming for himself. He took the lower 60 acres. And Grosscup was selling off to other farmers, too. He sold several pieces. Now I think that that was the things that I thought might be interesting to bring you up to when there were more people in Richland.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Right. Can I ask you, what kind of crops did your father grow on his land?
Hansen: Well, he raised hay. And that shows them putting the hay in the haystacks. And that's the way they did it. And they had these great big haystacks. And there were quite a few herds of sheep up the valley--oh, Lind or up in there. And they would take their sheep in the summer to the forest. And they could let them run in the forest. But in the wintertime, they would come down and bargain for the hay. And they would bring their herd in, and they would feed it right out of the haystack. And I don't know how my mother did it, but my mother could figure out how many tons of hay there was in a stack, so many feet long and so high, with an oval top. And they'd been in there. The hay had been sitting all winter, you know. And then they'd bring the sheep in there and feed them. And then you got the fertilizer on your land, too, because they'd eat the hay and leave the fertilizer on the land. It worked real well. And then when your hay was all gone, they'd go to another neighbor and buy his hay, and the same thing--they feed it there. So that's what a haystack looked like. And now my dad was from Iowa. So he had to raise corn. And he raised corn for his chickens. And you can see that the corn really did well. And then later, when asparagus came into this country, why, then he plowed up a lot of his land and put it into asparagus. We had 16 acres of asparagus. Now almost everybody in Richland had asparagus. But they had an acre or an acre and a half. And dad had 16 acres. But anyway, he'd go down to Kennewick and get some fellows that didn't have work and bring them out. And Mom would feed them. [LAUGHTER] And they would work for him through the asparagus season. Now you know we have good-looking buses now. And now this is the kind of bus that we had for when I started the school. I started in 1930 going to school. And this is the kind of buses we had.
Bauman: And where was the school? Where was the school?
Hansen: In Richland. We all came to Richland. And I think I have some pictures. Oh, this is a picture--this was when my mom was going to school. And this is the entire Richland school at the time my mom was going to school. And there was a vessel got frozen into the ice. And it was wintertime, and they couldn't get it out. And so the teacher thought it'd be a good trip for the school. And so this was the whole school. And you can see some of them are little, and some of them are big. And that's my mom in the plaid coat. [LAUGHTER] But that was their day tour. Now, I don't have a date on this. But my dad's brother is on here, and my mother's brother is on here. And this was the Richland baseball team. And this man bought land from Grosscup, and he lived across the street from us. And we knew everybody in Richland.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Hansen: Now, this is the school that I went to school in. This is Richland, and eight grades in this building. Now this picture, this shows the Methodist church. And this is the grade school, and this is the high school. And you can see, we didn't have fancy streets at that time. This was my graduating class, class of '42. Now there's 12 pictures. But two--the picture was taken before we graduated. When we actually graduated, there were 12 in my graduating class. Now this was the high school. And this was everybody that was in the high school at that time, and I don't see a date on there. But I think probably in the '30s, maybe '40s. Now and this is another one. And this was 1940. And this is the whole Richland school. And that were the things that I thought might be interesting. Now did you have some questions you were going to ask me?
Bauman: I do, yeah. I wanted to ask you about the school--going to school in Richland. What was it like going to school in Richland? And do you remember any teachers in particular?
Hansen: Oh, yeah. I should have brought the picture with the teachers.
[LAUGHTER]
Hansen: We had eight people in our building. And the eighth-grade teacher was the principal. So that was the staff. The complete staff was eight when I went to school.
Bauman: What about churches? What church did you go to?
Hansen: I showed you the picture of the Methodist church, and that was the big church. We were Lutherans, and we had a little bitty church. And [LAUGHTER] they were teaching--having the minister in German and things in connection with the church in German. But my mom just really worked it over with my grandfather. [LAUGHTER] She said, you ought to be teaching in English. And then the kids would get something out of it because they were getting English in school. And but anyway, it was a tiny church. And I really think the Catholics all went to Kennewick. And I think that that's about what we had in the way of churches.
Bauman: I asked you about your farm. Did you have electricity on the farm or a telephone?
Hansen: We got electricity in 1938. Before that, we had carbide. Do you know carbide?
Bauman: Mm-mm.
Hansen: Well, it's a gas. My dad went down to Kennewick. And the man said, now, don't let anybody touch this but you. You need to do this. [LAUGHTER] And my mother run it all the time. But you put this product in water, and it created a gas. And we had three bedrooms upstairs. So we had three gas deals up there. And we had a light in the living room and the dining room that was with the gas. [LAUGHTER] But they didn't think a woman could handle the—[LAUGHTER] But they didn't know my dad. My dad was a farmer. He wasn't [LAUGHTER] a gas man. Mom took over the gas. But in 1938, the electricity came in. And that was wonderful. We started off with, we bought a refrigerator. And then we had, of course, the electric lights. And then we got other appliances after that.
Bauman: And what about a telephone? Did you have a telephone at all?
Hansen: [LAUGHTER] Well, they put in a telephone back many, many years ago. But when my dad would want to call—make a phone, there would be some neighbor women visiting on the telephone. And he got so mad, he took it out.
[LAUGHTER]
Hansen: We only had it for a year, I think. And he got so mad at the women visiting on the telephone [LAUGHTER] that we never had a telephone until later on, my older sister had problems. And she moved in with her two children. And of course, she put in a telephone, so that they had it. That would have been in the '40s.
Bauman: Uh-huh. And when you were growing up on the farm, did you have any particular chores or responsibilities?
Hansen: Oh, we all--when we hayed, we all hayed. Mom ran the team. And well, Dad mowed it and got it raked into shocks. And then when it was the way he wanted it to be in the haystack, he'd give it a few days to cure in this shock. And then we would bring the team out. And Mom ran the team. Mom had the team. And dad would put his fork in the shock and put it on the sled. And then we kids, 7 and 8, we had our own little rake. And if he didn't get all of the little pieces picked up, we would pick them up and put them on the sled, too. And then Mom would drive it to the haystack. And Dad would crawl up on the top of the stack. And Mom ran the derrick--ran the team--hooked the team up to there. And then there were chains on this sled, and they would, when she ran the derrick, the chains would come up together. And then they'd swing it up there on the top of the haystack. And then when Dad got it just where he'd want it, then he would call her to stop the team. And then we kids would pull the--there was a rope came down. And when he got it where he wanted it, then we'd pull on that rope. And then the chains would come off and it would drop on the top of the stack. And then we'd go get another load--another load, another load. [LAUGHTER] And then, of course, we fed the chickens and took care of the chickens. And we had turkeys. I mean, we'd just have ten or 12 turkeys and just let them run loose.
Bauman: Do you remember any community events--picnics, special community celebrations or gatherings at all?
Hansen: Well, there was the Grange in town. And a lot of people went to the Grange. But my dad was not much of a joiner. And so he didn't ever join the Grange. But we had friends that would come. And we would go up to the dam when they were fishing. And he would spear fish. And then we'd can the salmon. And we bought an old house. I think it was built in about 1902 or '04--something like that. Wasn't much of a house. But anyway, one of the first things they did was they built a great big concrete porch. And Mom bought a piano for the girls to learn to play the piano. And we had a lot of dances at our house. The porch was wide enough and long enough you could get three square dances going--circles going on the porch. And the piano was in the living room. And we opened the door so they could hear the music. And then they did other dances, too and played cards--lots of cards. Had neighbors in lots of times for cards.
Bauman: Now you graduated high school in 1942? You graduated high school in 1942? Is that correct?
Hansen: Yeah.
Bauman: And then the Federal government came in the following year to build the--
Hansen: Yeah. We hadn't heard one word about it. But I guess they'd already picked the location. But anyway, when we graduated, we didn't know anything about the Project. And so it was when we went to college that we got letters. And it was at Valentine's Day when all the farmers got--the farmers were out there preparing their land, making ditches, planting stuff when they got the notices to move out. And that was a real jolt when they moved the people out. But my dad didn't have to move because he lived eight miles out. And that was the Grosscup Ranch. And Grosscup was the lawyer from Seattle. He had it all worked out. And [LAUGHTER] they said it would take them too long to go through the rigmarole that the lawyer would put them through. So they just left that, and anybody that had bought land from him got to stay.
Bauman: And so your parents stayed there on their land through the war and all that?
Hansen: Yeah.
Bauman: And where were you in college?
Hansen: I went to college in Ellensburg to be a teacher. And I graduated--well, I didn't graduate. They had lost so many teachers in the Army that they would take us at three years. So I went out to teach at three years of college. And then I would go back summer school to finish up. So I got my degree. But the war was over by the time I got my degree.
Bauman: And how long did your family stay on their farm?
Hansen: Lyle? When did we sell the farm?
Lyle: Well, [INAUDIBLE], early '70s, I think--early to mid '70s.
Hansen: What did he say?
Bauman: He said, early to mid '70s--1970.
Hansen: Well, [LAUGHTER] I was the seller.
[LAUGHTER]
Hansen: But I didn't even remember what--but anyway, Dad got bad and died. And Mary moved in with her kids and took care of Mom. And then my mom had to go to a nursing home. Mary had stayed for a couple of years. That was my older sister. Anyway, we finally decided that [LAUGHTER] my husband and my sister's husband had to keep going down and things kept going wrong with it. And so we talked my sister into moving into town--the third sister. And we sold it.
Bauman: Who were some of the people who lived nearest you? Who were some of your neighbors when you were growing up?
Hansen: Well now, I pointed out, the McCarthys. They lived right straight across from us. Now they just bought a little place. They must have had five or ten acres. But my dad had about 60, didn't he, Lyle?
Lyle: Yeah, that's what you said.
Hansen: Anyway, he really farmed. But McCarthy was kind of retired. The Grosscups--they lived on their place for quite a while. And he became a county commissioner, I think. He wasn't a farmer. But he knew a lot of people. And they sold a big piece of land to--well, they sold off several pieces of land. Anyway--
Bauman: So how would you describe Richland as a place to grow up?
Hansen: Oh, it was great. Yeah. We had a real good time. And we knew everybody. Anyway, when the farmers had to leave, a lot of them were really upset. I mean, they had put money into their homes and built their farms up. And they had asparagus planted. And they had cherries planted and everything, and they had to leave it all. And they looked for farms, but farms were pretty hard to come by. An awful lot of people were unhappy. But they thought it'd be nice if we could get together and see our old neighbors. So we arranged with Prosser. Would Prosser let us use their park as a get-together? So for several years, anybody who had lived in Richland could come to up there. And they sent out letters so people could visit with their old neighbors and tell about their new farms. But they were all over the state of Washington, and some went in to Oregon. But anyway--
Lyle: Mom, tell them about--
Hansen: --after four or five years going to Prosser, Richland decided that it'd be okay for us to come down and stay in one of their parks. And so then we had these get-togethers. And in fact, we still meet. But now [LAUGHTER] we're down to about eight.
Bauman: Yeah. I spoke with Bob Fletcher.
Hansen: Oh, you talked to Bob?
Bauman: Yeah. And he talked about you getting together, yeah. Did you have a--
Lyle: That's what I was going to bring up.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Lyle: That it was still going on.
Bauman: Right.
Lyle: Old Richland.
Bauman: Yeah.
Hansen: Yeah. I see Bob once in a while.
Bauman: Yeah. I want to thank you very much for coming today. I really appreciate it, for coming and sharing your memories. Thank you.
Hansen: Did you have any other questions you wanted?
Bauman: I think I'm good. Do you have anything else you want to add--anything--
Hansen: Well, that's all the notes. I made those notes this morning. And [LAUGHTER] I didn't get everything in.
Bauman: Well, thank you very much.
Hansen: But I mean, I think probably my family is about the only one, you know, way back.
Bauman: Yeah.
Hansen: Because my mother was only about four years old when they came from Seattle. But there were a lot of people came in the '30s. And then there were a lot came in the '40s, too.
Everett Weakley: And there I worked in the lead process for years. And then I moved over later—
[VIDEO CUTS]
Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Everett A. Weakley on January 13th, 2016. Interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Everett, or Ev—would you prefer Everett, or--?
Weakley: Just—yeah, Ev or Everett. Either one.
Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. About his experiences working on the Hanford site. Okay, well thanks for being here. So—you were just telling me while we were having some camera issues—I’d love to hear about sort of how you got involved with the Hanford site, what you were working on that brought you here, and then your sort of early years, what you were working on here.
Weakley: Well, they came up to University of Idaho and recruited people. And I was one of the ones they recruited. So I came down here, and they put me on work at the tritium program extraction process. So I was a process control engineer at that time.
O’Reagan: Do you know why they recruited you? Were you working in physics?
Weakley: They were after engineers, especially chemical engineers at that time.
O’Reagan: I see. Did you know anything about nuclear science specifically?
Weakley: Oh, no. We didn’t know squat. [LAUGHTER] Of course. Because we were up at University of Idaho. But it was a lot better than being drafted and sent to Korea.
O’Reagan: How much were they able to tell you about the job before they hired you?
Weakley: Very little. Very little. They didn’t tell us what was going on. They came down here and they put some people—engineers in this job, some in this job. I was selected for tritium extraction.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Could you tell me about your first experiences on that job? What sort of the first month or two like? Do you remember?
Weakley: Well, they put us on shift work. I think it was called XYZ shift. And it was only five days a week, but it was—changed. So they were going 24 hours a day, but only for five days. It was a glass line at that time. Tritium was extracted and then you had to send it—you had to pump it out through palladium windows—that’s the way they got the hydrogen out, and the tritium and the deuterium. And then we had to collect those in glass containers. It was all hooked up to the system. And then we were designing one for a metal one. So I went in on the metal designs also. And most of that work was done in the shops down in—oh, what do they call it—the old Hanford site. They had a lab—or a place down there, and they did most of the work—construction work. And then they assembled it all. It was interesting work, actually. Because they kept me out of the Korean War, also, so I was happy about that. I didn’t want to go over there.
O’Reagan: Part of what we’re trying to get an idea about is sort of—what was it like working on the Hanford site? Is there anything that sticks out to you about the way things worked? Or the structure, or anything like that?
Weakley: Well, since I was a single guy, they put us in the dorms. They ran out of dorms, so they put us—there was two dorms that were down in the women’s dorm area. So they put us in one of those dorms down there. I remember there was a—what the heck street was that? Anyway, those women’s dorms were right close there, too. And then we’d go up and eat at the Mart, which is still here, but it isn’t called the Mart now. And we’d walk through this field of—I think they were prunes or plums or something like that. And you’d go through there and you’d get attacked by the birds. [LAUGHTER] They would actually attack you during the daytime. So it was a lot of things going on. For dorm club, we’d go down to—oh, the Blue Mountains, and we’d go up to Mount Hood, and hunting and fishing was always what I did. It was a good place. Lot of people. It was interesting, because everybody was new, had come in. It was quite the exciting time to see all these people from all over the United States.
O’Reagan: Did you live in the dormitories long?
Weakley: Oh, let’s see. I lived in there until I got married in ’53. Then we got a B house on Van Giesen Street—one end of it. And I wasn’t the oldest tenant, so I could not buy that anyway. I wouldn’t want it anyway. And then they started selling houses; I got a H house, south end of town and had to remodel that. Had to dig out the basement and all that. By that time, I had several children, so I kind of had to make room for all these kids. Took out the chimney. My wife did not like the coal-burning stove down there to heat the place. So we put in electric baseboard heat. Swamp coolers on the windows. Re-put new—took the chimney out. Had to put new roofing on. All that sort of thing. And later on, we moved to where we are on Pike Avenue now. Then we had more kids. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Keep you busy.
Weakley: That’s right.
O’Reagan: What was life like in Richland in the ‘50s?
Weakley: Well, it was kind of—there was always something to do. Mainly, down along the river in the park. We’d go down there for entertainment in the evenings. There’d be dances. And then I took up square dancing, my wife and I. So that was in different places, but mainly at the end, it was down in the—what do they call it, down there now? At the park. Oh, community house. It’s still going. I think this is their last year. We used to be on what’s now a hole in the ground, on the south end of that building, was where they used to have a structure. That’s where we danced, it was in that. And they had a kitchen in there; everybody’d bring food. It was a nice time. Had a lot of fun.
O’Reagan: So you said—do you feel it was easy to get integrated into the community, to be a part of the community at that time?
Weakley: What do you mean?
O’Reagan: Well, I’m just thinking in terms of your—you’ve been describing a very interesting social scene that people can get into. I’m just thinking, there were a lot of new people coming into town. How—you yourself, of course, experienced this—what it was like to be a new resident in Richland.
Weakley: Well, mainly you were in dorms. So, you were all right out of college. Here you are, a bunch of college kids, here—men, and then college women right next door to them. So there was a lot of dating going on. Then we’d go over to Pasco, to the Elks Club at that time. And on Friday nights, they always had a fish dinner. We’d go over there and dance and eat. That was a good time. That was ballroom dancing, it wasn’t square dancing. That was later.
O’Reagan: So returning to your work for a minute, I guess to some degree you’ve done this, but could you sort of describe a typical work day, and did that change over the long course of time that you were working there?
Weakley: Well, when I went out there, I had to work shift work. XYZ shifts. You’d work daytimes, evenings, and nighttime. I didn’t like that too well. Then when I went to 300 Area, I was all daytime, which I liked.
O’Reagan: How much did the work you were doing change as you got these successive promotions, as you got the new jobs?
Weakley: Here?
O’Reagan: Yeah. I mean, when you were an engineering assistant, was your—I’d assume—if only because it’s decades earlier—how different was your work than when you were principal engineer or senior principal engineer?
Weakley: Well, the added responsibility, of course. And I spent a lot of time in the old reactor fuel and then I wrote a lot of documents on how to—the canning process. And that’s probably in here—I’m pretty sure it is.
O’Reagan: I noticed here, it says that you are an expert on fuel manufacturing environmental issues. I wonder what—when did that become a priority? The environmental issues, was that something that was always part of your work, or did that develop over time?
Weakley: Environmental issues—you worried about what was going out the stacks, especially in 313. We had slug recovery—we’d take the aluminum—the ones that were reject—and they would dissolve the aluminum cans off in caustic, and they always had this exhaust going out. If you didn’t watch it, it would suck out quite a bit of moisture with it, and that would have caustic in it. We had trouble with the women walking by—their nylon hose would disintegrate. And they didn’t like that. I don’t blame them. And you could feel it—you could feel it on your face. They had to fix that up, of course.
O’Reagan: Were safety issues or the environment ever something you were concerned about working there?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, I was always worrying about—And then at the 306 Building, making fuel elements for the N Reactor, I was involved in that—a lot of things. I had to make trips to the aluminum companies that made aluminum products for us. Bought them back east, and some of them in California. So I did a lot of traveling, going to these different places, trying to get improvements made in aluminum ore, and later on, Zircaloy-2. That was Wah Chang made that down in Oregon—made Zircaloy-2 for us. That was interesting. So you’d take a drive down there and visit their plant. And then you’d go to these other places and visit those plants.
O’Reagan: These were to get components for the fuel manufacturing?
Weakley: What’s that?
O’Reagan: Were these trips to get components for the fuel manufacturing?
Weakley: They were making components for—
O’Reagan: I see. How much—let’s go with this. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy impacted your work?
Weakley: Well, you couldn’t talk about what you were doing, and we knew that. I made a lot of trips—I went to National Lead Company in Ohio at Fernald. That’s the ones that we would get our uranium cores from, for the old reactors. Then I’d go down to Mallinckrodt in Weldon Spring, Missouri, and that’s where they started making the billets that they’d send up to—on Lake Erie. There was a place that’d take the big billets and make smaller billets for the N Reactor. So I was always traveling around. Then at the same time, I was going down to the Savannah River plant and checking on what they were doing, because they had the same people. Like me, engineers that were busy and they’d get together and compare notes, and try to get the lower prices on some things. Especially aluminum components for the old reactors. Nothing much you could do about the Zircaloy: it was pretty well fixed. The only plant I never go to was the one that made the braze rings for the N Reactor fuel. That was back in—and it had beryllium in it. And I never had gone to there. I don’t know—I just plain missed it for some reason. I don’t know why.
O’Reagan: Was it easy to communicate with all the engineers and workers at these plants, or did the secrecy ever sort of inhibit that?
Weakley: Oh, no. If you’re buying, say, Zircaloy stuff, you go right down here in Oregon and talk to them. And that’s what we did.
O’Reagan: Okay.
Weakley: Same way back east on the aluminum plants. Did a lot of traveling. My wife didn’t like that, I don’t think, but we had to travel a lot. And it was old airlines at that time. [INAUDIBLE] had an airline to go to Spokane. You could catch a plane from there, it takes six hours to get into—now takes just a few hours.
O’Reagan: Was it unusual that you were traveling that much? Did other people also travel that much from the Hanford site?
Weakley: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a lot of people were traveling. It’s hectic now. I won’t get on an airplane anymore, so heck with them. [LAUGHTER] I’m retired; I don’t do that.
O’Reagan: Do you feel the security or secrecy of the place changed much over the decades?
Weakley: Oh, yeah. When I started here it was really secret. They didn’t want the Russians to know anything about making tritium. But the secret got out, because somebody in Savannah River—or down at Oak Ridge probably told them. So nothing we could do about it.
O’Reagan: Right.
Weakley: But oh, yeah, they tried to keep it secret.
O’Reagan: What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford?
Weakley: Ooph! That’s a tough one.
O’Reagan: It’s a big question. Any particular times that you were working on a project that was really stumping everybody? Any real challenges there that stick out?
Weakley: Well, there’s always challenges to make things safer and better, and don’t dump stuff out into the atmosphere, or down the drain out to the ponds. Because at that time, they ponds along the river. And it discharges—a lot of stuff went into that pond. They tried to clean that stuff up, but—oh, yeah. When you have time to go through this, you will find a lot of things in here that I worked on.
O’Reagan: Is there anything in there that you’re particularly proud of having accomplished? Or that sticks out?
Weakley: Well, I lasted the whole—until I got laid off. [LAUGHTER] That’s an accomplishment—I didn’t get crapped up with anything.
O’Reagan: Did you like your job?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, I liked it. Oh, sure. It was a challenging job. I wrote a lot of manuals. That’s one of the things I did, a lot of manual writing when I was out there. There are still some of those around on the processes of lead-dip canning process, and co-extrusion process. I did a lot of writing.
O’Reagan: Have the Tri-Cities changed much in your time living here?
Weakley: Oh, yeah.
O’Reagan: And how?
Weakley: Oh, yeah, since I came in ’50? Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of changes. They couldn’t even allow the blacks to live in Kennewick. They had to go over in Pasco, for instance.
O’Reagan: Right.
Weakley: So we didn’t see too many blacks, actually. Now towards the end, they started hiring some people in that were blacks. I had no problem with them.
O’Reagan: Yeah, we’re trying to get a sense for how the community has changed over time. I know that’s a vague question. That’s certainly an interesting point about the demographics of it. Anything else about sort of the social life, the number of things going, anything else like that that sticks out to you on how the community’s changed over the decades?
Weakley: Well, I always had been hunting and fishing. So when I came here, I took up hunting and fishing again. Some of the people that I—I belong to the Rod and Gun Club—joined that many years ago, and I still belong, even though I got rid of my guns last year. I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the middle of the winter anymore. That’s too cold. I didn’t like to eat geese, anyway. [LAUGHTER] But I had a lot of good trips hunting down the Blues and up north of Spokane, up in that area.
O’Reagan: One of the things—well, okay. Let me go to this one next. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Weakley: Hmm. That’s an odd one. Well, for one thing, we couldn’t announce what we were doing anywhere. If you could, you made sure you didn’t. If they said, hey, you’re from Hanford. But it didn’t bother me on traveling too much. Because I’d usually go on to aluminum vendors or Zircaloy-2 vendors. Or I’d go to Savannah River plant, which has got the same restrictions as we have. And it was a free exchange then when you went there or you went to National Lead at Fernald. It was free exchange with the people there. So that was just like being at work. So I had no really problem with it. I didn’t really like traveling that much. But there was nothing I could do about it.
O’Reagan: You were mentioning your collaboration people at Savannah River. Can you tell me more about that?
Weakley: What’s that?
O’Reagan: You were mentioning your training people at Savannah River, is that right? Or just trained people who eventually were at Savannah River?
Weakley: No, they were—I met one of them. But they sent people up in tritium extraction. Because they built that plant for tritium. The guy that was running the tritium extraction plant was one of them that I trained. And the last trip I made down there, I met him and went into the tritium extraction plant with him and talked to him. He gave me a tour of what it was like. It was a lot different than what we had out here, of course. Then they shipped their stuff again to Oak Ridge.
O’Reagan: Okay. So, I’m also interested in how people commemorate their community, how people celebrate the history, or try to remember the history. I understand that you’ve been involved in some of the historical groups around here. Can you tell me something about that? Why you thought that was important, why you got involved with those groups?
Weakley: Are you talking about the Richland Rod and Gun Club, for instance?
O’Reagan: Well, them and also the B Reactor Museum Association and so on.
Weakley: Well the B Reactor Association, I was one of the earlier ones, before they got the Indians out there. It was interesting, because I was on the ground floor with them. In fact, I was in a meeting this week with them. I still belong to them. Just like the Rod and Gun Club, I still belong to them, even though I don’t—got rid of all my guns because I don’t go out and dig goose pits in the wintertime anymore. So it was interesting.
O’Reagan: I always find that there’s an awful lot of things that I don’t know that I should be asking. What could you—what would seem important or interesting that you might want to talk about, or think might be worth discussing that I might have not thought to ask? Anything that comes to mind?
Weakley: Hmm. Not right off the top of my head, it isn’t.
O’Reagan: Sure, that’s fine.
Weakley: [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Yeah. We’re just trying, as I said—we’re most interested in getting a feel for life in the Tri-Cities throughout the Cold War, up to the near present. And just how things have changed over time. What it was like to be a worker on the Hanford plants, how work on the Hanford plant changed over time, what it was like living in the community and getting to know people. So really, a broad set of things, but there’s always questions I don’t think to ask.
Weakley: Okay. Well, you might have some ideas when you go through this later on. They gave me this, had my payroll number on it and all that. My service dates, 6/19/50 is when I came here. And payroll number 51500 was pretty easy to remember, thank goodness.
O’Reagan: As you went through this, did anything—
Weakley: Huh?
O’Reagan: As you started reading through this again, did any memories leap to mind? Did anything about it sort of jog any fond memories or any surprises?
Weakley: Well, we always had surprises. We never knew what was going to happen. Item—let’s see, what is that? Item four.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Weakley: I would ship pyrophoric uranium Zircaloy chips and fines back to National Lead. And we had surprises there, because they were supposed to use metal pallets. Somebody brought in wooden ones. And they put all these things that we had full of concrete and chips and fines in it, and they had to take them over across the street into a building. And when they did that, they heated it up and it broke one of the containers, and it caught fire on the shipping containers. They weren’t supposed to use shipping containers. That was a hell of a mess to clean up. Because we had a fire, had to clean all that up then. But we actually shipped the stuff back there and they recovered the uranium and reused it.
O’Reagan: Well, I think that’s the written questions I have here. There are certainly a lot more interesting stuff here. Again, if anything comes to mind you would like to speak about, we would love to hear a bit more. Also, it mentions here that your historical knowledge of site activities, particularly in 300 Area, has been extremely valuable in the preparation of the RCRA and CERCLA documents and planning. Could you tell me anything about that initiative?
Weakley: Whereabouts are you?
O’Reagan: It’s number five, sub-point A.
Weakley: Oh, okay. I did a lot of document writing and preparations of these RCRA and CERCLAs documents and planning. And I worked with—what’s her name? Michelle Gerber?
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Weakley: I worked a lot of work with her, as she was a kind of historian. You’ve probably met her, of course.
O’Reagan: I know the name, but I haven’t actually met her, I don’t think.
Weakley: You haven’t met her?
O’Reagan: I don’t think so.
Weakley: Amazing. I’m surprised you haven’t met her yet. Anyway. She needed a lot of work. I would find things in 300 Area when we were cleaning out for the old reactors, getting 313 cleaned out. We would find movies. I’d ship that out to her, and then she made a CD out of it, I think. It showed the canning process, which had never been done before. It was—
O’Reagan: Do you think the history of your job is going to be well-preserved? Do you think the records are still there that can reflect on your times, your work? That is again, sort of an open-ended question here. I’m just trying to think through how people will remember this time in history, and sort of the work that you were involved in. You’re mentioning you found this film and were able to get it out there. But probably some materials didn’t make it out, for security reasons or whatever else, or just weren’t preserved. Do you feel that people have an accurate memory of the time as you look through?
Weakley: Well, most of them, I think, do. I always rode a bicycle around, between the buildings out in 300 Area. I would collect lead parts that I’d see laying around and get rid of them—or pick up anything else. So that I would ride those into the building. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: I saw—I was out at the DoE’s artifact collection—historical artifact collection. They have some bicycles out there that I guess were what you were describing, people traveling around the site. Was that common?
Weakley: What do you mean?
O’Reagan: You were using bicycles to get around the site?
Weakley: Well, it was in our area. Oh, I used it all the time. And it had a basket in the back wheels. I’d put something in there—I would collect lead brick or something like that, and put it where the lead’s supposed to be and kind of clean things up. Well, it was a pretty good-sized area, 300 Area, so if you had to go down to the south end for some reason, you wanted to get there and get back.
O’Reagan: Right. Okay. So as I said, I think these are the questions that we had prepared, sort of the general ones here.
Weakley: You might have some questions when you—well, you can use anything you want out of this write-up.
O’Reagan: Yeah, I think this will be a great help. This has been very interesting from my perspective here. We certainly thank you for your time. Yeah, I think that’s at least our first set of questions. But maybe if anything occurs to us, or to you, maybe we could send follow-up questions? Would that be okay, if any questions—
Weakley: Oh, yeah, you can always get ahold of me if I’m around. I don’t go travel too far since I’m 88.
O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks very much. We appreciate your time.
Weakley: Oh, she’s still back there.
O’Reagan. Yeah.
Weakley: [LAUGHTER]
Tom Hungate: Okay.
Robert Franklin: You ready, Tom?
Hungate: Mm-hm.
Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with George Boice on July 15th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mr. Boice about his experiences living in Richland. So why don’t we start at the beginning, that’s the best place. When and where were you born?
George Boice: I was born in Ellensburg. A third generation native of the state of Washington. My father and my grandmother were born in Cle Elum.
Franklin: Oh, Wow.
Boice: We came through this—the tribe came through this territory and crossed the White Bluffs ferry in 1885. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: And went up to the Kittitas County area. And then we came back later. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: What year were you born?
Boice: ’37.
Franklin: ’37. Did your family work at all at the coal mine in Roslyn?
Boice: Yes. [LAUGHTER] Short answers. My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Tony, was a mine rescue worker up there at Roslyn.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: You go up to Roslyn, that is interesting. Ever been there?
Franklin: Yes, I have.
Boice: 27 cemeteries. Just neater than all get out. [LAUGHTER] The different ethnic groups up there. They talk about one Fourth of July, the Italians were going to raise the Italian flag in the main street there. Some of the local citizens took a dim view of it. And some wagons were turned on their side and the Winchesters came out, and the sweet little old lady got out there and got everybody calmed down before the shooting started. [LAUGHTER] But the flag didn’t go up. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. So what brought your family down to the Hanford area?
Boice: My—[LAUGHTER] When they started Hanford—Dad was a firefighter in Ellensburg, had been for a few years. And when they set up Hanford, the first thing they did for a fire department was pick up the retired fire chief out of Yakima. Well, he goes around to the local fire departments and starts hydrating citizens. [LAUGHTER] So, Dad came down here in ’43 as the ninth man hired at the Hanford Fire Department. Always claimed that half of them had been canned before he got there. [LAUGHTER] So he went to work in ’43—June of ’43 at Hanford. We were still there at Ellensburg, and we didn’t come down here ‘til summer of ’44.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Boice: And they were still moving prefabs in, and unloading them with rapid shape.
Franklin: Did your father commute at this time, or did he live on—
Boice: Uh-unh. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Where did he—do you know much about his living quarters or where he lived?
Boice: Yeah, there were barracks.
Franklin: So he lived in the barracks?
Boice: Oh, yes.
Franklin: Okay. Did he come back to visit at all?
Boice: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: Wasn’t but—hell, by the time you get up to the Hanford area, it’s just over the ridge. [LAUGHTER] So he’d come in every couple of weeks.
Franklin: Okay. How many siblings do you have?
Boice: One of each—one brother, one sister.
Franklin: Older, younger?
Boice: Oh, yeah. My brother was born in Kadlec in September of ’45. My sister was—well, they bracket the war. She was born about a month before it started—or right after it started. She was born in December of ’41.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And he was born September of ’45.
Franklin: So can you talk a little more about your father’s job at Hanford? What did he—did he talk much about what he did, or—
Boice: [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah! You know. The place is building up, it’s trying to erupt. You’ve got construction going all directions. Trailer house fires. He talked about them [EMOTIONAL]—how quick people died in them damn trailer houses. They’d go up in a matter of seconds. And there were acres of them. But yeah, it was—And the amount of nothing to do. I mean, you had time to work and then there was really no recreational facilities. He worked at a grocery store for a while in his off hours stocking milk. He said it was not unusual to work a whole shift with a forklift or a handcart walking out of the stack and filling the same slot behind the counter there. We came over twice to visit him at Hanford.
Franklin: Before you moved—
Boice: Yeah.
Franklin: --in ’44. Okay.
Boice: You drive across the Vantage Bridge, and somebody had gone through with a grader and graded out a dirt-slash-gravel road. And we drove around and down, and across the Hanford ferry into Hanford. Because you could get into Hanford; it wasn’t restricted—the town. Everything else was. So getting in and out of Hanford was no trick. Getting out of the surrounding area was. So my mom and I and my grandfather went down there.
Franklin: Wow. And where did you stay? Did you just go for the day?
Boice: Well, we didn’t—when I was there, we didn’t stay. We just went for the day and went home.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: But Mom talks about going down and staying overnight. [LAUGHTER] She says she was not warned. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Warned about what?
Boice: To keep everything you wanted nailed down.
Franklin: Oh.
Boice: She got up in the morning and somebody stole her girdle. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. So when your family moved in summer of ’44, where did you move to?
Boice: 17-1.
Franklin: 17-1?
Boice: That was the lot number and the house number. It is now 1033 Sanford.
Franklin: Ah.
Boice: It’s on the southwest corner of Sanford and Putnam.
Franklin: Yup. I live right by there.
Boice: We went in there and it was—they had—you can’t describe to people how they had come in there and just dozed the farmland over, staked out streets and planted houses. And hauled them in on trucks and set them down. We were fortunate—I didn’t realize how fortunate it was—in the fact that we had only come about 100 miles or so—we came in a truck. We had our stuff. Mom had her piano. And I can’t tell you how many times women would come up and bang on the door, can I play your piano?
Franklin: Really?
Boice: Strangers off the street. Just because it was there, and it was—so we had all kind of musical stuff. Everybody could play better than Mom could. But we had the piano.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: And she had her houseplants. It was different. But there was no trees in Richland. There wasn’t three blades of grass! [LAUGHTER] You’d come in, you got a garden hose and a plastic nozzle. You hosed down your lot and it immediately became a slick, slimy mud pile. Great for kids to play in! Man, we could slide in that mud across there—it was really cool! And then when it dried up, why, it reticulated like a picture puzzle. So we’re picking chunks up and stacking them up and building houses. And Mom gets up and she’s just madder than a wet hen, so we had to put the lawn back together. [LAUGHTER] But the hose nozzles were so interesting, because when you had a plastic nozzle, but you couldn’t get anything else. There was a hardware store here, eventually, but they didn’t handle stuff like that. This was a war going on. And the ingenuity that went into lawn sprinklers would just boggle your mind! The cutest one I remember was some guy took a chunk of surgical tubing—he got a bent pipe for an uppensticker. And he stretched his hunk of surgical tubing over the end of it, turned the water on, and it was not efficiently watering his area, but he could flail water all over a half an acre! [LAUGHTER] That was one of the cuter ones. There was also no shade and no air conditioning.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: Coming down in a moving truck, Dad brought his carpenter tools, he brought his bench, and he set to work building an air conditioner. Now, this was the dog-gonedest thing you ever saw. He got some burlap sacks and set out there with scrap lumber in the backyard on his workbench just creating shavings out of boards. Fill these burlap sacks with wood shavings for the pads for his air conditioner. He got a motor out of I-don’t-know-what. It was an appliance motor out of something. And he whittled out this propeller out of a two-by-four. And he cranked this thing up and it sounded like a B-29. [LAUGHTER] But it would blow sort of cool air, which raised the wrath of the neighbors. Number one was the racket he was making. Number two was we had air conditioning. So immediately, guys come out of the woodwork in all directions. Guy next door was a sheet metal worker. He came home with parts to make a much better, more efficient fan that was quieter. [LAUGHTER] So they set to work building him one. [LAUGHTER] We made air conditioners—you come up with a motor, and they would come up with an air conditioner. And we would deliver them on the back of my little red wagon. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Where would you put that? Like, would that just go in the window?
Boice: We put it in a window.
Franklin: Oh, okay. And how would you attach it to the house?
Boice: Ingeniously! Most often, they would just build a rack underneath, a shelf on top, and set it up on top there. A houses, you wanted to put your air conditioner—at least about everybody did—set it at the top of the stairs where it would blow out the upstairs and cool your downstairs. They were reasonably efficient. The one thing about all the homemade air conditioners—very few of them, if any, had a recirculating system. So you had to use fresh water. This had two sides to it. You didn’t crud up your water system with alkali by reusing your water. But you did have to go out there and keep moving your hose where it drained out to water your lawn.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Wow. What kind of house did your family move into?
Boice: Well, originally we had a three-bedroom prefab. Prefabs come in three sizes and five colors. And a bunch of very ingenious kids on Halloween 1944 went out and stole the damn street signs. The buses coming back off of swing shift had no earthly idea where they were going. They wandered around town, because all the houses looked alike! [LAUGHTER] Then after a while—oh, let’s see, we moved in in August, and about the following spring—because we started out school at Sacajawea and then at Christmas vacation they changed us to Marcus Whitman. But up there on Longfitt, thereabouts, I was coming home from school and here sits the roof of a prefab right out in the middle of the street. Apparently, this guy was sleeping and a windstorm come along and picked up his whole roof and set it out in the middle of the street. Thereafter they had a crew of carpenters going around fastening the rooves of the prefabs down a little tighter.
Franklin: Because at that time, right, they had flat rooves.
Boice: Flat rooves.
Franklin: Correct? That kind of overhung a bit, something that the wind could really easily—
Boice: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: --grab ahold and pop off. Do you remember when they got the gabled rooves that they all have now?
Boice: No, I don’t, because I was—I think after we left, but I wouldn’t bet heavy money on it. We moved off the prefab in ’45.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And into an A house on Swift. I don’t recall when they put the gabled rooves on.
Franklin: Okay. So what did your mom do? Did she work at Hanford at all?
Boice: No.
Franklin: No?
Boice: She was a stay-at-home mom.
Franklin: Stay-at-home mom?
Boice: It was such an interesting place. The buses ran every 30 minutes. No charge, just go out and get on the bus. One of my main jobs was—because there was no mail delivery, everybody in Richland got their mail general delivery. So I’d take the bus, go downtown, get off at the post office, check the mail, go down to the grocery store—and there was only one—that was a brief period, but then there was only one grocery store at that time. And that’s where that ski rental shop is—kayak rental shop on the corner of Lee and GW?
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Boice: That was the grocery store. The one and only. Shortly thereafter, Safeway opened up on the corner of—southwest corner of Lee and Jadwin. So things picked up. And then there was—they come up with the community center grocery store—whatever you want to call them. There was one at Thayer and Williams, which was the Groceteria. Garmo’s was out there on Stevens and Jadwin—no, Symons and something-or-other. The south end of town was—oh, nuts. He was the one that survived—Campbell’s. Campbell’s grocery store. He specialized in fresh fruit and stuff, and of the whole pile of them, he was the one that really come out of it in good shape. But the fourth one is now the school office, up there by Marcus Whitman. That was a grocery store.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: But you go down, you do your post office work, and then you go and get your groceries, and if you’re lucky you get ten cents. Next bus home. You know where the Knights of Columbus Hall is out on the bypass?
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Boice: That used to be—originally that was the Richland post office.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Boice: It’s up there at Knight and GW, I think. There wasn’t a whole bunch of shopping centers. The Richland Theater was in existence. The drug store next door to it was there. After a while, the big brown building, which was everything, at that time, when it opened up it was CC Anderson’s. Then there was the dime store, and, oh, we were hot and heavy then. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Can you tell me a little more about your dad’s job? What would a typical day or a typical week look like for someone who worked on the fire department?
Boice: On the fire department, there is no such thing as typical. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: It was wild. In the beginning, they opened up—they were on shifts. Like everything was on day shifts, swing shift, graveyard. In our neighborhood, after my brother was born, we moved down to Swift and McPherson. Dad had come into town by that time. If you go behind the Richland Theater, you look real close, there’s two B houses back there. One of them’s a real B house and the other one ain’t. You look at the B houses over here, and the other one that ain’t is over here. And you look real close at the driveways. That was the original fire station that the City of Richland had going. That was the fire station when Hanford came in. Then they built a fire station on Jadwin in conjunction with the housing building and a couple other things, right across from the 700 Area, which is what they wanted, was coverage on that 700 Area. So that was the downtown fire station. And when they opened that up, why, then Dad came up out of Hanford.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: He wasn’t too long there, and they opened one up Williams off of Thayer, in behind the Groceteria and a little service station up there with a small satellite fire station. Two trucks and one crew. Dad was there for years and years and years.
Franklin: How long did your dad work for Hanford or the government here?
Boice: Like I say, he came in in ’43 and retired in the early ‘70s.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Boice: Rode her right on through.
Franklin: So what did he do when the community transitioned in ’58?
Boice: They bought him!
Franklin: The City of Richland did?
Boice: Yup, the City of Richland bought the outstanding time and he rolled right over.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Boice: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So can you talk a little bit more about growing up here? You said you went to Marcus Whitman and then to—and then what other schools did you go to?
Boice: Well, like I say, there was no shade.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: And very few radio stations. With a good shot you could get in Yakima, Spokane, and Walla Walla, and that was about it. So we sat around in the shade, and my mother read us stories. [LAUGHTER] One of them was a book we picked up in Walla Walla about Sacajawea. She read us the entire story of Sacajawea and the Shoshones and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, et cetera, et cetera. And in ’44, they opened up Sacajawea School. Now, as everybody does, they did their darnedest to convert us kids to saying Sah-CAH-jah-wee-ah. It didn’t take. [LAUGHTER] Because there was already Sacajawea State Park and everybody was using the term Sacajawea. But Sah-CAH-jah-wee-ah—they tried. They gave it their level best. It didn’t take. But the time that they were doing this, Miss Jesson was a teacher there was giving us the thumbnail sketch about Sacajawea. She did a pretty good job—well, you know, she told you what she knew. And she made mention of the fact that she was married to a trapper, but they didn’t know what his name or anything about him. I says, his name was Toussaint Charbonneau. He got her off a wolf man of the minute carriage for a white buffalo robe. My status went up. [LAUGHTER] And the teachers wanted to know where in the cat hair I learned that. Well, Mom read us the book. But I’ve always liked Sacajawea School. Just kind of a kinship. We went—in ’45, they opened up Marcus Whitman. We went there ’45 was all, because when they broke for the summer, we were over by—we moved. By the next fall we were over in the area where I could go to Sacajawea again. But we were going to Marcus Whitman when Roosevelt was shot—died. So that was the event of the time. You watched the transition of one President to another. The flag ceremony—the whole thing—it was interesting for a kid.
Franklin: I bet. What do you remember about during the war years that kind of focus on secrecy and security? How did that affect your life and your family’s life?
Boice: You didn’t talk to nobody about nothing! [LAUGHTER] I mean, that was just the words. You didn’t talk about—if somebody asks you what your dad does, you talk about something else. It was so interesting here in the last year, I think—time goes quicker now. A whole bunch of us from that neighborhood on Swift went to a funeral—this boy’s mother—well, yeah—Bill’s mother’s 100th birthday, after the funeral they had a sit-down dinner. I happened to sit down at the table with the whole kids of the old neighborhood. And we’re talking about all this stuff, and the secrecy, and the ones you watch out for—this girl over here. Yeah. She didn’t share the secrets with the neighbors when they were talking about who’s got butter on sale. They didn’t tell her anymore. She fried her food in butter. So no one would tell her where the butter sales were when it was available. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Was there any mention of the work going on at Hanford at school that you can remember?
Boice: The one thing of what was going on, and it wasn’t the work at Hanford, because nobody talked about that. But when the Japs were sending over the firebombs—
Franklin: Yeah, the balloon bombs.
Boice: Yes. We were told to write no letters, tell nobody, because they didn’t want it to get out how blinking effective they were.
Franklin: Right. The fear of these bombs from the sky—
Boice: They were hitting, and they were working.
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: You guys are in the right position to find out. But there was a rumor going around that a balloon-loaded Jap had landed out there in the area and they caught him and bundled him up and carted him off before they did any business. Okay, la-di-da-di-da. There’s rumors about one thing and another. And four or five years ago, CNN or one of these, they were talking about the weather balloons. They showed the colored pictures taken out here at Hanford of the balloons landing in the BPA lines and burning up. [LAUGHTER] End of speech, end of story. [LAUGHTER] But I was surprised to find out that something had happened. There was no soldiers attached or anything else, but there was an incident.
Franklin: Yeah, we’ve—there are a couple confirmed reports of—we actually did an oral history with a gentleman whose father had been a patrolman and had seen one of the balloons land and had to chase it down and didn’t realize right away that it was—had explosives attached to it. The others—there’s a couple reports of them touching down onsite. And there was a family that was killed in Idaho where they were picnicking and a balloon came down.
Boice: Idaho or Oregon?
Franklin: I think it was—oh, that’s right, maybe it was Oregon.
Boice: K Falls.
Franklin: Yes.
Boice: You go to the museum in Klamath Falls had the—or when I went through it—I was working down there twenty years ago or so—they had a big display of the family that was picnicking and the kids went to prod on it, and it went off and killed a girl.
Franklin: Yeah. Were there—when you were—so we’re still in the World War II era and we’ll definitely get to the Cold War in a bit—but were there any kind of—what do you remember about like emergency procedures in school? Was there anything special, kind of drills or something during World War II?
Boice: You mean the duck-and-cover?
Franklin: Yeah, that kind of stuff. Was there any duck-and-cover during World War II?
Boice: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Of course—my kindergarten days—now, man. Lived across the street from the college there at Ellensburg, and firebombs were to be worried about. But I was covered. I had a bucket full of sand and a shovel, and it was there on the front porch. When the firebomb came through there, I was going to put my sand on it. So we were prepared. God help us if it landed any place else. [LAUGHTER] But the beginning of the war when I was a kid in Ellensburg was so funny, because we were living right across the street from the college and everything was just the standard college. And the war started, and immediately, there’s all these people running around here that can’t count. Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four. I wasn’t even in kindergarten, and I knew about my ones! [LAUGHTER] And there was—you go across the street and around the corner, and there was this one half basement room where I could stand there and watch the guys play shirts-and-skins basketball. And the next time I looked, here’s a skeleton of a single engine aircraft, and a guy instructing people on how to make dead stick landing. Now, of all the damned things for a four-year-old kid to remember, dead stick landings was what he was talking about. And they had this thing skeletonized where they could show the internal workings of all the aeronautics.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: But in Richland—oh, yes. Duck-and-cover fire drills. But they never talked about nuclear, because it was yet to be discovered. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right, right. So Ellensburg then quickly became inundated with—the state college there became a training area?
Boice: Oh, yeah. Just that fast.
Franklin: Wow. In your notes here, I also see you mentioned about the heavy military presence and the olive drab everywhere and the cops in Army uniforms.
Boice: [LAUGHTER] It absolutely was. Richland was strictly OD. I think they only had one bucket of paint. But all the vehicles were olive drab. The buses were, on today’s standards, I’ll call them a three-quarter size school bus painted olive drab. The vehicles were anything they could scrounge up, because I remember two GIs in a ’37 Chev coupe, and I know today some farmer had taken the trunk out and made a pickup box out of it. But they scrounged this thing up someplace, painted it OD, and here’s the MPs running around in a ’37 Chev pickup. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] A homemade pickup?
Boice: Yeah. It was years later that I found out—Dad didn’t say anything about it, and he certainly knew—that it was simple, because the war was going on. Everything was prioritized. But they had unlimited supply of uniforms. So they put the cops in soldiers’ uniforms; the firemen were in Navy uniforms. The firemen stood out and were very easily recognizable, but you couldn’t tell the soldiers and the cops apart, because they all had the same stuff on. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. A couple oral histories we’ve done with people that were children in Richland, a couple of them mentioned their fathers had taken them onsite somewhat clandestinely. Did your father ever take you onsite into a secured area?
Boice: No.
Franklin: Did you ever get access to any of that some way?
Boice: No, I did not go to any secured area.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: I was raised running in and out of fire stations. To this day, when I go through the door of a fire station, my hands go into my pockets. You’re allowed to touch nothing. Because you leave fingerprints. [LAUGHTER] It’s just a genuine reflex.
Franklin: Yeah! So you said that you went to Sacajawea, then to Marcus Whitman then back to Sacajawea. Then where did you go to high school?
Boice: We went through all of the—I’ll call it the school construction. They couldn’t build schools fast enough in Richland.
Franklin: I bet.
Boice: We had double shifts. Now they have these temporary quarters—whatever you call them. But we had hutments. Sacajawea had six hutments out there. They built the hutments, and then they went to double shifts. So you went to school at 8:00, and at noon they marched out, teacher and all, and our class marched in, and we went home at 4:30 or 5:00, something like that. So we went through all of that, and then in ’49, they opened Carmichael. A brand new junior high school, man, this is cool! And I was in the seventh grade in Carmichael and I are still the proud possessor of ASB cord 001, 1949, Carmichael Junior High School. The first one they ever gave out. [LAUGHTER] And that was neat, to have a real hard-built school. It was—oh, we had class. After three months, we moved to Kennewick. The Kennewick school system—
Franklin: Your family did, or--?
Boice: Yeah!
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Boice: Dad stayed in Richland, but they were selling off. And if you didn’t have priority, the houses went to the guy that was there first. And in that A house, we were in second, so we were not in line to buy the house.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: So, Dad got a piece of property in Kennewick and we moved to Kennewick. And what a school system mess.
Franklin: Why?
Boice: They were behind. They couldn’t get money quick enough. They couldn’t build stuff fast enough. They had the red brick building—forget what it was called. It had been a high school at one time, and they pressed it back into service. It was so overcrowded you couldn’t believe it. But they finally built the high school that’s there now. It opened in ’52, I believe. ’51—yeah, class of ’52 was the first one to graduate—’52 or ’53. Graduated from Erwin S. Black Senior High School. And it was Erwin S. Black Senior High School one year. Because he was the school superintendent, and they built the school—they named the school in his honor because he had gone to bat and made trips back and forth to Washington, DC to cash some money to use for the school system. Then they got in a shooting match with the Tri-City Herald. [LAUGHTER] And Erwin S. Black and the schoolboard got run out of town, and they chiseled his name off the front of the school. But for one year it was E.S. Black.
Franklin: And then it just became Kennewick High School.
Boice: It became Kennewick High School.
Franklin: Can you talk a little bit more about this disagreement between Erwin S. Black and the schoolboard and the Tri-City Herald?
Boice: It was several things. One of them, there was a book—and I can’t recall—Magruder? McGregor? Somebody. It was a history book, and it mentioned communism. And that was brought up and made a big deal. This was back in the McCarthy era.
Franklin: Right.
Boice: That was brought out. And there was a lot of talk—Black was a certified building inspector, and he inspected the construction of the high school. It was said by a lot of people that it wasn’t up to standards; that the concrete wasn’t what it should have been. And I don’t know what the specs were. I wasn’t into concrete work at that time. I have been later. But I know when we were hanging the benches in the ag shop, where you would put a concrete anchor in the wall ordinarily and it would hold, they didn’t there. And they had to through-bolt through the wall to get to things to hang. So there was—and transfer of equipment and stuff—this was swapped for that, and that was swapped for this—and I don’t remember that, and the only guy I know that did know has died. [LAUGHTER] But one of the kids that graduated from Erwin S. Black, one of the few that was in that class, worked with him off and on and was aware of what went on.
Franklin: When you said that there was a book that mentioned communism, did it mention it in a favorable light, or did it just make a mention to communism?
Boice: More or less, it just made a mention.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: I was on the—oh, we had the open house at the school, and I was one of the tour guides. Yeah, I showed them the book and what it had to say. And I don’t recall anything drastic.
Franklin: So then did you graduate from Kennewick High School?
Boice: No. [LAUGHTER] The military had a hell of a sale. Anybody that enlisted by the first of February got the Korean GI Bill of Rights. And those that enlisted afterwards didn’t. So I drug up in January and joined the Air Force.
Franklin: Oh. Without graduating.
Boice: Without graduating.
Franklin: Okay. Interesting.
Boice: So I served my illustrious military career in a photo lab in Mountain Home, Idaho. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: And how long were you in the Air Force?
Boice: Two years.
Franklin: Two years, and then you were discharged?
Boice: Yes, yup, yup.
Franklin: When you were in school, you mentioned being in school during this McCarthy era, one of the real hot points of the Cold War. Can you talk a little bit about the civil defense procedures and kind of the general feeling of that time as it related to—because I imagine with Hanford so close, and now knowing what was being produced there, that would have been a likely target. It’s a major part of the nuclear weapons stockpile. So can you talk a little bit about that time and just the general feeling?
Boice: Well, you knew what was going to happen—or what they said was gonna happen. It was the duck-and-cover thing. And we had drills. A lot of what they said what was gonna happen—now they talk about getting into water to modulate it. Then, it was one of the things that they didn’t want you to do. Because we had the irrigation ditch that was running right alongside of the schools. But then they didn’t want you to get into it. So, it’s changed. They had the civil defense procedures—Radiant Cleaners, they’re in Kennewick. They had panel delivery cleaner trucks. They were rigged for emergency ambulances. They had fold-down bunks in them; they could handle four people. [LAUGHTER] It was taken serious.
Franklin: Did you feel any particular sense of worry, or did it not seem to really affect you, your daily life or your psychological—
Boice: It never bothered me ‘til years afterwards. When they talked about the Green Run, where they turned a bunch of that stuff loose, just to see what it would do to the citizens and count the drift on it. The people that had—the down-winders, and the people that had the thyroid problems. My sister was one of the first rounds that went to court over that.
Franklin: Really?
Boice: Because she was—we moved into Richland. She had her third birthday in the prefab, when they were still practicing how to build this stuff. And then we moved in on a farm where the alfalfa grew, the cow ate it, gave them milk, and everything was recycled and nothing went over the fence. And so it bothered me, then, that they used us as guinea pigs. But the other hand, they really didn’t know what in the cat hair that they were doing in a lot of cases. The nuclear waste? You’ve heard about the radioactive rabbit turds.
Franklin: I have.
Boice: You have?
Franklin: Yes, I have, but why don’t you mention that?
Boice: I was working with Vitro out here—’72, I think it was. The radioactivity, of course, is settled on the sagebrush. And the rabbits went around eating the leaves, just leaving fat, dumb and happy, and concentrating everything into the rabbit turds. And they were contemplating taking the top six inches of about two or three sections and burying it. Only they couldn’t decide where they had to build the hole. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: When you—you mentioned just a minute ago that you were on a farm, and you had the cows that would have eaten the tainted alfalfa—was your milk ever tested? Or did anyone ever come and--
Boice: Nah. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: test your—Were you ever tested for—or your family, anybody in your family, ever tested for radiation? Because I know that they, at one point, had those Whole Body Counters that they would test—some children in Pasco were tested through those machines?
Boice: You ever been through a Whole Body Counter?
Franklin: I have not been through a Whole Body Counter.
Boice: Depending on where you’re at, there may or may not be a—they’re kind of a joke. Now, when I was working here at Vitro, we went through the Whole Body thing, and they were serious. I mean, before we got cleared out, we went through the chamber, and we were counted. I went to work in South Carolina. They—as far as I was concerned—were very sloppy with their radiation handling and their checking and their radiation monitoring. We had a hand-and-foot monitoring station where we was going in and out of. You stick your hands in and they check it, and your feet were there at the same time. Well, this one time, I come up pretty hot, so I found an RM. I says, that machine gave me a bad reading. Oh, he says, that machine’s no good anyway. Come around to this other one over here and we’ll check you out. Well, if the blinking thing’s no good, why in the cat hair are we using it?! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So, just a second ago, you mentioned you were working for Vitro?
Boice: Uh-huh.
Franklin: What is or was Vitro?
Boice: What was Vitro? Okay. Vitro Engineering—and I don’t know how many times the name changed hands. But these guys were the ones that laid out the City of Richland—laid out the Hanford Projects. These were the strictly insiders. There was pictures on a wall of my grade school buddy’s dad, who I remember being a surveyor in Richland there. And these guys—this has gone on forever, and they were a pretty dug-in organization. To the point that they were not really aware that there was a world outside the fence. They’d heard about it, but they weren’t too sure it existed. [LAUGHTER] But I ended up at Vitro, and we did the Tank Farms that they’re having problems with, the hot tanks? We were in on the modification of that farm. We surveyed in there quite a bit. Whenever they show the pictures on TV, they always show you the evaporation facility. They show you that same picture. Warren Wolfe and I—I say Warren and I—it’s a little—our crew brought that up out of the ground, and we modified the tank farm, and we laid out the construction on that building from the ground right through the top.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And I was very fortunate, because all my surveying experience to that point was with the railroads and pipelines and longline work. Construction surveying was new to me. And I got throwed in with an old boy that was good at it. [LAUGHTER] And I learned a bunch working with him. And rolled right over, later on, into Hanford, too. We got in on the end of that—[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Hanford II?
Boice: Yeah.
Franklin: Oh, as--T-O-O. And which building was this that you and Warren Wolfe and your crew built?
Boice: All I remember is the evaporation facility.
Franklin: What was your specific job at Vitro? Were you a surveyor?
Boice: I was a surveyor. I was an instrument man. You get in the hot zones—we got inside the Canyon Building on several different occasions. And you got suited up, and I was instructed very specifically and emphatically to touch nothing, because anything that got crapped up, they kept. And we couldn’t get the instruments crapped up. But that stuff was so hot that the paper—the Rite-in-the-Rain books have got a specific paper there that has pitch in it or something—it attracts radioactivity like a sponge. And when they kept the notes, then one of us would stay inside and the other guy would get out in the clean zone, and we’d have to transcribe all the notes, because that book was so hot that they wouldn’t let it out of the area. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: There was some weird stuff going on.
Franklin: Any other—
Boice: Yeah, but there’s some I ain’t gonna talk about. [LAUGHTER] Okay. We came so close to having a nuclear disaster, it wasn’t even funny. We were good. We were awful good. And we were fast. And we were set up out there on an offset, and Rosie the labor foreman come over. Somebody said you needed a shot here for a hole for a penetration into the tank. Man, we whipped that out and figured the pull and what it was gonna take. Swung over there, put a distance and an angle, drove the stake in the ground. I figured that Warren checked it, and away we went. We come back in a week or so, or a few days later, we were back in that same farm. And Rosie comes over there and he says, would you guys check that again? Because these guys was digging a hole there and they’re supposed to hit a tank. And we checked it. And I lied, and Warren swore to it. [LAUGHTER] We forgot we was on a ten-foot offset. So they’re digging clear to one side of this tank, and just good solid dirt. Had we been just half as screwed-up as we were, they would have gone right down the edge of that tank with a core drill. And we’d have had ooey-gooeys all over the place. They talked to us. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Kind of a happy accident, right?
Boice: Yeah, we were—I’ll never forget Warren’s work. He’d come back with the boss and he says, name me one guy in this world ever got through this life being perfect. He says, always pissed me off, he’s a damned carpenter. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So you went to—you joined the Air Force, you went to Idaho for two years. When you came back—or what did you do after that? Did you come back to Richland after?
Boice: We were living in Kennewick.
Franklin: Living in Kennewick.
Boice: And I was working at the Washington Hardware Store. And this kid—we were working on cars in my buddy’s garage. And this guy comes through and he’s surveying for the Corps. And he talked that they were setting up a photogrammetry section. Well, heck, that’s what I was doing in the service. So, I beat feet over to Walla Walla to sign up to lay out photo mosaics. And they say, we haven’t got enough work for fulltime at that job. Are you a draftsman? No, I are not a draftsman. He says, would you take a job surveying? You bet. I became a surveyor. [LAUGHTER] And we worked from the mouth of the Deschutes River to Lewiston, Idaho. The first thing was the mouth of the Deschutes to McNary Dam—we mapped from the water level to the top of the bluffs by hand.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: And then we went through, starting in ’58, and we inventoried the railroad. Now, when you inventory a railroad, we inventoried a railroad. Everything they possessed was put down. First, you go through and you measure and put stations—mark station markings on the rails. 80 miles of them. Then you go back and you reference everything the railroad’s got. Ties, spikes, tie plates, rails, joints, joint bars—if the fence moves, how far did it move, from what to what? If the rail changes, if there’s an isolation joint in there, you put that in. When you come to a switch, you measure everything that’s in the switch facility. You go—everything that that railroad has got. You become very, very familiar with railroads. [LAUGHTER] And then we went ahead, and we built railroads clear up to Lewistown. We handled a railroad layout real heavy. When they—are you familiar with the Marmes men?
Franklin: Yes.
Boice: Luck of the draw, I was on that. Because we were the—call it the resident survey crew in that area.
Franklin: Oh.
Boice: And we were babysitting construction. Make sure they got sticks out ahead of them, make sure that things are checked out behind them. They’re putting in a detour, why, check that out. They’re building a bridge, make sure it’s set up right, and check it out when they get done. So, first they call up and they say, there’s a guy down here at the mouth of the Palouse River thinks he hit something, and he wants an elevation on this cave, see where the water’s gonna come when they raise the water behind Lower Monumental, I believe.
Franklin: Yeah, I think that sounds right.
Boice: Is that the dam? So we went down there and run him in an elevation, painted it on the cave face. Happily on our way. Well, they hit pay dirt. [LAUGHTER] They dug up bones. So we were called back. They wanted—because the drillers were in there then doing sub-cell drilling of what’s down there. So we got to come in there and locate their holes so they know where what is. That was interesting. The whole thing. Now that the world has got into this Ice Age floods and stuff, I wish so heavily that I knew then what I know now. Because the layers that they went through were very definitely visible. This thing had been covered in various floods. But it was so interesting, the stuff that they found. Because it became an international incident. One of the coolest cats in the whole joint was Pono the Greek. And Pono run the sluice box. He had been all over the world. When the girls dug everything out, then they took the dirt to Pono, and he washed it down. Pono found thread of somebody’s sewing. Then they found the needle. And that to me was so cool. They had this needle that looked for all the world like a darning needle. How in the blazes they cut that eye in there! This was a really heads-up organization. [LAUGHTER] Interesting. Very interesting.
Franklin: Yeah, that was a very significant archaeological find.
Boice: I’ve got to go back some day and talk to that doctor. At an anniversary of something, we’re down here at Columbia Park, and he was talking and I showed up there with the historical society doing something-or-other. And I talked to him for about five minutes. He mentioned the fact that he wanted to see the guy that painted that elevation. I said, well, you’re looking at him. [LAUGHTER] It was—I got to go talk to him. Because one of the things in their report—they talked that the ditch was dug with a Cat. Now, I ain’t saying they’re wrong, because I didn’t see any digging when I was there. But just—as you’re going up and looking at a hole, and in those days we had looked at a bunch of holes—we were inspectors. They were going behind the soils guys. And it just to me had all the appearance of somebody that dug a ditch with a dragline. And I always figured it was a dragline in there, and somebody said it was a Cat. I don’t totally agree with him. But the bones were so interesting. They said that the one thing about the site was there had been somebody living on it forever. Just, the further down you went, the more primitive they became, ‘til you got past the layer of the Mazama ash, when Crater Lake blew its top. And they went past Mazama ash and suddenly things looked pretty sophisticated. That’s where the needle came from and a few other things. It was neat. I’d have liked to spend more time with them.
Franklin: Yeah. I’m sure you heard about the dam failing and the site flooding after they—because they created the protective dam around the shelter, and that failed and let water in.
Boice: It didn’t fail! The SOB was never built to hold! When they brought us down there to check these drill holes out, the drillers—we had other stuff to do that morning, and we didn’t get down there until 10:00. The driller had a half-a-dozen holes in. I’m talking to this old driller, and he says, they ain’t never gonna keep water out of that thing, because there’s a layer of palm wood down there and it’s gonna leak like a sieve. But they did it anyway. And we’re down there checking on settlement pins and a whole bunch of other stuff when the water’s coming up. But we’re all on the radio, and it’s like a big one-party line—you can hear what’s going on no matter where. And they’re putting in pumps, and the more pumps they put in, the more water they sprayed out, but noting changed. [LAUGHTER] So it’s a lovely fishing pond. But interesting: it was shortly thereafter that I quit the corps and went to Alaska. Within a year-and-a-half, two years, I’m up there doing the same thing, only instead of spotting holes in the ground, we’re spotting oil wells. And sitting in a warm-up shack, talking to a driller, and he made mention of the fact that they had spudded oil wells. Now, when they spud an oil well, they get in there with an oversized auger, like you’re setting telephone poles. And they go down there through the mud and the blood and the crud ‘til they get to solid rock. And then they bring in the drills. And he says, we have yet to spud a well here that we didn’t get palm wood. And that has always sat with me. Now, when they’re talking about global warming—if there has been palm trees growing at the mouth of the Palouse River, and palm trees growing at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it’s been a lot warmer than people are willing to talk about. [LAUGHTER] Just boggles my mind that there is palm wood in Alaska as well as Marmes Rockshelter.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting. So you were—Marmes, then Alaska. When did you come to work for Vitro at Hanford?
Boice: That was a pretty short season. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: At Hanford, or in Alaska?
Boice: At Vitro. Oh, at Alaska I worked for various contractors. But Vitro—we didn’t philosophically match. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Ah.
Boice: Their minds were all inside the fence. And I’m too antagonistic. [LAUGHTER] If we had a problem—thou shalt not speak bad of Vitro. And we’re laying out penetrations on top of a tank. And they’re all done. Radius and angle—which radius is—and they had them at different stages there, and other people had been doing them. And this tank had been there for quite a—not quite a while, but every once in a while someone would come in and set some more holes, set some more holes. Well, they didn’t continue their circle around—nobody closed the circle. So by the time we get there ‘til the end, we have to figure out by adding up each and every hole all the way around the circle at every different radius to get the dimensions to where we’re at. Where if the guy had closed out his circle, you could have backed him out and been out of there in about a tenth the time. So I happened to make the statement, I said, Vitro drafting strikes again. And I was a marked man. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: How long in total, then, did you work out on the Hanford site?
Boice: Well, in ’56-’57, or ’57-’58, they were doing a lot of military work out there. And we did the roads up Rattlesnake—was in on that. The road up Saddle Mountain. A lot of RADAR sites. You’re aware of the Nike sites on—
Franklin: Yup.
Boice: --the north side of the river over there?
Franklin: Yup.
Boice: Been there, done that. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So—that wasn’t for Vitro, was that when you were with—
Boice: That was the Corps.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: And we also did a lot of work up at Moses Lake.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: All the runway extensions up there, we were in on. They throwed us in the clink. They did not like our very presence.
Franklin: Why?
Boice: Apparently Moses Lake had two different structures. There was the Strategic Air Command structure up there, and there was the Military Air Transport Service. I didn’t know the difference. Les was—we were doing some mapping work. And the three of us were just gonna run some levels out to the next site we were gonna work at. And we took off the BM—benchmark—at the control tower. And we get about two turns out across the flight line there. And a bunch of guys come out, like a changing of the guard or something. Two or three of them stopped to talk to Kirby and George. The other five come out along, and they walked, just formed a circle around me, and they wanted to know if I wanted to go with them. They had submachine guns and a whole bunch of other stuff, and I said, heck, there’s nothing I’d rather do! [LAUGHTER] So they called up Walla Walla and they verified our existence. Then we had to go through security and get badges to—and we’d been working on that thing off-and-on for months. But we just hadn’t stepped in the right zone.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Boice: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: They were just kind of waiting for you, then, to—
Boice: Just different—different bunch of stuff.
Franklin: Right. When you were in school in Kennewick, so after the—or even just after the word was out about the Hanford site, after August 6th, 1945, when you were in school, did they teach anything about Hanford history? Was it—
Boice: Go back to August 6th.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: What a day. [EMOTIONAL] What a wonderful day! I’d been down at the Village Theater—now the Richland Theater. I don’t even remember what was playing. But we came out, [EMOTIONAL] and the bells were ringing. The church down there, they were ringing their bells. And everybody was whooping it up—the war was over! And I’ll never forget, some gal in there alongside the street, she had half a dozen kids with garbage can lids and a parade going, and they’re banging and clanging. And the festivities that the war was over. And then we went back and they came out with the thing and Truman said, It’s the Atomic Bomb, and that’s what we’ve been building. And Mom went over and talked to the lady next door. She mentioned the U-235. And the gal says, they didn’t talk about that, did they? And she’d been keeping files, and her husband had been working on it. And neither of them would ever admit that they knew what the other one was doing. It was that tight. And the security in Richland. The FBI knew everybody in town, because it was not uncommon—it was a regular thing that they would come around and they would talk to you, and ask about him. And then they’d go talk to him and ask about you. It was just—it was what was going on. We didn’t know why. Well, after that—yeah, after it came out what was going on out there, then we knew what was there. But until Truman come out and said, here’s what was going on, we didn’t know.
Franklin: What about V-J Day? Was that a separate kind of a big celebration?
Boice: Yeah.
Franklin: Was that as big as the news of the bomb drop? Or was the bomb drop more of a pivotal moment here in the—
Boice: Well, the V-J Day, the end of the war, was the big day. That’s the celebration that I’ll never forget.
Franklin: Can you talk about it?
Boice: June—you heard about Harry Truman, didn’t you? When he come out to Hanford?
Franklin: No.
Boice: [LAUGHTER] The head of security was a guy by the name of McHale. And Dad worked pretty close with him with the fire department because everything was safety and security and if you had a problem, see McHale. Now, the guy had taken—he was pretty much high up in intelligence—but he had assumed the position of a first sergeant. And Sarge McHale was the guy. No matter what happened, Sarge McHale. Harry Truman did a fantastic job, and made his reputation just going from plant to plant—the Truman Investigating Committee, cutting down waste. And I guess he did a heck of a job. But he come out to Hanford and demanded to be let in.
Franklin: Sorry, was this when he was Vice President or President?
Boice: He was a senator!
Franklin: Senator—Senator Harry Truman. Okay.
Boice: And he comes there and demands to be let in. And of course, the guard says, McHale! And McHale comes over there and meets him head-on. He says, I’m Senator Truman, and I demand to be let in. McHale says, I don’t give a damn if you’re President of the United States; you ain’t coming in here. And he didn’t. Well, years later, and I believe it was when they were dedicating the Elks Club in Pasco, Truman was back up in this area. And he was President. And he come out to Hanford and he looked up McHale. And he said, uh-huh, you son of a bitch, you didn’t think I’d make ‘er, did ya? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow. That’s a great story. [LAUGHTER] But thank you. So after the war was over, was what went on at Hanford taught in school? Was there mention of the work at Hanford that built the bomb? Was that part of the curriculum here in town?
Boice: The local lore.
Franklin: The local lore, but nothing in the school at all?
Boice: Not that I recall.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: Everything was—there was a terrific amount of pride. The Atomic City, the atomic this, the atomic that. The first barber shop quartet come to town, when GE left—no, DuPont left, GE come in, four guys come in from Schenectady, New York with a barber shop quartet. First ones I ever saw. And they were the Atomic City Four. And the next one were the Nuclear Notes. [LAUGHTER] But there was an atomic pride, all over the area. Then there was the people that thought we should be ashamed of it. That we had built this device that killed a whole bunch of people.
Franklin: Now, were these people in the community? Or people outside?
Boice: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Franklin: And this was right at the time—
Boice: Oh, no, no, no. This is--
Franklin: Later?
Boice: Last week? [LAUGHTER] Last few years ago, yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: I got my—I’m still behind Hanford.
Franklin: Okay.
Boice: Screwed up and all. Back to Vitro for a little bit. Like I say, they were—the organization that literally purchased and built the city of Richland—now, at that time I was flying, and I was flying out of the Richland airport. And there was an old geezer out there called Norm. Norm flew the bench. He was always on the bench out in front of the airport, there. And if somebody just going up to burn up some hours or play, why, Norm was willing to go along. I saw Norm and I hauled him around and then I went back to work for Vitro. And Pritchard brought this guy through—it was Norm! Norm had been the head of real estate when the entire city of Richland and the whole Hanford Project was bought. He was in charge of it. And he retired and trained his successor, who died. And he trained the next guy, who died. So they had Norm on a retainer. Just to ride dirt on real estate. Quite an interesting character!
Franklin: Yeah, I bet. I think I’d kind of like to return about something we were just talking about a minute ago, where you were talking about people that—especially in the later years that have been critical of Hanford. I’d like to get more of your feelings on that. On how you feel about that, or kind of what part of their argument or their viewpoint that you don’t agree with.
Boice: They were talking about—well, first there was the Richland High School and their bomb insignia. It was felt that they were making a big deal or prideful about this terrible event. And I always go back to a group from Japan that came over and were very critical of Richland for the same thing. And the gentleman who was interviewing them or was talking to them, when they got done, informed them in no uncertain terms, that we were invited very unceremoniously into that war, and we’re sorry if you didn’t like the way we ended it. [LAUGHTER] You get to researching, I’d like to bring up, why didn’t they drop the bomb on Tokyo? Because there was nothing left on Tokyo to injure. If you read about Curt LeMay and the Strategic Air Command and the bombing of Japan, he had eliminated that thing down to—the B-29 was supposed to be a high altitude bomber. And it wasn’t as great at it as it was advertised to be. But they had eliminated the defenses. And they made the B-29 into a low-level trucking company, and they were just hauling stuff over and unloading it. And the firebombing of Tokyo—the movies they showed us in the Air Force was something to behold. I mean, they—it was so much worse than what happened at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, either one. He was told to save two or three targets—clean targets. And when they come over there with the bombs, then they used these clean targets and saw what they could do. Of the four devices—the four nuclear devices, we used—was it four or three in World War II?
Franklin: Are you referring to—
Boice: All but one of them came from Hanford.
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: The first one at Los Alamos was plutonium. And then Hiroshima was Oak Ridge.
Franklin: Yup.
Boice: And then Nagasaki was plutonium.
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: But there’s those that—and there were at the time, there was a big discussion on, should we demonstrate to them what this thing could do? And the big argument was, what if it doesn’t do? What if you drop it and it don’t do nothing? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Interesting. Can you speak to—or do you remember anything about the Civil Rights era in the Tri-Cities?
Boice: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: There were reports of—you know, it’s known that Kennewick was kind of a sun-down town, and that many minorities were forced to live in East Pasco. And that during the war—
[NEW CLIP]
Franklin: There had been a sizable African American population at Hanford, but that after the war many of them left. So I was wondering if you could speak to the Civil Rights action you might have seen or you might have observed or anything in the Tri-Cities?
Boice: Well, I was up in Lewiston when their civil rights march come through. But it was well-advertised. People knew what was gonna happen. And I was at the hardware store, and there’s a black cement finisher I’d worked with building houses in Pasco. I says, Leroy! You gonna come march on Kennewick? He said, [AFFECTED DIALECT] shee-it. I wantsta live in Kennewick just about as bad as you wantsta live in East Pasco. [LAUGHTER] They had a march on Kennewick—a bunch of people that—I am told, because I was living in Lewiston, and I was in Lewiston at the time. But there’s a group out of Seattle and a group out of Portland come up to Pasco, and they marched across the bridge. They marched down Avenue C, up Washington Street, down Kennewick Avenue. And Kennewick yawned. Nobody particularly cared. They got to the Methodist church, and the groups come out and says, you look hot. Come on in and have some lemonade. They sat down at the church, had lemonade and went home. And that was the civil rights march in Kennewick. But there is—when I was there growing up, there were no blacks in Kennewick. There were blacks in Pasco, and there were no blacks in Richland. With the exception—the guy that run the shoeshine parlor at Ganzel’s barbershop lived in the basement, and they tell me that there was two black porters at the Hanford House. And that was the total black population of Richland.
Franklin: Wow.
Boice: But they were not welcome in Kennewick. It wasn’t that big a deal when I was walking down Kennewick Avenue when a couple of black guys—they were bums, hobos—come walking down Main Street, you might as well say. And a cop pulled up and says, the railroad tracks are two blocks down that way. They go east and west. Either one will get you out of town. And they went to the railroad track. I always figured that the blacks wanted to move to Kennewick because they couldn’t stand to live next to the blacks in Pasco. [LAUGHTER] And if you want to get right down to it, well, all that hooping and hollering they do right now, you go down to Fayette, Mississippi, which is 98.645% black, and all the blacks in Mississippi can live in Fayette and nobody cares. Go down to Van Horn, Texas, which is all Mexicans, and they can all live in Van Horn, Texas, and nobody cares. But you let half a dozen white guys go up in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and they just have yourself a storm. Why, these are a bunch of white separatists! If everybody else can live together, why can’t the whites?
Franklin: Interesting. Some might say they were kind of starting a separatist movement up there, I think—claiming their own territory, and—
Boice: So what?
Franklin: Well, living together communally is often different from claiming that you don’t—aren’t subject to the law, the jurisdiction of the United States.
Boice: Nobody said that they weren’t subject to the law.
Franklin: Well--
Boice: They kept trying to integrate Prudhoe, but he kept getting cold and going home.
Franklin: Oh, in Alaska?
Boice: Yeah!
Franklin: Yeah.
Boice: They had a heck of a time keeping Prudhoe integrated. Because them black people do not like cold weather! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I don’t think a lot of people like cold weather.
Boice: It was a big joke when we went down south there, to work at Savannah River. Because—hell, we’d come out of here and it was Thanksgiving. It was cold. We got down there, of course, if you’re traveling you’re gonna get nightshift. We left having the cold weather here at night down there. And I says, that’s okay, you’ll get yours come summertime when it heats up. But surprisingly—and I was really surprised that they didn’t take the hot weather any better than we did. I mean, it was miserably hot, but they were just as big a problem as a rest of us.
Franklin: I imagine it’s quite a bit more humid down there, though, with the—when it gets hot, you know. Because the heat with the humidity is—
Boice: Yeah, it is.
Franklin: --much worse than the dry heat.
Boice: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? Or any question I haven’t asked you that you think I should—
Boice: I don’t know what it would be. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah, we’ve really gone—really jumped all over the place. It’s been great. Anyone else have any questions?
Hungate: No, the only question—you said you’d done some work with the railroad. What railroad?
Boice: Name one. [LAUGHTER]
Hungate: All railroads? Union Pacific, all the different--?
Boice: Yes. Right now they’re talking about the oil trains, and their problems with them tipping over? I wonder how long it’s gonna take them to get to the problem. In the beginning, railroads were 39-foot rails bolted together. Measured mile after mile after mile of it. Then in about, oh, the middle ‘60s—’67, thereabouts, ’66—when they were putting in the SP&S, that’s now the BN—the Burlington Northern on the Washington side. They went with quarter-mile steel. And the first question that we had as surveyors—because you’re constantly working with the expansion and contraction of steel—was how are they going to control that in long rails? Because if you’re working on railroads very long, first thing you realize is do not sit on the joints in a hot day. You get your butt pinched! [LAUGHTER] When those tracks expand. So we brought this up and the first thing they told us was, well, they’ve got special steel and it’s only going to expand sideways. Well, that story lasted about as long as it took when they started putting it together. Because when they started—they’d set up a factory down here, if you’ll call it that. Brought in 39-foot un-punched rail, and just rolled her off, welded her together and ground down the joints and put her in quarter-mile sections. They were very particular when they put it in at the temperature that they laid that down on, where before—you know what a creeper is? Okay, it’s a kind of a hairpin device that you put over the rail so that it will slide less. But in the old days, the 39-foot rail very seldom saw any creepers. When they put that quarter-mile steel together, you saw a lot of creepers. Now they have gone to ribbon rail. They welded the quarter-mile steel together. You drive down to Portland, and you look at that rail, and you’re gonna go a long ways before you see a joint. There at Quinton and Washman’s dip—which don’t mean a thing to you guys—[LAUGHTER] about a mile post from 120-whatever, they have got a creeper on each—alongside of each and every tie. I mean, they were using creepers like they were going out of style. To me, the expansion’s the thing that they got to worry about, but then they should have figured this out because they’re running it. But it’s a factor. You got to factor it in when you’re doing a pipeline, when you’re doing a railroad. When we were doing the pipeline, Maurice Smith of British Petroleum, who was the head pipeline engineer, I had lunch with him. [LAUGHTER] It ain’t like we sit down at a specified lunch—he dropped in at the chow hall I was eating and sat down at our table. So we got to talking about it. And that was the question I brought up, was how are you going to handle the expansion in the steel? And he says—he admitted it was a heck of a problem. And that you got to run as many Ss as you can so that it’ll take up and accordion itself. And when you’ve got a long straight stretch, it’s gonna give you problems. [LAUGHTER] Because it’s gonna go someplace. And that’s the thing that—after they started the quarter-mile steel, a couple of years later, we had a hot summer. The article in the Tri-City Herald called it the long, hot summer, where we had over 90 days of over 90-degree weather. But they were cutting chunks out of that railroad to keep her on the road bed. And at that time, when the SP&S was having these problems, the UP was laughing at them. They said, we tried this stuff in Wyoming. It didn’t work. And they’re using 39-foot stuff, and it was just whistling down the road. But now I see that they’re using the ribbon rail like everybody else. I can’t see how it’s gonna work, but the they’re doing it. [LAUGHTER] It ain’t my role! [LAUGHTER] The other one was the Camas Prairie. And that starts out, oh, about ten miles above Ice Harbor Dam, thereabouts, breaks loose, and goes clear up past Lewiston, up into Grangeville, Idaho. That’s a crazy little river.
Franklin: That’s the one that they filmed that Charles Bronson movie.
Boice: Breakheart Pass?
Franklin: Breakheart Pass, yeah.
Boice: Yeah, that was done up there. You get into railroad history—this area is knee-deep in it. Vollard was the great character in that. He started out with a little portage railroad around Idaho Falls and that area. And then he got the Walla Walla line—I call it the WWWWW&WWW line—Walla Walla, Waitsburg, Washtucna and Washington Wail Woad—which was a money maker. But he ended up getting a lineup from Portland out here. And then when they started building the Northern Pacific, they were building from both ends, and he was hauling Northern Pacific rail over his tracks and taking it out in railroad stock. By the time they got connected over in Montana, he owned a sizable chunk of the railroad. [LAUGHTER] And it was—you get into that railroad history, and it’s just takeover checkers. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much, George.
Boice: Okay! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: It was a pleasure talking to you. And, yeah, thanks for coming in today.
Boice: All righty. Write if you find work! [LAUGHTER]
Jack Collins: Now did you hear of people like—names like Alex Parks and some of those that helped sue the government? He was very—he was state legislature, I believe at one time.
Robert Bauman: Yeah—
Collins: From Grandview.
Bauman: I knew about the Wiehls—
Collins: Or Prosser?
Bauman: Dick Wiehl’s.
Collins: That had the ferry?
Bauman: Yeah. I talked to Dick Wiehl.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: That was one.
Collins: Ida Mae was in my class at school—
Bauman: Oh really? Oh, there you go.
Collins: We used to walk her down the river where her dad would pick her up and roll her across the river to where the original town of White Bluffs was.
Bauman: Oh, sure, yeah.
Collins: And he had—my grandparents lived in Old Town. They had a house in Old Town there before it moved up to the newer area. And spent a lot of time in Old Town.
Bauman: I think we’re just about ready.
Collins: Okay.
Bauman: So we’ll get started here in just a minute. And then—
Collins: Yeah. And another thing, are you aware of the Mormons coming out there, when the Mormon Church bought it?
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Okay. Did they tell you the story about the guy that brought his John Deere tractor and a four wheel trailer out from Utah? All the way out from Utah and brought all of his stuff—
Bauman: No.
Collins: And set it down on the black sandbar?
Bauman: No, no, I haven’t heard—
Collins: That was quite a story. Can you imagine the time it took him to drive out with a John Deere tractor?
Bauman: That would—no, I can’t imagine. [LAUGHTER]
Collins: [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Are we good to go?
Man: Yeah, yeah.
Bauman. All right, we’re good to get started. So, the first thing I’ll have you do is just say your name and spell your last name for us.
Collins: I’m Jack Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S.
Bauman: Okay, great. And my name is Robert Bauman and today is August 4th of 2015. And we are recording this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So first of all, welcome, and thanks for coming all this way out here-- [LAUGHTER]
Collins: I’m glad to—
Bauman: --for this interview.
Collins: I’m glad to be here.
Bauman: Great. I wonder if we could just start by maybe talking about your family and what brought them to White Bluffs, when they came, and that sort of—
Collins: We came to White Bluffs in the middle of the Depression. [LAUGHTER] And we didn’t have much. And my grandfather had moved there ahead of us, lived in Old Town. And he wrote my folks and told them that there was work there. Farm work and stuff. My dad was a good mechanic. And he went to White Bluffs, so we had work. We bought a little farm, ten acre farm, in White Bluffs. And he worked for farmers for years around there. And then when Sam Allard needed a person to help out up at the county pumping plant, he had met my father—I don’t know how they met, but maybe through Joe Grewell that run the Priest Rapids power plant. But they asked my dad to come up and they liked him very well, because his dad had had a blacksmith’s shop. And my dad knew how to do things, how to make stuff, how to forge, weld, how to do all this type stuff. And they had a lot of machine work that they had to do in the plant in those days. And it was all handwork. They had to hone thrust bearings. We used to go down as kids and help him hone thrust bearings, because it was fun! Sit out on the porch at the county pumping plant. We used to run the chain hoist lifting those big pumps out. There was two 500s and a 750 horse power pump. They were all raw sewer pumps that the water district had bought from Chicago or somewhere back there. They didn’t use them, and they were for sale and that’s how they got the— This is--I wasn’t there when this happened, this is the story that I always got. They did that, and then they had their own power plant—the Priest Rapids power plant. So my father got out there and worked and Sam taught him all the stuff about the plant. And finally my dad ended up as head operator there, running it. He worked there for a number of years. We lived in the house up above the plant. We owned a farm down below the plant, downriver from the plant. We had a 35 acre farm the government took away from us. And then they kept my dad on after the government took over to pump water for all the construction in the water districts. So we had—us and the Potter family, Jack Potter, and his son Jackie, and the three boys of us, Ted and myself and Ray, were the only kids living in the restricted area. We lived at Coyote. And Mom—they hired Mom to haul us down to school every day during school. That was after White Bluffs School had burned and we started going to Hanford. It was 16 miles. So we did that for a number of years. Then the government finally, when the government finished and they were ready to start operating the plants, they had us move out. We moved to Zillah, Washington. And then we saw a lot of stuff in there, what the government did to those people was—was not good. They took their property, and a few people like Alex Parks and some other influential farmers in there took them to court because the government took the property without buying the water rights or any of that stuff. And the people there owned the Priest Rapids power plant, the power lines going to the county pumping plant. And they owned all the canals, the pipelines, head boxes, risers, you can name everything for the water district. A lot of stuff. That was about, probably 20 miles of canals, concrete canal. The government just assumed that. And it took over three years in court to get the government to pay for that. And they just forced the people out with—my folks had very little money when they left there. We lost our farm, we had two farms, we had one down in White Bluffs, we had one up at Coyote, up by Allard’s pumping plant was. And then me and my two brothers, we were the ones that were going all over the area out there, selling food to the guys coming out there in the area. All they’d get is peanut butter sandwiches coming out of the mess halls downtown there in Hanford. And those guys, trying to eat peanut butter sandwiches and water in hundred and some degree weather—we’d end up out there with egg sandwiches, candy bars, pop, coffee-- [LAUGHTER] and sell it to these guys. So we got to be their friends, so they hauled us all over the area with their construction equipment. We rode construction trains, the engineers all knew us. They were all buying this stuff from us. So we made a lot of money. We put it all in war bonds. I cashed my war bonds to marry my wife. That was my money that I had when I married her. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: That’s great.
Collins: And it was a fun life out there. And we—in the summer, we just stripped down to just nothing but a bathing suit and our bare feet, and we was all over the country out there, just in the bare feet in the desert out there. We were pretty tough kids in those days. [LAUGHTER] Swim in the river, and swim in the canal. And there was a lot of parties went on down at Black Sand bar. Community parties, we had a lot of fun at those. Everybody would meet down there for big swimming parties and picnics and stuff. And then Table Mountain, now where the stuff is all stored—I don’t know whether you’ve heard about Table Mountain where they dug and they put the—
Bauman: Yup, yup.
Collins: Okay. We used to have our church picnics on top of Table Mountain. And used to go out, and we used to follow the sheep herds and stuff that went through there, and get all the bum lambs and stuff. We had quite a herd of sheep that we got from—we had no place to take them. We had to sell them when the government took over. We had cattle and sheep and everything. And they forced us to sell all of that stuff. We got not much out of it. But that’s the way the government operates. I got like twelve other stories, a lot of stories that I heard from some of the old timers, how they used to fish for sturgeon. They used to throw like a head of lettuce on a big hook out in the Columbia River.
Bauman: Really? Yeah.
Collins: Or a part of a chicken. And they’re bottom feeders, and they had quarter inch rope hooked to those. And they’d take the horses and pull them out, they were so big.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: And that’s the—the old timers used to do that. Then we used to go to the—one of our trips at school was to go out to the Indian smokehouses, where they were smoking fish and stuff. The Priest Rapids Indians. That was quite a trip! And we were very familiar with them. And then my dad, when he worked up at the Priest Rapids power plant, when the put the new channel in to channel water into it, my dad worked on that, on running a jackhammer. That was before he went to work at Coyote. And we would go up there when they were going to have their blasts, and watch them blow that rock up. It was big time! They were drilling that basalt up there, and boy that was really a blast when they set all that rock off.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: And we’d see the Priest Rapids Indian kids, they would be in their steam house getting all hot and everything, and they’d come out of the steam house and go jump in the river, naked! [LAUGHTER] Tough little kids! But I don’t know where they—they didn’t go to school with us. I think they were self-taught up there. But they were very healthy.
Bauman: So, I’m going to go ask you a couple questions, kinda go back a little bit. You mentioned that your grandfather lived at White Bluffs before you moved there?
Collins: He lived in Old White Bluffs.
Bauman: Lived in Old White Bluffs.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: And what was his name?
Collins: Lyons.
Bauman: Oh, his last name was Lyons?
Collins: Lyons, yeah. [LAUGHTER] What was Grandpa’s name?
Woman: Alva.
Collins: Alva Edward Lyons.
Bauman: Okay, okay.
Collins: Him and my grandmother, and they’re the ones that taught us. And they had two children that lived with them, they were my mother’s parents.
Bauman: Okay. And how old were you then when your family moved to White Bluffs?
Collins: I was in the first grade of school. So that was about, what? ’37, ’38, somewhere along there.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: And we were the last family moved out of Hanford when they opened—when they started the plant.
Bauman: Right. And do you know how long you were there?
Collins: I went to school—finished the seventh grade of school at Hanford.
Bauman: Okay. And then you moved to—
Collins: We moved to Zillah.
Bauman: To Zillah. Okay. So what was the community of White Bluffs like?
Collins: It was a very friendly community. Everybody got along. I could say we went down to—we had all kinds of community things there. There was nothing else to do. We had a movie theater. The guy that run the ice plant there in town, he put on a show about twice a year, and that was a big thing, going to the movie, down to his little old movie house. Oh, they had church doings and stuff there. And a lot of potlucks. They had a grange there, too, I believe, and a lot of potlucks at the grange. That’s about all there was to do there. But everybody was friendly. It was different. They all looked out for one another. And—
Bauman: Now, you mentioned that you had a farm in White Bluffs and then one by the—
Collins: Our first farm was a ten-acre one. It was close to the town of White Bluffs.
Bauman: And what sort of crops did you have there?
Collins: Oh, we—it was old ground, leaded-out ground.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: It wasn’t great ground. But as kids we used to, there, we would cut asparagus and stuff. Take it uptown in our wagon, and pull it uptown. We only lived about a half a mile from town. Sell asparagus to the people in town, little bundles of asparagus. Then go to the drug store and buy candy with our money. That was our candy money. I’ve always worked, even as a kid, I’ve always worked. We picked fruit and all kinds of stuff.
Bauman: And so you mentioned you went to school in White Bluffs, and then at some point the school burned?
Collins: Yes, I went to school at White Bluffs ‘til the school burned.
Bauman: Mm-hm, and then Hanford—
Collins: Can I bring up a thing about the principal there?
Bauman: Oh, sure, absolutely.
Collins: She had—that’s the house that we got and they had—her husband run that horse ferry that pulled—I mean the cable ferry that pulled the—across the Columbia River. And she had a way of making the kids mind, she had a rubber hose and she’d take you down to the furnace room, and introduce them to a rubber hose.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Collins: My brother Ray got that one time. [LAUGHTER] And I was always good in school after I heard what happened there! [LAUGHTER] But we need more of that today. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So your family got to stay much longer than most other families after the Federal government came.
Collins: We got to stay, we were the last family moved.
Bauman: When we were talking before, you’d mentioned that you got notice around the time you had some apricots that were—
Collins: Apricot trees, yeah. We were going to plant 15 or 16 acres of apricots on our place. We lost all of our deposit and everything. The government could’ve cared less. They just—we had to turn them back. They arrived the day that our place was condemned.
Bauman: Wow. And so do you remember how long you got to stay there, like—a lot of people had to move out in ’43, early 1943—
Collins: It was about—
Bauman: How long, much longer did you--
Collins: A year and a half or two years.
Bauman: Oh, okay. So that’s quite a while longer you had to stay.
Collins: Yeah, all during construction, Dad pumped the water for the construction of the railroads and the roads and stuff. All the water trucks that came there. And he had pumps, pump it out of the canal, he was pumping in any water going on down. And they were using it for all the construction, the water he was pumping.
Bauman: Okay. So he was very valuable to the—
Collins: Yeah, they had—they wanted to move him to Richland and keep him on. My dad only went to fifth grade of school, but he was pretty knowledgeable. In those days, although they didn’t go very far. But they wanted to move on down, they’d give him a bunch of training and stuff. But he said, no, he says, I’m not going to take my boys to Richland. Because Richland was a pretty tough town in those days. And so we moved, he left the government job. He was making $150 a month for the water district. We got a house, our lights and water furnished. He worked seven 12s for them. And ‘round, all year long. In the wintertime, when they shut the plant down, they were working in the plant overhauling stuff. And then when the government took over, I think he went up to $1,200 a month. And he worked a 40 hour week.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: I can bring up another thing about—They used to hone all the thrust bearings. There were big thrust bearings that these big pumps sat on. They were three stories high, and they were very heavy. They weighed tons. So they brought an engineer out there that was going to tell my dad how to do that. So he said they could do a better job machining them than he could do it by hand. He told them, no, they couldn’t. So this engineer, he was going to prove it. So he took one of them and did it. And they took, I think it was a 750 horse pump out of it, and they set it down on it, and he threw the switch. And you have to rock those switches in to bring those motors up to speed there. So big and so heavy that you can’t bring them up just once. This guy threw the switch on it, blew the windings out of this pump and stuff, and it cost the government a load of money to tear that pump apart and get it rewound. I don’t know that he lost his job or not, but they always believed my dad after that, because he knew how to start them. He never blew one up in years that he ran the plant. They’d never had that happen before. And so a lot of things happened there. They brought guys out that my dad had to teach how to run the plant. They had young college guys. And it was interesting. We used to go down once in a while. We’d sit in for Dad. They brought the power in that was 66,000 volts from up there, and they had to transform down to 2,200 for the pumps. And you had to check those transformers every day for temperature. And then you had to check all the bearings on the pumps and all that. You had to work. And then call the readings in on the gauges there to tell them how much power you were drawing and everything, so they’d know how much power to send from Priest Rapids down to the plant. Because that’s the only thing that they furnished power for. So you was always busy there. You had to know what you were doing.
Bauman: Oh, yeah.
Collins: So Dad taught us kids all how to do it. We didn’t have nothing else to do. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: You mentioned when people had to leave in 1943 that a lot of people went to court eventually. Do you have any idea how much money your parents got for your property?
Collins: It was very little. We had enough to buy an old leaded-out ten-acre place out in Zillah.
Bauman: And that was enough?
Collins: But it wasn’t good. And it took them years, a lot of those people that they went out of there with, the older people, the widows and widwoers and stuff. They ended up in institutions. They had no family, they had no one. And the government just forced them out. They told them they’d come in with trucks and haul their stuff out if they didn’t leave. They’d haul them out of the area.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: That’s the way they operated with us. We were a very fortunate family, the way we got out. And my father had a truck and he bought a lot of the stuff from those people and we took it out to the auction sales and stuff and sold it. And we’d load up watermelons. And take them to the end of the barracks, we’d buy overripe watermelons. Because they were good, they were good watermelons. And take them in and sell them to the barracks there. And they were very—those people down there were very happy to get nice, ripe watermelons. Because everyone else was selling them green ones, and we were selling them ripe ones.
Bauman: Yeah, you were very enterprising. [LAUGHTER]
Collins: Hey, we did anything to make money. We had to.
Bauman: Sure.
Collins: We didn’t have any. We picked lots of fruit, worked in warehouses, did all of that stuff. Oh yeah, and there was another thing, too, that came up. There was an old recluse lived down under the railroad station, under their deck out front. And he had been, and I think you have something about him—he had been a pharmacist, was the story. And he had given the wrong prescription and killed a lady. And he left pharmacy and just ended up a recluse there—I don’t—I’d seen him, I’d seen him in the stores and stuff, seen him wandering around town. But that’s all I know about him.
Bauman: So when we were talking earlier, you also mentioned that at some point you ended up working at Hanford. Is that right?
Collins: I worked for the telephone company.
Bauman: For the telephone company.
Collins: And Hanford was the area that I had.
Bauman: Right.
Collins: And I had a high security clearance to go out in the Hanford area and build a number of the offices out there. I built West Richland—or I didn’t build it, I was in charge of it—when that young fellow got killed, that was one of my projects. When he swung the crane into the powerline and killed him. That was one of my projects. Downtown Richland, I did a lot of work on that one. And Kennewick, I did a lot of work there on all the Kennewick offices.
Bauman: So what time period was this, then, that you were working for the phone company?
Collins: I was working, doing that—that was, oh, I was about 40-something years old, so it would have had to have been ’70, in there.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: When they were building the offices out in the Hanford area. We didn’t have—our company did not have the Hanford area for the telephone offices—went out of, oh, down on the Columbia River had that. And we did their engineering and construction for them. They farmed it out to General Telephone at that time. That’s why it was out there building them. I drilled a lot of grounding wells out there, which—north of where Colonel Rockwell took over to watch what was happening underground. And they locked them up, but we never got to touch them again after we drilled them. They took the wells over. We could use them for grounding for offices, but we had to drill pretty deep because there’s no mineral in this ground here. It’s very poor grounding in this area. So.
Bauman: Was it—did it feel strange at all, when you were doing that to be back out in that area working? Where you had lived for a while?
Collins: I’d been out there, yes. I’m a pioneer resident. So we got to go on the trips when they took them out there. You used to come out to the White Bluffs-Hanford picnic here all the time.
Bauman: Okay, right.
Collins: And we went out to our old farm one time. We weren’t supposed to be there, but we did. [LAUGHTER] And they had burned everything down. Mysteriously, while we—before we left, we had a big barn full of stuff, stored full of stuff—that mysteriously burned. And no one else—no one out there but the people, the government people.
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: And it was other stuff happened out there. The house that we lived in out there got burned. When we were there, we saw the foundation of it and a bunch of ashes. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So, talking about White Bluffs community, who were some of the families that you knew well growing up, or some of your friends when you were—
Collins: We knew Alex Parks. Oh, jiminy. I just can’t remember all the names now. It’s—
Bauman: That’s okay.
Collins: But he was a very close friend of my folks’, very influential when they had the lawsuit. Russ Webert.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: Heck, can’t remember anymore.
Bauman: That’s all right.
Collins: Somewhere, I’ve got all the school pictures and stuff, too. I’m trying to get them back, of all the years I was in school down there. If you’d want those for your museum, I’m trying to get them back now.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: I may have to go to court to get them, I don’t know at this point.
Bauman: Wow. The other thing, when we were talking earlier that you had a picture of the school bus—
Collins: Yes.
Bauman: That you, that you rode.
Collins: That was the school bus that we rode from there to the Hanford School.
Bauman: Right, after the White Bluffs School burned down.
Collins: And my uncle drove it, and we had a lot of—[LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Looked like a pretty small school bus. How many kids rode in that, do you remember?
Collins: [SIGH] There was probably five or six of us on it. It would hold a few more than that, but there just wasn’t any more kids up there.
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: And so how long did you go to school in Hanford, then?
Collins: I went to school in Hanford for two years.
Bauman: Two years, okay.
Collins: We were on the double shifting when we went to Hanford.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: You know what—we were on the morning shift, we went in the morning, and then they had a night shift.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: We were on the morning shift. We didn’t get to learn too much at Hanford. It was tough when went to another school all day. I had a lot of catching up to do!
Bauman: And how long did that take to ride out there?
Collins: Well, it was about 16 miles.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: To our place, and then the bus went on farther, so--probably another eight miles.
Bauman: Pretty good ride.
Collins: Oh, yeah. Then after the government took over, then my mother would haul us. The government hired her to haul us. Because it was just us three kids and Jackie Potter. Four of us. And she would haul us in that old ’36 Ford. Haul us to school every day, and two round trips a day, every day.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: So it was cheaper than them owning a bus and stuff. So they didn’t get a lot out of it, but it was better for us.
Bauman: So by the time you and your family left, pretty much everyone else was gone, all the other residents of White Bluffs. Had the government already torn down a lot of the buildings at the other farms and places by the time you left?
Collins: Oh, yeah, they just went in and wiped the place out. They didn’t give a darn about anything that was in there. And then after we moved out and I got older, my brother and I went in and bought a lot of that stuff. We bought all the poles and the powerline between the Coyote pumping plant and Priest Rapids. We bought all those there around Sunnyside. And then the racetrack, we got most of those poles for the lighting and everything there—the poles around the racetrack. And then we bought a lot of those Quonset huts in there. Tore down a lot of those Quonsets. I saw pictures of them on some of your stuff, you know, the fish hatchery and stuff?
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Collins: We tore that old fish hatchery down, my brother and I did.
Bauman: Really?
Collins: And hauled that all out of there and sold them to farmers in the valley for shelters for their pigs and cattle and stuff. And we bought a lot of stuff in Hanford there, him and I did. I worked for him, and we hauled a lot of stuff out of Hanford when they were tearing it down.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Collins: And that was kinda interesting. One time we were in tearing the fish hatchery down, and he picked up a bucket and said it was radioactive. And we mentioned it to the guard there, and I didn’t see him all day. They took him and he was gone. And boy, he said they run him through any test you can imagine. Because we didn’t work for the government, we were bidding on stuff and buying stuff in there. But that was quite an interesting experience, too. We got to see all those fish hatcheries, those big fish in those tanks that they were testing radioactivity on. And then I had a lot of friends that worked out there, like Jack Potter. I don’t know whether you ever—his dad was the mayor of Hanford at one time.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: And he’s told me stories about running dozers in those pits out there. And how dangerous it was, him and some other people were telling me about it. How they saw people get sickened out there. They’re all gone now. They were a lot older than I was. But friends of my family.
Bauman: I was going to ask you, the pumping station that your dad operated, how big of an area did that serve?
Collins: That served everything from Coyote down to Hanford and all the Hanford area.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: White Bluffs, Hanford, about—I don’t know—16 or 20 miles of canal that it served. It was a big area.
Bauman: Yeah, it is.
Collins: All those farms that it pumped. And a few farms pumped out of the river. They had pumps on the river. Now my grandfather run a farm for an outfit there. And they had a pump. It was just right below the black sandbar—or above the black sandbar, I mean, on the river. And my grandfather run that for a few years. And they pumped out of the river for that. A few people did. But most of them were from the Coyote pumping plant for water.
Bauman: Yeah, that’s a lot of farms that it served.
Collins: Hundreds of acres.
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Beautiful farms. Everything there was two weeks ahead of everywhere else in the country. So the fruit all got on the fresh fruit market. And it was—they got really a high premium price out of it. And they had their own packing houses there. There’s a railroad that come in, they trucked stuff out of there. And a lot of stuff went on there.
Bauman: Yeah, yeah.
Collins: But we used to go down—I used to lid and make boxes and stuff in those warehouses for Alex Parks. We worked for him all summer long. Just when we were little kids! But all the kids there worked. Every kid that lived there worked. They aren’t like today. [LAUGHTER] We were busy! [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Right, yeah. So you were, what, about fifth grade when people started leaving?
Collins: I started first grade at White Bluffs—
Bauman: When you first came, yeah, but--
Collins: And I went to the fifth grade there, no, sixth and seventh at Hanford.
Bauman: But when people started having to leave because the Federal government was coming in, do you remember your, or your family’s reaction to that? As people were leaving, and what you thought about that?
Collins: It was complete shock to everybody when that happened. A car drove up to your house with guys in it, and they told you your property was condemned, you’d have to leave within two weeks, I think it was. You know, how shocked would you be if they’d do something like that to you?
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Or, if you didn’t leave, they’d bring in military people with trucks, and they’d haul you out of the area. And I was just a young kid then, but I can remember that, you know.
Bauman: Sure.
Collins: And it wasn’t good.
Bauman: Right. Yeah, do you remember seeing the trucks come into the area?
Collins: Never saw that, no.
Bauman: No?
Collins: Most of them got out. It’s all they could do.
Bauman: So what would you like people to know about White Bluffs—because it’s not there anymore and hasn’t been for a long time—what should people--
Collins: It was a beautiful area. It was a great place for kids to grow up. Because we learned how to work. Practically everyone that came out of there was successful. My brother Ted was a car dealer, now he’s a farmer. Ray is—I gave you the information on him—is very successful. He was an officer in the military and flew training planes for the, where they shot at him with those big howitzers and stuff. Yeah, it was his job flying those planes off from the ground. He’s got bad hearing now from those howitzers going off behind him. Wrecked his hearing. Anyway, he went and got a lot of training from the military in radio. And then he got into it, and now he’s—from the letter I gave you there—he’s very influential in the electronics industry. He’s getting a very large award, he’ll be in the history books with Edison and all those people for his contribution to the electrical—you know, the radio industry. He’s invented a lot of radio stuff. I was in construction. I was construction superintendent, worked my way up to an engineer in construction. We’re all non-college-graduated. We all learned it on our own. And in the service, I had a lot of electronics school in the service, too. I went through all that in the Airforce. And got out and started studying. And I did go to college some after I was older and working. But I built a lot of projects. I built projects here, which I was telling you about. I was in charge of all of them. My area at that time was eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana for the telephone company, over all their construction projects and building construction. So we all—
Bauman: Are there any other memories about White Bluffs, or stories that you remember well that we haven’t talked about yet or you haven’t shared yet?
Collins: [LAUGHTER] There’s so many—
Bauman: That you can—
Collins: --things that I can just go on. It was just a very great community, as far as we were concerned. They moved a bunch of—the Mormons came in, they shipped a lot of them up here. They were on—the Mormon Church was supporting them in Utah, was my understanding. So they bought these farms for them. Boy, they were ornery kids. [LAUGHTER] We used to fight with them all the time.
Bauman: Oh, you know, you mentioned—I was going to ask you—you mentioned, your grandfather, the place he bought was one that had been for World War I initially, is that right?
Collins: That was the one my father bought.
Bauman: Oh, the one your father—okay.
Collins: Yeah, the ten acres. There’s a lot of those war veterans—I don’t know what happened to it. There’s a lot of that property available. And you have the listing of what they were talking about, on how you could buy cheap property? And my folks got in there and they was able to buy a little ten acre farm.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: I don’t know how much Dad paid for it, but it wasn’t a lot at the time. And they house hadn’t been lived in for a long time. And we fixed that up to live in. He had a barn on the place. And we lived there and worked and folks worked on the house. It was a small house. But we were close to the school, we walked to school, there was no school buses then.
Bauman: Right.
Collins: So we all walked to school. And then he got the chance to go up to Coyote pumping plant. And that’s the first time we was able to have—my folks went to town and they bought an electric stove and a refrigerator. And that was a big deal! We’d never had that before. We were not a wealthy family. We were lucky to have an icebox. And a wood stove, and all of this stuff. And we didn’t even have running water in the house when we bought it. We had a pump on a well out the back door. And that was even big time to us, them days. It was better than what we had before. And then when we got up to Coyote, up there, then we had all the conveniences. We had electricity, and we had—
Bauman: Running water?
Collins: --hot water in the house—
Bauman: Did you have a telephone?
Collins: Huh?
Bauman: Was there a telephone?
Collins: Telephone.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: Crank telephone. And everybody listened in. He’d crank it and everybody else’s phone would ring, and you knew what was going on in the whole neighborhood. Because everybody was on the phone, the whole neighborhood. Because they could hear you. And if you wanted to go long distance, the drug store downtown, they had some equipment down there where they could—if you wanted to make a long distance call, you had to ring the operator down there and have her connect you with where you were going at that time.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: If you wanted to call out of the area. And it was one of these old ones where they had it on fence posts or whatever they could anchor the wire to, you know. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty crude, boxes with the telephone equipment in it. Wooden boxes. [LAUGHTER] It wasn’t—but people did it. They survived. And we had an icehouse there in town—I can’t remember the name of the people. They made ice for the railroad. And you’d get ice there for your iceboxes. They were friends of my folks, but I can’t remember their name. And they had a son that lived down here. I knew him quite well, but I can’t remember him now.
Bauman: Yeah, the other thing I meant to ask you was, where did you move from? Where did your family come from before they came to White Bluffs?
Collins: Well, I was born in Zillah.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: And then we—it was during the Depression—I was born in 1930, and those were tough times. I don’t remember much about it, but I remember my folks telling me about it. We moved around in the valley doing different work where my dad could find work. He would get maybe a dollar and a half a day. That was wages then. If you was lucky! And then when he found out we could get work in Hanford—or in White Bluffs, we moved there. Because you could work for farmers and stuff, and you could get all of your stuff, you know, all your fruit. We canned all of our own fruit. We canned everything. Asparagus. We had—Mom canned everything. We lived on that. [LAUGHTER] And we probably lived better than a lot of other people. Because we were resourceful. We had a big garden. We raised a lot of stuff. We even raised peanuts here one year!
Bauman: Really?
Collins: Yeah!
Bauman: Huh.
Collins: The ground was that good. It was sandy and hot. And raised hay and started getting cattle—cows. Had milk cows, and we had all of that stuff. We had all of our meat. During rationing times, we butchered all of our own meat. We didn’t have to worry about rationing, because we had it. [LAUGHTER] So we lived pretty good. We didn’t have any money. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Yeah. But you had the farm and resources.
Collins: We had the farm, and we had food. And that was a big thing during Depression, if you had that—
Bauman: Right. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you very much for coming today, all the way out here. [LAUGHTER]
Collins: Well, I hope I’ve done you some good, I don’t know—
Bauman: Oh, this is really interesting stuff. I haven’t been able to interview very many people who lived out at White Bluffs, so—
Collins: Oh, well, I’m 84 years old, and I was just a little kid! [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Collins: But I do remember a lot of that stuff. And I talked to both of my brothers. And Ray wanted me to show you that, to show how some of the people came out of there successfully, you know?
Bauman: Sure, right, right.
Collins: And I’m sure there’s a lot of others. I’m sure we weren’t alone.
Bauman: Now where were you age-wise among the brothers?
Collins: I’m the middle one.
Bauman: You’re the middle one. Okay.
Collins: I’m the middle one, yeah.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: Ted is older and Ray is younger.
Bauman: Okay. All right. And so after you moved to Zillah, what did you do from there?
Collins: From Zillah?
Bauman: Yeah, after you left White Bluffs and you—
Collins: Went back to Zillah?
Bauman: You went back to Zillah and—
Collins: We went to school there, finished school there. And then I worked some for the telephone company. I worked around different jobs, farm jobs and stuff like that. And then I married my wife. And we couldn’t—I worked for Western Electric then, putting in the new telephones off of Yakima. And they laid all of us off, they laid I think 1,200 or 1,500 people off in one shot. So I had an electronics background and everything, but they only kept very, very selected few. I wasn’t one of them. And I didn’t have a job and I—doing some other stuff around there. And I wasn’t making any money, so I moved to the coast. I went to work at Boeing. [LAUGHTER] And I didn’t like Boeing. It was known as the Lazy B, and that’s what it was at that time. The people just—they didn’t know how to work. They drove me crazy. I didn’t have enough work to do, I couldn’t find enough work to do. We had one guy in our area that was supposed to be the biggest producer. He’d come in and we had to stamp our work. I was in quality control there and we had to stamp our work when we inspected things. I inspected on Airforce One, on the wings of that. And this guy, he would come in and check in, and the mail girl was his girlfriend. And they’d check in, he’d give his stamp to one of the mechanics, and the two of them would leave for the day. Come and check out at night. They were high producers because their stuff was just getting shoved through. And he was a buddy of our supervisor, so me and the supervisor didn’t get along. And then when he asked me to come and mow his lawn on the weekend, and I—I explained to him I didn’t do things like that. I had a family, I had four children at the time. And I wasn’t about to mow somebody’s lawn on the weekend and take care of them rather than take care of my family. I don’t care if he was my supervisor. I didn’t like him. So that was my, about the end of my job at Boeing. Then I went into construction work.
Bauman: Right.
Collins: Where I did well.
Bauman: Well, again, I want to thank you very much for coming today and sharing stories about White Bluffs and your father’s work at the pumping plant and all that. It’s really interesting.
Collins: We were supposed to someday—I was supposed to get that land back. But I don’t think that will ever happen.
Bauman: Mm, mm-hm.
Collins: I would love to have our property on the Columbia River. God, it was a beautiful piece of property.
Bauman: Oh, yeah, I bet.
Collins: All that, Coyote Rapids there. And we were going to buy Delia Allard’s place, down the river—Sam Allard’s first wife. He was married twice. I don’t know what the reasoning was. She lived down there with her son-in-law, I think it was her son-in-law. And I don’t know the whole deal there. And we were buying their farm, too, which they had a beautiful home that they built down there. Rock home, and we wanted that. But Dad was negotiating for that when the government took our land away from us, so that was gone. So—[LAUGHTER] Anyway.
Bauman: Well, thank you very much, I really appreciate it.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: This has been really interesting and very helpful. Thank you.
Collins: Well, I hope I don’t get myself in any trouble with some of this stuff I talked about.
Bauman: Oh, not too much.
[LAUGHTER]
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right?
Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—
Martin: Okay.
Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.
Martin: I believe it was earlier.
Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Not originally.
Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge.
Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?
Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications.
Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?
Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years.
Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?
Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially.
Franklin: The first name was John—
Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.
Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?
Martin: No, he’s not.
Franklin: And what about Lyon?
Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.
Franklin: What’s that?
Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Yeah, give or take.
Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue?
Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable.
Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?
Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do.
Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?
Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?
Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure.
Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?
Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford.
Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?
Martin: Oh, yes.
Franklin: Oh.
Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.
Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.
Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.
Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—
Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.
Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?
Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.
Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States?
Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.
Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?
Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall.
Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?
Martin: In the US, yeah.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site.
Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?
Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.
Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?
Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US.
Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.
Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise.
Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one?
Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.
Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—
Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.
Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown?
Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there.
Franklin: Ah!
Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too.
Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?
Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done.
Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?
Martin: Well, mainly that room.
Franklin: That room.
Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense.
Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?
Martin: 155 millimeters.
Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be—
Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction.
Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—
Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.
Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—
Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief.
Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.
Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.
Franklin: It’s okay.
Martin: Maybe I should come back.
Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.
Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well.
Franklin: Great.
Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year.
Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?
Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program.
Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working.
Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?
Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.
Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—
Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.
Franklin: Oh!
Martin: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?
Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—
Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—
Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with.
Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?
Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.
Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.
Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired.
Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?
Martin: I came back in 2001.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.
Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way.
Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.
Martin: Very interesting project.
Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?
Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them.
Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same?
Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?
Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.
Martin: Yep, that was the one.
Franklin: So you helped design—
Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: And tested.
Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.
Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.
Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired?
Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Interesting story.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?
Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that.
Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?
Martin: I moved here in ’76.
Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?
Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.
Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?
Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting.
Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different?
Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us.
Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time?
Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation.
Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask—
Martin: It did.
Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.
Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour.
Franklin: Really?
Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things.
Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?
Martin: Yes.
Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?
Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation.
Franklin: I can imagine.
Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting.
Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics?
Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: We were trying to help them.
Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?
Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.
Franklin: Okay, just curious.
Martin: I heard about it of course.
Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about?
Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job.
Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.
Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, okay, good.
Martin: But I’ll do that.
Franklin: Well, good.
Martin: We’ll do that.
Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—
Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?
Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.
Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?
Franklin: I believe we did.
Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That’s okay.
Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.
Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.
Martin: I hope so.
Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about.
Martin: Oh, okay.
Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.
Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—
Martin: Sure.
Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact?
Martin: The most lasting impact.
Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was—
Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything.
Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security—
Martin: I do.
Franklin: You do?
Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile.
Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.
Hungate: Okay.
Franklin: Great.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right?
Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—
Martin: Okay.
Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.
Martin: I believe it was earlier.
Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Not originally.
Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge.
Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?
Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications.
Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?
Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years.
Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?
Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially.
Franklin: The first name was John—
Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.
Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?
Martin: No, he’s not.
Franklin: And what about Lyon?
Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.
Franklin: What’s that?
Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Yeah, give or take.
Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue?
Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable.
Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?
Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do.
Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?
Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?
Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure.
Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?
Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford.
Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?
Martin: Oh, yes.
Franklin: Oh.
Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.
Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.
Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.
Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—
Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.
Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?
Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.
Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States?
Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.
Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?
Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall.
Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?
Martin: In the US, yeah.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site.
Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?
Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.
Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?
Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US.
Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.
Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise.
Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one?
Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.
Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—
Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.
Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown?
Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there.
Franklin: Ah!
Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too.
Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?
Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done.
Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?
Martin: Well, mainly that room.
Franklin: That room.
Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense.
Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?
Martin: 155 millimeters.
Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be—
Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction.
Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—
Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.
Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—
Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief.
Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.
Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.
Franklin: It’s okay.
Martin: Maybe I should come back.
Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.
Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well.
Franklin: Great.
Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year.
Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?
Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program.
Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?
Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working.
Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?
Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.
Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—
Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.
Franklin: Oh!
Martin: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?
Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—
Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—
Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with.
Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?
Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.
Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.
Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired.
Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?
Martin: I came back in 2001.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.
Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way.
Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.
Martin: Very interesting project.
Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?
Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them.
Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same?
Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?
Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.
Martin: Yep, that was the one.
Franklin: So you helped design—
Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: And tested.
Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.
Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.
Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired?
Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Interesting story.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?
Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that.
Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?
Martin: I moved here in ’76.
Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?
Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.
Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?
Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting.
Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different?
Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us.
Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time?
Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation.
Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask—
Martin: It did.
Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.
Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour.
Franklin: Really?
Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things.
Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?
Martin: Yes.
Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?
Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation.
Franklin: I can imagine.
Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting.
Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics?
Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: We were trying to help them.
Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?
Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.
Franklin: Okay, just curious.
Martin: I heard about it of course.
Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about?
Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job.
Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.
Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, okay, good.
Martin: But I’ll do that.
Franklin: Well, good.
Martin: We’ll do that.
Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—
Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?
Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.
Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?
Franklin: I believe we did.
Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That’s okay.
Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.
Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.
Martin: I hope so.
Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about.
Martin: Oh, okay.
Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.
Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—
Martin: Sure.
Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact?
Martin: The most lasting impact.
Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was—
Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything.
Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security—
Martin: I do.
Franklin: You do?
Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile.
Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.
Hungate: Okay.
Franklin: Great.
Tom Hungate: We’re rolling.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I’m conducting an oral history interview with Jerry Tallent on June 15th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerry on his experiences working on the Hanford site. Before we begin, Jerry, could you say your name and spell it, please?
Jerry Tallent: My name is Jerry Tallent. And that’s J-E-R-R-Y, T-A-L-L-E-N-T. And you’ll have to excuse my speech.
Franklin: That’s okay. Thank you very much. So, I guess, let’s start at the beginning. Tell me how you came to Hanford.
Tallent: I was running a D8 Cat up on Rattlesnake Mountain for a guy—a friend on the ranch. I was raised on a ranch.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: And he came to me and said, you’re the one that drives the D8. And I said, yeah. He said, I want to dig some petrified wood out of Rattlesnake Mountain. So we hauled up the Cat and I dug a bunch of petrified wood. Anyway, when we got done with that, he said, your dad’s leaving the farm. Is you gonna to run it? I said, no, I’m gonna get out. He said, I’ve got a job for you at Westinghouse Hanford in the 308 Building and you’d be working with plutonium. There it is. [LAUGHTER] I went to work for him and I worked inside 308 Lab. I think it’s all gone now, finally. The last building, they had to clean it up—clean the fuel up in it. But I worked there for about eight or nine years. And then an engineer I had, named Bobby Eschenbaum, she wanted me to come down to 305 Building, because, she said, you got a lot of brains. [LAUGHTER] That was a long time ago. [LAUGHTER] So I did. I left 308 Building and went to work for her. The pictures I got there are the stuff I designed and built. I did a lot of it back in our machine shop. I got in trouble with the machinists’ union out there. [LAUGHTER] But they ended up saying, okay, it’s a prototype and if you want any more built, we have to build it. No problem. So they patted me on the back and left, but, boy, they all showed up in force. They were after me. Because the technicians and engineering technicians weren’t union, and the metal fabricators were. So I was stepping on the metal fabricators’ toes. But then they realized it was all R&D—research and development. So they—it’s okay. And I had them build some stuff for me. We became pretty good friends, you know.
Franklin: Yeah.
Tallent: Yeah, it was after a while, I’d go into their building and—hey, how you doing? [LAUGHTER] Help me out all they could.
Franklin: Wow, that’s great.
Tallent: So that was pretty good. But, yeah, I enjoyed it. We had a couple of problems in the building. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Can you elaborate on the problems?
Tallent: Well, one of them, they sent me downtown to radiation specialists. It was—
Franklin: Was that at the time, or recently?
Tallent: No, no, that was at the time I was working out there. We worked in gloveboxes.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: And we had some plutonium from Arco. As a matter of fact, it was from Karen Silkwood. [LAUGHTER] That sound familiar?
Franklin: It doesn’t; I’m sorry.
Tallent: It doesn’t?
Franklin: No. Karen Silkwood?
Tallent: Karen Silkwood was from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: And there was a show about her. She defied them, so they—I’d get in trouble with them. So they sabotaged her and said she stole plutonium out of the building. Well, there was no way. You can’t—that stuff, if I had a can of it in here and you had a radiation detector in the corner, it’d go off scale, you know.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: So, anyway. It was a sabotage deal. Because she was—what do you call it—telling on them.
Franklin: A whistleblower?
Tallent: Yes, yes, she was kind of a whistleblower. And I said no.
Franklin: And so you had some plutonium from her?
Tallent: Well, they’d send it up here.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Tallent: And thank you for getting back on the right track. Anyway, I dealt with her, and we went to open up the can and re-can it and put it in our vault. Well, we opened up the outer can. Of course, it’s in a bag, and then another can, which is in another can. Well, we opened up the outer can, and took out the inner can, and the plastic bag looked like it had been on fire. It was burnt to a crisp around the plutonium.
Franklin: Oh!
Tallent: Yeah, that’s what we said: oh! And my lead that was with me, I looked across and I said, Bob, we’d better get a radiation monitor inside. And he said, well, we got a detector here. And I said, yeah, well, okay. And about that time, I looked across. His gloves were black. And all of a sudden, on his arms, I could see white. And I said, don’t move. Your gloves are rotting off on your arms as we talk.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: And I looked over at the door—and the alarm going off, and I looked over at the door. I had two radiation monitors standing there. They come running in with masks on, put a mask on me, and put a mask on Bob. I do have a little piece of plutonium in my lung.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: In my left lung. It’s just a tiny nodule. And Hanford, downtown, said that’s the best place to have it, is in your lung. I said, oh yeah. [LAUGHTER] But they said, no, because as soon as it goes into your lung, your body protects it from you and puts a nodule around it. So I said, okay. So it hasn’t bothered me since ‘80s and ‘90s. I’ve got COPD and emphysema. But that don’t have anything to do with that tumor that’s in there.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: Anyway, that was one incident, and then another one was just in our lab, just on normal. One of the guys that was working with us, he’s dead now. He died of cancer. One of our guys was opening up a can with a can opener. And you know how sharp the lids are. Well, he cut his glove, so he hollered for help, and I ran in with a couple of masks. You had masks always in your drawer, in a bag. If they weren’t in a bag, then you couldn’t use them. But they are always in a bag. And I tore open the bag, and put one on me, and tore open another bag and took it in, and put on him and hit the button for the radiation monitors. And they come in, and they looked in, seeing masks, and—oh boy. [LAUGHTER] So they come in, and what they do is cut the—I’m shaking. They cut the sleeve off your arms and pull them down and then cut the tape on your gloves—your gloves are taped to your arms. You got rubber gloves on. And they’re taped to your arms, so they cut that off. And then slide everything off, and leave it in the glove, and then tape over the glovebox—over the opening.
Franklin: Right, right, okay.
Tallent: So nothing gets out. And you’re on negative air. It was—you know—if I had to do it over, I’d work out there again. It’d be no problem. Can’t work there now; it ain’t there no more. But just a few minor things here and there. We’ve had a few after that glovebox. Their gloves deteriorate and fall off. We got into the habit of changing them out once a week.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: To keep them from—you get plutonium in there, it deteriorates rubber fast. And we tried the lead-lined—rubber lead-lined gloves, but they were so heavy. So you work in them for 15 minutes, you’re exhausted. So my lead and I, we threw them out and said to hell with them. [LAUGHTER] Shoved them into the glovebox and put on new gloves. Everything—nothing comes out. [COUGH] I’m sorry. Nothing comes out. Everything goes in, and then gets bagged out.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: With a sealer.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: You get a fork to pull everything, put it in a bag and then pull it out and put it on this table and it puts a seal across it—a double seal. So it was—it was safe. And then we put it in a waste—radiation waste. That’s what they’re working on out there now.
Franklin: Right, all that stuff.
Tallent: All our crap. [LAUGHTER] Well, not all ours, but—it was stored down in the basement at 308. Not many people—I don’t know if I was supposed to say that. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well, it’s gone now, so—
Tallent: If I get a bunch of Feds come to my door—[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: No.
Tallent: There was a big room downstairs in the basement that held all these barrels of waste—radiation waste. Do you mind?
Franklin: Oh, no, not at all. Take your time.
Tallent: And once in a while, a radiation monitor would grab somebody to go down the basement with them. Because they can’t go alone—a monitor can’t go by themselves. So I had—[LAUGHTER]—a lady monitor that kind of liked me a little, and she would always grab me to go down the basement with her. And we’d check them for seals and leakage. We did hit one that was leaking. So that was taped off right away, and no problem. But when we’d go to ship—that was one thing that got me. When they’d go to ship plutonium out, a black Chevy Blazer would come in, and then a truck behind it—and there’s another one I might get in trouble for.
Franklin: Oh, no, it’s all documented.
Tallent: A black Chevy Blazer would come in and then a truck—an unmarked truck—and then another black Blazer. And they’d pull up to our loading dock, and there’d be one Blazer on each side of the loading dock. And the truck’d back up to the loading dock. The back doors would open up to them Blazers, and here’s a guy or a woman sitting there with a machine gun. [LAUGHTER] And there’d be three or four people—one of them a gorgeous lady that carried machine gun. I wouldn’t want to say anything bad to her. [LAUGHTER] She had a machine gun, and she stood guard, and she was not friends with anybody. And don’t come out on the dock. The only one allowed on the dock was the one with the truck—with the forklift.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And everybody else stayed inside—or else.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: And they’d load that up, close the doors, lock it, and I said, what happens if you got hit? I asked one of the guards, because she’d come in for a drink of water, thank God. And I said, what happens if you got hit? And she said, that truck—the minute that they don’t have the code to get into that truck would fill instantly with foam. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So then it would—
Tallent: It would just be foam, instantly. And they couldn’t get it out. It’d take them a week to get to it.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: So I said, well, that’s pretty amazing. It was pretty interesting.
Franklin: Yeah.
Tallent: And, like I said, shortly after that is when I went down to 305 and started R&D on the other equipment. But I enjoyed working in the hot lab.
Franklin: The hot lab, you mean 308?
Tallent: Huh?
Franklin: You mean 308?
Tallent: That was 308, yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Hot lab.
Tallent: I enjoyed working there, but it got to the point it was just too—[SIGH]—political. And that’s as far as I’m going to go with that.
Franklin: Sure, okay. I understand.
Tallent: You had to put in guaranteed overtime. And it wasn’t for any reason. You just had to be there. Bring your cards and your Playboys. And I’m not that kind of person. If I’m there, I’m gonna work. So.
Franklin: Interesting.
Tallent: There’s another one to be after me.
Franklin: No.
Tallent: Be a bomb at my door. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I’ve heard—funny. Those stories circle around, so you wouldn’t be the—there’s no harm in sharing that stuff.
Tallent: Well—
Franklin: Oh, yeah. Please, feel free. You mentioned—the first incident you mentioned, you mentioned your guy—your lead, Bob. What was—do you remember his name?
Tallent: Bob Henry.
Franklin: Bob Henry, okay.
Tallent: Yeah, he’s long-dead now, I’m sure. He was a good old boy for a while. Then him and I got into it over this mandatory overtime. He took a week’s vacation and I didn’t work it. So he told a supervisor, the manager of 308. No more raises, no more that kind of stuff. So that’s when this Bobby Eschenbaum that was an engineer in 308 for a while, she heard about it, and she said, I need you. Come to work for 305.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: So I did.
Franklin: What year did you start at Hanford?
Tallent: Oh, boy. ’73, ’74, somewhere.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: Yeah, I left the ranch. We sold out.
Franklin: And where was the ranch?
Tallent: On the Yakima River just outside of Richland.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: My dad and his partner which owned the Richland Laundry were partners on it—Harvey Stoller. Him and his wife both got killed in a car wreck in California. It was right across from the West Richland golf course. That’s what I loved about it. When we weren’t working, I’d go down to the river and go fishing all the time. We had a heck of a bass hole down there. My mom and I, we’d go fishing there all the time. We’d go up on the upper end or down by the house. And went up on the upper end one time, and out of all things, she got a huge hit. And I said, that is one big bass! Come out of the water, it was a steelhead. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: So she caught a big old steelhead.
Franklin: Were your—where—so did you grow up on the ranch then? Did you grow up here?
Tallent: Pretty much. I lived in Kennewick for a long time. My dad worked in the shipyards, fixing them up during the war.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: And he’d be one of the first guys going in, open up the hatches of these ships all shot up, come in. And he said he didn’t like that at all. That was ugly. He left there, and then he went to—heard about the dams. He was a carpenter. So he came to Kennewick and started working on the dams.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: He went to Alaska for a short time. Thought he’d try that out, because it was good money. All he did was sit on the Cat and haul sleds off the LSTs—materials—off the Aleutian Islands. They said, don’t get down. He’d go to get down. They said, don’t get down. That’s your home, right there, you just stay on that. You’re going to be working 24/7s. So he just slept on the Cat. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: Yeah! But that didn’t—they got all the stuff they needed there on the islands, so they—he come back here and started working, building the dams. He worked Ice Harbor—constructing the dams.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Tallent: Yeah.
Franklin: And so where were you born, Jerry?
Tallent: I was born Hamilton, Montana.
Franklin: Hamilton, Montana. And what year were you born?
Tallent: ’45. 1945.
Franklin: Okay. And—sorry.
Tallent: And then we moved here to the Tri-Cities in ’47 I guess it was. So I wasn’t much bigger than a—I was a little guy when came.
Franklin: Little sprout?
Tallent: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Yup.
Franklin: And then your family lived in Kennewick until they bought the ranch?
Tallent: Yeah. My dad got—he wanted to be his own boss again. And he’d always loved farming. He farmed in Hamilton—an orchard and all that. So he knew a lot about it. We raised 350 head of Black Angus—registered Black Angus animals. And just a few pigs and sheep and that to eat. But every once in a while, we’d get a barren cow and she didn’t have no calves, so she wasn’t worth nothing. So that was her downfall. She’d end up being on our table.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: Yeah. You know, about once a year. If we didn’t need any meat, they went to the stockyards—went to the show—sale. We sold them. We sold all the male calves. He’d keep an eye out for a good-looking bull, and we might raise a bull. But most all the males were sent to sale. And then the heifers, we would keep them and put them with the new bull, so there’d be no inbreeding.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: So that’s how we lived for years, ‘til ’73 or something like that, I believe. Then that’s when I got the chance to go out to the Area. And Dad says, I’m out of here. I’m retiring. He bought a big doublewide and some property out in Burbank by his one brother and retired out there. Ended up dying. He’d worked in the coal mine in Idaho and Montana, and died of black lung.
Franklin: As a lot of coal miners do.
Tallent: Yes, sir. But he still had a good life. I mean, he was 70-something years old.
Franklin: That’s not—yeah, that’s not bad.
Tallent: No. Mom died at 88.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: Years old. And she just died of old age. [LAUGHTER] She was like me. Too damn ornery to die.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] So, tell me a little more about—I heard some weird stuff about the 308—you said the hot lab. You said that they used a can opener to open the cans. Do you mean like an actual can opener, like a regular can opener, or was it like a specially designed can opener?
Tallent: No, just a can opener.
Franklin: Like, just a—one you buy at the store.
Tallent: Had a rubber handle on it, so it wouldn’t poke a hole in your glove.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And when—it comes sealed. And they would seal them, but then they’d be in a can in a can, and they’d have the plastic bag around them. But the last can—the first can that had the actual materials in it was a sealed can. Safety is not spared.
Franklin: Right. Well, yeah, it’s a pretty valuable product. So when you went to—you went with Bobby Eschenbaum to the 305 Building. So what kind of work did you do at the 305 Building? How was that different from the 308?
Tallent: Well, there was no material down there. It used to be a hot building, years ago, before I got there. It had, actually, a reactor in it—in the basement of it, from what I heard.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: And what I understand. It had—that’s where the dismantling machine went to. It’d go clear down into that basement. It was about—probably 16, 18 feet deep.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: It was quite deep.
Franklin: So what kind of work was done at 305?
Tallent: All research and development lab. Just what them pictures show.
Franklin: Okay. Yeah, I’d love to get the camera on those pictures in a little bit so you could talk to us a little about that.
Tallent: Yeah. She said, well, we’re going to build a dismantling machine to hold the fuel driver assembly and somehow cut it open. So she gave me an endcap, and go to work. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: On the mechanism to hold it with, you know. We actually built clamps around it in two or three different areas, and they would rotate. The arms would come out, and they didn’t move, but inside the clamps rotated. So it would—and the base would turn. No, it wasn’t the base; it was the upper part. There’s a picture of the upper part. I designed the motor and had the gear built for that and put the motor on there and it worked amazing. It was great. I patted myself on the back ‘til I hurt my arms. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So for the non-real-technical people, what was the main purpose of that machine?
Tallent: The main purpose was to cut open the fuel driver assembly to get the fuel pins out. Once they’d been irradiated, they swell.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: And some of them even burst open.
Franklin: Oh.
Tallent: Yeah. Which was—aw, shucks. But they were in a hot place; they were in a cell. They would—had to design something to cut these open to get all these fuel pins out. And I cannot remember how many was in there, but there was a bunch. You got it with them pictures, you can see them.
Franklin: Yeah, it looked like a lot.
Tallent: But there were configurations. The first row would be not as many as the next row, the next row, and the next row, and then it’d go back down again. To fit that octagon or hexagon or whatever it was—six-sided or eight-sided—fuel driver assembly.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And so I was—my engineer and I, we scratched our heads, and figured it out. He was a good guy, Pete Titzler.
Franklin: Pete Titzler.
Tallent: Yeah. I don’t even know if he’s alive.
Franklin: Sounds like he would—well, if he is, he sounds like he’d be really interesting to talk to.
Tallent: Huh?
Franklin: If he is, he sounds like he’d be a really interesting guy to talk to.
Tallent: Yeah, he would be, he would be.
Franklin: So then you mentioned after—how long did you stay at 305?
Tallent: Well, it wasn’t—probably only three or four years.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: And then—
Franklin: Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Tallent: Then I went away.
Franklin: You mentioned earlier that you went to FFTF for a short time.
Tallent: Yeah, a short time.
Franklin: And you left FFTF, just because it was mostly desk work?
Tallent: Huh?
Franklin: You left FFTF just because it was mostly desk work?
Tallent: Yeah, basically it was just gonna be—one of the guys really liked it. In the picture there. He went out there, and he liked doing that kind of stuff. But I want to be the guy doing the work. I want to, you know, run the metal arms or push the lawnmower—anything. I want to do something. I don’t want to sit on my backside and write notes and tell this guy what to do and tell that guy want to do. I want to do it myself.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: You know.
Franklin: So when did you—do you remember the year that you left Hanford?
Tallent: No. In the ‘80s—early ‘80s sometime.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: You’re making me reach way back there now. [LAUGHTER] I’m a feeble old-minded feller.
Franklin: No, your recollections are great. I don’t—I can’t get to the early ‘80s myself, either. That’s because I was born then. What did you do after you left Hanford?
Tallent: Well, I worked for this one construction company for a short time. I won’t tell you his name, because he didn’t like me because I was buddy with the lead. And he didn’t like me being friends with him, so he gave me all kinds of hell, and wouldn’t give me a raise and all that. So I walked off and said, keep your company. I’m going. Well, he—the last paycheck, he wouldn’t—I was going to get, he bounced it. They wouldn’t accept it. So I had a buddy of mine that owns the tavern in Richland, Two Bits and a Bite.
Franklin: Oh yeah.
Tallent: Yeah. Yeah, he’s a good friend of mine. We lived together for a while. Anyway, he had me do a bunch of work there for him. I remodeled his kitchen for him. And then one day, this guy comes in and says, hey, Jerry. I’d met him through this other construction company. I said, yeah. He said, I got a bathroom remodel, and I can’t do it. You want to do it? I’ll give it to you. And I said, no, but you and I can do it. Well, I don’t own nothing, you’ll have to show me. And I said, let’s get to work. That was in the early ‘90s. Him and I been buddies ever since. Now he’s—I can’t do anything anymore, and he’s decided to—he takes care of all the Head Start schools around the Tri-Cities. Richard Meyers is his name. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had. He comes by—in fact he was there this morning—he’ll come by and spray my weeds and weed it and clean the filters on my fish pond, and—man, he’s just a wonderful fella.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great. And where do you live now—do you live in Richland?
Tallent: Yes, I do.
Franklin: Okay. So, let’s see here. We’ve talked a bit about Hanford as a place to work and your kind of challenges there. Is there anything else you’d like to say about working at Hanford? Is there any special challenges or rewarding aspects of your work?
Tallent: It was all very rewarding. I wouldn’t ever deny it—I’d do it all over again.
Franklin: Really?
Tallent: Yeah.
Franklin: That’s great.
Tallent: I’d do it all over again. Now, speaking of reaching back into the past for memories, I’m going to ask you about some—to do that again for me. What are your memories of any major events in the Tri-Cities, like plants shutting down or starting up, or any local events? I guess that’s kind of a two-parter, so we can just start with stuff at Hanford.
Tallent: Well, I know that all the barracks out here went away and the trailer courts on the right-hand side, they all went away after—you had all these construction guys. I’ve seen pictures of those at the DOL office, they’ve got all these guys at the dinner table, the big long tables in the barracks. I remember when Kadlec Hospital was just a barracks. Now it’s huge.
Franklin: Yeah, it is.
Tallent: And getting bigger.
Franklin: Yeah.
Tallent: It’s really a mess right now. I had to go there yesterday, and they’re making the hospital bigger, but there’s no more parking than they had. There never was no parking before!
Franklin: Yeah, I drive by there every day when I go—
Tallent: Yeah, it’s like the park down here in Richland. They built that big theater there, but there’s no place for anybody park to go to it. Oh, I’ve been here forever. I remember in Kennewick—the road to Kennewick was Columbia Drive. And that’s how you got to Pasco, was on Columbia Drive. That was the only way you could get from Kennewick to Pasco.
Franklin: Oh, right.
Tallent: Yeah. Yeah, it was. That was pretty interesting. My uncle, he also lived here. He drove bus at Hanford. He drove a bus—everybody that was working out there, he would pick up in Pasco and drive them to Hanford to work—bus driver.
Franklin: Wow! And when did he start doing that?
Tallent: Oh, gosh. I’m sure in the ‘50s.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Tallent: Yeah, ‘40s—somewhere in there.
Franklin: Did you have any other family that worked at Hanford?
Tallent: I guess my real dad worked here for a short time. I have—the man and the woman that raised me was really my aunt and my uncle. But they raised me since I was in arms. My real dad and mom was having marital problems, and they said, here, hold on to this, we’ll be right back. [LAUGHTER] And they ended up going through a big [dispute], and my real mom says, the woman that raised me, she didn’t have any kids, and I didn’t have the heart to take you back. I just met her a few years ago.
Franklin: Really?
Tallent: Yeah, my real mom. She was wonderful. I got to see my dad. I went back to a one-and-only family reunion. And it was quite a story. We were back there—my son and my daughter went with us. And—no, it wasn’t my daughter. My son and his wife and my granddaughter—she was—my daughter-in-law was carrying my grandbaby. And we went back there to the family reunion, and my real dad, he come up to me. My dad was dead—my real—the man that raised me, my uncle. And he said, your mom wants to meet you. I said, my mom? She’s dead! No, you got her confused with who I married afterwards. She’s still alive, and she wants to meet you.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: So, I got to meet my real mom. And it was a good thing, because she was well up into her late 80s.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: And she lived in Arizona, and she went back to Arizona and died, right after the reunion. But we were at this community center, having lunches and drinks and everything, and my real dad come up to me. Now, this is the first time I’d seen him in years. He come up to me and said, you drinking Rainier, huh? And I said, yeah. Oh, come up to the bar. He was drinking a Rainier. He drank Rainier just like I did. I said, that is—we never socialized together, and you drink Rainier just like me. Yep. My favorite beer. We weren’t done that. He said, how about a hard drink? I said, yeah. He said do you like Black Velvet? I said, that’s the drink I drink. So we both drank beer and the hard booze the same brands. That was just—it just drove me crazy! I said, I can’t believe this!
Franklin: Yeah, that’s really something.
Tallent: Yeah. We live clear across the country from each other and we both drink the same drinks.
Franklin: Well, you know, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree—fall far from the tree.
Tallent: Yeah, not far from the tree, yup.
Franklin: So what was it—so you mentioned you first moved to Kennewick and then you lived kind of in West Richland area. What was it like growing up from a really small child in the Tri-Cities? You know, it’s kind of a special place next to Hanford.
Tallent: Yeah, Kennewick was—Dad built the house we moved into. We had lived up above, up the hill from it. And he had this pasture—he’d always loved animals. He had the pasture below us and on the side of our property. So he decided he’d take this old concrete slab that used to be a barn and build a house. So he got that done. He’d get off work, go down and work until midnight. God, he was just—endless hours of work.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: And he got that house built, and I helped him—[COUGH]—Excuse me.
Franklin: It’s okay.
Tallent: Helped him hang the cabinets and put up all knotty pine inside—knotty pine panels. It wasn’t the four-by-eight sheets; it was the one-by-six—or half-inch-by-six. And we put up all this stuff. Made room for a fireplace and he decided he wasn’t going to put in a fireplace, so we put in a window there instead. Built that there, and I loved it there. I had a good buddy up the hill. He ended up being a Vietnam hero. We used to go bike riding all the time when we were kids and run up and down the roads and get into little trouble. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: And this was in Kennewick, or in Richland?
Tallent: Yeah, in Kennewick.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: But then Dad decided that he’d had enough of this little place. I met this guy that’s got a big ranch and he wants me to come out and look at it. And I said, well, I want to finish school here. It didn’t happen.
Franklin: So what school did you go to in Richland?
Tallent: Huh?
Franklin: What school did you go to in Richland?
Tallent: Col High.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: Columbia High in Richland the last two years. And I was a real derelict. Because I was—all my friends were at Kennewick.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: Everybody I run around with, girlfriends, boyfriends, all were in Kennewick. And I couldn’t get to hardly meet anybody here in Richland. I just—they all had their different little cliques.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And so I was kind of a loner, so I did a lot of school skipping. [LAUGHTER] I’d go to Kennewick and walk the halls with all my buddies. And then they started checking for—where you from? I was in—I went to the study hall. [LAUGHTER] Went to study hall with them. I was sitting there and talking, and all of the sudden there was a hand on my shoulder. Who’s your homeroom teacher? [LAUGHTER] Out the door!
Franklin: Oh, jeez. So what was it like to grow up in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War? Was it—did you ever have—I mean, did you know what was being made at Hanford when you were growing up, or when did you first start to realize--
Tallent: I—
Franklin: --what was going on onsite?
Tallent: Yes, I did. I did know that it was for the Manhattan Project. I never missed that show.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Tallent: That was a good series. I knew that they were building reactors and everything out there, yeah. In fact, from 308 Building, right across the driveway there was the old PRTR building, which was one of the first reactors. 309, I think it was called. And that was a gutted-out reactor. It had a round dome on it.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: We went over there and visited that, and they’d give us a tour. This is what was there, and this is where it was at, and all this stuff. It was pretty interesting.
Franklin: So what—did you ever—so you would have been—born in ’45, so you would have been kind of a kid in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. Do you remember special emphasis on the Cold War, you know? Or preparations—especially being so close to a major, you know, nuclear weapon—you know, site for nuclear weapons fuel.
Tallent: Yeah.
Franklin: Do you remember any—what was kind of—what was it like to grow up in that? Was it scary, or was it just normal, or--?
Tallent: It really didn’t bother me. It worried the heck out of my mom. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Really?
Tallent: Yeah. I guess it’s—the Korean War, she wouldn’t get away from the radio. We didn’t have TV.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: She wouldn’t leave the radio and read every newspaper while all the problems of the Korean War. And after the Korean War, I was getting close to the age. And then here come Vietnam. You’re not gonna go to Vietnam. You’re not gonna go. [LAUGHTER] I said, Mom, I’m gonna sign up. No, you’re not. And I snuck out and my buddy—he became a war hero; he was on a chopper—rescue chopper—and went down, and he saved all of his buddies. Hung them up on the—he dove down in the water I don’t know how many times. And they already had a loaded bunch of—shot-up or—you know, crew from another helicopter.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: And they were—so he lost most of them. But his pilot—his captain said that if it wasn’t for him, a lot of people wouldn’t have been there.
Franklin: Wow. And so you never went to Vietnam then?
Tallent: Huh?
Franklin: Did you go to Vietnam?
Tallent: No, because I was on the ranch, and I went to sign up with all my buddies—seven of them. You might remember Sam Francisco. You heard of him?
Franklin: No.
Tallent: Samson—Sam Francisco?
Franklin: Sam? Sam Francisco?
Tallent: Sam Francisco. He never came back. His body’s here now. His sister in West Richland wanted it back and they haven’t given it back to him yet—to her yet. But Jimmy was one of the few that made it back. We kind of—after—I signed up, but—I was a 1-A, and I signed up to go with them. And I didn’t have the brains Jimmy did to be a pilot—a Navy pilot, or on the choppers of that. You had to be pretty smart on your math. I don’t know how smart you had to be to run a gun, but—[LAUGHTER] But anyway, he got to go. And I was 1-A, and then they sent me a letter said, you’re a single son, and you’re on a farm. You’re not going.
Franklin: Mm.
Tallent: They made me a 4-F.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: So they wouldn’t take me. My mom, she was—ooh, mad at me. How come—where’d you get this? Well, I signed up to go with Jimmy to Vietnam. I told you, you’re not gonna go! [LAUGHTER] She wanted me to go to Canada or something. Don’t go! And I said, I’m gonna go with my buddies. I guess maybe it was a good thing I didn’t. Because I’d have been a ground pounder. I wouldn’t have been—you know.
Franklin: Yeah. Do you—can you describe any of the ways that security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Tallent: Well, I know you had to have a badge. I had a Q clearance, which was a top-of-the-line. I could go anywhere out there. You had to show that badge every morning, and then pass through the metal detector. If you didn’t—you didn’t get by if you had metal on you. One of the guys—his name was Arnie—he was in the Air Force, and his—he was the tail gunner. It wasn’t during the war, but he was a tail gunner, and the plane crashed. And he was in the tail. He ended up in the cockpit. And he had nothing but pins in his legs. He could walk all right; he played volleyball at lunchtime with us out on the grass. But he couldn’t pass the metal detectors. He had to have a special permit saying he had—
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Tallent: Stainless steel pins in his legs. Arnie’s something. Arnie Dupris.
Franklin: Dupris. And what did he do on—
Tallent: Huh?
Franklin: What did he—did he work in the 308 and the 305 with you?
Tallent: No. He worked in 308, but I don’t remember—I can’t tell you where he worked.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: But—no, I’m the only one that went to 305 besides that one engineer. She became a manager and ran the 305 Building.
Franklin: Bobby?
Tallent: Bobby Eschenbaum, yeah. Her husband was an engineer. And I’m not sure where he went to. He was a nice guy, too. I got along with both of them good. [LAUGHTER] Oh. Bobby Eschenbaum was a little, short lady. She held a meeting—she was an engineer—so she held a meeting out in meeting room at 308, before we went down to—so she’s like this, and grabbing the table, leaning back in her chair and talking to us, grabbing the table. Missed. Poot. I was sitting closest to her. I grabbed her dress, pulled it down, and helped her up. She was pretty embarrassed. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, jeez. That’s awesome. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford—your work at Hanford, or what the role of Hanford in history?
Tallent: Well, there ain’t no future in Hanford, except way out there now. I’d say, go for it, if you get the chance.
Franklin: No, I mean, what would you like future generations to know about Hanford? Or to—when—
Tallent: Well, it was very instrumental in winning the war.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: It shortened up the war to Japan.
Franklin: Sure. What about the Cold War? And the nuke—arsenal and things. What about Hanford’s other role, after World War II?
Tallent: Well—boy, you know, all I know is they built fuel for reactors to go into reactors—light-water stuff, the enriched uranium reactors and plutonium reactors. But—I don’t know what else I can tell you about that. [LAUGHTER] Really.
Franklin: That’s okay. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention?
Tallent: Well, I don’t know. You’re pretty thorough. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, thanks. [LAUGHTER] Emma, is there anything? No? How about could we take a few minutes and go through some of those photos?
Tallent: Sure.
Franklin: And then I can hold them if you’d like and you can make talk through them a little bit. Because those are really interesting; I’d like for the camera to see the things that you developed.
Tallent: Well, hold them up here or something.
Franklin: Okay, great. So how do we—
[NEW CLIP]
Tallent: Dismantling machine. Right there.
Franklin: And that’s you, right?
Tallent: That’s me.
Franklin: With all the hair.
Tallent: Yup, the fuzzy hair.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Tallent: I’m trying to remember what this is. This was part of the dismantling machine right there. And this turned. They would cut the top open.
Franklin: And just to be clear, the dismantling machine dismantled what, exactly?
Tallent: This. The fuel drivers.
Franklin: Okay, okay.
Tallent: It would take that all apart. This is all what’s in the reactors.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: There’s—I don’t know how many in the reactors. And we had—after they come out of the reactor, they would go in to this room. You can see down there below the concrete, this second story down there. But this would come up—this door would open, and this would come up and go in there. It’d rotate and they’d cut the top off. Boy. I don’t know what all—[LAUGHTER] But they would—here’s the steel arms that would—manipulators--
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: --that would grab ahold of it and help it. And I believe this took place so it could rotate—goodness sakes. That would rotate this guy more, instead of having to turn it by hand or something like that.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: That’s just a proof for the photographer.
Franklin: This one here?
Tallent: Yeah. That was just proofs.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: But there’s probably a picture of that. Once you’re out on the floor, you got to wear a hard hat.
Franklin: Right. This one is interesting, can you tell me what—
Tallent: That’s a glovebox there.
Franklin: So it’s supposed to be like that, right?
Tallent: Huh?
Franklin: Should be like this, right? Because—yeah, there’s the person.
Tallent: Yeah. That’s actually 308 Building. That’s the only picture I got. This was loading the fuel pellets. There’s fuel pellets in there.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: Holy mackerel. How’d I get that? [LAUGHTER] Anyway. The fuel pin is right there, and then that’s—you can see that bag?
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Tallent: That’s on the open room. So this is sealed up tight, and then I’m shoveling fuel into that fuel pin. Then you have a spring—goes in and then you plant them and then put the endcap on.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: And then it gets welded—goes over to the welding lab.
Franklin: Wow. That’s—
Tallent: Yeah. That’s a—that was—that’s not ours.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: They—that’s what they were building for Three Mile Island, but it never happened. And they were wanting us to build a better one, because that one wasn’t very good.
Franklin: Mm. And that’s just another—
Tallent: Yeah. And I said, let’s design a better one. But it never happened.
Franklin: Tsk. Right. Okay, so here’s another one here with the—
Tallent: That was going to be a one-time deal. You’d build it, and then it stays in the bottom of the Three Mile Island.
Franklin: Oh, we’re talking this thing here—this robot.
Tallent: Yeah, because Three Mile Island, that’s where they had that bad accident.
Franklin: Right, right.
Tallent: There, and Idaho Falls.
Franklin: So what’s going on in this picture here?
Tallent: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Your guess is as good as mine.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Okay.
Emma Rice: It looks like there’s those arms there.
Franklin: Yeah, we have the--
Tallent: We were getting ready to—oh, there’s a clamp. Oh, okay. That’s ready to be taken off. It’s cut at the bottom, and see that there?
Franklin: Yeah.
Tallent: That’s grabbing ahold of the assembly, the outer assembly.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And it’s starting to lift it off. This is a—you can see it’s cut open. So, it’s not hot; it’s just all—you know. But this lifts it off, and down the hole that goes, and this lifts it off and then it rotates and sets it aside.
Franklin: Mm.
Tallent: And this is—that’s what I was working on, too. So it’s a little rough, but there’s all the pins on the bottom—the bottom fuel pins. And once you lift it off, then it shoves these pins—there’s locking pins that holds all this into place, and it kicks them out.
Franklin: So here—and this is kind of that hexagon or—upside-down? Oops.
Tallent: There you go.
Franklin: There we go. So this is that formation you were talking about, right?
Tallent: Yeah, see those pins?
Franklin: A six-sided—yes.
Tallent: They’re held into place. I’m shaky.
Franklin: No, it’s okay.
Tallent: I’m sorry.
Franklin: No, it’s all right.
Tallent: These pins are holding these into place, and once they get—my brain. [LAUGHTER] Not working good. Anyway, once they get the—oh, it is off of it. This is not the fuel driver assembly; this is a canister to hold these fuel pins. Then I’m not sure after that.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: So I’m at a loss.
Franklin: That’s all right.
Tallent: There’s all the people.
Franklin: That’s you right there.
Tallent: That’s me. That’s my secretary. That’s my engineer. And these guys are—no, that was one of my engineers. His name was Steve. This was Pete Titzler. This is the one him and I got an award for designing this stuff.
Franklin: Great.
Tallent: Yeah. And he was—this guy here was—
Franklin: This gentleman right here?
Tallent: --Manager of all the other ones. Bobby isn’t in there.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: Oh, she—I don’t know. I can’t remember. She left or something.
Franklin: So here’s—it looks like another view of the arms there.
Tallent: Yeah, that’s—
Franklin: You’ve got some nice bellbottoms on.
Tallent: Yes, I had my bellbottoms. I was a hippy. On days off, I had a headband on, too. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So what are you doing here in this picture?
Tallent: You know, I was trying to remember that myself. I’m running the dismantling machine.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: I’m making it turn and go up and down on all that stuff. I never did that. They just wanted it for pictures, basically.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Just to have you pose?
Tallent: Yeah.
Franklin: Oh, I see.
Tallent: Get your hair done, and—you know.
Franklin: Yeah. So here you are again.
Tallent: Yeah. And this one was—this one was a—and they had to have room, so you had a two-story one. You had the gloveboxes down here and a glovebox down here, and you could go up to work on it.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And Greg is in there working on it. Just demonstration.
Franklin: What is HEDL stand for?
Tallent: Hanford Environmental Development Lab.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: How’d I remember that?
Franklin: I don’t know; your memory’s good.
Tallent: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That just came right off. Tell us about this photo.
Tallent: Okay, that—you tell us about it.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] You brought it!
Tallent: Oh, boy! You know, I—it’s a single pin. See, there’s wire wrapped around this fuel pin, too. That keeps them from touching each other.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: But I don’t remember what that—that was my baby, SN005.
Franklin: Right, you mentioned earlier when you showed this before that you had invented this machine here, right?
Tallent: Oh.
Franklin: Or you worked on it, or--?
Tallent: I helped invent it.
Franklin: Helped invent it.
Tallent: Yeah, I helped invent this whole—that whole guy, wherever it went to—the dismantling machine.
Franklin: Yeah, we saw that earlier. Well, I think we have maybe some of that here.
Tallent: Yeah.
Franklin: Right? Over on this side, over here.
Tallent: Yeah.
Franklin: Wow. That’s just kind of part of the crew there. Oh, no, you said this is the group of—
Tallent: Them’s the group of foreign people. The—I don’t see a Japanese fella. Maybe that’s him. But there’s French and German and they all wanted to see it work. They were all excited about it, so we had to put it on display. It was kind of a last-minute thing for me. All of the sudden, they come up to my office, my desk, and say, hey, Jerry. Come on down. We’re gonna—you’re gonna be on the show here. They filmed it all.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: And he said, we have all these foreign delegates here that want to see this thing work. And I said, oh, you’re kidding me. Get somebody else! [LAUGHTER] I didn’t want to—this is the first thing they had. This actually is an auger. And that would cut that open. And—that’s right, I—this thing is floating on air. It weighs probably 800, 900 pounds. And it’s floating on air and you can move it back and forth. But see that—those there?
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Tallent: Those are stops. These come out, and center it up.
Franklin: Huh.
Tallent: And they had to be set just right. There’s two on each side. When the machine would turn it on, these would come out and center up the machine so it’d hit it right on the corner and cut that open.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: But that’s when they said that they didn’t like that, because of all the shavings.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: It left great big chunks of stainless, and they were going to be irradiated, so it was going to have them all over the floor. So I said, okay. Back to scratching their head and finding out. That’s when I discovered stainless steel and copper don’t like each other.
Franklin: And can you tell us again how you kind of helped develop this new process for getting these open?
Tallent: Well, Pete and Steve Dawson? I think his name was Steve Dawson. Anyway, Pete come to me and said, hey. He explained to me that all these shavings on the floor were gonna be irradiated. You’d turn off the light and you’d see shavings everywhere, and they were hot. So let’s develop a method for cutting them open that has no shavings.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And he said, how about a cutting torch? They had a lot of smoke, and they don’t want the smoke. So I tried—that’s when I tried the TIG welder. Well, TIG welder didn’t do much but leave a weld on it.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Tallent: So I asked Pete. I said, what won’t stick to that stainless steel? He said, copper. Get me some copper rod. Okay. Went and got me some copper rod and I—that’s what I told you earlier, I mentioned—it just popped open.
Franklin: So you’d just weld that to the steel and then it’d—
Tallent: It bust that wide open—
Franklin: Pfft. Wow.
Tallent: It’d split. Just enough to relax all the fuel pins inside.
Franklin: Okay.
Tallent: To where they’re not—because the fuel pins would expand after being irradiated.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: And with that being busted open, it would relax it so you could—
Franklin: Pull the fuel pins out.
Tallent: Pull the—yeah. Pull this off, pull the driver assembly off, so you could get to the fuel pins.
Franklin: Wow. That’s really ingenious.
Tallent: Yeah, it was pretty cool.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That is pretty cool. So what—
Tallent: I was just—scared the heck out of me the second time I did it. Because when I used the copper, he said, well, do it again. I’ll get you another chunk. Got another chunk, and he stood right there and we were watching it and it got to the end and it just popped and jumped off. And we both jumped back.
Franklin: Wow.
Tallent: He said, you got an award coming.
Franklin: Wow. Yeah, you said you got like a $500 bonus or something?
Tallent: I got a $500 bonus, and that was quite the deal.
Franklin: That’s great.
Tallent: And Westinghouse got the patent.
Franklin: Ah, of course. [LAUGHTER]
Tallent: [LAUGHTER] Nothing—not allowed to have the patent.
Franklin: Right, because you’re a government contract.
Tallent: Yeah, that government. This was a different style of steel arm there, the manipulators. We could change them out to go to them big ones or the little fingers.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: They got little fingers on that? No, it’s got the bigger on one that.
Franklin: I think it’s the same kind of—
Tallent: Yup.
Franklin: --Steel arm. That’s another duplicate.
Tallent: That’s just about all.
Franklin: I guess we got one more left here.
Tallent: Yeah. That hippy on the left.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] So what are—what’s being—do you know what’s being—is this a glovebox in here?
Tallent: Well it—
Franklin: What’s being watched here?
Tallent: Well, it would be the glovebox looking at the dismantling machine here, and that’s through six feet of glass. And that’s just the wall—it was pretend there, but out there, FFTF, it was real. But this would be six foot of concrete with steel BBs in it. I mean lead BBs. And lead—plutonium doesn’t like lead.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: So it don’t want to go through the wall anyways.
Franklin: Right.
Tallent: But even at that, it’s six foot thick. And then the glass is six-foot thick. And looking through that all day long would drive you crazy. I mean it’s just hard to look through.
Franklin: Hurt your eyes?
Tallent: Yeah, I mean, six foot of glass. Back then I wasn’t wearing glasses, was I?
Franklin: It doesn’t look like it. Well, Jerry, thank you so much for your oral history and for going through all these pictures with us. It’s been one heck of a time.
Tallent: It was a great ride!
Franklin: Thank you so much. We’re gonna really—we’re gonna digitize all of these and we’ll have them with your—we’re gonna digitize them all and we’ll have them with your oral history. And this will, I think, really be a great resource for students and scholars.
Tallent: Yeah. No problem. You can hang on to them.
Franklin: Great.
Tallent: Just don’t lose them.
Franklin: Well, I promise you that. We will not lose them.
Tom Hungate: Rolling.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Keith Klein on February 7th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Keith about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Keith Klein: Keith Klein. K-L-E-I-N.
Franklin: Okay. And K-E-I-T-H?
Klein: K-E-I-T-H, yeah.
Franklin: Okay, great. Tell me how and why you came to work at the Hanford Site.
Klein: Well, I suppose it started as—born in the early ‘50s, and at that time, atomic energy was the stuff of comic books and intrigue and power. It was, you know—whenever the planet was threatened by alien beings, they’d always convene a meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission. So I think in the back of my mind, I always had an inkling that I’d end up somehow dealing with atomic energy. The path that got me here was actually as an Atomic Energy Commission intern in the early ‘70s. One of my assignments as an intern was out here doing FFTF construction, I think in ’73. After that, a series of assignments, most back at headquarters dealing with all aspects of the fuel cycle. Mid ‘90s, I was dispatched to Rocky Flats, and that’s where I gained experience dealing with plutonium and contaminated facilities and the work force and this kind of the field experiences as a deputy manager out at Rocky Flats. One of the obstacles to getting Rocky Flats cleaned up was getting rid of the transuranic waste. So I ended up getting dispatched down to Carlsbad, New Mexico for a six-month stint with the assignment of getting it open and recruiting a permanent manager. Opening WIPP had eluded a number of people and brought in lawsuits. There were a lot of different combination of technical issues, operational issues, regulatory, political, perception, communications issues—you name it. But I guess I impressed the secretary with that assignment, and next thing you know, he asked me to come out here to Richland. That was in 1999. So I came out here as a manager of the Richland Operations Office then and was here until I retired from federal service in 2007.
Franklin: Great. Just for those who might not know, could you say what WIPP stands for and what its mission was?
Klein: WIPP is the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, and it was the first deep geologic disposal facility in the—well, in the world, really. It’s in a geologic formation, about a half-mile under in salt beds that are several hundreds of millions of years old and have been—just their very existence shows a lack of moving water, because salt being soluble. And of course disposing of nuclear waste and particularly of things—plutonium-bearing waste, transuranic waste falls in that category. Lot of folks afraid about transportation and is it going to leak out and so forth. But the community there was actually very supportive. The scientific community was as well. But of course there was a lot of—you know, this is falling on the heels of nuclear power, a lot of opponents of nuclear power. It seemed like we’re similarly opposed to solving the waste problem. So it had some similar characteristics as the challenges being faced up here. But that was a very big deal for those of us in the nuclear waste community. It was recently shut down for some operational issues. And when it shuts down it shuts down for a few years. But it was key to emptying out this category waste called transuranic waste from sites around the country including here at Hanford and the national laboratories.
Franklin: When you came out in the early ‘70s as an intern for FFTF construction, what did you do?
Klein: Well, it was FFTF construction. Actually first assignment was dealing with electrical systems then. I was assigned to—it was a Bechtel Corporation doing work out there in the field. I was being mentored by a fellow that was actually in a responsible for the crafts, pulling wire and routing things. So you know that was all part of giving us on-the-ground experience. And this in particular was construction. Later went to a Westinghouse subsidiary that was placing the large vessels, setting the pumps and the heat exchangers and that sort of thing. It was an incredible amount of stainless steel. And quality assurance, obviously, building a reactor is very important. Had to have good records and had to know that things in fact were welded like they’re supposed to be, tested like they’re supposed to be and so forth. And it—of course—you know, then I was part of the AEC Breeder Reactor Program and I think that was what really attracted me to the Atomic Energy Commission, is the idea that a source of energy could make more fuel than it used. And it seemed environmentally benign at the time. I still happen to believe it’s one of the more benign forms of energy, but it’s obviously been beset with a number of challenges in terms of the times—and this comes back to Hanford, actually. The time it takes to do things now and the number of layers and checks and so forth. In the commercial nuclear business, time is money. And the more time it takes, the more costs. And then things getting held up in the regulatory process with interveners, it basically got priced out of the market and became uneconomical. It had also gotten very complicated at the time, and that’s another example. You start adding layers of safety and things like that, you can end up—things getting more complicated and difficult to analyze and manage and deal with. So it kind of collapsed under its own weight there for a while. But there is a new generation of reactors that are coming that are more inherently safe and simpler in a lot of respects. So I think there’s still some hope out there for sources of electrical energy that, in my mind, can be very benign.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Thank you. So you came to RL—Richland—in ’99, then, and you were the site—the DOE site manager.
Klein: Correct.
Franklin: For the Hanford unit. Can you talk about some of the progress you made in that position, but also maybe some of the setbacks as well? Because that’s during this kind of shift into this more modern phase of cleanup, right, where most of the production and reprocessing of fuels had stopped by that point.
Klein: That’s a huge topic, Robert.
Franklin: Sure.
Klein: But it’s actually one I love to talk about because it was indeed a very daunting challenge. I understand you’ve interviewed Mike Lawrence and he signed a compliance agreement out here, the Tri-Party Agreement. But then he left and left it to others to implement that and get the work done. So he made the commitments and everyone else was kind of left holding the bag. John Wagner, I think did his best to get the ball rolling, but I think during that time there was just a lot of norming and forming and trying to figure out things. There wasn’t a whole lot of on-the-ground progress. I learned a lot at Rocky Flats and at WIPP about what it takes to get work done in these kind of environments. That included both technically and in terms of dealing with the workforce and dealing with the contracts. You know, the people that do the real work here are really contractors to DOE. And depending on how the contracts are written and things are incentivized and how much—just the whole dynamic between receiving the money—you have to go out and get the money from Congress, so you have to convince them that you have a plan, you know what you’re doing, you can deliver, that you’re investment grade. And then you have to deliver, because if you don’t, the money will dry up and lots of other problems. So giving this cleanup some focus, some momentum and just making it manageable, if you will, was one of the biggest challenges. Technically, there were two urgent risks—well, there were actually three urgent risks at the time. Of course the high-level waste that I think everybody knows about. But we had about 18 tons of plutonium-bearing materials that were unstable. These were things that when they shut down after the Cold War were left in various forms: alloys, residues, oxides, pure metal. And plutonium can be very reactive and exothermic. So it really needs to be stabilized, lest your—you have some real problems. Recall high school chemistry, you put a little sodium in the water—it’s that type of thing. So dealing with the plutonium—and again, I had the experience there with Rocky Flats—was a second urgent priority. And the third one was the spent fuel that was left in the K Basins. There were about 2,000 tons. That was about 80%, 90% of the DOE inventory that was left in the K Basins. This fuel was prone to oxidizing dissolving. And as a result of that, just deteriorating. So it was losing its integrity and creating a lot of sludge on the bottom. So even the act of moving it would create these clouds and you couldn’t see. The Site had been experimenting with different things to try to package up and dry out this—and stabilize this spent fuel so it could be stored in a dry, inert, stable, stable environment. So that was a second major challenge. And then of course there’s all this contaminated groundwater underlying the Site. Billions of gallons that had been dumped into the soil. You know, the soil here is something called a vadose zone where it’s got this dry sand and gravel mixtures and then there’s—can be basalt layers under that that are relatively impermeable, and you know, the water table that’s about where the Columbia River level is. So the center portion of the Site is built up. But long story short, waste in both liquid forms and then solid forms of waste have been buried in several hundred sites around the Hanford Site. So figuring out what we’re going to do with all those waste sites and with the contaminated groundwater was another set of challenges. And then of course there were, depending on how you count them, 700, 1,500 contaminated buildings out there that needed to be dealt with. This coupled with—right when I came, a legislation had been passed setting up a separate office of river protection to deal specifically with the high-level waste and the high-level waste tanks. So part of my job was helping to get that set up and transferred. Dick French was my counterpart dealing with that. The national lab, PNNL, was also actually under the Richland Operations Office at that time, but after a couple years it was decided similarly that the office of science—you know, it’s such a different focus that it was better off separated out. And from my standpoint, these were all good things, because there’s plenty of challenges to go around. So when I came, I guess my biggest challenges were how do you help manage, mobilize, organize efforts to get confidence that you have a plan for dealing with these things. We had these regulatory commitments, but it’s people that clean these things up. It’s not paper. You can sign anything you want; it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. So this kind of comes down to contracts, understanding the workforce, what motivates them, and basically how to enable them. So my job is one of enabling. I mean, there’s so many smart people out here, it’s intimidating. And impressive and inspiring. And given the latitude, they’ll figure out how to do things. You compare when I came here it was different than it is even now, what, 16, 18 years later. But when I came here compared to like the ‘40s, a world of difference in terms of what it took to get work done. In the ‘40s, they could learn by doing, experiment, play with things, and they didn’t have to get multi layers of permission, or—they didn’t have emails or cell phones or computers. I mean, it was slide rules and hand-written notes and so forth. Which comes back to just how amazing they were. How creative and innovative. Of course, it was under a wartime environment. But contrast that, when I came here—a lot of different regulatory structures put in place—something called the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to oversee DOE. The Atomic Energy Commission was self-regulating. And when environmental laws were passed, which has led to the Tri-Party Agreement, the Department of Energy was out of compliance with a number of these national laws, like the Resource Recovery—RCRA—and the Comprehensive Environmental Liability—CRCLA. So this compliance agreement, the Tri-Party Agreement was basically—this is how DOE was going to come into compliance with these things. Of course, there’s money that’s associated with that. DOE, like other agencies, lives on an annual budget. So you can’t get multi-year appropriations; you never really know how much you’re going to get from year to year. So to make commitments hoping you’ll get the money is part of the whole dynamic of getting work done here. But back to what it takes to get work done. It’s understanding these different laws and regulations. In my mind, I was fortunate, then, that I had good relationships back at headquarters and the trust and confidence of the leadership. So I was able to basically authorize more things on my signature based on my discretion than, certainly, what can be done today. Unfortunately with problems, you get more oversight and more second guessing and so forth. So it’s kind of success-begets-success. But in any event, my focus—and before you can clean up the buildings, you have to deal with the urgent priorities first: things that can go bump in the night. And again it comes back to the top three at the time were high-level waste and the plutonium, and the spent fuels. So the focus was really on the plutonium and spent fuel until you can get these things out of the different buildings, you can’t take down the buildings, that’s—stabilizing these things more important than—you know, the ground water was contaminated. I mean, the contamination was spreading, but you had to remove the sources, otherwise you’re continuing to feed—you can continue to clean up the groundwater, but there’s still stuff coming in, then you’re just kind of halting some progression but not really cleaning it up. So dealing with these different sources was the focus. But long story short, we had some brainstorming sessions with all the contractor heads, KEA, you know, folks that were working for me—how can we make this a simple, compelling, understandable vision? Make this, our task, more manageable? And what we came up with was basically featured three things. We came to call it the river, the plateau and the future. And said, our job is going to be to transition the central part of the Site into a long-term waste management area. The central part of the Site is where the high-level waste tanks are, the reprocessing canyons, a lot of these burial grounds. I mean, we were going to be here for a long time. And that’s also the stuff that’s farthest away from the river. So if you can sort of encapsulate and stop the hemorrhaging there, then kind of in a triage approach, then, that gives you—allows you to start cleaning up the rest. The second part was restoring the river corridor. And there the idea was to clean this up as good as is practical as we could and to make it available for other uses. So these are the reactors along the river, the other waste sites, burial grounds, the areas around the 300 Area where all the research is taking place and things like that. And the third part, the future, was—I guess I viewed this whole challenge out here as one of managing change and transition. And considering that we have 10,000 folks working out here, they need a future. It’s hard enough to ask someone to work themselves out of a job, but to work themselves out of a job without the prospect of other jobs, so—and that’s not something the DOE, the Atomic Energy Commission or others had a whole lot of experience at or are very good at. We’re a scientific and technical community. And most of us, myself included, is engineers. We go into these disciplines because we like numbers and quantities and we’re typically introverts and that sort of thing. So dealing with something as amorphous as the future is tough. But we convinced ourselves it was important and we had all these resources like the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and university systems and all these smart, talented people. There’s no reason why the things we’re learning here, lessons learned and businesses that could develop around here couldn’t be provided for a good socioeconomic environment here, too. And I think the Department of Energy and its predecessors always wanted to be a good community citizen. So just scrubbing out all the molecules but leaving this place an economic ghost town is not the right thing to do. Certainly, we want to get it as clean as we can, but you want to leave the community whole. And it comes back to the sacrifices that were made here going back to the tribes and the folks that were evicted in order to do this and the people that lost their lives helping to build the facilities and operate the facilities in the early years to produce the weapons material. Certainly the communities paid a price here. So the river, the plateau, and the future was kind of our mantra, and that’s how we organized things. Tried to fashion over the years that followed contracts that did that. But in any event, what I did was I sold—as for meeting with Doc Hastings, he was the congressman at the time. Sat down with him. I remember it very well, I was still—had become a—because of Rocky Flats and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant—I had some experience dealing with elected officials and high level stuff, but it’s still intimidating. You know, it’s like, I’m a freaking engineer. So but went to him with—at his office over in Pasco and laid this out. And he liked it, and we had some very good discussions and a rapport. But he lives across the river from the 300 Area, is where his house is. So he looks down, and he can actually see a lot of these things. And of course he’s committed to the community and Hanford and he wanted to give me the best shot possible as well. And I should say, too, due to my homework before I came in here, I learned about folks like Sam Volpentest and Bob Ferguson and I went around and met them and got their ideas, perception of things, and how things work. So I think I was fortunate, had a lot of good support from different corners. Doc went to bat for us, as did the senators, for the funding. They’ve been great supporters here, appreciative of the history and the challenges that remain. We put in place contracts. I brought a contract type they used at Rocky Flats successfully that’s different than the conventional contracts that the Atomic Energy Commission was used to operating under. The traditional contracts are management and operating contracts. And in that kind of contract, it’s for a certain period of time and the contractor’s pretty much graded by how their DOE counterparts felt about how they were doing. And it was a lot of one-to-one counterparts with the contractors doing whatever DOE said at any particular time. So, it can work well when you’re in kind of a steady environment in a production mode, like churning out nuclear weapons material and operating. But at Rocky Flats what we learned is you need a lot more incentive to be creative and innovative. What worked there was having an agreement with the contractors and the contract type and the regulators about, this is the scope of work that’s going to get done, and as long as we stay within this box, basically—you know, leave us alone. And that was my philosophy in this contract that’s called a cost-plus-incentive-fee contract, CPIF, versus MNO which is a cost-plus-award fee. And the amount of money the contractor makes is tied to how well they do this tangible piece of work that you can actually see and feel. So we have an official government estimate that this is how long it should take based on our historical experience; this is how much it should cost. So every dollar you save bringing that in sooner and earlier, you get to save 30 cents on that dollar. So when you’re talking about contracts that cover, you know, five- to ten-year period, you’re talking about potentially a couple hundred million dollars in fees on the table there. Well, at Rocky Flats, what we learned is, particularly the contractors can share that with the employees, that they can get quite creative about how to do things. And they are able to learn by doing. You know, the envelope is a safety envelope; you can’t do anything unless you know it’s safe. So that’s where we focused our attention, is making sure we had a good safety basis and watching that through facility reps and other things. But basically, not trying to micromanage or giving them the freedom, as much as we could, to do things. And having a very good scope. So that’s what we put around the river corridor contract. The idea there is we’re going to blitz the river corridor. And we need this tangible progress, too, to further build confidence that we can do this. Of course, you can’t demolish buildings and excavate sites unless you’ve got something to do with the waste that’s coming out. So that comes back to things like ERDF and the different disposal grounds in the middle of the site—the energy—Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility—huge facility in the center of the site. So this whole thing becomes a huge chess game of sorts where the different pieces are the money and the contracts and the people and the labor agreements and the different technical pieces that have to fall in sequence before you can do things. And in some way, the icing on the cake is actually taking down the buildings. Because by that time, you’ve had to take the materials out. And you can’t take the materials out unless there’s something you can do with them. So whether there’s plutonium and having the equipment in place to stabilize them and then package it and put it somewhere. That’s basically the plan we had: the river, the plateau and the future. And I think the results, I’m pretty proud, speak for themselves. We packaged up all that spent fuel, got it off the river, from out of the K Reactors into the central part of the plateau. We got all the plutonium stabilized. And that ended up being able to—my successor able to ship that actually offsite to Savannah River. And put in place the river corridor contract, which I think has been pretty widely acclaimed and recognized as being successful. And it meant a lot of good things are happening. The folks dealing with high-level waste and the Waste Treatment Plant I think have had some different kinds of challenges and still dealing with a lot of that. But I think you see excellent progress on the rest of the Site.
Franklin: I was wondering if you could speak about the challenge of vitrification as a—I mean, it’s a proposed way to isolate and deal with the waste and it’s been successful at other sites, but seems to have hit snags at Hanford.
Klein: Well, this was not my territory.
Franklin: Okay.
Klein: I know a fair amount about it, so I’m tempted to give you opinion. But I did not have responsibility for that, and so—Kevin Smith is the current Office of River Protection manager and he’d be a better one to talk to about that. But vitrification in general was a form preferred by the state and others for stabilizing some components of the waste out there that’s very highly radioactive. It’s interesting—back in the day, some of the components in these tanks that generate the most heat are strontium and cesium: fission products, versus the actinides. The actinides being plutonium, uranium, those type of things. And there’s not a whole lot of that in this high-level waste. But in the old days, they started taking out the cesium and the strontium so the tanks weren’t generating as much heat so they could put more waste in. And we put—before my time, they put the strontium and cesium into capsules. And they’re stored in a water pool up—attached to one of their processing facilities and that was under my purview. Now the process moving that to dry storage. And I only say that because, you know, in my mind, there are alternative forms for managing these different wastes that they can be used. And with fission products, 30-year half-life, rule of thumb is if ten half-lives—these things reduce to a millionth their radioactivity or less, 10-6, and basically are innocuous at that time. So thirty years, half-life of ten years, that’s 300 years. In geologic time, that’s nothing. So do you really need geologic disposal for things with fission products with 30-year half-lifes? And if you don’t need geologic disposal, do you really need to vitrify the wastes and put them into these glass waste forms? I mean, basically what’s attractive about glass is it’s not as susceptible to dissolution and water and dissolving. So things can stay pretty much contained, is the thought. But even these high-level waste logs, they’re just going into dry storage anyway. You know, I’m a proponent, I guess, for a lot of these different wastes, that dry storage, I think, is the most economical, efficient, and—I think there’s a reasonable chance our civilization will stay intact for 300 years. You can put these things in dry storage casks and things like that, they’re basically tamper-proof and they cool themselves. It’s just keeping people away from them. I mean, I can talk more about vitrification if you really want, but like I said, it’s really not my bailiwick.
Franklin: No, that’s fine. So you said your three major challenges were dealing with high-level waste, dealing with unstable plutonium-bearing materials and then the spent fuel.
Klein: High-level waste was assigned to the separate office, so that really wasn’t my—
Franklin: Oh, okay, so—
Klein: --biggest challenge. So it was plutonium and the spent fuel were the two urgent priorities. But the third is really getting on with the cleanup and giving the whole cleanup some momentum and direction and some legs.
Franklin: What do you see as the future of Hanford? Because the focuses of the river, the plateau and the future. And the river and plateau seem to have these concrete goals applied to them. The future does seem harder to diagnose or kind of see, because eventually there is an idea that cleanup will be performed. And then so what do you think the future of the Tri-Cities holds after the danger’s mitigated?
Klein: Science, technology, engineering and math. I think this is, at its heart, a STEM community. And I think that we are very well-suited to grow that identity. We have a great STEM education that’s getting recognized nationwide [UNKNOWN] leading that. We have, I think, STEM employment opportunities. One of the things—my interests after retiring is running something called Executive Director Tri-Cities Local Business Association. And it’s looking at helping build local businesses with a high-tech nature that can help accommodate transition of employees. I’ve been active in promoting provisions in the DOE subcontracts that encourage the prime contractors to contract out more and better pieces of work to companies. So, I mean, I think there’s always been a good support for small businesses, but oftentimes that can be for janitorial supplies or this little thing, that little thing. There’s basically a huge workforce embedded—we call it in the fence—that does a lot of these other things. I’d like to see more, bigger, better chunks of that work able to go to local businesses that can then use that to develop their resumes. I mean, they’re highly incentivized to perform if—one, this is their backyard, their neighbors; two, you don’t get invited back to the party if you don’t do well. And they’re small and they’re very manageable. I think it would be very efficient. We have a number of examples of companies that have grown out of Hanford business or out of PNNL inventions or the expertise that people develop here that’s applicable to environmental challenges around the globe. So I think capitalizing on the lab and its high-tech things they do. We have BSEL right here and WSU Tri-Cities is a good example of kind of the collaborations. But PNNL is in a number of different sectors, and so the leveraging that more to help grow STEM businesses, employment opportunities, research opportunities I think is good. You’ve got the viticulture and the science of wines that is, I think, grown appreciation. Tourism, things like the Manhattan National Park, where people will come and see and appreciate the remarkable things that were done here. And the consequences, good and bad. But I mean it’s just—the stories to be told, people come here from around the world, I think, to see firsthand B Reactor and learn more about what that meant, what it took to get there. You’ve got the Reach National Monument, you have Ice Age Floods. There’s even STEM tourism. So you’ve got STEM education, STEM employment, STEM entrepreneurship. STEM tourism, I think, could really change—when people think of Hanford, instead of a stigma and high-level waste, oh my god, and the images that are conjured up there, I think are somewhat overblown. But instead of that, thinking of Hanford as science, technology, energy and math. This is the place to come to start a business, to get experience, to find good, smart people. I think it would do a good service for the community. And I think the national park would be one of the crown jewels in terms of STEM identity.
Franklin: Great. Speaking of high-level waste, has most of the danger been mitigated, to your knowledge, of the waste that’s out onsite? Or where—yeah, that’s my question.
Klein: The urgent risks have. I think, for the most part, the High Level Waste Tank have been interim stabilized, which means they’re—most of the things that are a threat of getting out and leaking, they basically got as much water, liquids, out of them as is possible in the single-shelled tanks. Leaks there, without a source of water, something to drive it further down into the water column or out, is mitigated. Double-shelled tanks are getting old and, of course, that’s a—had some leaks there. But even there, they’re double-shelled, so you can detect it and they can be emptied. Of course running out of space there. But the problem with nuclear waste, again, is until you know what you’re going to do with it, you can end up just moving it around. So the idea is you really need to put it in a better form and move it to someplace where it can be more easily managed or basically almost be semi-maintenance-free. We put a lot of stock into deep geologic repository, Yucca Mountain, that’s what we need to manage this high-level waste. But as I said before, I think, a lot of these can be managed quite safely for as long as may be necessary in dry storage still. So in terms of urgent risks, I think they’ve been for the most—mitigated. Now we’re dealing with more chronic, the longer-term risks and there, I think it’s a matter of being smart and getting a more productive. I think the red tape and the bureaucracy and the second-guessing, it’s almost become like a spectator sport with all the different oversight agencies and folks that are from King 5 over on the west side that seems to—and others, they’re really just focused on I’d say the things that can scare people or that might reflect badly on here but without appreciating it, I guess. I mean, there’s—yeah, there’s some mistakes that have been made, are being made, but the bulk of the people here that are good-hearted, well-intentioned, hard-working—you know, we live here, we drink the water here. If something was acutely dangerous, we’d know and we’d be able to deal with it. So I think things here are a lot safer than we appreciate.
Franklin: Do you find that, in general, the public is misinformed about both the nuclear materials production process but also the waste and the dangers of nuclear waste?
Klein: I would say, for the most part, the general public is apathetic about it. That there are segments of the public, the media, and others that—with different agendas, whether it be attention or profit or others, that put their own slant on it. But I think that with each new generation of people and understanding the atom that things are getting better. With radiation, you can measure it. It’s very easily detectable. Unlike gasses and chemicals and other things. We as a society put up, well, what are you going to do with the waste? Well, you look at the volumes of waste that are being involved and so forth, it’s really small. But we don’t seem to ask that same question about carbon dioxide and some of these others, yet we’re perfectly content to continue driving our cars and so forth. So I think there is a lack of perspective on these things. In some ways, it’s—the attention to them is important because they’re not going to just go away on their own. I mean, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done and we need to have the resources to do it, and it’s kind of the squeaky wheel gets greased when it comes to budget things. But on the other hand, those things can get out of hand. So I don’t know what the public thinks, but I do have—[LAUGHTER]—I guess I’m an optimist at heart and think that each generation, like I said, is going to be smarter about—you know, what are the real hazards of these things and what really makes sense in terms of dealing with it? But one of my concerns is the less productive, the more inefficient we become: people with hands-on experience are retiring or dying. We can’t afford to lose that expertise. So I’m very much in favor of getting on with these things while we have these people around that know their way around and can deal with these things. Otherwise, we’re going to be wringing our hands and analyzing everything to death and actually doing less work. So that’s one of my biggest fears about all this stuff getting stretched out and prolonged.
Franklin: When you were—it was eight years you were head of—for eight years you were head of DOE RL. How did you deal with the critics? Hanford detractors or critics of the cleanup operation. Were there protests in Richland? I know Mike Lawrence talked about protests, and I’m wondering if you—how did you deal with either the protests or media scrutiny of Hanford?
Klein: You have to develop a thick skin. I mean, it still hurts. You feel it personally, you feel a disservice to all the folks that are working out here, putting their heart and soul into this. They get maligned so easily. How do you deal with it? It grates on you. It just kind of contributes to the stress. But it’s like, we’re all people with feelings and it’s—but the media typically focus on what’s going wrong and what’s sexy or what’s—get people’s attention, either sell viewership, readership, whatever. It just comes with the territory.
Franklin: Interesting. Thank you. Do you—you mentioned something pretty interesting a few minutes ago and I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on it. I understand that you probably don’t have an intimate—you might not have an intimate knowledge of the oil and gas industry, but do you feel that the nuclear industry has more unfair restrictions on it than oil and gas does in terms of energy production? Because you mentioned that oil and gas production, people don’t think about their emissions from their car the same way they kind of get this emotional response to nuclear energy. And certainly oil and gas producers don’t have to plan for 50, 100, 3,000 years into the future for the byproducts of the product they sell. I’m wondering if you could ruminate on that a bit more, or if you feel like there’s an undue burden on the nuclear power industry that’s not on other forms of energy.
Klein: I do think it has suffered unfairly for a number of reasons. Some of which I touched on before. I mean, I’m all for renewables, but I think they can only go so far. And it’s about the economics. I think the strength of our country is a lot about our economy. If you have cheap natural gas or—you know, the regulations on coal don’t take into account the cost of these different emissions, whether it’s CO2 or others, then I think those penalize the alternatives. Things like solar and wind have gotten tax breaks and different credits that I think have helped them come to market. Now you can get very inexpensive solar cells and things. And like I said, I’m all for using those where it makes sense. But from my standpoint, I think there’s still a need for some baseload. I think regionally distributed baseload, like small modular reactors, makes tremendous sense. So that you don’t have these vulnerable interconnected, largescale grids, but local communities could live on that, I think. In some areas of the world, they’re able to use the bypass, the residual heat, for steam, home heating and others. So I think, you look into the future, I think there could still be a very useful role for clean, safe, nuclear power without it being stymied by what about the nuclear waste? I think that can all be managed very well. So for future generations, I think—reducing dependence on fossil fuels and making the renewables—and I would consider nuclear power a renewable source—there’s lots of energy in those big atoms. It can and should be economical.
Franklin: Great.
Klein: If we get out of the way.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I’d like to switch topics to the historic preservation angle of your work. And I’d like you to talk about your involvement with preservation and saving of B Reactor from—and where you started. I know it was originally scheduled to be remediated and that was postponed and then eventually, I think due to pressure from B Reactor Museum Association and other groups, it gained a different kind of status, landmark status and things. I was wondering if you could talk about your role in that effort.
Klein: Well, you know, nine different reactors operating here along the Columbia River—really, nowhere else in the world is it like that. B Reactor being the first large industrial scale reactor in the world. The DOE office, back under the Office of Environmental Management. And their job is to clean up. DOE does have an historian. So you have a bureaucracy that’s basically goal in life is to remediate these sites and facilities and get the liabilities down, the mortgages down and so forth. There’s a lot of pressure to do that. We’re on a course of cocooning these various reactors, putting them into cheap-to-keep mode where basically you’ve removed all the ancillary facilities and reduced it down to a core building and sealed that up and basically [UNKNOWN] that went through all the regulatory processes. If we seal these up, put these into a mode that’s good for 50, 70 years, keep the critters and people out, and have monitors in it and then we’ll come back and the radiation levels will further decayed by then. And we can dispose of these, finally—these graphite blocks and cores. So we’re on a roll in terms of cocooning these reactors. But the—I guess the people—and you can’t help but work at these sites or go out to these facilities and not be in awe of the magnitude of what was accomplished out here from an engineering and scientific standpoint. I mean, to me, it was just remarkable and first time I went out to B Reactor, it—like most people, as nuclear engineers, it’s kind of like Mecca. It strikes you and it just—really, it just hits a chord emotionally. And certainly the folks at BRMA, the B Reactor Museum Association, and others felt—knew that. I think they were instrumental in raising some community consciousness about it. I had a person on my staff, Colleen French, who is now running the national park, who is communications, and she and I, basically, strategized as to how can we stop this freight train from running over B Reactor, considering that I had a mandate to proceed, basically, and cocoon it like the others. Folks on my staff, to be honest with you, were split. There were some people that saw it as an asset and others not—it’s a liability. Come on, get on with it. I lean towards the wanting to preserve it, and I guess, feel guilty almost taking it down. So Colleen and I strategized as to, how do we give this the best shot possible? So we went back and met with the DOE historian and talked to some others, and basically were able to prepare some memorandum decisions that said that at a minimum, we should give this more time and think this out. At a maximum, we should just bite the bullet and preserve it and do what we can and try to be careful. I mean, you can only spend money for things that—it’s government money. DOE goes to Congress, it’s appropriation and it’s money to x, y, and z. It’s illegal to use it for r, s, and—you know. It’s for this purpose and this purpose only. So it started with, I guess, working with the DOE system and other laws and rules that say, you know, under preservation—there are some preservation responsibilities and others and exploiting those to create room to keep it open until folks could get a better sense of, in general, just the role of the Manhattan Project in history and DOE’s role in preserving that, and working with other institutions, the Park Service and others to formalize that. And of course Park Service is struggling with their own—they don’t have enough money to take care of things they already have. So you get into that whole realm of things. But at least we were able to stop the bulldozers, if you will, or the momentum—the cocooning momentum, at least for B Reactor. Potentially with even T Plant and some other things. And I really give Colleen a lot of credit with how hard she worked, too, to help us put together that strategy and create that opening or stay of execution. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Did you encounter resistance in Washington, DC for—
Klein: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: --for this idea? How did you overcome that, to help to show people the value of this?
Klein: Well, I guess, fortunately, I had enough—what—backing and credit or chits that I could dissent, disagree with my management agreeably and get things elevated to a higher level. So it was, I think, agree to disagree. And I credit with my management back in DC in the Office of Environmental Management with how they dealt with it too. And letting higher powers basically decide this, with the help of the historian and others. And I think that’s—you know, the other thing that I did is I listened to Skip Gosling. Clay Sell was the deputy secretary at the time. He was a history buff.
Franklin: So you say at the time, which—what time was this?
Klein: This was at the time when we were struggling with, how do we legitimize preserving B Reactor?
Franklin: Do you know around what year or years this would have been?
Klein: I’m going to guess it was 2003, 2004 timeframe.
Franklin: Okay. Sorry to interrupt.
Klein: Yeah, no, I just—so much of this is a blur in terms of who was where when. You start dealing with DC, it’s like—[LAUGHTER]—all look alike after a while. You know, I can come at it from different angles, Republicans, Democrats, you know, different folks’ emphasis and so forth. So I’m having a hard time recalling who exactly that was. But I remember Clay Sell and I can easily get back to you on when that was.
Franklin: It’s okay. I was just trying to get a general sense. So you said Skip Gosling?
Klein: Skip Gosling was the historian that we were working with. Clay Sell was the Deputy Secretary of Energy that was a history buff and who, I think, just, in the end, prevailed and was a decision-maker that enabled preserving this and working with Park Service. Colleen and I had a few different trips back to DC talking to these people and encouraging them—I hesitate to use the word lobbying, because it means something very, very particular, and we weren’t lobbying Congress; it was really within the Department. Although we had, certainly, allies, I think, with Patty Murray and Doc Hastings and others who, again, appreciated the Hanford history and what was done here and its significance.
Franklin: Did the Hanford collection—the array of historic objects and artifacts gathered from Site—was that part of your—what you were in charge of when you were heading the DOE or was that a different—
Klein: No, it was—I mean, that was under my purview. And we certainly had staff. But I must confess that of all the alligators that were surrounding the boat, that was the least of my—it wasn’t high up. I mean, that wasn’t—just too many other things were chomping at me and having to deal with. But I always felt comfortable—I mean, when you get in these positions, you kind of look at what your people are doing and you trust them in doing the right thing and you try to set a tone and direction and values and that sort of thing. So I was very fortunate—we have a very competent staff in environmental analysis and preservation, conservation. Paid attention to the different rules and governing those things. And they took care of it. They were, I think, good stewards.
Franklin: Great. How did you become involved with the REACH Museum?
Klein: Ah! At first it was as an ex oficio member of—it was called the REACH Board at the time. I think Colleen actually suggested it to me and them and set that up. I mean, it was an easy fit for me. As long as I was with DOE, I couldn’t be an actual member of the board. So the job was more of advisory and helping them. Of course, by that time, I think my feelings were well known that I did have a soft spot for appreciating the heritage here. Even predating the Manhattan Project, going back to the basalt flows and then the Ice Age Floods. There’s something very special and unique about this area, both the land and the people. And it’s those circumstances and things that gave rise to—I mean, the geology and the setting here is what gave rise to this being a great location for the Manhattan Project and the plutonium production mission. Which in turn brought all these incredible people here and formed a national laboratory that’s self-sustaining and a wonderful thing in its own right. And now lands are getting turned over to the port and being made available for other uses. I think it opens up opportunities for the tribes. But anyway, so the REACH was an easy fit for me to get involved in. And I’m proud to say I’m still—now I’m one what’s called the Foundation. It’s how the management structure of the REACH is set up. But they’ve overcome some very big hurdles. But I think the fact they have is—it’s meant to be, and it’s going to grow and prosper. But we still have some heavy lifts.
Franklin: Okay. Is there—sorry. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford? Or just Hanford in general?
Klein: I guess I’d like future generations to appreciate both the sacrifice and the significance of what happened here. That goes back to the tribes and what they sacrificed to what the early settlers that were evicted sacrificed, what the men and women involved in the construction, design, that relocated out here sacrificed, and the significance being with what was done. I’m still in awe. B Reactor up and running from nothing to up and running in 18 months, come on! I mean, it’s just—without computers and slide rules. These were adventurers, technologically, engineering, scientifically, and even management-wise. People come together. And at the same time, this is all under—because of threat of war. And creating something where people came and did this remarkable thing and have it used to kill people. There’s so many conflicting things about this to be learned so we don’t repeat the lessons of the past, yet showing what we’re capable of doing when we do come together with enough motivation and incentive and liberties. It’s just remarkable. So it’s a tough one to answer, what do you want people to remember? I just hope they appreciate the whole thing. The sacrifice and the significance.
Franklin: Great. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention?
Klein: I feel drained. [LAUGHTER] If there’s something in particular that you’re interested in. Yeah, no, I just feel like I’ve been spouting out all over the place here.
Franklin: No, it was great. You really touched on a lot of really pertinent topics and it’s really nice to have your interview next to Mike Lawrence—you know, just this kind of documenting this post-production change. I think it’ll be really crucial to help people figure out—this is all part of the same story, and how people figure out, okay, what happened when that singular mission was kind of over, and how did this place kind of find its identity after that, that the whole mission had changed. So thank you. And thank you for talking to us today.
Klein: Well, I’m just—it comes back, like the STEM identity. I’m just hoping and optimistic that we can have a future that’s as distinctive and worthy as the significance of our predecessors did out here. Because it really changed the world, when you—it really is mind-blowing in a lot of respects. I’m just grateful to have the opportunity to be a little part of that continuum. Yeah, the fastest eight years of my life. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well, thank you, Keith. I really appreciate it.
Klein: Yeah, you bet, Robert.
View interview on Youtube.
Northwest Public Television | Silliman_Ken
Camera man: I'm recording.
Robert Bauman: All right. So I'm going to get the formal stuff out of the way first, and then we’ll talk. My name is Robert Bauman, and I'm interviewing Mr. Ken Silliman. And today is July 2nd of 2013. Interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking with Mr. Silliman about his family's history about growing up in Kennewick and about his memories of the area and the impact of Hanford on the area and so forth. So Mr. Silliman, I'm going to start by just asking you to talk a little bit about your family and how and why they came to Kennewick.
Ken Silliman: Well, my mother's family was Case, and the Cases came in 1894 to the state of Washington. They came to Goldendale and then down to the Prosser area. And my granddad homesteaded then on Rattlesnake. When my mother and dad got married in 1914, Dad farmed a section of Grandpa's land for a year. And then he went out to the Weller Ranch and leased that. And he farmed that I believe until 1928 as close as I can figure. Couldn't afford to farm any more on dryland wheat on Rattlesnake, so he eventually took a job at Farmers Exchange. And that's how we got down to Kennewick. And then bought one of the partners out in '34 and the other one in '43, and we've had it since then.
Bauman: Okay. And so you moved into Kennewick in the 19--
Silliman: 1930.
Bauman: 1930, Okay. And then you were born in Kennewick?
Silliman: Yes. My brothers were all born on Rattlesnake. I was born in Kennewick in 1931.
Bauman: Okay. And what sort of memories do you have of Kennewick as a young boy growing up? What sort of community was it like? What sorts of things did you do for fun?
Silliman: Well, it was a very, very small town. Even in 1940, it was probably a little under 2,000 people. If anything happened in town and you got in any kind of trouble, well, your parents already knew about it by the time you got home. I learned to swim in the Columbia River and the irrigation canal there. Kennewick was very small. 10th Avenue was the boundary line of it on the south, Olympia on the west, and just past Gum Street on east. So there wasn't much town here.
Bauman: And so was it mostly an agricultural area then?
Silliman: Definitely, definitely ag. Both fruit and dry land wheat. Dry land wheat controlled a lot of the money that was spent in the area in that.
Bauman: Okay. I want you to talk about Farmers Exchange a little bit. I know your--was it your grandfather or your father who bought part of the business?
Silliman: My father.
Bauman: Your father.
Silliman: Yeah. Carl Williams and Alfred Amon, who were two dryland wheat farmers, started it either in '23 or '24. I can prove both dates there. [LAUGHTER] They came in towns, started--Alfred was mayor in Kennewick four different times. I believe it was in four different decades. And Carl Williams I believe was one of the trustees for WSU a period of time there.
Bauman: And so initially, what sorts of things did Farmers Exchange do?
Silliman: Well, it started as a livestock trading outfit. Trade horses for pigs or chickens for cows or just whatever you wanted to trade there. And then they got into the feed business a little bit to feed their own livestock and to sell a little bit. Got into garden seeds just a little bit. They were located right behind Washington Hardware on what at that time was Front Street. It's now Canal Drive. And our livestock pens were between us and Washington Hardware. They finally decided that, the city did, they did not want the livestock there a half block off Kennewick Avenue. So we moved our livestock down to behind Church's Grape Juice there on some leased land. And then when that Dad bought Alfred out, the last partner in '43, he couldn't go out and trade livestock and run the store, too. So we did away with the livestock at that time. Other than we still given into chickens, and rabbits, and wild turkeys, and things like that yet.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So did you help out at the store when you were growing up?
Silliman: Oh, sure. I worked the store. I was small for my age, so I didn't start right away there. And at that time the feed was all 100 pound bags except for wheat. It was in catch weights, which was just whatever would fit in the bag. It could be 125, 130, 120 there in that. Yeah, I worked there as a kid. But when I say how long I've worked there--which is 59 years--I don't count when I worked there as a kid because I probably wasn't worth much.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Silliman: But also of course we know we worked in the orchards there. So we cut asparagus after the war started. They let us out early. They started school late so that we could go out and cut asparagus in the morning. Then we'd have to go to school some on Saturday to make up that time.
Bauman: Hm. Interesting. So what was school like in Kennewick in the 1930s, 1940s?
Silliman: Well, it changed considerably from the '30s to the '40s. They built the new high school in Kennewick in '36. And the first graduating class was '37, one of my brothers that I was later in business with was in that class. And I started first grade in the fall of '37 there. But very, very small. You knew everybody until about '43. Then things went nuts. People have asked us, didn't we resent all of a sudden, the class was just being overflowing and having to use extra rooms and storage buildings and stuff like that. We didn't think about that too much. Just more kids to play with. And a lot of those kids that came in the '40s are still my very, very close friends.
Bauman: Growing up, do you remember any community celebrations, picnics, 4th of July parades, any of those sort of community events?
Silliman: Oh, yes. We're right on 4th of July right now. And they always had a big to do it at the Keewaydin Park there. The Brandland wheat farmers would normally maybe make one round around outside of their field to make sure their machine was working. Then they'd take a break and come to the to-do downtown here. And then right after that, they'd usually start harvest there. Then there was the Gape Festival in the '40s I would guess, '46, '47. I remember that one specifically. They had two different entertaining groups. They had Spike Jones here and Jack Teagarden. And when Spike Jones sent them their contracts, there was two different contracts. And there were different amounts of money. So they took the cheaper one. So he put on the same show for three days in a row. That was right in the street there in the 200 Block on Kennewick Avenue. But some of the other Grape Festivals were held up around Keewaydin Park in that. We used to have rodeos up where the high school, Kennewick High School is now in there.
Bauman: And so you were born in 1932?
Silliman: '31.
Bauman: '31. And so you, when you were growing up, in the Great Depression, did you have a sense that there was an economic depression going on? Or as a young kid, were you not really fully aware of this?
Silliman: I probably wasn't fully aware of it. We had a great big garden. We had a couple milk cows. We had chickens. We were pretty self-sufficient there on it. I got a new pair of shoes usually the start of school, new pair of overalls. So I was doing fine, yeah. Probably the folks were having to scrape and stoove for it.
Bauman: So going back to talking about the Farmers Exchange a little bit more, you mentioned that your father was partners with--
Silliman: He went to work for Carl and Alfred. Then in '34, he bought Carl out. And he and Alfred then were partners until '43 when Alfred wanted to go run his cherry orchard. And so Dad bought him out there. Things were simpler then. They wrote the contract with an indelible pencil and half a piece of paper and tore the bottom half off. And I still have that contract.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Didn't have a roomful of attorneys there--
Silliman: [LAUGHTER] No, no.
Bauman: --to do the contract. So you mentioned one thing you noticed when, at some point, in the 1940s, suddenly there were a lot more students in schools in Kennewick. I wonder if you could talk about any other changes you noticed or impact the Hanford site on the town of Kennewick?
Silliman: Well yes, there was a lot of things. Avenue C went from the Old Grain Bridge to Benton Street and then as Columbia Avenue down to the river. And that was houses, basically. All of a sudden, any space that had a place where you'd put a trailer or any building that you didn't have rain coming through it was rented out. I remember one time, I think it was in '43, that we lived at 603 North Everett which was down by the river about half a block off the river. And we were out in the yard on a Sunday. This car drove by several times, a little coupe with a man and woman in it. And finally the man got out and came and said, do you know any place we can rent a bed and bath there? We've lived here for a week just in our car and we just can't find anything. My dad said why don't you sit down and have some iced tea. And I'll call around, surely I can find something. He came out about a half hour later and said you're right, there just nothing for rent in Kennewick. He said you might as well stay with us until you find something. And they lived with us for about a month. He was an engineer from the East Coast and his wife.
Bauman: Right, so it impacted your family directly, at least--
Silliman: Oh, yeah. And the schools and everything else there. The road, when the workers would come home there at quitting time, the roads would be so full you couldn't even get on Columbia Avenue and that. I remember Newman's Grocery, finally they had—most of the groceries closed at 6 o'clock. He started a second grocery on the corner of Benton and Kennewick Avenue. It was a cash and carry rather than a charge and fill your order for you. But he had stayed open late so the Hanford workers could get back and get some groceries there. Entertainment, I remember the folks would take their car over Saturday sometime and park on Kennewick Avenue, leave their car there. And then they'd go over in the evening and people would walk down street and visit. And women would sit in the cars and men would walk up and down the street and visit to different guys. It was a different time.
Bauman: You mentioned more students in school. Were more schools built then?
Silliman: Well, not right away. My favorite thing to do as a little boy was to go with my dad when he was trading livestock. And he'd go to Wallula, or Pasco, or Connell, or Benton City, or Richland. And I always had to ask him, when we crossed the river, whether we were going into Benton City or Richland because they were both very, very, very small towns there. I think Richland had a store in it run by John Dam, if I recall right. And his daughter was our sixth grade teacher there, Geri Dam was her name.
Bauman: So you did occasionally—you did go to the other towns sort of in the area at times?
Silliman: Oh sure. We came up to football games. Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland--Pasco and Richland kind of fought back and forth. Pasco of course was a railroad town and that. But we had friends in Pasco and we had friends in Richland. And we competed against some of them there.
Bauman: Mm-hm. So any other changes or ways that the sort of significant growth seemed to affect Kennewick at all, if you can remember? Obviously it changed some of the business practices. They stayed open later, at least—
Silliman: That grocery store did. Yeah, mm-hm. Things were just chock full. Everything was chock full. For instance, there was a place called Camel's Cabins right at the base of the old Green Bridge. And I've heard stories that at times, he had some CCC camp type places there with boards up about four foot and then canvas over the top. He rented those for eight hours at a time. You moved in, ate, slept, got out so the next family could come in there.
Bauman: Wow.
Silliman: So like I say, everything was just chock full.
Bauman: Right, right. Now, do you remember--so you were born in '31. So you were about 12 years old in '43 when the Hanford project started. I guess, first of all, do you remember--going back to 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor-- do you remember--
Silliman: Oh certainly.
Bauman: --that sort of thing. And do you have any memories from that? And then when did you find out about something happening out at Hanford?
Silliman: Well you never knew what was happening in Hanford. If you asked somebody what was happening out there, they said they're building Wendell Willkie buttons or nylon stockings or something like that that you couldn't get a hold of. But of course, everything like sugar and shoes were rationed.
Bauman: And when did you find out what was going on at Hanford? After the war ended, after the bombs?
Silliman: Yes. You just did not hear what was going on. And if somebody did say anything, they weren't there very long. Yeah.
Bauman: You just knew there was some sort of big project that people were working on?
Silliman: Yes, that's all we knew, was a big project.
B. Yeah. And so going back, do you remember finding out about World War II itself, the attack on Pearl Harbor?
Silliman: Oh yeah. As I recall, it was on a Sunday. And it affected me because my brother Clint, who was working for J.C. Penney's up in Palouse, he enlisted right away with the caveat that he be able to bring his stuff home before he went in. So he got to be home for Christmas. So that's the last Christmas he was home for a number of years.
Bauman: Right, so your family was impacted very immediately.
Silliman: Mm-hm. Yeah, all three of my brothers were in World War II.
Bauman: And so then what about yourself? What happened with you after finishing high school? What did you do from that point on?
Silliman: Well, I had grown up with a friend that lived down in the garden tracts with me there. His name was Bill Bryce. We'd gone all the way through--we played together before school. Went to school together. Walked back and forth to school together. Went to college together. Roomed together in college. Then when the Korean War broke out, they weren't giving deferments to begin with. So I enlisted and he sat it out. And finally they gave deferments there. So he went ahead and completed his college there and then went to University of Washington. That was at Central. And then he went on to the University of Washington and got his masters. And then did his service and put in his career with Boeing. In fact, he was responsible for writing the Boeing contract out here a number of years ago when Boeing was doing the computer service out here. He was the sales manager.
Bauman: And then what point did you come back to Farmers Exchange?
Silliman: When I got out of the service, I was considering a job with Fairchild Camera Corporation. I was in a RB-36 reconnaissance bomber outfit that used a lot of cameras. My job was to run the shop to repair and service those. And I got offered a job there. But it would've been travelling. And by this time, I married while I was in the service. And my brother came back to South Dakota where I was stationed at Ellsworth and said, would you like to come back to the store? And that's what I always want to do all my life. So I took him up on that. And when we got out, my wife I came back here and went to work. And I've been there ever since.
Bauman: And what year was that?
Silliman: That was 1954. And Clint and I and Dad were in partnership. Them we bought Dad out shortly after that. Then Clint and I were in partners until '81. His son was going to buy him out, and then he backed out. So I bought him out. And then they shut down Hanford. [LAUGHTER] And boy, did it have an effect on us through the '80s. Just almost busted us.
Bauman: Really?
Silliman: Yeah.
Bauman: Hm. So again, more impact related to Hanford?
Silliman: Oh yeah. And Hanford still has a big impact on us. We didn't realize, some of these people that traded with us had been trading with us for a number of years. We didn't know what they did. To us, that's Old Joe, you know? And in '81 when they started laying all those people off, Old Joe was coming in and saying hey, I make sure the family gets the feed and stuff they need. I’ll send you a check, I'm going to Texas or somewhere else and see what I can find. So it really had an effect on us in the '80s. Some of the layoffs since then haven't had as big effect. But they still affect us.
Bauman: Yeah, so it definitely says something about the economic impact that-
Silliman: But there's been more diversification since then.
Bauman: Mm-hm, mm-hm. And since 1954, a lot of grown in Kennewick?
Silliman: Considerably.
Bauman: Changed quite a bit from 1954. What are some of the biggest changes that you've seen since 1954 in Kennewick? Obviously the size is one of them, right?
Silliman: The size, the selection, the competition. You know, every time they open a big box store, they handle something that we handle there. But we find we can compete with them through service and other ways. And we've had to change. We started off trading cattle. Now we trade lawn mowers and power equipment there. We still have the feed. We still have the garden supplies. We've enlarged that. But you wouldn't recognize the store from what it was when I was a boy. We've also bought other buildings around us and expanded there.
Bauman: But still in downtown Kennewick?
Silliman: The same location. Other than the one move that we made there in '39 from behind Washington Hardware up to where we are now.
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about or that you haven't talked about in terms of, especially in terms of say, growing up in Kennewick or any stories or events that really stand that you think you'd really like to talk about?
Silliman: Well during the buildup of Hanford--we'd always had dust storms here. But during the build up of the Hanford, all the ground was been worked. And we had dust storms--you might as well just close everything down because you couldn't see, you couldn't drive there. It was just really bad. Obviously, part of it was from the dryland wheat farmer. But a lot of it was just from everything building up on that. We were offered some land to collect a debt one time. And my brother and I went out and looked at it and decided it was too far out of town and the town wasn't building that way. And so we said no, we couldn't use that for payment for the debt. That land was at 395 and 10th Avenue in Kennewick which now has got a whole bunch of businesses and PUD and that there, so--
Bauman: Probably a pretty valuable piece of property.
Silliman: Yeah. And you know everything built west to begin with. The city was able to--when Columbia Center came in--was able to slip in there and take a road, make it city property and get that in the city of Kennewick. But now it's building to the south in the downtown area. I've seen it go up and down and up and down. At one time I thought it was going to be just not livable down there. But it's changed again now. New storefronts, the businesses are filling the downtown area. When we came home in '54, my wife was not from here. So I took her around the Tri-Cities. And we start grading the areas. We graded Pasco as the best shopping area in the Tri-Cities. 4th and Lewis just had all sorts of stores around it. Good shoe stores and good clothing stores and that. Richland was nice and clean up there too. Not as many stores though. We rated Pasco first, Richland second, and Kennewick a very--downtown Kennewick a very poor third. We had J.C. Penney and that was about it. And that has changed. I would rate now Kennewick maybe as the top of the older areas there.
Bauman: The downtown?
Silliman: Yeah.
Bauman: What would you like for someone who maybe decades from now might be interested in watching your interview or something and learning more about Kennewick or about the Tri-Cities or that sort of thing, what do you think is most important for them to understand about the town of Kennewick that you grew up in the 1930s and 1940s?
Silliman: Well, it went from a strictly farm community. Everybody was either involved in farming somehow or dealing with farmers and that. And were the orchards were have been torn out. Now there's houses where the biggest grape vineyard, Concord grape vineyard was in the world. It's now buildings there. Those grapes are gone. So it's just entirely changed. The Tri-Cities is become a metropolitan type area there. And what are they, fourth or fifth in the state as far as there? You got Tacoma, Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and then maybe the Tri-Cities? Good place to live.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Well, do you have any other things that you'd like to talk about or think would be important to talk about?
Silliman: Not that I can think of.
Bauman: Great. Well thank you very much--
Silliman: You bet. It's been my pleasure.
Bauman: --for coming in today and doing the interview.
Silliman: I'm sorry I didn't have more on Hanford. Oh, there used be a boat that went up the river to Hanford. I believe it's called the Hanford Flyer. And a number of years ago when the Tri-City Herald was repainting one of their buildings and striped the paint off, I noticed on the building, on the east side of the building, there which--and this building is just south of their main building. It had a sign up there for the Hanford Flyer.
Bauman: It was still on the building?
Silliman: Yeah. But they covered it of course when they repainted.
Bauman: Do you have any idea what years the Hanford Flyer was in operation?
Silliman: No, I do not. I meant to ask Tom Moak about that, if he had some information.
Bauman: And so what did it take up?
Silliman: I believe it took mail. And it would take passengers and freight up.
Bauman: That's a great story, and that it was still on the building after all those years.
Silliman: Yeah. There used be a couple horse troughs there in downtown Kennewick too, but they're all gone too. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Great. All right. Well Mr. Silliman, thanks very much.
Silliman: Thanks for having me, Bob.
Robert Franklin: Victor, are we ready?
Victor Vargas: We’re ready.
Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Ruth Lorraine Fer—
Lorraine Ferqueron: Ferqueron.
Franklin: Ferqueron. Thank you, Lorraine. On October 18th, 2016. The interview is being conducting on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Lorraine about her experiences growing up in the Richland area and the forced evacuation in 1943. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Ferqueron: My name is Ruth Lorraine Ferqueron. It’s R-U-T-H L-O-R-R-A-I-N-E F-E-R-Q-U-E-R-O-N.
Franklin: Great. Thank you. So, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born?
Ferqueron: Pasco, Washington at Lady of Lourdes, May 7th, 1931. Those days, they kept the mother and the baby for ten days. So I came to Richland when I was ten days old.
Franklin: And where in Richland did your family live?
Ferqueron: Well we had—during the time, we had three different farms. One was out by basically where Battelle is now. I can’t really tell you exactly because I don’t have any points to base it from except the river.
Franklin: Sure, but somewhere where the Battelle campus is now, okay.
Ferqueron: Mm-hmm. Actually, that area was called Fruitdale when I was little.
Franklin: Mm-hmm. I’ve seen that on some—
Ferqueron: You’ve seen the Fruitdale?
Franklin: --On some maps.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: Some early maps—like ‘30s and ’40s maps. So you said your family had three farms—three acres?
Ferqueron: No.
Franklin: Three areas that they farmed.
Ferqueron: Three areas of farms.
Franklin: Three areas of farms. So one’s in Fruitdale, or PNNL campus.
Ferqueron: Yeah, but I was very young when that was going on. And then we moved in to—closer to Richland and had a farm up below where Tagaris is now.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: And then the last one was out on—is it Wellsian Way that goes—not Wellsian, the road that goes to West Richland.
Franklin: Van Giesen?
Ferqueron: Below the Tri-City Court Club was—we had 118 acres there.
Franklin: Is that Van Giesen?
Ferqueron: Huh?
Franklin: That goes to—is it Van Giesen that goes to—
Ferqueron: Yeah, Van Giesen.
Franklin: Yeah.
Ferqueron: Right below the Tri-City Court Club.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: We had that until 1943, when we were forced out.
Franklin: Can you describe your memory of that event?
Ferqueron: That day? Yeah. I remember it. I was 12. These two men came to the door and told my father that they had declared eminent domain and they were taking the land. We had I think it was about three weeks to get out. There was seven of us children.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: We had a dairy farm there—well, my parents did, of course. I think we had 27 cows that Dad had to sell for five dollars apiece.
Franklin: And I imagine that was pennies on the dollar.
Ferqueron: Yeah. Well, yes. And then we were given—Dad was given—everyone was given, I think, $5,000 for their property, no matter what size or anything. That was actually owed to the bank, so we never—my father and mother didn’t have any money. And we moved to Finley.
Franklin: And then what did your parents—what did your family do in Finley?
Ferqueron: Well, Dad did a lot of trucking and we had a small farm there.
Franklin: But more like a truck farm?
Ferqueron: Yeah, well, we had peppermint.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: And asparagus. We had, I think, three cows that Dad kept. Two or three cows. My brother could tell you that more than I could. And we raised asparagus.
Franklin: And how long did that go on, did your parents do that?
Ferqueron: Until I was 15. We moved to the Richland Wye.
Franklin: And why did your parents moved to the Richland Wye?
Ferqueron: Dad went into working in construction. We left the farm and farming. We took one cow and moved to the Richland Wye—what’s now the Richland Wye.
Franklin: Your favorite cow?
Ferqueron: Yeah, probably. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Did he work for Hanford, or in—
Ferqueron: No, no.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: The only one in our family that worked for Hanford that I’m aware of is my grandfather. My grandfather had a farm here. His name was Augustus Long. He was the ditch back rider. A ditch back rider is someone who rides the irrigation ditches and checks it out and makes sure everything’s going fine. Started doing that on horseback. And then, I guess, the irrigation district or somebody bought him this truck to ride it in. After they took him off—took his land, he went to court, actually, and they paid him off.
Franklin: Hmm.
Ferqueron: Because they had to, to keep—it was all secret, you know. Everything at Hanford—nobody knew what was going on, even the people that worked there. He went to work for them for a short time, just to show them where everything was. He knew all the county—all the boundaries, and all the lines and where everything was. So he worked for them for a while—short time. Then he moved to Grandview.
Franklin: Did he receive more money in the settlement because he took them to court?
Ferqueron: No, no.
Franklin: No?
Ferqueron: No.
Franklin: He just had to go through the extra step.
Ferqueron: Yeah, he got extra because he worked for them for that short time. And then because he got as far as the court in Spokane, and they paid him off. In other words, they bribed him out of it.
Franklin: Oh, so, but did he receive more money in the end for going to court?
Ferqueron: Yeah, he probably did. I have no idea how much, but he probably did, yeah.
Franklin: Sure. And how long—do you know approximately how long he worked for the government—for Hanford?
Ferqueron: Oh, it was a matter of two or three months, probably.
Franklin: Oh, okay, so not too significant.
Ferqueron: Yeah, I don’t really remember, but it wasn’t long.
Franklin: But he was part of that transition, though, right? Kind of showing them the lay of the land.
Ferqueron: Yeah, he said the hardest thing he ever had to do was cut off the water to all those farms, and they just—
Franklin: Watch them die.
Ferqueron: Watch them die. And bulldozed under—they were actually bulldozed.
Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, many of them were.
Ferqueron: That’s why—I hear people today say, well, it was a sand pile when we got here. Well, of course it was.
Franklin: Yeah. That helps erase that evidence of human habitation.
Ferqueron: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: And make sure people don’t want to come back.
Ferqueron: Right.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really—so your father—or your grandfather was the only person that worked for—
Ferqueron: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s true, because—it was a very traumatic thing, because one day I had my complete family here. And three weeks later, they were scattered all over the state.
Franklin: Mm.
Ferqueron: And I lost—I could walk from our house to grandpa’s house. And then they went up to Grandview, I mean, and we just didn’t get to see them as often.
Franklin: Right, right, because of the—not as much—farther distance, not as good of roads.
Ferqueron: Well, eventually, he moved back to Benton City and had a farm up there. But in those days, going from where we lived in Finley to Benton City was quite a trip.
Franklin: I bet. I bet that would have been an all-day affair.
Ferqueron: Yeah. My mother told me when they were children to go to Kennewick to shop, it was all day, because they had a horse and a wagon.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Ferqueron: They went to Kennewick and back and it was an all-day trip.
Franklin: So when do your parents and grandparents—when did your family come to the Richland area?
Ferqueron: Yeah. My great-grandparents came here just about the turn of the century. But as far as I can figure, about 1900. Maybe a little earlier. And my great-grandfather farmed the area somewhere between where WinCo is now and the Yakima River.
Franklin: Okay. And then did they—when they came, were there already—was there already irrigation piping here? Was there an irrigation district?
Ferqueron: I don’t remember—I mean, I don’t really know. I never was told. My grandparents and my mother and her siblings came—let’s see, she was born in 1905 in Nebraska, and she was three when they came here.
Franklin: So in 1908.
Ferqueron: 1908, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. I know there were irrigation lines—
Ferqueron: And there was irrigation then.
Franklin: --at that time.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: 1900 is a little—
Ferqueron: A little early.
Franklin: A little early. Did your—
Ferqueron: But—
Franklin: Oh, sorry.
Ferqueron: They had the Yakima River. So they had a water supply and they--
Franklin: Right.
Ferqueron: I know you’ve probably heard about the Rosencrans and the water wheel they had here on the river?
Franklin: No, no, tell me about that.
Ferqueron: Well, I don’t really know much about it, but there are pictures of it available somewhere.
Franklin: Okay. I’ll have to look at—
Ferqueron: The Rosencrans family had that.
Franklin: Okay. Great. Thank you.
Ferqueron: And that was—that was probably the start of the irrigation right there. Around that time.
Franklin: Right. From the research I’ve done, it shows that kind of later in 1906, 1908, the White Bluffs Irrigation Company and the Hanford Irrigation Company, which were formed by kind of collected capital on the west side of the state laid down the irrigation piping, bought the land—
Ferqueron: Miles and miles of it, yeah.
Franklin: Right. And then sold the land to people, and then people would have to pay monthly irrigation bills.
Ferqueron: Right.
Franklin: Whether they used the water or not. It was kind of a scheme to make a bunch of money.
Ferqueron: Well, it’s still that way.
Franklin: Right, it is. But I’ve always been kind of interested about the pre—because it sounds like there were smaller attempts by families at creating some irrigation tunnels and ditches.
Ferqueron: I don’t know if there’s anybody still living that would know.
Franklin: Yeah, it’s—the nature of the history is—physically the evidence has been wiped off the map.
Ferqueron: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was wiped out with the bulldozers and everything—that was all—
Franklin: So your great-grandparents that came, that would have been your father’s side?
Ferqueron: My mother’s.
Franklin: Your mother, oh, so then your mother was born in Nebraska?
Ferqueron: My father, on my Sloppy side of the family, I don’t really know when they came. But my father was born in Prosser—well, AmaRosa district outside of Prosser—in 1905.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: He was the third baby born in Benton County.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: Well, you know, years ago—before 1905, there was no Benton County. It was Yakima County.
Franklin: Yup.
Ferqueron: Then they divided it, and Dad was born after it was made a county.
Franklin: Interesting.
Ferqueron: I don’t know exactly where they came from. They did live here in Richland for a number of years because my mother and father went to school from first grade to, I believe, fifth. And then his family moved away. And then he came back in his 20s and went to work for John Weidle and Thad Grosscup. There’s streets named after them in West Richland.
Franklin: John Weidle and who?
Ferqueron: Thad Grosscup.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, Grosscup.
Ferqueron: Yeah. Yeah, I knew both of those men.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: He was working in wheat fields all over here and Idaho and everything. And anyway, my parents married here in 1930.
Franklin: In Richland?
Ferqueron: Oh, actually, married in Kennewick because the old Methodist church in Kennewick on Kennewick Avenue.
Franklin: Oh, right. And then how did your parents meet?
Ferqueron: In school.
Franklin: Oh, in school. Well, right, first through fifth. But how did they reconnect later—I mean, were they both in Richland at the same time, or—
Ferqueron: Yeah, he came back to work for Thad--
Franklin: Well, right.
Ferqueron: --in what is now West Richland. And mom worked for John Dam. You know, John Dam Plaza?
Franklin: Yup.
Ferqueron: Named after him. Well, she worked for John for—right out of high school. She graduated in the old high school here in 1922, and went to work for John Dam.
Franklin: And what did she do?
Ferqueron: And Dad was in and out of the—she was a clerk.
Franklin: Oh, in—
Ferqueron: In his store, mm-hm.
Franklin: Oh, at his store.
Ferqueron: Yeah. Well, John Dam had a—well, it was like a department store. He sold everything. He was also our unofficial banker.
Franklin: As many storekeepers often were in those days.
Ferqueron: Well, he gave credits through the winter to the farmers and then they would pay it off in the fall with the crops.
Franklin: Right, yeah, no, that’s a—
Ferqueron: An old—
Franklin: A long-standing tradition in agriculture.
Ferqueron: Yeah. A lost tradition now.
Franklin: Yes. Although, sadly, sometimes, abused and—like the sharecropping system of the South. But usually not quite so much here, luckily. So graduated from Richland. Okay, wow. So you said you grew up—you lived in three different farms here.
Ferqueron: Yeah. And went to school here in Richland at what is now Lewis and Clark.
Franklin: Went to school at Lewis and Clark. Okay. And how come your parents moved so much in the 12 years between the three different farms? Do you know why they--?
Ferqueron: You know, I really don’t remember. Some of the farms—two of the farms were rented. So that might have been why. He found a better place. There was a time when we moved away from Richland. We lived in Corfu, which does not exist now.
Franklin: In where, sorry?
Ferqueron: Corfu. It’s right across the mountain from White Bluffs.
Franklin: Could you—
Ferqueron: Right out of Othello.
Franklin: Could you spell that for me?
Ferqueron: Corfu, C-O-R-F-U.
Franklin: Oh, okay. I would not have spelled it that way. Thank you.
Ferqueron: And as far as we know, my sister was the only person ever born there. My mother was a postmaster there. All the outlying farmers would come in and get their mail there.
Franklin: Mm. Do you know if there was a store there, or was it just a—
Ferqueron: Yes, there was a store, but it was gone. It was abandoned. Actually, Corfu was founded, I think, for the railroad workers.
Franklin: Oh.
Ferqueron: To have a place to stay. And we lived in—it was a hotel, and we lived on the second floor, and, well, part of the time on the first floor. And my mother was postmaster.
Franklin: Interesting. Was it a functioning hotel at that point?
Ferqueron: No. No, we were the only residents in there.
Franklin: Only residents there. Oh, wow.
Ferqueron: We had lots of room.
Franklin: So it was really just the postal designation to deliver mail at that point. And was that—
Ferqueron: We had a lot of sheep herders go through.
Franklin: Oh, I would imagine. Interesting.
Ferqueron: I don’t know if you know about the sheep herds that went through. They were—oh, about four of five thousand sheep per herd, you know.
Franklin: Right, and it was often—
Ferqueron: They would go up, and go across Grand Coulee Dam before it was closed to them.
Franklin: And it was often—I don’t know if it was this far north, but often sheep herders were Basque men? People from the Basque region? Do you know of—
Ferqueron: I just remembered, when my father was in his early teens, he was a sheep herder for a summer or two.
Franklin: Oh, really?
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really—in the same area?
Ferqueron: Yeah, mm-hmm.
Franklin: Is Corfu—was that where part of the Hanford reservation extends over?
Ferqueron: You know, I don’t know if it goes that far or not. I doubt it, but I don’t know.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: I know people are surprised when I tell them that there’s ice caves up there.
Franklin: Really?
Ferqueron: Yeah, the White Bluffs range there. Yeah. We used to go into those ice caves, and the people in Corfu and another little town up there used to keep their meat and stuff in there.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: Refrigeration, yeah.
Franklin: Yeah, that was a very prized thing before electric refrigeration.
Ferqueron: Well, it’s been there since the Ice Age.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: What was the other little town?
Ferqueron: You know, I just don’t remember now.
Franklin: That’s okay. So your parents—your mother worked for John Dam for a time, your father was kind of a wheat farmer—
Ferqueron: Yeah, and—
Franklin: Then they settled down and lived in these three different farms. Now, the last one you lived in in Richland, that was one that your parents had bought?
Ferqueron: They were buying it.
Franklin: Yeah--or they were buying it, they had a mortgage on it.
Ferqueron: Yeah, they did pay quite a bit on it when we lost it. But we lost—they just lost all of that.
Franklin: Right.
Ferqueron: So.
Franklin: And it was a cattle ranch?
Ferqueron: It was a dairy farm, yeah.
Franklin: Dairy farm, sorry.
Ferqueron: Yeah. As far as I remember, we had about 27 cows. We had a huge pasture. Dad rented out pasture land to horses, too.
Franklin: Mm. Was that irrigated pasture, or--?
Ferqueron: No.
Franklin: Oh, just for—
Ferqueron: It had a pond, but—
Franklin: Oh, it had a pond, okay.
Ferqueron: I only remember that, because I was sliding around on it one time on the ice and went through the ice and cut my ankle open.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Ferqueron: That’s why I remember it.
Franklin: So tell me about growing up in kind of this small agricultural town—
Ferqueron: Well, it’s—
Franklin: And your childhood and school and friends.
Ferqueron: Well, everybody knew you, and I was related to half the town, because I had--two uncles had places here, and at least one aunt and her husband. Well, I always say, it was so small in town that if I did anything wrong, my father knew about it in about 30 seconds, because—[LAUGHTER]—the whole town would call him and tell him, you know? But it was just a really easy-going good time.
Franklin: How did the Depression affect your family? Did it affect the town?
Ferqueron: Well, about like anybody else, except we had meat, because we had cows, we had pigs, we had chickens. Mom would buy a bunch of little chicks every year. We grew—my mother canned everything. We had lots of food. Clothes and everything, that was a little bit of a problem because of the money. But we did pretty good because—and I don’t remember ever being hungry. Well, I had the kind of parents that if there was food, we got it first anyway.
Franklin: Right. So you might not have known at the time—
Ferqueron: I don’t remember it being an unhappy time at all.
Franklin: Interesting.
Ferqueron: But now I realize how much I learned from my mother of how to get by cheaply. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah! Did you ever go to Hanford or White Bluffs at all? Did you know anybody at Hanford?
Ferqueron: Oh, yeah. We went through there. I did know them, but now—except for one teacher and I can’t remember his name—and he also taught at Kennewick later. I had him for a teacher there. That was 65 years ago that I graduated. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Of course, of course. A lot of focus is on—especially recently with the creation of the National Park and some of these stories of White Bluffs and Hanford are becoming more well-known, but Richland is also a community that was—
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: --displaced by the—
Ferqueron: We were very affected by it. I mean, a very emotional thing. There was one man that when they told him he had to get out, he died later that day of a heart attack. Now, whether or not he had a heart attack coming on, who knows? But he did die of a heart attack. Well, that hit us all pretty hard. And then having to say goodbye to my grandparents, and my cousins, and aunts and uncles—
Franklin: Have you ever been to any of the—I know they had the Hanford-White Bluffs reunions—were Richland people ever included in those?
Ferqueron: I don’t know about—we never were included as far as I know with Hanford and White Bluffs, but we had our own. It was called the Old Timers’ Picnic.
Franklin: Old Timers’ Picnic, okay.
Ferqueron: And you could not come to that unless you were here prior to 1943. I remember one occasion there, I was living in the south at the time, in South Carolina—came out for vacation. I was 36 years old, and I’m sitting at this table, and Mrs. John Dam, who had not seen me since I was a child, came up to me and said, you must be Edith Long’s little girl. And she patted me on the head like I was a little child. I’ll never forget it. I could not believe she remembered me all that time.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: That was shortly before she died.
Franklin: Wow, that’s something.
Ferqueron: She was in her 90s then.
Franklin: Wow. Yeah, memories are funny that way, huh?
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: I mean, some things we remember crystal clear, and others kind of seem to get fuzzy.
Ferqueron: Just the other day, someone asked me, well, who was John Dam? And its kind of surprised me, because I just assumed everybody knew who he was.
Franklin: Right.
Ferqueron: And he was county commissioner, too.
Franklin: Yeah. How much of—do you live in Richland now?
Ferqueron: I live at the Richland Wye, yes.
Franklin: Okay. How did you feel coming back to the Richland Wye and seeing this different town that had been—
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: --created, and this kind of suburban landscape that had been placed over what had once been farmland. How did that make you feel when you came back?
Ferqueron: Well, it made me—it was not a good thing. Bad memories. Losing—my dad’s losing his farm that he’d worked so many years and everything for—it basically shortened his life some.
[TELEPHONE RINGS]
Ferqueron: Oh!
Franklin: Oh, it’s okay.
Ferqueron: Well, it means I got to take a pill.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Ferqueron: So I need my bag over there.
Franklin: Oh, sure. Emma, can you grab that? And then we have water right here for you.
Ferqueron: Yeah. I forgot about it. I would have turned it off.
Emma Rice: This bag?
Franklin: Believe me, it’s all right.
Ferqueron: Well, if I don’t, I might forget it.
Franklin: Right, no, believe me, it’s—
Ferqueron: You know, when you’re 85, you’ve got to be careful.
Rice: No, you—[LAUGHTER] You’re good.
Ferqueron: I’ve got water here. I’ll be fine.
Rice: Oh, okay.
Ferqueron: But it was also a little complicated, because living at the Richland Wye, we had one time and Richland had another time. It was an hour’s difference between us.
Franklin: Huh? Really?
Ferqueron: Yes. Yes, Richland city proper—property was on—an hour ahead of us.
Franklin: Huh! Oh, is that—that must be before they—
Ferqueron: That’s before the government gave out—
Franklin: --firmed up the time zones, right?
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: Interesting. That’s very—that I had not heard at all.
Ferqueron: We wanted to go to Richland to a movie, we had to go at a different time.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Is there any—I’ve heard there’s still a few buildings in Richland left from the pre-’43 days.
Ferqueron: Yeah, there’s a few houses. The Carlson house as far as I know is still here. And John Dam’s store, I think, is still here. Down there, off of Lee, where they have that roundabout with the metal tree?
Franklin: Yeah.
Ferqueron: His store stood in right there somewhere. I’m pretty sure that building is still there.
Franklin: Oh, really?
Ferqueron: But I’m not positive to that at all.
Franklin: Of course.
Ferqueron: It would be on the corner of Lee and Jadwin.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: But everything has changed so much. And then there’s—across the street, on Lee going into the park, on the left-hand side, I’m pretty sure that’s an original building. Well, maybe not original to Richland, but it was in Richland before Hanford. It was, I think, a bar. And something else, because I remember going in there and asking Dad for a dime so that the six of us—at the time there was just six of us—could buy some candy. And for a dime, we got a whole bagful.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: And I remember the butcher—George Gress was his name. Had a butcher shop. He was German, and he made these wonderful sausages that were ready to eat. Us kids would go down and stand in front of his store and look in the window at it. Ha! He had such a good heart. And we’d send our youngest brother in because he was so cute—in to see George. And he—Dean, my brother—would come out with sausage hung around his neck. [LAUGHTER] And we’d all have some sausage. I don’t know if my parents ever found out about that or not. If they had, they’d have put a stop to it.
Franklin: Right, right. What was—I gather that a lot of the street names were changed when the government came in.
Ferqueron: Oh, yes.
Franklin: And what was—you mentioned the John Dam store was on Lee and Jadwin, so I imagine there were streets there.
Ferqueron: It is now. I don’t know that there was a—if there was, I don’t remember it.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: Yeah. I would go down there to cash—I was old enough to go and cash the dairy checks that Dad got for his milk and stuff.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Ferqueron: And instead of him coming in to do it, or my mother—when I was at school I’d go and cash them there. But I don’t remember there being any streets.
Franklin: Okay. Do you—I know Howard Amon Park was there before the—
Ferqueron: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: So do you have any memories of Howard Amon Park?
Ferqueron: Oh [LAUGHTER] yes. Well, first of all it wasn’t quite as large now. But Howard, as far as I know, gave that—he died before I was born, but I knew all the other Amons.
Franklin: Sure.
Ferqueron: But I think he gave them the lease on that land for eternity as a park. And that concrete gate they have down there, I remember that as being larger, but of course I was a child, you know, so maybe it wasn’t larger. But no, the one story I remember about that was our class had an Easter egg hunt down there one year. I was one of the tallest in the class, so I could find all the Easter eggs. They were real eggs. [LAUGHTER] I had a small washpan full. [LAUGHTER] And the teacher asked me if I’d share them with the children. And I said, oh, yeah, glad to! Because we had a farm and we had 500 chickens laying eggs, you know? And I did not want to take home a bunch of boiled eggs to my mother. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right, you were probably eating enough eggs.
Ferqueron: But what I really remember is the winter of the egg hunt, got a chocolate bunny about this high. And I got that bunny. So I didn’t care about the eggs, I won that chocolate bunny. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right! Can you talk a little bit about going to school in Richland and kind of just—
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: You know, the teachers and the kinds of subjects you learned and the classes taught and just kind of how that experience was for you?
Ferqueron: Well, it was just really average, except there wasn’t anywhere near as many of us, of course. One of my teachers was Miss Carlson, who was a friend of my mother’s. Now, when I came into the Kennewick School District, I had gone to school the first year in Corfu. We had a two-room schoolhouse, and I was the entire elementary school. I was the only student in the elementary school.
Franklin: Who—
Ferqueron: And there was three high school students. And our teacher was a high school teacher, and he didn’t know what to do with me.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: So he read me stories all day long. Whenever he got a chance, he’d read me stories and teach me a little bit. So when I came to Richland, I was very far behind.
Franklin: Right.
Ferqueron: And Miss Carlson got one of the other students to spend a couple hours with me in the library to catch me up. So I caught up to the third grade, and then from then on, it was pretty easy. Pretty good.
Franklin: Who was the—so you went to a four-person school in Corfu—
Ferqueron: Yeah. Well, actually, the second year in Corfu, it was five, because my brother joined me in the elementary school. We doubled our elementary school.
Franklin: Doubled the elementary school. Were your family religious at all? Did they attend church in Richland or Corfu?
Ferqueron: No, no, we didn’t. But my mother was a religious person, and we got some there. Now, I don’t remember going to church there.
Franklin: Mm.
Ferqueron: Of course, later on, I did. We all—and my parents decided that the seven of us could choose our own religions. So they didn’t push us in any particular direction. But my father ended up a Catholic.
Franklin: Okay.
Ferqueron: And my mother was baptized in the Baptist church. And I go to a Baptist church.
Franklin: That’s very—I don’t know—very progressive kind of stance on education—or on Christianity—on religion for that time period. Because so many preexisting—
Ferqueron: Well, they were always very strong. I never heard my parents say “if” you get out of high school; it was always “when” you get out—“when” you graduate. I had one brother who didn’t, but he had some vision problems, and he went into the Air Force and finished in the Air Force. So we’re all graduates. And I have a couple—a brother that’s a graduate of—I guess Washington. I’m not sure. He did it—he was in the Army, so he had some education in Berlin, El Paso, Texas, wherever he could get it.
Franklin: Right, sure.
Ferqueron: But education was always pushed in our family.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: I mean, it’s so fundamental for success later in life.
Ferqueron: Right. Well, it’s really the reason we left Corfu and went back to Richland, is because, obviously, my brother and I were not learning anything in Corfu. We were just not. And the teacher was not a good teacher. So they pulled us out and we came down here to—because of us getting education.
Franklin: Right. Are you—where are you—you said you had seven brothers and—or you’re of seven--?
Ferqueron: I’m the oldest of seven.
Franklin: You’re the oldest of seven, okay.
Ferqueron: I have five brothers and one sister.
Franklin: So I can imagine, then, that they—staying in Corfu, they would be looking at kind of a legacy of not so good edu—you know.
Ferqueron: Right. Yeah.
Franklin: Yeah, that makes a lot of—and how close are you all in age? Are you fairly close in age?
Ferqueron: Well, let’s see. Yeah, we are, except for two of them. There’s me, and 18-19 months later is my brother, Verne, whom you’ve already interviewed. Then there’s Roy, who’s another year, year-and-a-half. And Lorne is a year, and then my sister comes a year after Lorne. And then there’s Dean and then five years after Dean—surprise, there’s Dale. [LAUGHTER] So that’s how we run. All pretty close.
Franklin: Right. Most families have at least one surprise.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: What did your mother do in this time, you know—did she work on the farm with your father?
Ferqueron: Oh, yeah. She did until she became allergic to the sun.
Franklin: Oh! There’s a lot of sun here.
Ferqueron: But most of her time was spent either with us children, or she was canning. She had a garden. Of course our garden was quite large. And then the farm was alfalfa and dairy. But we had a big garden.
Franklin: Did she or your father ever take any cash work before the government came? You know, any kind of off-the-farm jobs or anything?
Ferqueron: No. Well, yeah, wait. When the war came, we were still on the farm, and Dad went to work at Big Pasco. You heard of Big Pasco?
Franklin: Yeah, the holding—the supply depot.
Ferqueron: Right, supplies for the Army. He worked there for a short while—maybe a year. I don’t remember how long. I do remember why he quit. He had a major that was a 90-day wonder, they used to call them. He’d been an officer for 90 days. And anyway, he and Dad got into it over something, and Dad says, well, I quit. And he said, well, you can’t quit, because you’re working for the Army. You’re frozen in the job. And Dad said, well, that’s just tough, and walked off. Two days later, this officer and a sergeant showed up at our house and was going to take Dad off to the Army. Well, he was 35. Dad just lined us kids up in the yard and said, these are my six kids, and there’s a seventh one on the way. I am a farmer, so therefore I’m deferred. And I remember the major getting terribly angry, and the sergeant actually drug him back to the Jeep. He was so angry! And as they were driving away,Dad said, oh and by the way, I have an ulcer. Which the Army wouldn’t touch him with an ulcer. I remember that so clearly because it was absolutely hilarious. Well, that was my father, the way he did things.
Franklin: Is there anything else you would like to say about Richland before the war that I haven’t asked you about?
Ferqueron: Well, I remember the day that Pearl Harbor happened.
Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah.
Ferqueron: I was listening to the radio in the house, and my mother was outside talking to somebody, some lady. And I heard the announcement that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and so I went outside and I asked my mother, where’s Pearl Harbor? And she said, in Hawai’i. And I told her what happened, and I’ll never forget her remark. She said, thank God my boys are little. And that’s about all I remember about that.
Franklin: That’s—
Ferqueron: That particular day.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s very searing.
Ferqueron: But I had uncles who ended up in the war and all that kind of stuff. No, I don’t remember an awful lot about it.
Franklin: Sure, sure.
Ferqueron: Well, I do remember, they had a rubber drive. And we had a rubber—we had a tire swing in our yard that Dad had put up for us. And us kids, we scoured that farm for rubber and metal for the defense, you know? We were getting ready to cut the tire down, and Dad made us stop. He said, no, you’ve given enough. He said, you’re not giving up your swing.
Franklin: Aw.
Ferqueron: I do remember that.
Franklin: That’s really sweet.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: Did things economically start to improve for your family during the war?
Ferqueron: They did, when the war come, yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Until, of course, the evacuation.
Ferqueron: Right.
Franklin: I kind of already asked you about how coming back made you feel. When you look at Hanford and its kind of legacy, you must have an interesting—you have a different perspective from most people that came here during the war.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about—
Ferqueron: Sometimes I’m resentful because of what happened with my parents and what they lost—what we all lost, everybody who ever lived here. But then again, you just kind of live with it. But I do get upset when people don’t want to talk about anything but Hanford. I want them to remember there was something here 200 years before. Because we had Indians here. We had woolly mammoths walking up and down the Columbia River, for heaven’s sake. And what about the Indian history? I don’t hear much about Indian history.
Franklin: No, that’s a good question.
Ferqueron: There was Indians living up there!
Franklin: Right. Did you ever have—did you ever meet any Wanapum or Yakama people?
Ferqueron: I never met a Wanapum until years later—in fact, about five or six years ago. But I did know some Yakamas, but not while I was living in Richland.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s—several groups of people have been alienated from the land here.
Ferqueron: Right, yeah. Oh, the Indians—they were done really rotten.
Franklin: Yeah, yes they were.
Ferqueron: Long before we were. I never could figure out—
Franklin: I teach—
Ferqueron: Why do we call Indians savages when our people were really the savages? Stealing their land and everything.
Franklin: Yes, and indiscriminately killing them.
Ferqueron: Yes, that’s how I—well, our admiration of President Roosevelt went into the dumper when Hanford happened.
Franklin: Really?
Ferqueron: Yeah, there were a lot of people mad at him, because—I never did see it—but I’ve been told many times that there was a letter written by Roosevelt, saying that we could have the land back at the price they paid for it when they were through with it. Well, when the time came, and the government left here, he said, no, he’d never written it.
Franklin: Mm.
Ferqueron: And nobody could ever prove it. But I just heard about it; I never did see it.
Franklin: When you—can you describe about when you and your family found out about the atomic bombs dropped, that one of them was—part of that was produced at Hanford, and Hanford’s connection to that. How did that—
Ferqueron: Well, it was kind of a shock to even realize it was something as powerful as that. But the day that we found out was when Dad came home with a newspaper, and it was in there. And he said, well, now we finally know what they were doing out there and why they were doing it.
Franklin: Did that change anyone’s feelings about what had happened, or—
Ferqueron: I don’t—
Franklin: Or not?
Ferqueron: Some people it did. I went to a funeral a few years ago for one of the Richland—for Eddie Supplee’s wedding. It was quite a family of Supplees here. They were still bitter. He was very bitter before he died. I talked to him not long before he died and he was very bitter about Hanford, and it had been so many years. So it was a lot of people with a lot of resentment.
Franklin: Did you ever connect—do you know if there’s much connection between the displaced peoples of Hanford who later resettled and then the so-called down-winders, people that were affected later by releases from Hanford? Do you know if there was ever any talk between those two groups?
Ferqueron: No, not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of. I know one thing—when the construction workers came in—of course, they spilled out all over, because there was over 30,000 of them—
Franklin: Yeah huge influx.
Ferqueron: And they were settling all over in Kennewick and everywhere. Some of them were not a good class of people. You know, they were—I met a few of them, and they were pretty bad. But when everybody left Richland, they left the cream of the crop. We got some really great people in. We got a lot of good scientists. We are really quite an area for science and everything.
Franklin: Yeah.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: How does that make you—you sound a little—both happy that they’re there, but obviously then there’s this other side of it where—
Ferqueron: Well, I—
Franklin: --had this not happened, that would still be—that your family would still have a place here.
Ferqueron: I’m just the sort of a person—I adjust just very easily. I’ll say, well, this is life; this is the way it’s going. Why—there’s nothing I can do about it so, just enjoy what you have.
Franklin: So you came back to the Wye when you—how old were you when your parents—
Ferqueron: I was 15 when we first came to the Wye, and I’m still living in the same house.
Franklin: Oh, in the house that had been—
Ferqueron: Yeah!
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Ferqueron: Well, it was down on Columbia Park Trail. At the time it was Columbia Drive, but it set right almost on the road. In the Flood of ’48 or whatever that year was—it was about that far from our front door.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: But my dad moved it up on a little hill. And, yeah, I’m still living in that house.
Franklin: You are still living in that house.
Ferqueron: Uh-huh, yeah. I still own it.
Franklin: So the house from—
Ferqueron: The house that we moved from Finley to Richland Wye in was a two—three-room house. There wasn’t enough bedrooms—it was all that we could get at the time. But behind it was a Quonset hut left over from the war.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: So Dad moved—and Mom moved—my brothers and me out there, because I was 15, and I could be out there at night to—whatever the kids—boys needed, and to keep them from killing one another. You know how that is with—[LAUGHTER]—boys.
Franklin: Oh, I know.
Ferqueron: So we slept in the Quonset hut until Dad moved the house up on the hill where it is now, and added to it. And they raised seven kids, and the two of them, and an uncle who stayed with us for a while, in a two-bedroom house, very small house. Bunk beds all over the place, but we made out. And then years later, my brother put a basement in there. He lives in the basement now and I live upstairs.
Franklin: Oh, wow, that’s—
Ferqueron: We both own the house.
Franklin: Neat.
Ferqueron: It’s only about 75 years old. [LAUGHTER] It’s falling down around us, but we’re both in our 80s, so—
Franklin: Was that house brought here during World War II, or does that predate it?
Ferqueron: It was sitting there—I don’t know what the history on it. I know my parents bought it for $1,000—that and the land under it.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: That’s under it now. Yeah.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really—and so what were your—so you moved back at 15, and then what—you graduated from the—
Ferqueron: Kennewick High.
Franklin: Kennewick High.
Ferqueron: ’49.
Franklin: ’49. And then what did you do?
Ferqueron: It was just a few months later I went in the Navy.
Franklin: Mm.
Ferqueron: So I was in the Navy, and went to Bay Bridge, right out of Baltimore—not Baltimore—yeah, Baltimore for boot camp. And then I went to San Diego for school, and—
Franklin: And what did you do in—
Ferqueron: I was a commissaryman. What I did was—to put it as simple as I can—is I ran a large, very large restaurant. I was a crew boss. There was actually two of us, because it was—our shifts were 18-hour shifts.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: So, I’d work five days one week and two days the next, and the other girl would take over for the opposite watch. Anyway, it was like running a huge restaurant, except I didn’t have to worry about the menu; that came out of Washington, DC. I did that for two years. Then I got married, and married an engineman from South Carolina. That’s where the Ferqueron name comes from. We traveled around quite a bit for a couple years—well, about four or five years. Had one daughter. And he became an officer—a submarine officer.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Ferqueron: In Hawai’i.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Ferqueron: So I’ve lived in Hawai’i, I’ve lived in California—my daughter was born in California—Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Florida, and Washington. [LAUGHTER] I think I’ve got them all, anyway. That was over a 30-year period.
Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Richland area?
Ferqueron: In 1988—’84. ’84.
Franklin: 1984.
Ferqueron: ’84. My mother had a very mild heart attack, and I sold my house in South Carolina and came out here to take care of her. And just stayed, because she left me the house—me and my brother—the house. And I went to work for churches here in childcare. I worked for five different churches.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Ferqueron: And I retired from doing that, and now I do a lot of volunteer work.
Franklin: So when you left Richland, or the area of Richland, it was kind of this closed town.
Ferqueron: It was very—yeah. And small, compared to today.
Franklin: Right, smaller and also wholly government owned.
Ferqueron: Oh, yes.
Franklin: And when you came back, Richland was, you know—
Ferqueron: Wide open, yeah.
Franklin: Wide open. And then shortly after, production at Hanford ceased.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: I’m wondering if you can talk about that a bit, how you felt about that, and kind of watching that legacy of Hanford stop.
Ferqueron: Yeah. Well, I just—I really don’t know how I really felt about it. I just went about my way, and not too concerned. Although I wondered—all of that money and stuff in there and they’re closing it down. You know? And they might have to open it up again at some time. You never know.
Franklin: That’s true.
Ferqueron: I didn’t spend too much worrying about the past.
Franklin: Did you keep in touch with a lot of people from old Richland when you lived around, and--?
Ferqueron: No. They were so scattered that I didn’t—I lost contact with a lot of them, including some relatives.
Franklin: What about when you came back to Richland, did you start to rebuild those relationships again?
Ferqueron: No, uh-unh. No, most of my relationships, even today, are from Kennewick High.
Franklin: Oh, okay, right.
Ferqueron: Yeah, because I have lunch with the people that are still living here. I have lunch with them once a month.
Franklin: Sure. I mean, that makes sense because they weren’t scattered forcibly.
Ferqueron: Right, and the people who went to high school in Richland, we really had nothing to do with, you know.
Franklin: Right, because they were—
Ferqueron: Right, entirely different—
Franklin: Entirely different. And you weren’t welcome in Richland anymore, right? I mean—
Ferqueron: Well, they didn’t understand how we felt about it. How could they understand?
Franklin: Right, right. To them it had been an opportunity.
Ferqueron: Yeah, and they came here, and they thought they built the town up from a sand pile to what it is today. You know?
Franklin: Interesting. Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about today that you’d like to mention?
Ferqueron: No.
Franklin: Well—
Ferqueron: I do have something I have arguments with people about and that’s why the Richland Wye is called the Richland Wye. They all assume it’s the highway. It’s not. It’s an old Indian trail.
Franklin: Really?
Ferqueron: And the reasons why is because the Yakama tribes would come down from Yakima and camp at the Richland Wye. The Wanapums and the tribes up that way would come down, cross the river, approximately where we cross it now—the Yakima. They would meet the Yakama tribe there; they would go on to Walla Walla for the pow-wows, and that forms the Richland Wye.
Franklin: Oh, interesting. And where did you—
Ferqueron: I used to go to the meetings for the Daughters of Washington State. I didn’t quite qualify—my family didn’t come quite—or I couldn’t prove that they came quite soon enough for me to be a complete Daughter of Washington, but—
Franklin: Right.
Ferqueron: And then our particular section broke up. People started dying off, and—I was quite a bit younger than some of them. This is where I learned more about it.
Franklin: Interesting.
Ferqueron: Yeah. Well, they do have a marker out there now that says heritage trail, but there’s no explanation as to what it is.
Franklin: Oh.
Ferqueron: And I think the Indians should have credit for that! [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I mean, they certainly had extensive trading and travel networks and that things we—
Ferqueron: Oh, yeah. They did that once every year, I think.
Franklin: Yeah, I believe so.
Ferqueron: So it formed a trail.
Franklin: Yeah, there’s a lot there that we first ignored, and then the interest was in some cases too late for--
Ferqueron: Well, everything is focused on Hanford now. And Battelle and the companies that are here now, and the labs out there, and Battelle. I think all that stuff is great, but to me, I still see a farm out there.
Franklin: Right, right. I mean, how could you not? I mean, you had—you grew up there.
Ferqueron: Right. Well, from ten days old.
Franklin: Right.
Ferqueron: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Exactly.
Ferqueron: I can still picture my grandfather’s farm just as if it was still there.
Franklin: Well, Lorraine, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. It’s been really insightful, and—yeah, I think it’s really important to have a voice of those pre-war communities and that transition period, and how there’s this other narrative of Hanford that sometimes gets lost in the telling of the story.
Ferqueron: Yeah. I don’t want it to get lost. I want those people to be remembered. Because they gave a big sacrifice. That was a huge sacrifice.
Franklin: Yeah, it is.
Ferqueron: Even though it was forced, it was still—there is one other story I heard, and one of the farms here was owned by a woman and her cherries were ready to pick, and they told her she couldn’t pick them. She had to get out first. And this is a story I heard from the time I was 12. She had a shotgun loaded with rock salt. You know what rock salt is?
Franklin: Yeah, yeah.
Ferqueron: Of course. Well, she shot the FBI man. Hurt him pretty bad. And I remember everybody in town was, well, she’s going to go to jail. You shoot an FBI man, you’re going to go to jail. Nothing was ever done, she picked her cherries and moved out.
Franklin: Wow.
Ferqueron: Well, it was too secret; they couldn’t.
Franklin: Right, because if they had taken her to court, that arrest record would be—
Ferqueron: There would be reporters in no time. It would’ve been all over the country in no time at all.
Franklin: To kind of make that go away, right? Wow, that’s really something. That’s a great story.
Ferqueron: Yeah.
Franklin: Well, Lorraine, again, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today.
Ferqueron: Well, I want to do anything I can to make sure people remember there was a Richland before Hanford started.
Franklin: Yeah, and we’re going to add this oral history right by your brother’s, and so have that as a great—again, thank you for helping expand that—
Ferqueron: The other children in our family are too young, and my brother Roy is so deaf he couldn’t hear you if he tried, and he doesn’t like to think about those times at all. And he was born in Richland.
Franklin: Right.
Ferqueron: But a midwife who later became our grandmother—she married my—she had a farm here in Richland, and she lost her husband in ’35, and my grandmother lost his wife—my grandmother—in ’36. And they farmed alongside one another for many, many years.
[TELEPHONE RINGS]
Ferqueron: And then they got married. After we were all grown. So one day at school, there was a whole bunch of kids there that were just other kids; the next day they were my cousins. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That’s really something.
Ferqueron: Yeah, it was interesting.
Franklin: Well, again, I can’t thank you enough, Lorraine.
Ferqueron: Oh, well, I’ve enjoyed it, really.
Franklin: Oh, good! Me too. Me too. Okay, so we’ll--
Ferqueron: I wish I remembered more. I was only 12, 13.
Franklin: Well, that gives you enough, though, you know, concrete experiences that you do remember.
Ferqueron: Yeah, there’s a lot of family names that I remember. And, well, like I said, I’ve gone to a couple funerals from there. But those are pretty much gone now. I think it’ll be my family next.
Franklin: Well, hopefully not too soon.
Ferqueron: Oh, no. Well, I just had a heart valve put in, and the doctor told me to—and I’m 85—and the doctor told me to come back--
[VIDEO CUTS]
Northwest Public Television | Bruggemann_Ludwig
Camera man: There we go. That's pretty good?
Robert Bauman: Pretty good.
Cameraman: Okay. Seems like we ought to record that.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yep.
Camera man: Yep. We’re rolling.
Bauman: Okay. All right, guess we're ready to get started.
Ludwig Bruggemann: Good.
Bauman: So, if we could start first by just having you say your name and spell it for us.
Bruggemann: My name is Ludwig Bruggemann. Ludwig, L-U-D-W-I-G, Bruggemann, B-R-U-G-G-E-M-A-N-N.
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?
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.
Bauman: So that was in place already, when he bought it?
Bruggemann: That was in place, and he took it over and got it going, got it working right.
Bauman: Any idea how much your father paid for it?
Bruggemann: No, no idea at all, no.
Bauman: And so what sort of crops were grown on the farm?
Bruggemann: My father had--what, Paula?
Paula Bruggemann Holm: I don't know if it was soft fruit.
Bruggemann: No, it was soft fruit as I remember.
Holm: Apricots, peaches?
Bruggemann: Cherries, wasn't it? Wasn't it cherries? Peaches? Apricots? Pears, maybe.
Holm: Apples?
Bruggemann: No apples, no. And he later wanted to go into grapes.
Bauman: Oh, okay so that was the plan for down the road.
Bruggemann: Yeah.
Bauman: And your mother--was your father married at the time that he purchased the property?
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.
Bauman: Okay.
Bruggemann: At Priest Rapids. And that's how my mother met him, and found him evidently a very attractive man.
Bauman: And what was your mother’s name?
Bruggemann: Mary.
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?
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.
Bauman: Right.
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.
Bauman: Right. So your father then took the government to court at some point? Is that what you're saying?
Bruggemann: Pardon?
Bauman: Your father, did he go to court then?
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.
Bauman: Right.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Bruggemann: Well, Gary and Margaret Wills, yeah, they had the contact and they were out there also weren't they?
Holm: Yeah, that's where they met them.
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.
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?
Bruggemann: Yeah. Either we'd go to Sunnyside or to Yakima. And the Yakima tour was about an hour’s drive at the time.
Bauman: So you were about five years old? Is that right?
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.
Bauman: So you had not yet started school?
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.
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?
Bruggemann: Yeah, right.
Bauman: Had you been back before then at all?
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--
Bauman: So that time with Gary was the first time you had actually been out--
Bruggemann: In the area, yes. Yes. Yes.
Bauman: What, I'm kind of curious, did it bring back any memories for you? Or what sorts of things.
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.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
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.
Bauman: Do you remember any of the other buildings that were there? Your sister mentioned the cook house, I think.
Bruggemann: The cook house is still there.
Bauman: The building is still there, right?
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.
Bauman: Yeah. And you mentioned the size of the property, obviously, your father must have hired a number of workers.
Bruggemann: Oh, yes, yes.
Bauman: Do you remember workers being around?
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—
Holm: [INAUDIBLE]
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]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Bruggemann: Which really impressed me at that time.
Bauman: That is something that you would remember.
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.
Bauman: What was the weather like? Do you remember winters or summers at all?
Bruggemann: No, I don't remember winters at all, but summers were warm. Warm, very warm.
Bauman: And you mentioned having a dog.
Bruggemann: Yeah
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?
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.
Bauman: So then in 1943 when you had to move, when your family had to move, you said you moved essentially to Yakima then?
Bruggemann: We moved here into Yakima into a rented house while my father looked for a farm out here on Englewood Avenue then.
Holm: The Canfield--he bought the Canfield house.
Bruggemann: The Canfield house, okay.
Holm: He was a representative for the state or something. He never liked that house.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Bauman: Right.
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.
Bauman: Right. So things we take for granted today, a lot more work.
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.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
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.
Holm: [INAUDIBLE] White Bluffs. Some of these little towns had a few--a grocery store or something.
Bruggemann: Yes, but--
Holm: I remember, I think he went to Sunnyside.
Bruggemann: Yeah.
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.
Bruggemann: Yes.
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.
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.
Bauman: Right. Makes sense.
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.
Bauman: I was just thinking, your parents in some ways came from very different places, right?
Bruggemann: Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
Bauman: So was your father bilingual? Did he speak English and German?
Bruggemann: Yes, German and English both, yes. Sure.
Bauman: Oh, okay. And did he speak both at home there?
Bruggemann: No, we didn't, at home we spoke English--my mother's language.
Bauman: Right, sure. Did you learn any German from your father growing up?
Bruggemann: No, no I didn't. I learned German the hard way. [LAUGHTER]
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?
Holm: Do you remember the hermit?
Bruggemann: The hermit? No.
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.
Bruggemann: No, no. I don't know that.
Bauman: That's right, you had mentioned him.
Bruggemann: I only remember--Do you remember the halfway house?
Holm: Well the name, yeah.
Bruggemann: The halfway house was an abandoned house that was sort of halfway to Yakima. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Oh, so that’s why it’s the halfway house?
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?
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.
[LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So I guess, you mentioned the Wills family?
Bruggemann: The Wills, yes.
Bauman: Any other family names you remember?
Bruggemann: No, no. I don't know.
Holm: Gilhuly.
Bauman: Gilhuly.
Holm: And Frye. Frye just died here, not too long ago.
Bauman: Okay, so I think you had mentioned that Gilhuly name when I was here.
Holm: F-R-Y-E, I think it is.
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.
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?
Holm: The Cinnamon Bear every evening.
Bauman: Okay.
Holm: We didn't have TV until like '51.
Bruggemann: No, no. See TV was much later.
Bauman: Yeah. I just wondered if radio or newspaper, if you—
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.
Bauman: Okay, well thank you very much. I appreciate it.
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.
Bauman: Sure. I don't know that I remember much before I turned five, so.
Bruggemann: Yeah, yeah.
Bauman: But yeah, I appreciate you taking the time out of your trip here to the states.
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.
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.
Bruggemann: Yeah, yeah.
Bauman: That's important. Again, thank you very much, I really appreciate it.
Bruggemann: Okay.
Bauman: All right.
Northwest Public Television | Watson_Madge
Man one: --Pretty good shape.
Robert Bauman: Okay.
Man one: Okay. I'm up. I'm rolling.
Bauman: Okay.
Man two: I’m rolling.
Bauman: Okay. All right. Well, why don't you go ahead and say your name just for the record first?
Madge Watson: Madge Watson. When I came, I was Madge Shardlow.
Bauman: And what was your last name?
Watson: Shardlow.
Bauman: How do you spell that?
Watson: S-H-A-R-D-L-O-W.
Bauman: Okay. Thank you very much. My name's Robert Bauman, and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Madge Watson. Today is July 17th of 2013, and the interview's being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And we'll be talking today about your experiences working at the Hanford site. So I wonder if you could tell me first how you came to Hanford, what brought you here, how you heard about the place, and when that was.
Watson: I came in '48, and I was graduating. I was in my senior year at Washington State, Pullman, and I had my degree in bacteriology and public health. And they recruited on campus, and all they would say is, we can't tell you what you're going to be doing. It's very secretive. But you have just the background for it. So it kind of left you wondering what I was doing, but you had to have the FBI clearance and a medical test and all of that. But before long, I got the letter asking if I would like to work here and what to do. And so I said I'll start on the 1st of July. That was '48, and that was the year the Columbia flooded, and it really flooded, and they had put up the dike here. But I don't think I had ever been in this area before. I grew up in Spokane Valley, and we always went up in the mountains when we had time off. So I came down thinking, I'll try it for a year and see how I like it. And so I came down by train, and friends who lived in Kennewick met another girl who had the same degree I did and was coming down just for the summer, and took us to the George Washington Way hiring center there to check in. But you couldn’t—the bridge was washed out of the Yakima, so you had to go over Bombing Range Road, which was just a dirt road, and over the old bridge on the Yakima. Came in, and they said, well, housing is really scarce, because we've used all available housing for people who have been affected by the flood. But they took us out to North Richland to a barracks that had not been used in I don't know how long. It was so dirty, you couldn't believe it. They dropped us off, and they said, you go over here to get your meals—an enormous place there. But we get busy and cleaned up the room that we were assigned to, and went over to get something to eat for lunch and walked into the biggest room I had ever seen. And I didn't see another woman in there. And the girl I was with was blonde and very striking, and there were all these calls, and we thought, what are we into here? [LAUGHTER] So we went back and packed up our bags, our suitcases--we didn't have much--and hitchhiked back into town and went to where they had brought us out from and said, we really don't like it out there. [LAUGHTER] Do you have anything else? Not realizing that people were waiting months to get into town at that time. And they said, who hired you? And we said the right answer. So they found us housing just in back of where the Federal Building is, right away. And coming out of school, it was fine, because everybody was in together, and it was just a regular room with one bed and one dresser and a shower and a bathroom on each floor—it was two stories high. So we settled down and caught our bus and went out to work and found out we were in the water treatment plant for 100 F, and the man who was our supervisor--and I can't think of his name--but he had developed the systems that were used for water treatment in cities. All the new ones were using his design. And so we walked in, and he said, we've got a couple of college graduates, and let us loose on equipment we had never seen before. [LAUGHTER] Washington State didn't have that type of equipment. And so we worked on it, and it was very basic chemistry, so it wasn't anything that was difficult at all. But they started having trouble with the screens clogging up. And so they looked through the files at anybody that had any biological training. They put about six or seven of us in a separate room, gave us microscopes and books, and we learned about diatoms and all of the plankton that might follow screens, and worked on that for several months. And when that project was finished, I was asked if I would like to work in the fisheries building. Well, my mother and father and I all liked fish. I thought that sounded like a good place. So my first supervisor was Jared Davis. He was an entomologist, again, from Washington State. And caddisflies were his specialty. But what they were doing out there is wanting to know what the effect of the reactors that were running would have on the river, especially the fish. They were concerned about that. So we got out there, and it was the winter of '49, I think it was. It was so cold that when we went down to the river to take an area and get all the various things that were in the water off. If you took the rock out of the water, it froze immediately, so you had to do all your gathering under the water there. But I learned so much, because Jared was a good teacher. And it was very interesting, because the fisheries part had been there for several years. Dr. Foster, Dick Foster, was in charge of that. He'd come from the University of Washington. And to know exactly what was happening on the river from the many reactors that were taking the water in and coming out radioactive on some of the things, they had to go through all the different stages of plankton, the insects, the algae, all the various things that were in the river. And so it was really exciting. I brought a greeny that shows--I would like to show you. It wasn't very fancy at all. It was just a Quonset hut, and in between that was a counting—where you could do your counting of your samples. And then on the other side was another Quonset hut with a greenhouse behind it. And they were just getting started. Everybody was new. I would say practically all except the top people had just come out of school. They'd been in the service, and they were really anxious to get going. There was very little known about the effect of radiation on anything at that time. So it was all brand new, and if there was anything known, it was classified, and you had to get it out of the classified material on it. So we did everything. We had places where we grew the things in the lab, where we could have a controlled experiment. We sampled up and down the river. We had a boat that had a driver that could take us out on the river. We could set nets. We could get plankton nets. We could do all kinds of things like that. So every day was new and different, and everything you did led to something else that you wanted to try and find out why. What was doing what was happening? And so what I'm really trying to get across to you is how everybody came so enthused. They had studied in school. They were going to put this to use now, and it was really a very interesting, exciting place to work. I even learned to drive a weapons carrier that you had to double clutch. [LAUGHTER] I'd never thought I'd have to--
Bauman: When did you have to drive that?
Watson: We sampled in areas up and down off along the shore out deep. We tried everything, so at that time, they would never let it--when I looked at the job, I know my adviser said, Madge, if you go with--GE was running it—you won't find that you're handicapped by being a woman, that you will have your chances, and it was certainly true. I had every chance to do everything that anybody else did.
Bauman: Were there many other women working in the fishery area?
Watson: In the fisheries area, there weren't many. But as time went on, more and more came, but—no, there weren't actually. There was Jared and Ray Kupi and, of course, Dick was in charge of it. So they had the regular fish runways that you see. They had ponds outside that were there.
Bauman: So it was a fairly small group of people.
Watson: It was. It was. In fact, the lab that we had would be about 20 feet long and about eight or nine feet wide. We had a hood at one end, and we had Bunsen burners out everywhere. And I remember that one of the men that was there was—I had hair that was very long, and he was sure I was going to go up in flames. [LAUGHTER] So I would braid it or do something with it to keep it out of the way, because we were just learning and experimenting as we went.
Bauman: And so clarify, where was the location of these Quonset huts that you--?
Watson: They were not at the main building at 100 F that biology had started up. But they had been put up very early to try and figure out, because everybody was concerned about what effect it would have on the salmon there. I brought along an interesting article on Dick Foster's talking about it, and it has the layout of the place. I don't know if you want to try and get pictures of that eventually or not.
Bauman: Maybe we could after.
Watson: Yeah, afterwards.
Man one: Before you answer the next one, would you tip your glasses just a hair? If you just lift them up on your ear just a little bit like this way.
Bauman: Just sort of down a little.
Man one: So they tip down just a little bit. I don't want them to be uncomfortable for you.
Watson: No, they aren't.
Man one: I don't want you to feel like you have to move in a funny way. I'm just getting more reflection than I want.
Watson: Reflection than you want, sure.
Man one: That's great. Thank you so much. Sorry about that.
Watson: Sure.
Bauman: No problem. So let's talk a bit about the area. You talked about first arriving and the situation with the housing. What were your impressions of Richland and the Tri-Cities in those early days here?
Watson: It was really fun. Living in the dorm, they had so much trouble losing people because of the dust storms, and it was pretty primitive conditions all right. But they put on classes every night, because there was no recreation here for anybody. So I took accounting. I took fly tying. I took hat-making. All kinds of different things. But you only stayed in town about two weekends out of the whole year. People didn't have cars then, which would seem so strange to my grandchildren. [LAUGHTER] But they didn't, but everybody had an FBI clearance. So where you worked, they would put up—the ones with cars would put up where they were going. And you signed up, and then you went with them. So I went in every direction there was from here going places, all with people that--
Bauman: So how did you get to the site? Did you take buses then? Is that how you got to and from the site?
Watson: Yes. You got up, and you had a bus that cane by and took you to—there's still the bus transfer station there, and it was much, much larger, of course, at that time. And you got on there, and it was really interesting, because there were so few women going out to the areas that very often the men would stand aside and let the women on first. I'm sure that doesn't happen anymore. [LAUGHTER] But it did then.
Bauman: And so you mentioned having security clearance. Obviously, security was a very important part of the Hanford site.
Watson: It was.
Bauman: I wondered if you'd talk about that a little more and any issues with that.
Watson: I'll go from the very first when, of course, the FBI went out and asked neighbors, and a neighbor called my mother and said, the FBI called about Madge, but I didn't tell them a thing. [LAUGHTER] But we had safety meetings one week. We had security meetings the other week. It was really drilled into you that you did not talk about what went on out in the plant and what you were doing. And I really realized that just this year when my daughter was asking me, Mom, you never talked about it. And I realized when I could, I hadn't. Evidently, it just was instilled so much into me not to talk about it. I've been with you all these years, and I didn't even know some of these things that you did. But she knew the people, because the people that you worked with became fast friends, and they truly were fast friends.
Bauman: Now, the people you worked with, did they come from all over the United States?
Watson: They did. They truly did. I worked this little Quonset hut that had the greenhouse, eventually. The next year, my husband-to-be, Don Watson, came, and he was a fisheries biologist, and they evidently, when they knew we were going to get married, they asked if I'd like to go work in the building next door. So I did. And it was very interesting work too, because they were just starting up, and we went out and went all over, even up to Saddle Mountain taking plant samples and doing the same thing that I'd done before there. And then you probably know of Leo Bustad who came. We had had biochemistry together in college, but he used a sheep as an experimental animal. And the place for that was just in back of where the Quonset was with the greenhouse. And so he needed bacteriological work done when he did postmortems on the animals. And so I got an autoclave and microscope and everything for working. And it was interesting, because there had been a close collaboration between Kadlec Hospital and here, out in the area. And so they did blood work every couple of weeks on everybody to--not that often. Maybe once a month. And so you got to know them. But it was good. You didn't have to have everything here. You could get the auger that you needed, the various dyes, and things like that from the hospital. So all the different groups worked together very well.
Bauman: And so Kadlec would do blood tests on everyone regularly? Is that what you're--
Watson: I assume it was Kadlec that did it. I really don't know for sure now whether they had—they came out to the area. You didn't go in there. They came out to the area, and you just did that. But I know that we worked very closely with Kadlec, and some of the people that worked there were the staff of the hospital too there, so it was very much a collaborative effort.
Bauman: Now you mentioned your husband was a fisheries biologist. Did you meet at work then?
Watson: We did meet at work. He took me fishing, and I caught a fish with a fly I tied myself, and we were married within five months. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So I imagine that most of the people you knew in Richland were connected to Hanford, in some way, worked there.
Watson: They were. And every kind of things you got out on the bus. The first time when I got on the bus, I sat down in an aisle seat, and one of the fellows said, do you play bridge? I said, yes. He said, good. Turn around. And out comes the boards they had that would fit between the seats on the aisle there. And so you always had the seat waiting for you there to do that.
Bauman: I wonder if you could talk about maybe what were the most rewarding parts of the work you did or maybe some of the most challenging aspects of the work.
Watson: I worked with a series of people. After I had worked there and worked with Leo and then with Dr. Berry on another part, I went up to the main offices, and I worked with Dr. Porter, Dr. John Porter. He was growing algae, single cell algae, to do the biochemistry using radioactive materials on there. And it was really interesting, because I learned an aspect—I'd had the medical part, but I hadn't had it using it as experimental. And in all these, it was like being in grad school. You were paid for what you were doing, but you learned so much with everything. You learned. And I think all of us just felt challenged.
Bauman: So how long did you work at Hanford, and at what point did you stop working there and why?
Watson: When I was expecting my first child, then I stopped working. And I did not go back, but I have, over the years, used so much of what I learned. I was interested in League of Women Voters, and that was at the time the Clean Water Act was doing. And I handed out petitions, and I set up—I attended the meeting on the Columbia as a representative from the local league, and then was asked to set up one on the Snake and on the Yakima River, where we got all the users of water. And since my father and mother had a fruit and vegetable farm that was irrigated, I certainly knew the farming end of it. And what we were trying to do is get people together to understand water and the uses of the water. And one of the things that I was proudest of was the fact that it was the first time an Indian nation had accepted and taken responsibility for attending. At that time, their attorneys and their biologists were non-Native American. But today, it's very different. But we got people to talk in that way. The Yakima River, which at the time, was the dirtiest river in the state, we even had a meat processing plant that the water was taken in, and effluent went right back out into the river at the time. So a lot has been accomplished. But it takes time with everything.
Bauman: Was your interest in the Clean Water Act connected to the work you had done at Hanford then?
Watson: Yes, because I'd really gotten interested in the water, and, of course, my husband continued to work out there. He started in '49 doing the salmon counts, the red counts in which are the nests in the river. And nobody else could stand to be in a plane where they put the tip down and just circled around as you counted with a little clicker, the reds, to count them. And so he did that for over 40 years. So I had many different interests in water.
Bauman: Sure. So when you worked the site in the fisheries area, did you find any significant impact from Hanford, other—on the river or on the fish?
Watson: They thought it was going to be temperature, but it wasn't temperature. It was the chromium that they put in to—I think it was to stabilize the equipment that was in there. And that's what it was. And so we ran a bunch of tests on different levels of chromium and what would be toxic and would not be toxic.
Bauman: That was the sort of major finding you had.
Watson: That was. And the change in temperature was enough that they found that some of the bacteria that affected the fish were more—with the warmer water it was much harder on them.
Bauman: So what year was it then? You said that you were expecting your first child. What year was it?
Watson: That was '55.
Bauman: '55, okay. So I was going to ask you, I know an event that a lot of people were here at the time remember President Kennedy visited in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor. I know you weren't working at Hanford Site anymore, but obviously it was something that the people in the community were very interested in, so I wonder if you have any memories of that.
Watson: I do. I lived on Butternut Street at the time. We had 50 preschool children on that street. So two of us mothers took our children and headed out to see it. And if you could see the number of cars—and so we thought we were being really clever tying a band on the antenna, on the car radio antenna. Well, so did everybody else. We looked and looked for our car [LAUGHTER] when it was through. But it was a fun time.
Bauman: Is there anything, any major events, other dignitaries visiting, or sort of incidents or anything that sort of stands out during your time working there that you remember?
Watson: Well, you did meet just about everybody, because there were so few when I was there that they came through looking to see what was being done. So you got to meet them. But those--what really stands out in my mind is how everybody cooperated. It really was a fun way to do it.
Bauman: Yeah. I'm going to shift a little bit and ask you a bit more about the community of Richland. You mentioned being involved in the League of Women Voters. And you also served on the city council. I wondered if you could talk about that, about what led you to get involved and what the community of Richland was like in the '50s and '60s.
Watson: Well, I said I was interested in League of Women Voters, and the first mayor was very interested in getting it. And one of the things that I did after I was not working out here any longer was I helped the school to establish a program that the principal said I've got children who've had all kinds of help in reading, and they still can't read, and they're smart as can be. And what's happening? So five of us went together and found a program, Slingerlands, and we spent an hour each day with one child, and it's using all the senses and figuring out which sense the child uses to learn to read, and a lot of repetition. And one child I had was dyslexic. But there's all different kinds of reasons for it. We just didn't know. And one of the gals there said—I had been asked if I would serve on the planning commission. And I had been doing this for about five years, and she said, Madge, I think you can make more of a difference there. So I did do that for six years, but in that time, I had always been interested in water, and so I was asked to serve on the state board on water. And I did that for a while. So everything kind of intertwines in what you do.
Bauman: So what time period was that then that you served on the planning committee and city council member?
Watson: Well, it must have been late '60s, early '70s. And then I was on the city council. I was appointed to the council, and then served a two-year term on it too. And then I decided that was enough meetings.
Bauman: That was good? [LAUGHTER] Now was your service on the state water board around the same time then?
Watson: Yes.
Bauman: One of things, obviously, happening with Richland is it was a government town obviously, when you first moved here, and that changed at some point. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that at all? Do you have any memories of that or anything that stands out about that?
Watson: Before it became--when it was a government town, you couldn't get a house until you had children. And so we were in the George Washington apartments just next to the Uptown there for five years. And then went up to a ranch house. And that was heaven. [LAUGHTER] And then when they sold the houses, we bought it, and after several years, decided we liked the area. But we built a home just in back of Jason Lee School.
Bauman: So when the federal government gave you the option to purchase, then, was when you bought the home?
Watson: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It certainly was a very generous offer.
Bauman: Were there any--in the '50s, late '40s into the '50s, you mentioned there wasn't a lot of entertainment.
Watson: No.
Bauman: Were there any community events? At some point, Atomic Frontier Days started at some point. Any things like that?
Watson: Yes, I can remember the parades when the children were just really small that they had those. When you get that many people together, there were the mountaineers. There were all these different groups that did things together on the weekends. So there were activities, but there just weren't that many cars around. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So I wonder if overall you could—what your thoughts were about the years that you worked at Hanford, what it was like as a place to work, your assessment of that.
Watson: I really didn't have any--I had grown up on the farm, and we worked on the farm. And all the time I was in college, I was a teaching assistant, because they didn't have any graduate students to do it, so I was doing that in chemistry. And so I don't have a lot to compare it to. But it was a very friendly place, and everybody knew somebody either through work or through where they lived. But there truly wasn't much to do. There was a movie theater, but it wasn't very big. And there weren't many places to eat.
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you would like to talk about or a memory that you haven't shared yet that you think would be good to share?
Watson: When I was looking through the material that I had in there, what really struck me was how long the friendships have been and how steadfast they have been. And it really--nobody had family here. So we were each other's family, and so you really got to know people in a way that I don't think you do in most places.
Bauman: Well, thank you very much for coming and sharing your memories and your experiences.
Watson: You’re welcome.
Bauman: I really appreciate it.
Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an interview with Maureen Hamilton on January 20th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ms. Hamilton about her experiences working on the Hanford site and her experiences in this community. Thanks for being here.
Maureen Hamilton: You’re welcome.
O’Reagan: If we could start, maybe—it’d be great if you could just tell us a bit about your birthplace, where you grew up, just a little bit of biography before you got to Hanford, if you would.
Hamilton: Sure. I was raised on a farm in south central Illinois, not too far from St. Louis. So I was a farm girl. I went to college at Monmouth College in northern Illinois, which is where I got my chemistry degree—I got a bachelor’s degree there. I worked briefly for Dow Chemical in Michigan, and then I was working at the University of Missouri in their agricultural chemistry lab while my husband was in graduate school. So there I was doing analysis of various environmental and animal products, looking for heavy metal contamination. Then we were in Germany for a couple of years while my husband was in service, and we ended up out here starting in 1972, where we both worked onsite.
O’Reagan: Sorry to interrupt. Okay, so you came directly from Germany to here?
Hamilton: No, there were a few months finding the job, once we got back. Well, at the time there weren’t a lot of chemist jobs around, I don’t think. So my husband sent out applications to several hundred companies, and Hanford was one of the places that responded. I think possibly because he was a special weapons technician in the Army, they knew—and his master’s degree dealt with some radioactive materials, so that may have been part of why he was hired here.
O’Reagan: Were you familiar at all with the community before you moved here?
Hamilton: No. No, it was something totally—totally foreign to us, but interesting.
O’Reagan: Do you remember your first impressions?
Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Well, coming out of Idaho and the green into the barrenness of eastern Washington was a bit of a shock, yes. Because I hadn’t seen it, he didn’t really see that much of it when he came for the interview. But we very quickly learned to love the place. I wouldn’t live any place else right now.
O’Reagan: What was the area like in the ‘70s?
Hamilton: It was still a small farming community, pretty much. There was obviously—Hanford was the main employer, as far as Richland and much of the Tri-Cities was concerned.
O’Reagan: Where did you live?
Hamilton: Well, for a couple—we had an apartment off of Van Giesen for a short period of time. Then we moved into a condo apartment out on the Meadow Springs golf course. Then in ’75 we built our own house on Peachtree Lane in Orchard Hills.
O’Reagan: So when you were working on the site, you were industrial hygiene chemist, is that right?
Hamilton: That was my position, yes.
O’Reagan: Would you explain exactly what that is? What’s involved in that?
Hamilton: Sure. The employer initially was the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which was the medical contractor onsite. In addition to providing the doctors and nurses, they had the industrial hygiene for the whole site. Industrial hygiene is monitoring of worker health and checking the workplace to make sure that it is safe, that people aren’t being overexposed to things. We had a chemistry lab, and that’s where I was involved. So we would analyze air samples that were collected onsite for things like asbestos or lead or heavy metals or whatever types of materials—non-radioactive. The lab was located here in town at 805 Goethals, so we weren’t onsite. We also did drinking water analysis onsite, and we were doing a little bit of hazardous waste characterization.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So what would a typical working day look like?
Hamilton: Oh, it varied, depending on what was going on. Initially, when I started, we were pretty much—I mean, the industrial hygienists were the people who went out in the field and collected the samples and evaluated the data. The lab—we were very small—I started actually as a technician for a year before I actually became the chemist. We had one chemist, one technician. And then we eventually grew to have a total staff in the lab department of about 20. We would run gas chromatographs, atomic absorption, different types of equipment, analyzing those air and water samples that were being brought into the laboratory. I also eventually—well, initially at least—was functioning as partly a quality person as well. In 1974, the lab became one of the first in the country to be accredited by the American Industrial Hygiene Association. So, while I wasn’t listed as the technical manager or the director at that point, I was kind of the technical expertise for that portion of the company. Eventually, expanded that I did manage the lab component as well as function as their QA coordinator.
O’Reagan: Is that similar to the work you were doing before you came here?
Hamilton: No, my experience before was strictly laboratory. Had no management responsibilities. And while I was using spectroscopy equipment at the University of Missouri, it was more on things like goose livers and grain and things like that. It had nothing, really, to do with human health.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So you said you went out to collect samples at some point, especially in the early career?
Hamilton: Just for a few months, I actually—Hanford had some offsite monitoring systems across the river for nitrogen oxides and I think sulfur oxides. It was things that would have come out of the production facilities. It wasn’t radioactive, again, it was chemicals. So once a week, we’d drive out there and change—they were liquid impinger type samples. So we’d change them out and bring them back and analyze them.
O’Reagan: I’ve read some accounts of local farmers who grew up remembering people coming from Hanford—scientists, to come gather samples from their farm to test for various things. Is that the type of--?
Hamilton: That might have been part of it, because at least one of them, I know, was set up near a barn on the top of the bluffs there, across the river. We weren’t doing any—there were a lot of other people doing radiological monitoring, that was nothing to do with what we were doing. But it’s possible that some of the people where the sites were located would remember. Because they were on private property.
O’Reagan: Did you ever find any safety hazards?
Hamilton: None of what we were—no, we never found anything that was exceeding any kind of limits in those.
O’Reagan: Could you describe the ways in which the security or secrecy of the Area impacted your work?
Hamilton: I mean, since I wasn’t doing radiological, it wasn’t as much so as like what my husband was doing. But if we wanted to give a paper or anything at a technical conference, it had to go through DoE for approval for release. So we worked with very little classified material where I was.
O’Reagan: Can you tell us about what your husband did?
Hamilton: He worked at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, PFP. He was a non-destructive assay chemist, where he was monitoring the plutonium that was being either produced or stored there at PFP.
O’Reagan: That was—did his role change over the course of time he was working there?
Hamilton: He had a few months, initially, where they rotated him through different sites to pick a spot where they wanted to end up. But, no, he spent most of his career there.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. So the first few decades you lived here were during the Cold War. Did you feel that impacted your time here, or was that just something in the background?
Hamilton: I was not nearly as aware of it as some people seem to have been. No, that just really didn’t—was some place off, had nothing to do, really. I didn’t feel like we were in danger because we were close to Hanford or anything like that, no.
O’Reagan: Do you have any impression of whether the community around you also felt that way? Do you know if there were—I don’t know quite what I’m asking here. Was there more of an impression of that, or did people just sort of go about their lives?
Hamilton: I think people here were just used to Hanford as a secret place. You don’t talk about what you’re doing out there, that’s just the way it is. We did our thing and didn’t worry about the rest of the world much.
O’Reagan: Tying back into—tell us a little bit about life in the ‘70s here. Do you feel—I don’t know—the social scene or the feel, the life in the area has changed much over the ‘70s to ‘80s to ‘90s?
Hamilton: Yeah, I would say that’s for sure. For instance, when we built our house out there in what’s now called South Richland, which is across the river, near[EM1] Meadow Springs—the road from there to Columbia Center was still gravel. Gage didn’t exist as a paved road. We were like the second house in the subdivision where we were built. It was mostly still orchards around us, so it was a lot more rural there. There was probably one, maybe, movie theater, the Uptown. And I guess Columbia Center maybe always had one. But there’s a lot more for people to do now, and there’s certainly way more people to do it.
O’Reagan: What was it you liked about living here?
Hamilton: Well, being a country girl from the start, I guess we liked the feel of a small, close-knit community. The job was good. It was very comfortable living. We had good friends. So it was pleasant. We didn’t have a lot of traffic to deal with.
O’Reagan: What sort of things would you do in your spare time, or with the friends in the area?
Hamilton: Oh, one of the things that became a big interest for us was the growing wine industry. We came just about the time it was getting started, and we stumbled into making friends with the Rauners at Yakima River shortly after we got here. So we got to actually help them at times with crushing things, to get to know all about the wine-making process. And we quickly joined the Tri-Cities Enological Society, it was called then. Now it’s just the Wine Society. So we were very much involved with that. We also enjoyed the variety of types of scenery here. Whether you wanted to do something, you were close to the mountains, you were close to the ocean, you had this nice dry, arid climate here, where you could go hiking or do things. So it was an easy, comfortable place to be. Have lots of things—options to do.
O’Reagan: You ever get to use your chemistry knowledge in the wine--?
Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Learned enough about the wine making process to know I didn’t want to do it. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: You’re—since 1999—a consultant, a public safety consultant. Is that right?
Hamilton: Yeah. When I retired from Hanford, officially, then, basically, I continued for five years going back, doing the same thing for them onsite that I had done as an employee on a part-time basis. But it was in ’95 that I started doing these laboratory assessments for the American Industrial Hygiene Association, which is one of the organizations that had accredited our lab here. So I still do that through—this year’s probably about the last year I’ll do that, but I’ve been doing that for 20 years.
O’Reagan: What’s involved in that?
Hamilton: It’s going to these various lab sites and making sure that they have all the documentation, the properly trained people, that they’re following the procedures and doing it in accordance with the now international quality requirement.
O’Reagan: So you’ve been involved in some of the historical organizations around here. When did you first start getting involved in those?
Hamilton: Pretty much after I retired from Hanford. I knew I wanted to do something locally, too. And I had visited the CREHST Museum from way back when it was still in the Federal Building. So that was the first thing I did. I started out reviewing some of their oral histories and then gradually, as I had more time during the day, I would serve as kind of a fill-in docent for them, and did various projects for them. Then when they were transitioned out and replaced by the REACH, I moved over there.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What is it about that work that you find rewarding? What is it that draws you to work with them?
Hamilton: Well, I think it’s extremely important to maintain the history of what was going on here at Hanford. This is certainly a unique and important part of our country’s history. I’m very pleased that the National Park has been designated. That will be an important part of preserving all of this. I like—people need to know their history. So I think the Hanford history is—as well as the exotic geology we have here, the effect of the Ice Age floods and everything. This is unique area, both geologically, and historically, I think.
O’Reagan: Mm-hm. I guess it’s more common today, but do you ever feel you are treated differently as a woman scientist over your career?
Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Unfortunately, yes. I had to do a little fighting to get some equal pay when I first came out here. But it was easy enough to do. And in the field of industrial hygiene, women have been moving in quite a bit, actually, there. Probably almost equal number of women as men in this field now.
O’Reagan: Interesting. Anything else about your time working on or around Hanford that leaps to mind that you’d like to talk about? Anything that was particularly unusual, or just sort of curious, or otherwise noteworthy?
Hamilton: No, I can’t really think of too much that at least I wouldn’t want to talk about. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Sure. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in this area over the course of time you’ve been here?
Hamilton: Well, I feel it has been a very rewarding experience, a very good place to live. I think it’s environmentally very pleasant. The work at Hanford is certainly important. The fact that the first commercial scale nuclear reactor in the world was developed here. The speed at which things were done back then. The government regulation has become extremely burdensome since then and it’s much harder, but when Hanford was a production facility, it was something you felt like you were contributing to the society and to the world.
O’Reagan: What haven’t I thought to ask, or should I be asking?
Hamilton: [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Anything? Anything come to mind? I try to go for the open-ended questions.
Hamilton: Yeah. I think the culture at Hanford really changed when they shut down. And now that it’s just a cleanup site, the loyalty, the sense of responsibility to the site, I think, has gone away. There’s a lot more disputes, unhappy employees, some of which may or may not be based on fact. There’s just not the continuity there was when people could work there for 30 years and know that’s where they were going to be for their lifetime. There was a lot more dedication to it. You felt like you were accomplishing something.
O’Reagan: Of course, the cleanup may be still going in 30 years!
Hamilton: Well, I don’t—do not print this part—but as far as I’m concerned, it’ll never get done. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: So were those documents you brought—
Hamilton: Well, I brought some articles out of some of the Hanford newspapers and things. I didn’t know if you have access to some of those types—I assume you do. But I just thought I’d show you some of those, if you were interested.
O’Reagan: Yeah, we’d love to go through them. Any of them in particular that would be worth talking about now?
Hamilton: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, it’s mostly things like the history of what was happening there with the environmental health. You can take a look at—one of the things that I think was important when I was there yet, and the industrial hygiene function—the health and safety function was focused in one company, it was better controlled, there were records that were kept, and everybody knew where they were, and they were being maintained. The first thing they did was they took the hygienist away from—well, first they took the respirators away from HEHF. Then they took the hygienists, separated them, and moved them, spread them out all over the contractors onsite. Then they moved our industrial hygiene lab out with the environmental lab, and we became a very small thing, compared to a bigger thing. Now, if you go out—we repeatedly would do things that had already been done, because the contractors changed, they lost the records, they have no history. That just added to the jumble. I feel sorry for the workers who have to try and recreate their health histories. Because I don’t think the records since the early to mid ‘80s are anything like they used to be.
O’Reagan: Do you feel safety was a priority on the Hanford site during your time there?
Hamilton: I think it was. They did what they could to the best of their ability with what they knew at the time. So I think it really was a very safe place to work. Yes, there are things that have happened. Yes, there were exposures. But then that was happening in any industry, no matter where you go. People learn because they see what’s happening. They don’t test animals on everything before they put it into practice. No, I think it was a very—you would hear of very few accidents, per se. There were asbestos exposures, there’s beryllium, there’s radiation, but it’s just part of industry. So I don’t think it was any different.
O’Reagan: Okay. Anything else we should look through that you have?
Hamilton: Well, you can keep that. That’s my resume. I’d like that other—if you want a copy of that other, I can send it to you. This one had some information just about the industrial hygiene lab being recognized. I don’t know if you want any—
O’Reagan: Is that a picture of you?
Hamilton: That’s me, way back when these were—and these are all Hanford-taken pictures. So they’re ones you could get, but I could make copies of those for you, too, if you wanted them. These are just—there’s Dr. Meader, these are some of the people at HEHF. That’s about all that’s in there.
O’Reagan: Great. Yeah, we have—we’re just setting up our scanning stations, so we might see if we could get copies of some of the pictures.
Hamilton: Okay. I know these I have on the computer. I can send you. There are three of these early ones of me in the lab. I could send you those.
O’Reagan: Yeah, I know there have been a number of oral history interviews and interest in some of the women who were assigned to this, around the site, or to work on the site.
Hamilton: Mm-hmm.
O’Reagan: So I think it’d be very interesting for that as well as the safety aspects are very interesting. And then also just everyone’s experiences in the area--
Hamilton: Yeah.
O’Reagan: --are worth knowing.
Hamilton: One of the unique things I got to do were I got to go on one of the first People to People occupational health trip to China back in the early ‘80s.
O’Reagan: What was that like?
Hamilton: Fascinating! [LAUGHTER] There were 23 of us, I think. We stayed in places like the Royal Palace in Beijing. We definitely had Chinese people who told us where we could and couldn’t go. [LAUGHTER] We were not allowed on the street by ourselves. When we were there with the group, people were just awed by us, because we looked so different. They were all still in their blue suits and not much else. One of our people had a Polaroid camera and having an instant picture was just amazing to them. We got to go to hospitals and factories and things that normal tourists wouldn’t see.
O’Reagan: That was all sponsored through Hanford, or part of your job?
Hamilton: No. HEHF paid my way, but I’m not sure—I mean, I belonged to the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the professional organization, and somehow, they put my name on a list, and HEHF said, yes, they’d pay for it. So I went. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: That’s very interesting.
Hamilton: Yeah.
O’Reagan: Did you get to do other travel over the course of your time?
Hamilton: Well, I went to conferences and things, but nothing as exotic. Yeah.
O’Reagan: Okay. I think that’s most of the sort of set questions that I had down, but anything else you think is worth the time to chat about?
Hamilton: I can’t think of too much else. I think you’ve got the overall picture. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: All right, well, thank you for speaking with us. It’s been very interesting.
Hamilton: Sure. Okay.
Douglas O’Reagan: First off, would you please say and spell your name for us?
Maxwell Freshley: My legal name is Maxwell Freshley, F-R-E-S-H-L-E-Y. Not many people around here know me by that name. I go by Max.
O’Reagan: Okay, thanks. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview history here on January 11th, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Freshley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. To start us off, would you tell us maybe some of your life up, before you came to this area?
Freshley: Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I graduated from the University of Portland in 1951 with a degree in physics. I was offered a tech grad position on the site here. At the time, it was operated by General Electric Company, and this was—I started work here in June of 1951. Okay. So I guess prior to coming here, my having been raised in Portland, and that’s where I went to school, my extended experiences were rather limited. That’s kind of what happened. So I came here in June of 1951, fresh out of school, I wasn’t married at the time. First place I lived was in the Army barracks in north Richland. I can’t tell you about how long I lived there, but while I was living in north Richland in the barracks, I did not have a car. So being kind of isolated out north was a bit of a challenge. So as soon as I could find somebody who would loan me some money, I bought a brand new Ford and that solved a lot of my problems. And then sometime during that first year, I was moved to one of the dorms in Richland. I think the dorms were located on Lee Boulevard. It was close to—I’m calling it a drugstore. But it was kind of like a Payless. I don’t think that was the right name at that time. But they had a restaurant—they served food in this drugstore. So that’s where I would eat.
O’Reagan: Had you heard about Hanford before you came here?
Freshley: Not really. I really hadn’t heard about it. It was all secret, you know?
O’Reagan: Right. Were you aware of the sort of connection with the atomic bomb before you got here?
Freshley: I’d have to say I was not. Although while I was still going to school—still in school—when was the Nagasaki ignited?
O’Reagan: ’45, I believe?
Freshley: ’45?
O’Reagan: I think so.
Freshley: That—oh, okay.
O’Reagan: It was the very end of the Second World War.
Freshley: Yeah. Well, I might’ve heard of that. Yeah.
O’Reagan: What was your first impression of Richland and this area?
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] First impression was living in the barracks out in north Richland-- [LAUGHTER] was not too great. Of course, my first impression was it was darn hot here, coming here in June. It was very warm. My future wife and her mother brought me to Richland from Portland and dropped me off. [LAUGHTER] So things kind of went from there.
O’Reagan: Sure. So we were going to ask about where you were living, but we already addressed that to some degree. What was life like in the barracks?
Freshley: Oh. I would say very basic. Of course, in the dorm rooms that were assigned, you always had a roommate that you lived with. So I became, of course, very familiar with my roommates. When I moved from the barracks to Richland, I had a different roommate. So I made acquaintances with two people like that. They were both scientists, so we got along really well. In fact, one of them is still living in Richland.
O’Reagan: What kind of work did you do at Hanford, and where on the site did you work?
Freshley: Well, first of all, I worked in 300 Area in 3706 Building. I was—they assigned me a position in the Graphite Group. We were studying graphite, the moderator in the reactors. One of the things that was going on at the time—and I can’t tell you what reactor it was—but the graphite core was swelling. It was—I don’t know if it had come in contact yet with the upper shield, but it was growing. I was assigned to two people in the Graphite Group. We went and extracted samples of graphite from the core of this reactor. The thing that they had set up to do that, of course, was already here. So we were extracting samples—core samples. What the purpose of my job was to determine the annealing temperature of the graphite, so that if they raised the temperature in the core to a point where graphite annealing started occurring, then the core would shrink back and not interfere with the top shield. So I think they were looking for somebody—[LAUGHTER] I won’t say it. But anyway, I was assigned the position or job of taking these graphite samples and investigating the annealing temperature. What we used was a Fresnel diffractometer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but interference rings from this interferometer would be displayed. It was my job to count the rings. It was a very tedious job. I’m sure that these two fellas didn’t want to do that, so they found me, and I did it. These rotations were—honestly I can’t remember whether they were three months or six months, but you would rotate from one position to another. I don’t remember if you could choose your positions—your rotations—I guess it probably depended on whether or not there was something available or not to go to. So I fulfilled my position in the Graphite Group. I didn’t want to stay in the Graphite Group, so I moved on.
O’Reagan: Before we move on, I have a quick question for you. This is a little bit off-script, but I have an undergraduate degree in physics.
Freshley: Uh-huh.
O’Reagan: I was reading a while back that when you started heating up the reactors, it caused that expansion to go back, and that sounds like what you’re describing.
Freshley: Mm-hm.
O’Reagan: But what is annealing?
Freshley: It’s heating to a temperature where the damage caused by the neutron radiation would be annealed physically. So the core would shrink back. But you had to get it up to a certain temperature, and you didn’t want to overheat it, because if you get it too hot, then the core—the graphite would oxidize. That would not be good. But I think the cores were enclosed in an argon atmosphere, as I remember.
O’Reagan: It just surprised me, of course—I expected you get something hot, it expands. But now we’re saying you get it hot and it shrinks!
Freshley: Yeah, that’s right. But when you’re looking at the diffraction rings on the interferometer, you can tell by the movement of the rings when you are reaching the annealing temperature. So either they—and I can’t honestly remember the details here, whether the rings did not move as fast, or whether they might have even changed direction.
O’Reagan: Interesting.
Freshley: So I had an early experience with a graphite-moderated production reactor.
O’Reagan: What was it—you said you moved on from graphite to something else?
Freshley: Oh yeah. My second assignment was in the metallurgy laboratory in 234-5 Building. 234-5 Building now is known as—god. Hm. Plutonium—it’s the one that you read a lot--
O’Reagan: Plutonium Finishing Plant?
Freshley: Pardon me?
O’Reagan: Is it the plutonium finishing?
Freshley: Yeah, Plutonium Finishing Plant where the plutonium buttons were received and machined to a hockey-type shape. Well, they were—actually, they were reduced to form the metal, and I was not involved in that. But I was in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, which was at one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. I don’t think there are many or any people left around who know of that. I can’t think of anybody that I worked with during that period who’s still around. But we had a Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, and my manager was a very nice fella. This, now, was in the early ‘50s. One thing that he wanted me to do—and I don’t think that what I did was original research, because I think all of the original research was probably done at Los Alamos, which was the renowned weapons facility. He wanted me to investigate the low temperature phase changes in plutonium. So what I did—and that’s important because phase changes in plutonium or any metal creates a dimensional change. And a dimensional change is not something that you want in a weapon or a bomb, because it interferes with the efficiency of the bomb. So here I was, fresh out of school and didn’t know from up. Anyway, I put together what’s called a differential thermal analysis apparatus. Are you familiar with that?
O’Reagan: I know the individual terms.
Freshley: Okay. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what I did. I ran low temperature phase studies on plutonium—pure plutonium to detect these low temperature phase changes, which were very—since they were low temperature, they were very difficult to pick up, because there wasn’t much energy exchange during the phase change. Then, since that was not something you would want in a weapon or a bomb, small alloy additions were added to the plutonium to stabilize the low temperature, so you didn’t have these low temperature changes. All of this at the time was quite classified, which make it extra interesting, I guess. But when I went out to 234-5 Building in the plutonium lab, we were—there were three or four of us—we were assigned a car. So we had a car that we could go back and forth in, to work. That made it pretty nice, because we didn’t have to ride the bus and all of that. Then—this is something else that I doubt very much that anyone knew about at the time. It was the fabrication of plutonium parts for artillery shells. We cast plutonium in what was known as the 231-Z Building. We didn’t do it in the 234-5 Building. 231 was just across the street. In that building, I was not involved in the casting or the machining, but the parts were machined in that building. Then they were brought over to 234-5 Building in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab. Because plutonium would oxidize and so on—so my job was to produce pure nickel coatings. But I don’t mean coatings like were attached. We used bismuth, which has a low melting temperature and it’s stable, to machine the exact replica of the plutonium part. Then, my job was to make—with electroplated nickel onto this bismuth—and then the bismuth was melted away. My job was to enclose the plutonium parts in nickel. So I had to do that in a vacuum. At first I had to do the electroplating. Then I had to put the nickel—what—the nickel cover, if you want—on the plutonium part, under vacuum, and solder a seal around the edge to make it—so it wouldn’t contact the air. And then it wouldn’t be as—you wouldn’t have to worry so much about contamination. But it had to be done in an atmosphere where, after the nickel part was put on the plutonium part, I sealed it with the vacuum and then it was not contaminated. The interesting part about that—one of the interesting parts—is that we were doing this for the Livermore National Lab, who was also at the time at a weapons facility. There were two: Los Alamos and Livermore. We were doing this for Livermore. As soon as the parts were finished, and I finished them, there would be a representative from Livermore waiting for the part. These parts, at times, were handed off, out the back door of 234-5 Building to this individual, who then took them to town, to the airport. I presume then, they were flown to Livermore. These tests at the time were conducted in the South Pacific—Eniwetok Islands. I never knew anything about the results. [LAUGHTER] Or what happened. But I suspect that these days we have artillery shells with plutonium weapons involved.
O’Reagan: When you were working on all these—all these different processes, what sort of team were you working—were you working mostly on an independent sub-project, or did you have other people you were sort of working with day-to-day?
Freshley: Well, when I did the differential thermal analysis, it was me. And when I was enclosing the plutonium parts in these nickel shells, that was pretty much me. Yeah. The group was small. I would guess—let’s see, there was—oh, three, four, five—I suspect there were less than ten people in the whole group. The machinist—there were two machinists—I guess I shouldn’t say who they were, but—they did very well—one of them did very well in the Tri-Cities. He had a big vision and—
O’Reagan: I ask, because some of what you’re describing sounds—at least to my sort of ignorant ears—like applied chemistry as well as applied physics. Did you have a chemistry background, or was that not really necessary for what you were working on?
Freshley: I did not have a chemistry background other than what you normally get in a four-year program. I did not have a metallurgy background, either. You know? So that all took—I had to get acquainted with that aspect of the world, and I found it to be very interesting. Later on in my life, I was sorry that I probably hadn’t taken metallurgy.
O’Reagan: How much were you instructed specifically what to do versus sort of innovating yourself or figuring stuff out as you go?
Freshley: Well, I’m sure that my manager—he had a degree from Montana School of Mines in Metallurgy. He was a very nice person. He—I’m sure I got instruction and help from him, because I needed it. Here’s this 21-year-old kid, just out of school, doesn’t know metallurgy from up. But I guess I was successful and it worked out.
O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. Could you describe a typical workday within those first—you worked there for a long period of time overall, is that right? How long were you working at Hanford overall?
Freshley: Overall?
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] I started in 1951 and I retired in 1993. Then I consulted for a period after that. So you figure out the years. The first 14 years were with GE, then Battelle came in ’65, and I transferred to Battelle. I had the choice at that point to transfer to either Battelle or Westinghouse. Westinghouse was focused on the FFTF, and the development of that reactor. But I chose Battelle.
O’Reagan: Why did you choose Battelle?
Freshley: I don’t know. I think they were interested in things that I found fascinating. So I switched to Battelle, and have never been sorry. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: So when you were describing—is that amount of time that you were describing up to the end of your time at GE? Or was there still more that you were working on at GE before, or subsequent to—you were describing the different plutonium products.
Freshley: I haven’t gotten to the end of GE yet. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Okay, great. I’d love to hear more.
Freshley: Yeah. And then I got out—I was moved—I got into other things besides plutonium metallurgy. I might say that one of the—while I was at the plutonium lab, one of the technicians was working in a glovebox—do you know what a glovebox is?—that exploded. And it totally, totally contaminated the lab with plutonium. So we spent—the group—spent a lot of time decontaminating that room, and everything in it. We were successful enough that the walls were repainted to secure the plutonium contamination and everything. But then—I don’t know why I changed—but I stayed in 234-5 Building, and maybe—I don’t know, three, four, five years, possibly. Then I got involved in light-water reactor fuel development. That’s where I basically spent the rest of my career. In the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction. We did—in those days, you were given—at least, in my case, you were given a lot of flexibility to do new things. That was really neat. Then—I didn’t write down the date, but in the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction, and there was the second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. We contributed to that publication—there were several publications. I didn’t get to go to the conference, but we contributed to that. Then I got involved in plutonium recycling in thermal reactors. I don’t know if you read this morning’s paper: there was an article there about a plutonium fuel—well, it’s called MOX—mixed oxide: plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, a mixture of fuel. This was at Savannah River, and they were building—or are supposedly building a facility for fabricating mixed oxide fuel for light-water reactors. But there have been some problems there, and it’s way behind schedule and over cost or whatever. But that doesn’t affect me. So I’m not involved in that. But anyway, I got involved in, like I say, fuel development—plutonium fuel development for light-water reactors. We had the liberty of doing a lot of different things. One of them was—oh, when we—at first, we found diluents for the plutonium. We irradiated and tested many diluents for plutonium. It had to be diluted—I mean, you can’t use pure plutonium. So I got into that, and we conducted lots and lots of testing of different diluents for plutonium in the MTR and ETR in Idaho—Materials Test Reactor and the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho. There was a lot of that, and the post-radiation examination was done in the 324 Building, where the major contamination still exists that they have to remove. It’s in the ground, and it’s a major decon project right now with whoever the contractor is, I don’t know. Anyway, we did a lot of testing in MTR and ETR with diluents. We developed a plutonium aluminum alloy spike enrichment element for PRTR. That was one of the activities. An aluminum plutonium spike element—excuse me—is only for spike enrichment in the core. These are spaced around for different neutronic effects. And the reason—it’s a difficult concept, and I don’t know how we got started on that, exactly, because the coefficient of thermal expansion of aluminum with a little bit of plutonium in it is a lot different than the Zircaloy cladding in which it is enclosed. So there were problems with that. Then—ah, let’s see—then I got into recycling the plutonium in thermal reactors, and that was a major government initiative to dispose of plutonium that was no longer needed. So we made mixed oxide fuels of different types. One of the types that seemed attractive at the time was a vibrationally compacted mixture of plutonium and uranium. That is a difficult thing to achieve, because we had to make plutonium—mixed oxide shot, and we vibrated it into the long rods. I remember setting up a shot tower in the basement of 326 Building to make uranium shot. That didn’t work out too good. We didn’t put any plutonium in 326 Building.
O’Reagan: Is this still the late ‘50s or have we gotten into the early ‘60s yet?
Freshley: Well this would be the late ‘50s. Well, we’re getting into the ‘60s, though, yeah. We did irradiation tests of aluminum plutonium spike elements in PRTR. I can’t remember what the plutonium concentration was, but then we started working on VIPAC, or vibrationally compacted fuel. It seemed like it would have advantages, because you’re not working with the small centered pellets. You can just pour the fissionable material into the tubes and VIPAC—vibrationally compact—it. So that—we did a lot of work on that, on VIPAC fuel, because we thought it would have an advantage fabrication-wise. But it had disadvantages, too, of course. You couldn’t compact it to the density that you would get with the centered pellet. There was another concern about it, and that is: fuel elements and reactors, the cladding fails from time to time. Still does. I think they suspect that there is a cladding failure in the Columbia Generating Station now. We needed to look at how they would perform with a cladding rupture. So we performed a test in PRTR in what was known as the Fuel Element Rupture Test Facility, FERTF. We were brave.
O’Reagan: It sounds dangerous!
Freshley: We put together a test element. The elements in PRTR were 19 rod clusters—I forget how long, but quite long. So what we did--we were adventuresome—we put a mixed oxide fuel element in PRTR, but first we drilled a hole in the cladding. John Fox, who you’ve interviewed, still can’t imagine that we did something like that. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: This probably couldn’t happen today [INAUDIBLE]
Freshley: Oh, no. No way. Anyway, in 1966, we had that experiment in PRTR, and everything was going pretty well until they started cycling the reactor power a little bit. Well, from then on, things went from bad to worse. The cladding failed, but I mean, other than the small hole that we had drilled in it, it ruptured for over quite a distance. When it did that, it swelled, and it came in contact with the pressure tube of the FERTF. It caused that to fail also. So this made a horrible mess in PRTR. The reactor was shut down for I don’t know how long during the cleanup and the recovery from that. I can’t remember—I have some pictures if you’re interested—whether or not we were operating with fuel melting at the time. Because we wanted to get as much heat out of the element—or out of the rods as we could. Now, uranium melts at a little over 2,800 degrees centigrade. So we did a lot of work with not only VIPAC fuel—fuel melting in VIPAC fuel, but also in pellet fuel. Of course, you don’t do that sort of thing in real life. In a commercial light-water reactor—I don’t know what the maximum operating temperatures are in the uranium pellets, but it’s a long ways from melting, I guarantee you.
O’Reagan: So did you get the data that you wanted from this rupture test?
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, don’t do it. Yeah, and that was kind of actually the end of VIPAC fuel interest. It would definitely not have been commercially viable to have something like that going on in a power reactor. Of course, we learned what the rupture behavior—probably the worst case of what a ruptured VIPAC fuel might do in real life. So that was kind of the end of VIPAC fuel elements. But it was interesting! A really interesting thing to work with and try and develop. We had various—came up with various schemes for compacting UO2 and MOX with using a Dynapac machine, which is a high-energy compaction machine, to form particles. The ideal particle would have been a sphere in a varying size range, so you can maximize the density during VIPACing. But it didn’t work out. And I didn’t get fired. [LAUGHTER] But there were a lot of experiments. Also with looking at the transient behavior of VIPAC fuel, we even conducted some tests in a test reactor. You are placing pure PUO2 particles next to the cladding. Then doing a transient power test on that to see what kind of behavior you would get: how the PUO2 particle would behave. This was done in a reactor in Idaho called SPERT—I can’t tell you what the acronym stands for right now, but it was an interesting exercise. Had some—maybe the reactor was in San Jose; I’m not sure. Anyway, I had some companions who were working for GE; we worked together on that sort of thing. But then, this would have been in 1975, ’76. The light-water reactor power industry wanted to go to higher burnups. That is, leave the fuel in the reactor longer, so they would have longer times between maintenance shutdowns. At the time, the maintenance shutdowns were probably a year or less. So what happened when they went to higher temperatures and higher burnups, the fuel column in—these are ten or 12 feet long rods—would shorten. The fuel column, then, would shrink—would settle. So that caused a great deal of consternation in the light-water reactor power industry, because they had these voids, then, at the top of the fuel columns. Something we called the irradiation-induced densification occurred. So then there was a big effort, commercially, to find solutions to that, so we had—there was what was called a fuel densification program to solve this problem. The fuel industry—let’s see, how was this—they could not tolerate the core shrinking, and then that led to an understanding, or an investigation of N Reactor densification—just the neutron activity. But then they wanted to go to higher burnups. So they started leaving voids in the pellets to accommodate the fission products associated with the high burnup. That didn’t work out to well, either, because of the column shrinking. So that’s when we launched, or got into looking at the fuel densification behavior. The fuel vendors, then, came up with adding materials into the fuel—god, I can’t think of the name now—that would disappear on the high temperature centering of the pellet, leaving voids—controlled voids in the pellets. And they do that today. So the High Burnup Effect Program was a big program here at the lab for quite a long period of time. As a result of that, the fabricators reduced, by using—I can’t think of the name—reduced the density to accommodate the fission—oh, then they put in pore formers. And we, as the lab, were instrumental in coming up with suitable pore formers that would disappear upon centering, during the centering process, to leave these voids in the fuel pellets to accommodate the fission products. As a result of that, this proved to be very satisfactory. It resulted in a stable fuel column and the achievable burnups were increased significantly. You’re probably aware of the fact, now, that the Columbia—the reactor, generating—the Columbia Generating Station, now, can go on a two-year cycle. Meaning they don’t have to shut down for maintenance every year; they can go two years. So the achievement of satisfactory high burnup in reactor fuel was made. All of the other reactors, now—light-water reactors—use that technique. And in fact, as a result of that, the NRC—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—has imposed a requirement that they test the thermal stability of centered pellets by exposing them to a heat treatment so they don’t shrink any more. Or the shrinkage would be very small. So we were instrumental in coming up with this out-of-reactor thermal test to test the stability, if you will, of the pellets.
O’Reagan: You mentioned working with the light-water reactor industry. Were you working with different groups outside of the Hanford Site and outside of Battelle at that point, or was it still focused within the company?
Freshley: I would say that the company, Battelle, the lab, was instrumental in these investigations. EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was a partner. In fact, they were kind of the driving force helping us put together a joint program where we had seven other contributors—financial sponsors to this program. We had meetings frequently on the progress of this effort. These seven sponsors came from all over the world: Japan, France, England—of course, the commercial operators in the United States were members. So we had this rather large, difficult to manage international program to develop these advanced fuels for high burnup.
O’Reagan: So this wasn’t classified, or was it more of a sharing agreement with [INAUDIBLE] Not classified then?
Freshley: No, it wasn’t classified. Well, maybe there might have been some—not security, but because the seven sponsors of this program were—they were paying money, you know? And contributing, and they wanted to protect their interests.
O’Reagan: More like trade secrets, then, rather than—
Freshley: Pardon?
O’Reagan: So, more like trade secrets, then, rather than confidentiality.
Freshley: Yeah, but I’d say, most of the—in the United States, the utilities that were operating light-water reactors contributed to this. Another contributor or sponsor was Germany. I can’t remember all of them. That made it real interesting. We had these technical reviews and meetings all over the world. So that made it kind of neat.
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: Yeah. But the program was very successful. I think I have some documents that describe it, if you’re interested.
O’Reagan: Yeah, absolutely.
Freshley: Okay. And then—I’m not covering this too well—I thought my notes would be more complete but they’re not. [LAUGHTER] Then I got into—this was late in my professional career. There was a reactor in Savannah River, and I didn’t—I can’t tell you the name of it—that produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. It had to be shut down because of safety reasons. So I got involved in what was called tritium target development for light-water reactors. Because you need tritium for a thermonuclear device. What we did was, the way we did it, we irradiated lithium metal—I shouldn’t say irradiated; we exposed lithium metal to a neutron environment in light-water reactors. The idea being to generate tritium, the gas. Well, what happens is lithium is a metal similar, maybe—low-melting, kind of—to aluminum. It’s not compatible with many cladding or enclosure materials. So we exposed lithium to neutrons to form tritium. In doing that, you had to—because the tritium is an isotope of helium, you had to tie it up some way and contain it. You didn’t want it to get out of the cladding, because we were using zirconium cladding. And then inside of this target, we used a getter for the tritium to collect the tritium and try and keep it enclosed. In fact, I’ve learned recently that there are some commercial reactors back east that have tritium target elements in their cores now to produce tritium for thermonuclear devices.
O’Reagan: I imagine that’s something the government wouldn’t want other places to be doing then.
Freshley: Well, probably not, yeah. You can google tritium production and you’ll get information on the process—well, I don’t know about the detail of the process, but information on producing tritium in light-water reactors. Then as I was nearing retirement, I got out of that and was taken over by a couple other people. But it was interesting, and so that’s kind of—I enjoyed doing this sort of thing a lot. Exploring and testing and so on.
O’Reagan: Was the tritium work also unclassified then, or was that back to the classified world?
Freshley: I think it was in the classified world, perhaps, at the time. Although the lady who currently manages that project at the lab here gave a talk on these elements, these targets, and some of the latest things that they were doing. This was a while back, that she gave this talk. But there were parts of the talk she could not discuss. These parts that she couldn’t discuss are unknown to me and foreign to me, because a lot of that has happened since I retired. See, I retired in ’93—1993. That was—what—25, 26 years ago.
O’Reagan: When you moved from GE to Battelle, did you ever notice any sorts of differences in your work experiences in sort of general terms?
Freshley: No, not really. They were the same people involved, in my case. The big difference is that under DoE at the time—I think it was DoE, maybe AEC—we did not earn credits for service. So 14 years, I didn’t get any—[LAUGHTER]—credits for service which would help my pension, until Battelle came. Then that changed. I do get a GE pension still, but it’s not very much.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. Are there sort of—one thing I’m interested in is how working on Hanford—people’s experiences changed over time as the decades went on, how things changed. Anything sort of leaps to your mind in those regards?
Freshley: Well, one thing that comes to mind to me is things that you do if you’re in the lab and so on, are a lot more regulated now than they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Can you imagine opening the door and getting somebody a plutonium part that he takes off with and goes to Livermore?
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: You don’t do that.
O’Reagan: Right. Let’s see.
Freshley: So things are a lot more regulated now. And I would say a lot more sophisticated, too. I am aware of the fact that AREVA, here, the fuel fabricator, has developed since my time some very sophisticated models on fuel performance. We didn’t have models like that in those days.
O’Reagan: Interesting. One of the things we’re also trying to get at, which is why a lot of this has been very useful, is what was done on the Hanford site that was sort of innovative or hadn’t been mastered elsewhere? Because you hear sort of both sides of the Hanford legacy, and a lot of these are harder to get at without having classified sources. So the unclassified versions people could tell us about are very interesting.
Freshley: Well, I would say, that except for my time in the plutonium laboratory, things were pretty much unclassified. The development of these different fuels—fuel materials—and testing them and so on. I would say that was pretty much unclassified.
O’Reagan: Interesting.
Freshley: Now, I’m sure that AREVA here has some proprietary interests in their fuel modeling these days. But I’ve seen some of it; it’s a very sophisticated code and model.
O’Reagan: What was it like living in Richland, let’s say the ‘40s and ‘50s first and ask for the later parts afterwards.
Freshley: Well, I can tell you my experience.
O’Reagan: Yeah.
Freshley: First, as I said, I lived in the Army barracks. Then I moved to the dorms that were on Lee. This was before I was married. I was here for a year before I got married, and then when I got married, we got access to one of the Gribble apartments. I don’t know if they’re still there on Gribble Street? I think, maybe, Kadlec has taken all of that over now and destroyed all of the old buildings. But they were two-story apartments. They were really nice. Then after that, we lived in that apartment for five years, my wife tells me. And then we bought a ranch house. It wasn’t a purchase from the government; it was after the ranch houses and the other government houses were sold off by the government. This fella was in a position, a management position, in DoE—I think it might have been AEC at the time. And we bought this ranch house from him on Burch Street in Richland. We paid him $10,000 for it. And then from there—we lived there for a few years, and then we bought a house on Howell. And from Howell, we built a house in Country Ridge. That’s where we live now. We’ve lived there for 20—over 25 years.
O’Reagan: Interesting. I was just thinking back on the timeline there. I know for a long time people couldn’t buy houses in Richland. So I guess you got your first place not too long after you were allowed to?
Freshley: Oh, I think it was very soon. I can’t remember his name, but he was in some management position in DoE and wanted to sell his house. So we bought it from him and got the title and made some changes and so on. Yeah, it was among the first government houses that were sold privately.
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What was life like in the community around there? Do you remember any sort of community events?
Freshley: Yup. Town Theater was there. Actually showing movies, of course. Mm, I don’t know how to answer that. I would say it was pretty normal. Did a lot of outdoor activities, a lot of snow skiing at Tollgate—I don’t know if you know where Tollgate is.
O’Reagan: I’m new to the area.
Freshley: Oh, are you? Okay. It’s in the Blue Mountains. A lot of boating activities. We had a canoe and enjoyed that. Things like that.
O’Reagan: Great.
Freshley: Pretty normal, I would say. Wouldn’t you?
O’Reagan: Sure.
Freshley: [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Did you ever feel like the sort of larger scale politics of the day ever impacted your life whether—Cold War security issues or changing Presidents or any of that?
Freshley: I can’t relate to that. I was not politically inclined like some people you know. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Sure. Let’s see. This is sort of a similar question, so we don’t have to go into too much detail. Any memories of the social scene, local politics, or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities over the time you lived here?
Freshley: Over what time period? Oh.
O’Reagan: In the time you lived here.
Freshley: Well, like I said, I’m not politically oriented, so if there were these things happening, I was pretty isolated from them.
O’Reagan: Okay. Could you describe any ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Freshley: No, I really can’t, except 234-5 Building, every time you went out there, you had to have your badge and security. I think even in the Plutonium Finishing Plant, there probably—I think there were—additional security requirements.
O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Well, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I would say, from my experience, it was very normal. I guess if there were security requirements and things like that, you just kind of got used to it, and you didn’t—it wasn’t something that stood out. I think that’s true.
O’Reagan: Okay. So what haven’t I asked about that I should ask about? What else is there I should be asking about?
Freshley: Well, how do I answer that? I don’t know. I think we’ve covered my experience pretty thoroughly. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Well, we don’t have to dwell on it if nothing comes to mind.
Freshley: No.
O’Reagan: It is an open-ended question.
Freshley: Well, what happened, after we bought our ranch house, the government didn’t come around and change our light bulbs anymore. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Oh, really? Did you have to—how much of a transition was that once you sort of became a homeowner? Was it--?
Freshley: Oh, it was a good transition, from my standpoint. You could do things—like we made modifications to the house. It was our house. It wasn’t controlled by the government—or owned by the government. So that made a big difference. You had a lot more freedom and so on in what you did and how you did it.
O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks so much. This is very, very interesting, very useful.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Michael Lawrence on February 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mike about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Michael Lawrence: Michael J. Lawrence. L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E.
Franklin: Great. Thank you. So, how did you come to the Hanford Site?
Lawrence: I went—I grew up in Washington, DC. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and I went to the University of Maryland and lived at home when I did so. And I was a physics major. Between my junior and senior year of college, I was fortunate enough to get one of five internships at the Atomic Energy Commission. That internship had me working in a division of the AEC, or Atomic Energy Commission, called the production division, which was responsible for, among other sites, the Hanford Site, because of its production of plutonium. During that summer, I actually shared an office with an individual who was responsible for the operations and missions of the N Reactor which was located here. So I had an opportunity to learn a little bit about Hanford at that particular point in time. When I graduated from Maryland with my degree in physics the next year, I had already been offered and had accepted a full-time job with the Atomic Energy Commission when I went back to the production division again to work. I was working on isotopes programs and other things when I was called into the director’s office one day. It just so happened that several years previously, in 1969 I believe, President Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and one of the provisions in NEPA called for something which, at that point in time, was not known at all. Something called an environmental impact statement. You had to do environmental impact statements for any major federal projects, and our division was responsible for two projects that were going to occur in the early ‘70s here. One was the design and building of the quite a bit. And also had a sense of what it was going to be involved dealing with the public on important and issues that were of concern to the public, like the Z-9 crib and plutonium production. Because one of our hearings for those environmental impact statements was held down in Portland. And I can recall going down there, and there were demonstrators in radiation contamination clothing protesting and all the rest. And you got a chance to see just how the public felt about it. But that was my first instance of dealing with Hanford. Then later in the mid-‘70s—again, I’m still back in Washington, DC; AEC had become the Department of Energy—and I was responsible for a program to manage and store commercial spent nuclear fuel. And that program, the contractor and site that was helping us out was the Savannah River site in South Carolina. But because of the heavy burden they had, I decided it would be best if we changed the management of that program, or the contractor working on the program from Savannah River to the Hanford Site and to the Pacific Northwest National Lab—at that time was Pacific Northwest Lab; it wasn’t a national lab, but PNL. And so I started coming out again and working with the people here. So I had a pretty good understanding of the community and what was out here, and I liked it. But in the early 1980s, in 1982 to be exact, after several years of very, very intense negotiation back in the halls of Congress, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed by Congress which set up a process and legal requirements for identifying, selecting, licensing, building, operating, and funding a geologic repository for commercial nuclear waste from commercial reactors and defense waste from the production of plutonium, primarily either at Hanford or at the Savannah River plant. I was one of several people called down from where I was working in Germantown, Maryland, down to Washington, DC to work on the direct implementation of that act. Obviously, that was a very—it was controversial, it was huge, and the new Secretary of Energy at that time—his name was Donald Hodel, who had formerly been the administrator of Bonneville out here in the Pacific Northwest—he was very familiar with the issues involved. And I got an opportunity to meet and work with him rather closely. And after several years of doing that, he asked me to come out here to be the manager of the Richland Operations Office.
Franklin: Wow. Thank you. That’s really fascinating, with all of your lengths between DC and to here. Did you—I want to ask—you mentioned a hearing in Portland where there were demonstrators. And that—I think it fits pretty well into what we hear a lot about how the west side and the east side of the state think about Hanford. Did you find a pretty supportive public here in Tri-Cities when you would come and hold meetings here in the area about, like, for example the Z-9 crib or other projects? Did you find a pretty supportive public?
Lawrence: I wouldn’t use the term supportive, I would use the term very informed and knowledgeable. They understood, to a greater degree, what the risks, what the concerns were, what the precautions were. Not universally, obviously. There were—and I have a good example of what a protestor would be. But basically, they seemed to be more informed, and certainly they were more knowledgeable of the situation. So the further away you went, the less direct knowledge people had of the situation. And so consequently—and it’s understandable, you know, they really didn’t have the same—they didn’t know people who worked at the Site. They didn’t—couldn’t appreciate the values that they had, their sensitivities. So that would be more the way I would describe it.
Franklin: Okay.
Lawrence: What was interesting, and I just had alluded to, was after coming out here—this was in 1984; I came—arrived in July of 1984. And at the beginning of that year was when the PUREX Plant, which processed the fuel coming out of N Reactor and reprocessed it to recover the plutonium, had just gone back into operation after a number of years of being mothballed. This was all part of President Reagan’s buildup of our military strength and weapons complex to more or less challenge the Russians or the Soviet Union in their ability to do so. And so we were gearing back up, really, the plutonium production mission at the Hanford Site. It was obviously very controversial here in the Northwest. And it was just starting up, and there had actually been a leak from the PUREX Plant right after it started up. And what I found when I arrived here in July was that even though the people on the Site—the contractor and the officials here—were saying, no, this is what it was and this is what the effects were. There was very little credibility. People would not believe them. And there was a strong opposition to what they were doing. That was a challenging situation to walk into where you really don’t have any credibility. But the first week I was in town, first week as manager, down in my office in the Federal Building, which is up in the northeast corner of the Federal Building, seventh floor, looking out over John Dam Plaza and the park, and I looked out on the street, and there’s a person with a big sign and billboard saying, Mike Lawrence, carpetbagger, go home. And he’s just sitting on the park bench in front of the building. And I—you know, I’ve just arrived in town, and I’m looking at him. His name was Larry Caldwell. He was known to everybody in town; he liked to protest. And I’m looking down at him and I—I sort of like to engage. I don’t like to ignore things. So I said, you know, I think I’ll go out and talk to him. Well, that caused quite a stir. But I walked down and walked across the street, walked up to the park bench, introduced myself, sat down and we started talking. I wanted to find out, well, since you don’t know me, why do you call me a carpetbagger, why do you want me to go home? Let’s talk. And it was funny because in the midst of discussing this with him, I happened to glance back over. And if you’re familiar with the Federal Building, it’s just full of windows. Every window was filled with faces looking out. [LAUGHTER] They said, this is our new manager and he’s out there. Security was very concerned. But you know? It worked out fine. Larry told me what his problems were. He didn’t like the mission. I told him, I said, I understood that. I had a job to do; Congress had appropriated the money, and I’d been given a job to do, and I was going to do it the best I could. But I was going to do it trying to do it in keeping the public informed of what we were doing and being as upfront and—now the term is transparent. We didn’t use that term back then—but as transparent I could be in handling it. So that was my first direct encounter with a protestor, if you will. But I thought it turned out pretty well. But that gets to a broader topic that I’d like to address, and that is, as I said, the Department and its contractors, I found they didn’t have credibility. And I’m not saying it was anyone’s fault, but it’s my opinion that it’s very easy for organizations—Department of Energy, Richland, Hanford—to lose credibility. And the only way you regain that credibility is through individuals, by really engaging with people so they get a sense of who you are or who the people are doing the work. And so we tried from the very beginning back in 1984 to go out and to meet with the public, to engage the public, to be as open as we could to explain our perspective and what we were doing. Obviously, we didn’t expect everyone to agree with us; some people were just diametrically opposed to it. But you’d like them to at least sense that the people doing the work shared some of their values, shared their concerns, in doing their work. The best example I have of that is—I believe it was in 1985. Again, Hanford, because of our role going back into the nuclear weapons complex had been quite controversial. I received a call from the pastor of the Catholic church down in Kennewick, St. Joseph’s. And he said, Mike, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the three bishops—Catholic bishops—in Washington State are having prepared a letter—very, very critical of Hanford, its operations, and the people who work there. And he said, I just think that it’s being, I guess—a focal point was being headed up by a person in Yakima where the bishop was a Bishop William Skylstad. And I happened to have met and knew Bishop Skylstad from my own personal dealings with the church. And so I thanked the priest in Kennewick, and I called up Bishop Skylstad, and I said, I’d really like to come—I understand you’re having some work done on behalf of yourself and the other two bishops, and I’d like to really come and talk to you about it. And so I actually took the president of Rockwell Hanford, who operated PUREX, his name was Paul Lorenzini—very, very intelligent, smart guy—with me. And we went to meet with Bishop Skylstad and he had the individual who was writing this who happened also to be a member of the Hanford Education Action League in Spokane. And, you know, I read what they had prepared. It was talking about the Department of Energy is lying about this, and they’re poisoning, and they’re making these intentional releases. And in discussing that, after a while, Bishop Skylstad said to me, he said, Mike, Mike, calm down. He says, you’re taking this personally. And I looked at him and I said, Bishop, of course I’m taking it personally. When you say the Department of Energy is lying, who is that? Who is it that you’re saying is lying? And it was amazing, because he just stopped; all of a sudden, it dawned on him. He said, oh my goodness, I never thought of it that way. But you had to put a face in front of the organization. And that helped a lot. Now, the letter still came out and it was still very critical. But it wasn’t as accusatory as perhaps it was. It says, we’re opposed to the mission. That’s fine; that I understand. But when you get into the motives and the ill will of the people, that’s where it goes a little too far.
Franklin: Mm. Right. The difference between unintentional or passive action and then direct action.
Lawrence: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about what it was like in the early ‘70s to actually—to physically get to Hanford from Washington, DC. Was it still very—was travel still kind of tough to get to Hanford? Or was there easy air travel or car travel? Or did you find it to be a little still off the beaten path?
Lawrence: Well, it was a lengthy trip. Coming from Washington, DC, I would fly from Washington, DC to Chicago, Chicago to Seattle, then Seattle to Pasco. And usually that was like going United, and then I think there was—it was called Airwest—Hughes Airwest, owned by Howard Hughes. Then it did get significantly easier later on when Northwest Airlines had a direct flight from Dulles Airport in DC to Seattle, and then you’d fly back over here. I always used to enjoy those trips. I mean, air travel was a lot different then than it was now in that it wasn’t as—a chore and the like. It was a little bit more creature comforts in traveling as well.
Franklin: When you mentioned NEPA and the need for the EIS, Environmental Impact Statement, and digging at Z-9 and I’m sure probably a couple other facilities—did that also trigger any kind of cultural resources work, archaeological digs? Were there ever any—was there any cultural resources work or things found?
Lawrence: In the ‘70s, no. I mean, that work was right in the middle of the 200 Area. Which is—it still today is the most concentrated area. I believe, if I recall correctly, the EISs probably said—would address that. But not—I mean, EISs then were maybe 100 pages long. Now they’re—[LAUGHTER]—multiple volumes and many thousands of pages long. But I wasn’t aware of any. I think the first real instance of dealing with Native Americans and their concerns was with a project we had on the center of the Site called the Basalt Waste Isolation Project, or BWIP, which was on Gable--
Franklin: I was going to ask you about that next.
Lawrence: --which was on Gable Mountain. But I’ll let you ask about it.
Franklin: Well, no, I was going to ask if you—you talked about the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and finding a geological repository. And I was just going to ask, I assume that’s BWIP, then, that is the—
Lawrence: Yeah, and, actually there’s a slight difference there. But the whole idea of the geologic repository, especially since I had been responsible for that program before coming here, led people to suspect or conclude that it was a foregone conclusion that Hanford was going to be named the geologic repository for the United States. And actually, when I came here, that Nuclear Waste Policy Act had set out a process for narrowing down until you had three sites that you would thoroughly characterize. We had gone from nine sites to five, and when I came out here, there were five sites under consideration. Once I was here, it was narrowed down to the three finalists, if you will: Hanford for basalt, Nevada for tuffs—that’s the Yucca Mountain Site—and in Texas there was a salt formation called Deaf Smith County. And so that was being looked at. Now, BWIP itself was not the geologic repository site. It was a test facility built into Gable Mountain—and Gable Mountain, of course, rises up and the geologic repository was going to go down several thousand feet. But it allowed the scientists to put heaters into basalt rock to see how the rock responded to it—expansion, contraction, did it attract water, was it pushed away, and the like. It was actually a quite successful project. We learned quite a bit about how basalt rock would interact. However—getting back to the cultural resources—during that period, we also found out that the Native Americans—the Yakamas, I believe—used to use Gable Mountain for vision-quest-type activities and places to send people on a spiritual adventure. This didn’t happen right away, but we finally worked out—because I saw no reason why we couldn’t—with a day’s notice, we let the Yakamas—we said, we will let you come on and go up to the site, and do whatever ceremonies, to do whatever you want to do. We just need to know about it. Obviously there is physical security and there’s safety we had to provide for them. But I think we were able to work out and arrangement with the Yakamas where they would have access. Perhaps not as freely as they would like, but it did allow some compromise to be worked out so they could still perform some of their religious ceremonies there.
Franklin: Sure. So you came—you arrived in July 1984, you said. And that was kind of—that was under this Reagan era mandate of basically restarting production.
Lawrence: Right.
Franklin: Because it had just been N Reactor through most of the ‘70s, correct, and into the early ‘80s. So I’m wondering if you can just elaborate more on that mission and some of the activities needed and the push back—if there was any push back—and the whole thing.
Lawrence: Well, there was opposition, particularly on the west side and in Portland to restarting plutonium production facilities. While N Reactor had continued to operate, the fuel had not been processed and plutonium had not been recovered in many instances until PUREX started back up. So that was the process of really then getting back into plutonium production. That’s what was leading to opposition to what we were doing. We did the best we could to try to go around and to explain at least what we were doing, how we were doing it, how we would interact. I can recall going with my wife to a meeting up in Spokane. I just went up on a weekday night and the Hanford Education Action League had asked me to come up and talk to them. It was clear. It was clear then, that there was very, very strong opposition to what we were doing. A person I remember asked me the question, did I realize that I was acting just like Hitler? [LAUGHTER] I said, you know, I don’t think of it that way. I think about what I do very seriously, and I’m doing something that’s approved by and funded by the government of the United States of America, from the President and the Congress. I have to do it safely, and I have to do it in accordance with the law, but that’s what needs to be done. But, again, it was another effort to try to get out and at least be present, answer the questions; you may not make them happy, but at least you know you’re there trying to interact.
Franklin: And so how many facilities ended up being restarted or brought online from when you got here to when things were shut down? Maybe you could kind of walk me through that process.
Lawrence: Well, as I indicated, N Reactor had continued to operate, because N Reactor, unlike the other production reactors that were at Savannah River, was a dual purpose reactor. It not only produced plutonium in the fuel elements, but the water which passed through the reactors for cooling it was then sent over to a facility operated by the Washington Public Power Supply System to turn turbines and to produce electricity, on the order of a gigawatt of electricity a year. And because of that, we needed to—the cycle of the N Reactor was different than other production reactors: it was on a shorter cycle. That was for production reasons, the type of plutonium we were producing. So N Reactor went from producing what was fuel grade—it was called fuel grade plutonium—for reactor development programs like the Fast Flux Test Facility and ultimately would have been a breeder reactor. It went to making weapons grade, which meant much shorter irradiation periods. Also, prior to their restarting of PUREX, the fuel was just stored. With the starting of PUREX, you would then let the fuel cool in the basin at N Reactor then ship it in casks on rail cars to the center of the site at PUREX where it would be dissolved in PUREX. The waste would be sent to waste tanks, the plutonium concentrate in a liquid form would be sent to the Plutonium Finishing Plant over in the 200-West area, where it would then be converted into a plutonium metal button about the size of a tuna fish can. And that would be then sent to Colorado—Rocky Flats Plant—where it would actually be fashioned into the material used in a nuclear weapon. So it was the facilities associated with reprocessing at PUREX, handling waste from PUREX, and the facilities associated with the Plutonium Finishing Plant for converting the plutonium to metal that were the primary set of facilities that had to restart.
Franklin: And so then N Reactor was the only reactor that was operated during that time?
Lawrence: It was the only production reactor on the Hanford Site at that time. And the only reactor that was producing water that was—steam—that was then used to produce electricity. There was another very important reactor at Hanford that was operating then. It was called the Fast Flux Test Facility, which had just started operation a year or so before I got here. And that was to be a precursor of a commercial breeder reactor. The developmental—the reactor, the full-scale reactor that was going to demonstrate the breeder process was going to be built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee at the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. But they built the FFTF prior to that in order to get a feeling for how the sodium cooling worked, the fuel worked, the interactions. It was a prototype, if you will, to see just how that system was going to work. And quite frankly, the FFTF was a tremendously successful test reactor and developmental reactor for liquid sodium. It operated flawlessly, really. Unfortunately, though, it shut down because the breeder program was canceled and there really wasn’t a need for it. People tried diligently to find a mission, to find a need for it. But it was a—it just wasn’t in the cards, and it eventually—it took until the late 1990s for it to be permanently shut down. But that was the other reactor that was operating when I came out here.
Franklin: Okay. Yeah, I’ve interviewed several other people that worked at FFTF, and they’ve all—
Lawrence: Oh, and they’re very enthusiastic about the FFTF. And I can understand it. It was a great reactor.
Franklin: Right, and a reactor with kind of a different mission than any of Hanford’s other reactors.
Lawrence: Yes, yeah.
Franklin: Save maybe the N Reactor which had a dual—
Lawrence: No, it was very different. It didn’t have that plutonium production role.
Franklin: How long did the production go at Hanford—that ‘80s Reagan era production?
Lawrence: Well, in 1986, the reactor in Chernobyl blew up—April of 1986. That was in Ukraine, at Chernobyl. Of course, there was very little information coming out after the news of that explosion occurred. You couldn’t get in; the Soviets weren’t saying anything about it. But they couldn’t deny it, because you could detect the radiation coming. But people knew, generally, what type of reactor the Russians were operating there. It was graphite-moderated, water-cooled, and very quickly they came upon the fact that, wait a minute, there’s a graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor operating in the US out of Hanford that’s called the N Reactor. So consequently, I believe it was in the first week of the Chernobyl accident, one afternoon—I guess it was a morning—in the lobby of the Federal Building, it was mayhem. There must have been 50 to 100 people, representatives from all of the television networks, the major newspapers and wire services—all there wanting to do a story on N Reactor, the Chernobyl of the United States. So I got on the phone to Washington, DC and I said, look, we’ve got a problem here. Because we had been told, do not talk to the press about this. This is one of the few times when I was manager here that we were ever given instructions from Washington about how to interact and how to manage the sites. The managers had much greater authority then than they do now. And there was only one manager here at that point in time, as opposed to three that they have now. So we had a lot of leeway, but we’d been told, don’t talk about it because it’s very sensitive; it’s international news and we’re concerned about it. So when I called and said we have this mob scene in the lobby all wanting to talk about and go see the N Reactor, they said, don’t talk to them. Don’t do anything. I got back on the phone and I said, look, there’s stories that are going to be coming out of here. They can either be based on fact or they can be based upon fiction. If they’re based upon fiction, it’s not going to be pretty. And it’s going to be inaccurate. And I said, look, I will not speculate at all on what happened at Chernobyl. I don’t know. I care, but I’m not going to say a thing about that. I just want to explain how N Reactor works and what its safety features are, so that they can see for themselves. So reluctantly but finally, they relented and said, okay, you can show them. Go take them out. So we got a big bus. We put everybody on the bus—it was multiple buses. And we went out to N Reactor. And as you know, that’s about an hour’s drive out. But they were chomping at the bit. And I can remember the look on their faces when they saw—I think they were expecting a little Quonset huts with steam rising out of vents and out of chimneys and all the rest. And when they see this massive building—and in fact we were able to open one of the doors, which was three feet thick of concrete and steel. They looked at that and they were kind of amazed. And I explained to them that although commercial reactors have a system called containment, which is a big steel dome, production reactors don’t. It’s called confinement. It’s different. So it leads to speculation. Well, you know, containment’s going to keep it in; confinement’s not going to do it. And I was pointing out how we had ways of safely venting steam and pressure so it wouldn’t build up, so it couldn’t explode. And we went through all the safety systems, showed them in the inside, the face of the reactor. And consequently, the next several days in USA Today—I mean, it was front page stuff. But at least it was based upon, well, you know, here are all these safety features. It still raised a lot of issues and concerns because nobody knew what caused Chernobyl, so how could we say it couldn’t happen here? We could only say, here are all the safety systems we have to prevent something like that from happening here. Now, ultimately, we found out over time, that what happened at Chernobyl was a physical characteristic called a positive void coefficient. But basically something that didn’t exist in the physics out at N Reactor. But the damage was done. We did need to do some safety upgrades at N Reactor, which we did. But ultimately, in 1988 I believe it was, the Secretary of Energy, John Harrington, in testifying before Congress announced that the US had now produced so much plutonium that we were in fact, quote, awash in plutonium and didn’t need to produce any more. And quite frankly, with that being the case, we no longer had a justification for operating N Reactor. And ultimately it was shut down. To this day, I applaud the hard work and dedication of all the people out at N Reactor. They worked on the safety upgrades and the operation of that reactor, they worked extremely hard and were very, very proud of the operation of that reactor. I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to those people. They did a great job.
Franklin: There’s several things that strike me as really interesting that I want to return to in what you just said about Chernobyl and N. One was one of the last things, that John Harrington, awash with plutonium; the US had produced enough. Did you agree with that statement then? That we were—because that would be, I mean, your boss or boss’s boss.
Lawrence: Quite frankly, I didn’t know what the total plutonium numbers were for the country. I didn’t know what the total demand was. I do know that plutonium has a very long half-life and sooner or later, you’ve got to have more than you need. We had thousands and thousands of nuclear warheads then. So, I mean, I didn’t know for sure, but I knew at some point we were going to reach it, and quite frankly felt we probably had overshot. So I did not disagree with Secretary Harrington on that.
Franklin: Okay, because I mean, we had passed mutually assured destruction quite a long—
Lawrence: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: And I guess, we know a lot more now about our stockpile then than we did then. But it’s a very interesting way to phrase that. We’re awash in—
Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, it conjures up an image that you really don’t want to have.
Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to return to the Chernobyl thing. It strikes me as interesting that this reaction of don’t talk to the press, which is—you can understand in some way, because you don’t want misinformation. But isn’t that the same kind of criticism that we would level at the Soviets? That they were clamming up and not saying anything, and we wished that they were saying something? So this reaction to not say anything on our side is—could have been seen as—you know—being too controlling maybe perhaps?
Lawrence: Well, I mean, it went against my instincts, but it’s understandable. The Soviets were the one who had the accident. Now, if we had had an accident and they said, don’t talk to them, I would have been incensed. But basically, we were just going along and people want to come in and try to write a story and say, you’re just like Chernobyl. Well, in a sense, we didn’t know what Chernobyl was, how could we have definitely refuted that? So I can understand their perspective, because, quite frankly, some people at other sites had been quoted by the press as saying, well, we think this is what happened at Chernobyl, or that happened at Chernobyl. And it was just—it was getting out of hand. So I understood that. That was—my point was, I’m not going to talk at all about Chernobyl, because I don’t know. I do know N Reactor. I do know how it works, and I do know its safety features; that’s all I’m going to talk about. And I was awfully glad they let me do it.
Franklin: That’s good, yeah. I’m wondering if you could talk about—being in charge of the Site here, I’m wondering if you could talk about the effect of Chernobyl on employee morale at Hanford. Did you notice a particular change—what changed as a result of—
Lawrence: I really don’t think I saw any change in the behavior of the people here. They were going about their work. They knew the systems and the procedures and the processes they worked by, the protections that they were given. I’ll tell you candidly one thing that always bothered me then and it bothers me today, is that sometimes people, they get off work and they act somewhat cavalier or bravado about the work they do. Whether it’s to impress somebody or what, I don’t know. But they say, oh yeah, we deal with this. You know, handling it not as seriously as it needs to be. I know on the job, they do and they have to. But then like a macho reaction at the Gaslight Tavern or something like that talking about what they’re doing. That bothers me because it leaves a wrong impression with the public. And it’s certainly not the way we act onsite.
Franklin: I guess I’d like to maybe rephrase that question. Did you see like maybe a level of—or rise of kind of the fatigue of workers, maybe thinking that anti-nuclear folks or that there was a new public perception that this was really unsafe or that there was really an imminent danger at Hanford? Do you think that weighed on—did that weigh on you, or did that weigh on anybody else?
Lawrence: Well, I think there was a sense on their part that there was an overreaction, that people were, in a way, paranoid and exaggerating the risk. They knew the risk. The people who work here know the risk. But they also know the precautions, so they can balance it out. And consequently, they felt like there was an overreaction. But even before Chernobyl occurred, there was an event that put the Site under somewhat of a microscope and an intense scrutiny, and that would have been, I believe it was September of 1985. Now, Chernobyl happened in April of ’86; this was September of 1985 on a Sunday, The Spokesman Review newspaper in Spokane came out with a multiday series on what they called the downwinders. Basically, they were interviewing and writing stories about an area across the Columbia River in Eltopia, Mesa, where farmers had experienced or felt they had experienced undue health effects—a number of health effects and cancers, and even some wildlife—some of their livestock being born with—there was reports of double heads and the like. And this was a major news piece done by a reporter called Karen Dorn Steele, and quite frankly she did an excellent job of researching this and writing it up. And I—you know, this is the first any of us had heard about this. That was on a Sunday-Monday. So, again, trying to engage on this topic, that Thursday, just several days after it had come out, we had a public meeting over at the Edwin Markham Middle School in Eltopia, across the river, with the public to say, we’re here. What are your concerns? This is—let us tell you what we’ve been able to measure and monitor, and you tell us what your concerns are. And I had some people from Battelle who—we put out an annual monitoring report saying, here are the releases, here are the quantities, here’s how they compare with standards and the like. It was somewhat emotional. You know, people are worried about their health and people dying of cancer and the like. But we also knew that we, in our numbers—we weren’t showing anything that should have resulted in something like that. During that meeting, one of the farmers who had been prominently noted in the article, his name was Tom Bailey, he actually got up and said, well, okay, we’re not saying that you’re doing that to us now, or that you’re intentionally doing anything now. But what happened in the past? What happened back in the ‘50s? When he said that, I realized that, although we had monitoring reports going back to the Manhattan Project—here’s what people were measuring and monitoring and releasing—most of those had been classified secret. And they had never been declassified. It wasn’t malicious; it’s just not a simple process to declassify a document. But I knew because of the extent of time involved, they could be. So, I then at that meeting said, you know, if you want to know, we can go back, we can review and declassify those documents and make them available so you can actually see what was being done. That seemed to both surprise but also satisfy. So we came back and started the process of declassifying monitoring reports going back to the mid-1940s. That is a time-consuming and expensive process. But we were doing it. And we were keeping the public—I used to have monthly press availabilities at the Federal Building and we’d talk about that. But we didn’t really have the first batch of documents, which was 19,000 pages deep, ready to release until February. Now, one thing I’d like to make very clear and to get on the record: we’re in the process of doing that—time-consuming and expensive—but in January, one month before we completed and released the documents, a Freedom of Information request was filed for those documents by an environmental group. I’m not certain of who it is, so I won’t say who it was. But it was an environmental group, filed a Freedom of Information request. And we said, wait a minute. We are releasing these; it’ll be ready next month—the first batch. The reason I raise that is because subsequently, to this day, I hear from time to time people say, you released those documents—they were forced out of you by the Freedom of Information request. And I say, that is just not true. We had—if you go and check the record, we had committed to doing that a long time before. Again, getting back to credibility—it was easy to make that charge. In fact, I had National Geographic call me about ten years ago checking a story and that specific point. Because they didn’t know if it was right or not and they were able to research it and confirm it. But anyway, we were able to release those documents. But when those documents came out—and this was a mistake on my part—there was a lot of information there, but where was the understanding? Where was the, if you want to call it, education of the public, so they could understand what they were reading? And very quickly, it was found that one of the monitoring reports from 1949 had talked about something called the Green Run, where fuel that had been cooled for shorter than normal, so there were radioactive elements in it, was dissolved and more radioactivity went up, intentionally, through the stack. Some of the background as to why that was done had to be deleted—because it was still classified. When this document—when that report was found and the Green Run was discussed, there was speculation that it was associated with human experimentation: let’s release it and see what happens to the public when it hits them. That was not the case at all. In fact, I knew from reading the documents, they had delayed the Green Run because unfavorable weather conditions that they thought might be harmful to the public. But nonetheless, since certain portions had to be deleted because of classification, we couldn’t really explain it to people. And that created quite an uproar. It’s normal and naturally you would expect people to think you’re trying to intentionally harm the public or experiment on the public. Ultimately, what we decided to do was that, even though we could not tell the public the intent of the Green Run, congressmen and senators from Washington and Oregon, by purpose of their position, have clearance and can be told. So I went back to Washington, DC with a person here from the lab and in a classified conference room in the rotunda of the US Capitol, we had the entire delegations from Washington and Oregon there, and we were able to explain to them the classified reason why the experiment was done and why it was still classified today. Tom Foley, who was later to become the Speaker of the House, from Spokane, more or less led the group. He appreciated it, but he pushed back. He says, I’ve got to have more to tell the public than that. I have to be able to tell them whether we know, but we can’t tell you. You’ve got to give me a little bit to tell them as to why it’s so classified. So I was able to get on the phone, again, back to the department, talk to them about it. And ultimately we were able to explain that the reason it was done was to allow the US government to improve their methods for determining and detecting what the Soviet Union was doing with their production program. Ultimately, it became known, if you measure the iodine and the cesium, you could cut back and see what they’re producing. And the reason it was still classified was that we were still, back in 1986, using that technique for nuclear non-proliferation detection around the world. So it’s since been declassified, but that was the reason. I felt that was a good use of our government and our representatives to represent the people and be able to explain to the people what was going on. But ultimately that whole—all those documents led us to create something called the Northwest Citizens Forum for Defense Waste, which was 25 individuals picked from a broad cross-section: academia, industry, church leaders—to be given the information and to be briefed on the information and ask and have answers provided for any questions they have. So they could act as the public’s representatives on what was being done. And that ultimately turned into all of the citizens’ groups that are formed at the DOE sites now. Where you have—here it’s called the HAB, the Hanford Advisory Board. But it was the first ever citizens’ group to oversee and look at what was going on at the DOE sites.
Franklin: Great. Thank you for that. That’s really illuminating. Wasn’t it still a calculated risk, though? Sorry, the Green Run, the actual action itself. Certainly there’s still, I think, in the mind of a lot of people—even though it may have been check the release to see how much the Soviets were releasing, there still is a real calculated risk, though. Or do you think that there’s still a calculated risk there—that there could have been some environmental or human population damage resulting from a higher-than-average—or kind of breaking protocol that was set to release that much contaminate?
Lawrence: Well, based on what I was able to look at and the rationale and how it was done, they were doing it at levels such that it would be a fraction of what the public was allowed to be exposed to. Even with that higher amount. It would just be a fraction. And that’s why when weather conditions weren’t right, and they felt it would rise above that, they didn’t do it. There are always risks. And were the standards that they were a fraction of, were they right, were they wrong, were they conservative, were they not strong enough? I mean, hindsight, you can go back and ask all those questions. But based upon the knowledge that they had at the time, they were being conservative. That also happened to be at the time when we were doing atmospheric testing at the Nevada Test Site. And you’re setting off nuclear bombs that people are going out and watching, you know, maybe 20 miles away. I’m not saying that’s right, and we know now it was wrong. But it was a fraction of the exposure that might have existed there.
Franklin: Right. I get—yes. That’s very true and that’s a good point. I guess it just—the only thing that still strikes, at least in my mind, as a difference is that they’re informing the public about the nuclear bombs so people can go and watch them. Whereas the Green Run was kind of this—I think that maybe—
Lawrence: Yeah, it was secret. No.
Franklin: It came out after the fact. And it was like, what else could these guys be hiding? Because, like you said, there was already that level of mistrust there.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Franklin: It just seems like that event can never really shake that level of mistrust in some ways with some people.
Lawrence: In hindsight, that’s true, but it was a very different time. A very different time.
Franklin: Of course. That’s just an interesting legacy. So, thank you for covering Chernobyl so much. I just have one more question. What role did Hanford play in assisting the Soviets—Hanford and Battelle play in assisting the Soviets with Chernobyl? Wasn’t there a team—
Lawrence: None at the time.
Franklin: --that went over?
Lawrence: None at the time. The Soviets didn’t ask for any. Ultimately, and actually when I came back to the Tri-Cities in 1999 and eventually started working for the Pacific Northwest National Lab, under my responsibility was the team we had at Chernobyl helping to build the new sarcophagus, the confinement structure, that now has been completed and rolled over the destroyed reactor. And I’ve been to Chernobyl a number of times and visited on that project. So we were involved in that. But I don’t recall us being asked to provide any assistance or having provided any assistance at that point in time.
Franklin: I was wondering—I’d like to—Chernobyl made me think of another incident, maybe hop back in time real quick and get your perceptions on that. You weren’t here, but I know you were still working in the nuclear industry, and I’m wondering maybe if you’re going to guess what I’m going to ask about, but I’m wondering, in the late ‘70s, the Three Mile Island scare. I’m wondering if you—because you were not here at the time of Three Mile Island, right, you would have been back east. But I’m wondering if you could talk about the legacy of that incident and how that affected people’s perceptions of nuclear—
Lawrence: Oh, it affected everybody’s perceptions of nuclear because—everyone in the nuclear industry had gotten a little sloppy, implying an accident cannot happen, it will not happen. You know, we’ve got all these precautions; the risk is so small, they’re non-existent. Well, nothing is non-existent. Everything is a risk, and if enough things go wrong, yes, you can have a problem. And they certainly had it there. Much more serious than they ever expected it to be. But in hindsight, the fact of the matter is, the systems all worked to contain it. There were never any releases harmful to the public. There was never a single fatality or anything associated with the Three Mile Island accident. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard about it. I was getting ready to go take a run at lunchtime in the AEC—or it would have been a DOE at that time—building. And someone said, hey, did you hear they had some reactor incident going on up in Pennsylvania? You know, it started then and several days later I was getting calls from good friends who we were godparents of their child who lived in Hershey saying, should we evacuate? And I said, follow what the governor says. I really don’t have any firsthand knowledge, but it really did shake people’s fears, because it led people to say, you said it couldn’t happen and it did. And that’s always a problem.
Franklin: That’s such a tough issue of framing, though, right? Because you can either say, well, it could happen but we have really good safeguards so it probably won’t, which leaves open the door in people’s minds to something happening. Or you can say, well, it won’t, we’ve got this under control and it won’t happen. How do you frame—framing disaster seems to be a very tricky subject. Or framing the possibility of disaster.
Lawrence: Yeah. In part, because you can say, just looking at risk and probability, you can say you’re more likely to be hit by lightning than to die from this. And you’re willing to accept one but not the other. It’s what people are associated with. And if they think, I don’t have to deal with that, I don’t even want to deal with that minimal risk. I just don’t want to do it. That’s understandable; it’s part of human nature.
Franklin: It kind of comes to, we see this a lot in current day in dealing with—well, won’t go into that. But there seems to be a—there’s these fact-based arguments but they can’t always counter the emotion-based arguments. And a lot of the response to nuclear seems, in some cases to be emotionally-based and not fact—and immune, almost inoculated against the factual side of it. Which seems to bother many who have a lot of intimate knowledge, a lot of people who worked at Hanford who know the risks can’t ever seem to communicate that to the critics. I wonder if you could expand on that at all, being someone who would have been trying to communicate that to critics of Hanford. And how you’ve dealt with that fact-versus-emotion in your career.
Lawrence: Well you see it—you still see it today. Fukushima is an excellent example of that. Assist you with the nuclear accident first. That tidal wave hits, completely washes over, and the plant loses all power. Now, most importantly that was an avoidable accident. Even as hugely severe as a tsunami was, if they just had have had the secondary generators higher and separated more from the plant, they wouldn’t have lost power, and the reactors would have been fine. In this country, we have that requirement. They didn’t have it there. So that reactor accident, which was catastrophic, it was devastating, could have been prevented if rules that we have here had have been used there. But the other thing—and this is more to the point you made—18,000 people were killed by the tsunami, by the flood, by all of the devastation caused by the tsunami. None were caused by the nuclear accident. And yet all of the attention is on the nuclear accident. And it’s not like, oh, but there’ll be 18,000 in the future—there won’t. You know, looking at the numbers, it’s hard to say if there’ll be any. And people are evacuated now, when perhaps they don’t even need to be, but it’s out of the fear of whatever’s left there. And consequently, because of that, it’s causing stress that have led to heart attacks and have led to fatalities. Are they caused by the nuke—they’re not caused by radiation, but they’re caused by fear of radiation or caused by fear of the displacement. So how do you put that in perspective, where as a nuclear accident has gotten all the attention, but a tsunami that killed 18,000 people, it’s sort of like, well, that’s an act of nature? And so, I really don’t know how to balance that. I do know that on NOVA last month, they had a very good show about that. Because nuclear is a carbon-free source of baseload electricity, and if we’re going to deal with climate change, I know I believe and many people believe nuclear has to be part of the solution.
Franklin: Yeah, I would personally agree with you. I wondered—so, moving past Chernobyl then, you mentioned that as kind of a major—you know, it definitely is a major event in regards to people’s perceptions of Hanford. And you mentioned in ’88 this—awash in plutonium. How did it play out after that? What was the drawdown like? What happened in the community when that—when it was realized that Hanford was—the mission was going to change?
Lawrence: Well, you know, there was fear, because Hanford—the Tri-Cities over time, going back to the ‘50s and ‘60s had gone through booms and busts. And whenever Hanford production was up, the community was good; whenever it was down, homes were for sale, property values dropped and all the rest. So there was a feel, that was going to continue. And if N Reactor was shutting down, PUREX was down, it was going to happen to have a devastating effect on the economy again. Of course, what also happened at the same time was the commitment to the cleanup mission and the negotiation in signing the Tri-Party Agreement, which led to the cleanup mission here, which has continued and kept levels and funding levels right up to where they were and actually higher than in the production days. Maybe not employment necessarily, but it’s close. But also the Tri-Cities has significantly diversified from Hanford. Still very much—we get through $3 billion a year from the federal government between the Site and the national lab in this community, and that’s got huge benefits. But we’ve diversified quite a bit. But, getting to the Tri-Party Agreement, that was a direct result of a legal decision in Tennessee in 1985 that said that Department of Energy sites had to comply with national and state environmental rules. Up until that time, it had been assumed that the Atomic Energy Act, that the department operated under absolved us from that, or we did not have to do that. When that ruling came down, ultimately, it led to getting together with federal regulators in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and state regulators in the form of the Department of Ecology, to find out, okay, where are we in violation, what do we need to change, and how do we do that? You don’t do it instantaneously. Which, obviously, is clear. And that led to the negotiation and the ultimate signing in May of—May 15th of 1989 of the Tri-Party Agreement. But that has provided a rather steady employment, funding, and—you know, I realize it’s taking longer than people thought, it’s costing more than people thought. And fortunately, it’s not an urgent—it’s not the type of crisis where something has to be done immediately or here’s the catastrophic result. It’s a problem in slow motion that the main thing you want to do is get the solution right the first time. You don’t want to go hot with the Vit Plant and then find out it doesn’t work. Because you’ll never—you won’t get around to it again. So let’s make sure we’ve got it right. It’s been an enduring process, and I’m very pleased and proud of the enduring capabilities of the Tri-Party Agreement.
Franklin: And what was your role in the negotiation and signing of the Tri-Party Agreement?
Lawrence: Well, we—the Richland Operations Office had the responsibility and role of negotiating with EPA Region 10 and the Department of Ecology for what the cleanup agreement would look like and what it would entail. And we kept Washington, DC informed of what we were doing and we’d get feedback from them. But it was our main responsibility to do that. Initially a person by the name of Jerry White and then ultimately Ron Izatt who worked for me as division directors had that responsibility of negotiating. And they would brief me every other day and we would get involved. From time to time, I would have discussions with the head of ecology who was Chris Gregoire, who subsequently became governor of the state, on issues that they would rise to our level. Or with Robie Russell, who was the head of EPA regionally, on issues that would come up. But we eventually worked out, basically, the agreement: this would be done and this was the timeframe for doing it. Then it came time to saying, okay, this is what we’ve got. It was in December of 1978 when we had pretty much wrapped everything up.
Franklin: Sorry—’88?
Lawrence: I’m sorry. ’88, yes, I’m sorry. December of ’88. So I went over to Lacey near Olympia where Ecology is located, to meet with Chris Gregoire and her team, and I had Ron Izatt and a lawyer from our team, to talk about what we were going to do. And at that meeting—it was a Friday afternoon—they said, okay, what we want to do now is we want to take this to a court and have a judge bless it, make it law: this is what has to be done. And we couldn’t go along with that, and the reason was that the lawyer for the federal government is the Department of Justice. And anytime you go to court as a US government agency, the Department of Justice represents you. They do not believe in friendly settlements. They will fight everything. I don’t mean that to be critical; that’s just the approach they take. And I said to her, I said, Chris, if you insist on taking this to court, we, the Department of Energy and I, lose all ability to deal with this, and it goes into the hands of lawyers who get paid to fight it. And you’re going to win. You’ve got the law on your side. But it’s going to be two, three years from now at great expense. I said, why don’t we just sign it as an agreement, shake hands on it, and you wait for us to violate it, and then take us to court. And she—we went back and forth on that issue. EPA, by the way, had stepped back and said, if you two can reach agreement, we’ll go along with anything that you say. Because they knew we had the tough issues. And so finally, you know, she said, no, we need it in court. These were her instructions, or this is where the governor wanted to go. And I said, well, Chris, can we take this to the governor? And, fortunately, through my tenure here, I had wonderful relations, a great respect for Governor Booth Gardner, who was the governor at that time. And she said, sure, we can take it to him. Subsequently, the following Friday I went over by myself with her and we met with Governor Gardner in his office in Olympia in the state capitol. And I went through the message of, you know, I don’t have the authority to sign this in court. If it goes to court, Justice will fight it, you’ll win, but it will be two years from now or whatever. Didn’t sway the governor. You know, it was clear: no, we want this—we want the law behind it and make it in a court of law. I must have said the same thing three times. Always slightly different. Maybe I warmed him, I don’t know what. But finally the governor looked at Chris and said, well, Chris, could you live with it as an agreement until if and when they fail to live up to it and then go to court? And she said, you know, Governor, if you can, I can. And the governor says, okay, that’s what we’ll do. And so it was an act of faith and it worked for a long time before it ended up in court. But we would not have had the Tri-Party Agreement when we did in the manner in which we did without his willingness and her willingness to concede on that point and let us move on with it.
Franklin: And so when the Tri-Party Agreement was established, what did that lay out for the future of Hanford?
Lawrence: Basically, it took the entire Site and all the areas in which we were in non-compliance, whether it was currently operating sites—even though the plant wasn’t operating, there were still facilities that were operating that fell under the state, or old sites which fell under EPA. All of those things, and when they would be cleaned up, the schedule and process for doing it. And that’s what it laid out. It also laid out, like, the ability to modify the agreement as you went forward. Because the simple fact was, we were operating with nowhere near the degree of knowledge and specificity you would need to have hard-and-fast deadlines. And the other thing was, we didn’t know, and we still don’t know today, what the funding will be year to year. Okay, or problems that will come up. But there was a process in there to move with it and to let it happen. And that was, I think, one of the best features of the Tri-Party Agreement. And it required parties to act in good faith. And I’m pleased it did.
Franklin: Excellent. Was there anything in there about any of the history at Hanford or preserving any of the historic activity at Hanford, whether—keeping buildings there or documenting the history in some way, or saving equipment or anything used in the process?
Lawrence: Not really, no. I mean, this was all compliance. This was an enforcement order. But we did make sure that B Reactor was going to be one of the last things to be—actually, originally, they wanted all of the reactors out on the Site by the rivers to be decontaminated as best they could, and then they wanted to dig under the reactors, bring in the big crawlers they use at Cape Canaveral to move missiles, put it under there, lift up the block, and take it to the center of the Site. And I thought, oh, my good—and that was to be done early in the process. And we said, let’s move that ‘til about 25 years from now. Of course, subsequently they’ve learned how to cocoon and maybe that’ll be found to be good enough. But, I mean, that was—we didn’t have the level of specificity or knowledge or information that you need to do a good cleanup then as we do now.
Franklin: I know that the B Reactor Museum Association was founded in the early ‘90s, but were there whispers then when you were signing that agreement or afterwards about saving B Reactor or saving something onsite as kind of a testament to the production at Hanford?
Lawrence: There very well may have been. I just—I wasn’t cognizant of it.
Franklin: Sure. So when did you leave working at the Richland office?
Lawrence: I left in July of 1990.
Franklin: Oh, okay, so you were—and why did you leave? Where did you go after?
Lawrence: Well, in part, I went to work for a company in Colorado that was doing cleanup work. But I was only there less than a year when the state department offered me a diplomatic post in Vienna, Austria. Because that was right after the first Gulf War, when they discovered that the Iraqis had a clandestine nuclear program, and they wanted the International Atomic Energy Agency, who was supposed to monitor things like that, to become stronger and more efficient and effective. And the State Department decided that they wanted a person with technical knowledge and ability but who also had had some international experience, which I had in the ‘70s under a Carter program doing international negotiations. So they called me up and I went to Vienna, then, to do that. I left here, one, because the managers’ authorities had been greatly, greatly reduced.
Franklin: Was that a result of the Tri-Party Agreement, or just from the shift or production to cleanup?
Lawrence: In part, it was due to the Tri-Party Agreement in that as we were negotiating the Tri-Party Agreement—we had the responsibility for doing that here, but kept Washington informed of our activities and getting their agreement as we went along. And right after those meetings that I told you about with Chris Gregoire and Governor Gardner, that was in December. In January of that year, a new Secretary of Energy was coming in. Admiral Watkins had been appointed to be the Secretary of Energy. So he was transitioning in, and there was an acting secretary. Her name was Donna Fitzpatrick, who was interacting with him as this transition occurred. Acting Secretary Fitzpatrick—they all knew what we were doing here. But as it happens, the agreement was formally signed in May 15th, 1989. But three months prior to that—what would that have been, February—is when—you have to give a three-month notice before you do something like that, for public comment and the like. As it turns out, everyone was so pleased with coming to agreement that the announcement of agreement was made in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, DC. Governor Gardner was there, I was there, representatives of DC and the Department were there, EPA were there, and it was announced we had reached agreement and it would be signed in three months in May. You know, after the formal comment period and any changes that had to occur. Well, in the normal question-and-answer period that went on, with that announcement, the State said, this is going to be commit the government to be spending $25 billion for the cleanup of Hanford. Now, it just so happened that the very next day was Admiral Watkins’ first day as Secretary of Energy. During that first day, he was to meet with all of the site managers, including myself. That morning, when it appeared in the paper that Washington State says it’s committed to paying $25 billion—whatever that means—the Office of Management and Budget, which, evidently had been left in the dark—I don’t know. I had no responsibility to inform them. They called him up and said, what in the world’s going on over there? What are you doing committing us to $25 billion? We go into the meeting with the new secretary. And he proceeded to just chew me up and chew me down as to, this is the worst thing we’ve ever done, how could we be so bad and stupid, and all this other stuff. And I just sat there, and—you know, you can’t push back, really. You just think—and unfortunately, the former acting secretary, Donna Fitzpatrick was sitting next to him. She knew all about it, but she couldn’t do anything. And it really just set a very bad tone with the secretary. Subsequently, however, as the kudos started coming in about what a good agreement this was and how it showed good cooperation and compliance by the Department, Admiral Watkins was very happy to take the credit for the Tri-Party Agreement. But life was a little uncomfortable out here. And I decided then I was going to be leaving. But I didn’t want to leave in the first year, because I wanted to make sure the Tri-Party Agreement got off to a good start. So, subsequently when I did leave, a lot of it was about the fact that it just wasn’t the same job. And quite frankly, a very important tenet of any management job is never accept responsibility that you don’t have the authority to fulfill. If you don’t have the authority, but have the responsibility, it just doesn’t work. And I didn’t, and I left.
Franklin: Interesting. How did you come back to the area?
Lawrence: That’s an interesting story as well. After I left Vienna in 1985, I was hired by—
Franklin: Sorry, you mean 1995.
Lawrence: ’95, I’m sorry, yeah, I have my years mixed. 1995. I went to work for a company called BNFL, which stands for British Nuclear Fuels, Limited. And they had bought a company in Los Alamos, New Mexico and they asked me to be president of it. I was running the company, and then they subsequently asked me to move back to their Washington, DC headquarters for their US operations as the chief operating officer, which I did. But that was also the same time when BNFL had gotten the contract to design the Vitrification Plant for the Hanford Site. And they had brought in engineers and managers from the UK to head up that project here in the Tri-Cities. So, I’ve gone back to Washington, DC as the chief operating officer of BNFL, Inc., which is the US component. And shortly—not so long after it—I was there less than a year—the manager of the project in Richland came back. And they had signed an agreement of what they were going to do and the government was going along with it. It was basically, for $6.5 billion they would build and operate the plant and process the first so many million gallons of waste, for $6.5 billion. When that manager came back, he indicated—he said, you know—he’s British; I’m not going to do a British accent—but he said, you know, I really—I’m not fitting in well with the community. I just don’t understand those people out there. I don’t fit in well with the community. We need somebody out there who understands things. Well, I love this community. I know this community. They were very, very good to me and my family when we were here. So I raised my hand and said, I know those people. This was our biggest project by far for our company, I’d be willing to go out and head up the project. And so subsequently, I came out to head up the Vit Plant. Within a week of getting here, I had to go and report to the new Office of River Protection, which had responsibility for it, what the status was of our cost estimates. I had only been here a week, so they give me the numbers. And I asked the—are they aware of this? Yeah, they’re aware of this. So I went in and, oh, all hell broke loose. Because the number—it had risen. It was higher than 6.5. And Dick French, who was the head of the project, rightly so, says, I can’t—this is terrible. Your first report—and it’s over budget already. And I knew Dick, and I understood his position. And basically, I said, let me go back and find out what’s going on. I was told you were on board with this. You obviously are not. Let me find out. I subsequently found out that there had been an arbitrary 20% cut in their estimates, thinking they were just going to drive things harder and shave things off and make it cheaper. And I had a—obviously, I had a major problem with this. Because in the beginning, you don’t shave back. You have contingency that’s built in and you work off. It doesn’t work the other way. And so I’d moved back here, we bought a house, I’m running the—and this project is going downhill quick. What was worse was that I tried to tell BNFL, we need to go to the Department and say, this number, $6.5 billion, for the plant and operations of it is not going to work. We need to renegotiate. We need to do something different. And I got nothing but pushback. We would not do this. And I was even—I said, you know, if we don’t do something, we’re going to be fired. And they said, they can’t fire us. They’re not going to fire us. And I said, I’m sorry, I said, I can’t continue to operate like that. So I resigned. Resigned from the project. Didn’t have another job, but I figured, I’ll find something. But I can’t continue with this. And within two months, Secretary Richardson had fired BNFL. Fortunately, a couple months after that, Battelle and Pacific Northwest National Lab hired me to run their nuclear programs. That’s how I came back, and that’s how I spent my first two years back. As managing a dying project and then transitioning to a new job.
Franklin: And how long did you work at PNNL?
Lawrence: Well, I worked from 2000 up until 2008. And during that period, I had responsibility—I was the associate lab director for energy. But in the latter part of that timeframe, I was also deputy lab director for facilities and was responsible for the putting together and funding and getting approved the new—they called it a consolidated lab—facilities that are just north of Horn Rapids Road and two private facilities that are on the campus. And then Battelle asked if I’d be willing to lead a team to manage the national nuclear lab in the United Kingdom. They had put together a team with two other companies to do that. And I said I’d be willing to do that. I had spent time in Europe already. And I went over and subsequently we won the contract in the early 2009. So in 2009 and ’10, I was the director of the national nuclear lab in the UK. And then I retired and came back and retired here in West Richland.
Franklin: Wow, great. Well, thank you so much, Mike. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?
Lawrence: Well, I’d like to get on record that I’ve been very, very fortunate in my life to hold some very interesting positions and to work for some phenomenal people. But the job that I enjoyed the most was as manager of the Richland Operations Office. There was a spirit, a camaraderie, a support, a community spirit that I felt there that I’ve just—as much as I’ve enjoyed my other jobs, nothing quite as good as that. It was really, really enjoyable, and aside from my wife and family, probably there was nothing better that had ever happened to us than to move to this area and be involved in these activities. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for coming in today.
Lawrence: Okay, very good. Thank you.
Franklin: All right, yeah.
Lawrence: Thanks.
Franklin: Yeah. That was a great--
View interview on Youtube.
Man one: So it’s pointing at you.
Philip Craig: So it’s pointing at me?
Man one: Yeah, yeah.
Man two: Exactly.
Craig: Oh, there we go.
Man two: Perfect, perfect.
Craig: There we go!
Man one: Okay, excellent.
Craig: Okay?
Robert Bauman: Okay. Let me know when you’re ready, all right? Then we’ll—all right?
Man one: We are rolling, so on your cue.
Bauman: So, let’s start, first of all, by just having you say your name and spell it for us, so we make sure we have that correct.
Craig: My name is Philip Craig. P-H-I-L-I-P. C-R-A-I-G.
Bauman: Great. Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this oral history interview on June 24th of 2015 on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So, Mr. Craig, why don’t we have you start, maybe, by just telling us a little bit about your background. Where you came from, how you came to Hanford, and that sort of thing.
Craig: Well my how I came to Hanford started back in high school. I had a high school chemistry class. I liked what I saw. And I knew that the Hanford Project was down the road—I was living in Selah, Washington, and the Hanford Project was very interesting to me. And I even wrote a term paper on Hanford, because I really wanted to work here. So, I went on to Whitman College, graduated from high school in ’56—or ’52, I’m sorry. Graduated from college in ’56, and then went on to Washington State College, then, now Washington State University in Pullman, and did a year of graduate work in chemistry. And at the end of that, I came to Hanford for my very first job. And lo and behold, that was exactly 58 years ago today: June 24, 1957. And it was quite an experience, let me tell you. The first thing that struck me, of course I had to have credentials to get in the building. And in those days, we didn’t have badges like you have today that are on a cord around your neck. We had a little plastic folder with our ID in it, and you’d pull that out of your pocket and flash it open to the guard sitting at the entrance desk. And then you could go on into the building and find your office and take it from there. The most interesting thing, I think, about it all was it was a very formal setting. For years we wore suits, ties, long sleeved white shirts only—couldn’t have colored shirts—and the ladies wore dresses. Far more formal than today’s environment. Security, of course, was very paramount. I mean, we were in the years where the Soviets and the United States was competing. And so the Hanford site, being one of the two principal sites manufacturing plutonium in the United States, the other one being Savannah River, most of the stuff in terms of total production and that sort of thing was top secret. A lot of it was not—it was secret, but security was paramount. I remember in my little office cubby hole—it was a room, it wasn’t just a cubby hole, in a big room—we had a three-drawer file cabinet with a combination lock. And I could take a piece of paper out of that file, put it on my desk and work on it. But if I had to go to the bathroom, it went back in the combination file, locked it, go down the hall and come back and you had to unlock the combination and start all over again. And the very first thing they had me do is they handed me about a three-inch black three-ring binder with a red coversheet, marked secret. This was the PUREX operating manual. Now, PUREX stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction, and it was the chemical process that is used to take irradiated uranium from the reactors, dissolve it in acid, treat it chemically, and come up with a plutonium nitrate solution. And I had to read this manual in about a week. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty daunting.
Bauman: Now where was your first office? Where on site?
Craig: It was on in the 703 Building, which is about where the Federal Building is today. The last part of the 703 structure—it was a herringbone structure. We had offices coming off a main corridor, and there was about six tiers of those. And the very last one is still standing, and the city offices are in there. But later on, the Federal Building took over.
Bauman: And what was your first job title?
Craig: Physical—let’s see. Physical Science Administrator, I think it was. The other thing about the environment is that you handwrote all your reports, and then gave them to a secretary who typed them. There was no computers. So, it was kind of a laborious process to do that. I needed to check out a government car, which I did in the motor pool, and drive out to the Area to PUREX, and see what was going on most every day, drive back, write the daily report, mark it all secret, send it up a line to my boss. But that government car, let me tell you—it was not air conditioned. So those days were pretty warm. But we got it done. About two months later, after getting into the PUREX part of it, the fellow who was a companion office mate had been handling the plutonium shipments. And he went off to Washington, D.C. for another job. So I got the job of accepting plutonium products on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission and the US government. So it was a very formal process. The products were in two forms. After the plutonium nitrate left PUREX, it was sent over to what is known as the Z Plant. And in that plant, by a series of chemical operations, it was converted to a metal button about this big and it fit in a tuna fish can. It weighed something close to two kilograms. So that was the first product. The second product were manufactured, machined weapon components. And I won’t talk about the exact details of their size and shape at this point. But nonetheless, Hanford was in the business of making weapon components. So my job was to accept this product and make the shipment, every couple of weeks or so, to Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats was about 15 miles northwest of Denver, and it was the receiving site for the plutonium as buttons. They would take that metal and cast it into weapon component shapes and machine those and so on. And of course the other part was the shapes themselves, they’d go up in pieces themselves, and they would go into an inspection process and eventually assemble parts of the warhead.
Bauman: So when you say—you’re accepting them from the contractor, or--?
Craig: I was accepting these materials from the contractor. I mean, General Electric Company was the contractor, and their job on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract basis was to run all these processes. And there’s hundreds of people involved in this. But at the end of the line, I had to make that transition from Hanford to the next step. So it was a couple of months into my first job, my buddy left for Washington, and here I am, learning how to actually accept these components. Now, you need to understand that plutonium was very radioactive. It emitted some gamma radiation, but not huge amounts. I mean, you could actually handle it. But it also emitted alpha radiation. And so it had to be contained in some kind of container, like a can. And then you could hold it in your hand. Interesting. It was warm. It was—the radioactive decay—was producing heat. So this can felt like hanging onto a 60 Watt lightbulb. Now, the other part of the business of plutonium is that if you got too much of it together in one spot, you had a criticality event. And of course, the bomb itself was designed to make a lot of it go critical at the same time, and that created an atomic explosion. But the point is that if you’re handling plutonium, it had to maintain a certain degree of separation at all times. In the chemical processing plants, they used different sized columns of chemical solutions and whatnot, depending on what was going on. And that was to maintain this critical geometry, so that you didn’t have any kind of criticality event. And after the plutonium was made into these buttons we called them, and canned in the tuna fish cans, they were stored in a vault. And the vault had pillars of metal rods, and little rings on that rod that you could put a can in. But it maintained the separation. So on shipping day, what we would do is we operators of the plant would go into the vault and take these cans and very carefully put—I don’t remember exactly how many—something about five or six cans in a little red wagon. Just a little kid’s wagon. But there was spacers in there so that these things didn’t get too close. And they’d bring it down the hallway to the room that exited to the building where it then could be handled further. And this assembly area, in this room were birdcages. Now a birdcage is a metal frame that’s about this big, this big, and this big. And in the middle was a metal pot with a lid. And the idea was that you took—one at a time—one of those cans from the red wagon, and you put it in the pot. And then I think the birdcage held like three buttons. Then there was a lid, and a bunch of bolts in places where you could put a wire with a lead seal on the end. And my job was to squeeze the seal closed with an imprint and record, of course, what the identity of those cans were, and the weight, and that sort of thing on paperwork. And at the end of that, I would sign this receipt for this material, and give it to the contractor. The weapon components varied a little bit differently, depending on the size and shape of the weapon component. Eventually, those were a much bigger birdcage, and it contained a couple of pieces of weapon material.
Bauman: So—
Craig: Hold up.
Bauman: Oh, sure.
Craig: I got to collect my thoughts here. Okay. You can go back on. The business of shipping, then—I owned that plutonium for maybe 15 minutes [LAUGHTER] before the government. Then I would transfer it to armed couriers, AEC couriers. They were not only armed with side arms; they were armed with machine guns. This was serious stuff. And they would load these birdcages into a truck, and eventually ship that off to Rocky Flats.
Bauman: How often did these shipments--?
Craig: Well, every couple of weeks or so.
Bauman: And so, they were shipped by truck then, to Rocky Flats?
Craig: That was a method used in later years. They didn’t really like shipping by truck that well. We actually had another system that involved—all I’m going to say is it involved rail. Because the exact details was highly classified.
Bauman: And did the amount that was shipped vary significantly, or--?
Craig: It varied, yes. Depends on how the production was going and what the requirements were on the other end.
Bauman: Oh, okay. Sure. And so how long did you do this, then? How long were you--?
Craig: From 1957 to 1972.
Bauman: Wow.
Craig: So I shipped a lot of plutonium.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
Craig: The other thing that was kind of interesting—I was explaining to you about the criticality. I hadn’t been on the job more than, I don’t know, a couple of months, shipping. I knew what to do, I knew the whole process, and I knew the sensitivity of it. One day one of these chemical operators who worked for the contractor had gone to the vault, and he came down the hall carrying about five tuna fish cans in his hand, and holding it with his arm like this. Well, that was absolutely high risk criticality event waiting to happen. And he walked in the room, and I said, ooooh. Just stop right where you are. And I instructed one of the other operators, take one of the cans from him and put it in the birdcage very carefully. And we got that shipment loaded and we were on our way. And then I went to the manager’s office—the plant manager’s office. Now, this fellow was like 60 years old. Kind of a salty southerner with—I mean, he was definitely in charge. And I’m 23 years old. Fresh out of college, wet behind the ears. And I gave him a real lecture about safety. And he didn’t like that. He called my boss. And my boss said Mr. Craig was right: you really almost had an accident today. That’s the end of that story. There was more to the whole weapons system. Since I was in the whole process, one of the small cogs—there was uranium coming from Oak Ridge. There was plutonium—some plutonium—and tritium coming from Savannah River. There was high explosives coming from Pantex. And then Hanford plutonium. This all had to be scheduled into what was known as the US master nuclear delivery schedule. It was the weapons document for all the weapons made in the country. It was a top secret document, and representatives from each of these sites got together, usually in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or at the Rocky Flats Plant. And we handwrote this schedule. There was no computers. There was a spreadsheet format, yes. But we didn’t have computers to do all that. Everything had to be balanced. This whole process had to bring all these materials together for processing at Rocky Flats. And so, about once a year we got together to do the master nukes schedule. I found I was pretty fortunate to be a part of that. I was pretty young. But it was a challenge. I had a lot of help, of course. But I was very impressed. One of the things that kind of scared me though was—and let me check on the date. October 22 to 24, 1962. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were in Denver and Rocky Flats to work on these schedules. Now, that was ground zero for the Russians. If they were going to attack the United States, that probably would have been one of their targets. And it was kind of scary working there for those two days. I was very thankful that President Kennedy convinced Khrushchev to back off and no ill things happened.
Bauman: Were you here when President Kennedy came to Hanford in ’63?
Craig: Yes, yes.
Bauman: Do you remember that?
Craig: Oh, I remember that. We got to drive out and see him out at the reactor site. It was quite an experience. I think that was one of the only Presidents I’ve ever seen in person. And it wasn’t long after that, you know, a couple months or less, that he was assassinated in Texas.
Bauman: Do you remember much about that day?
Craig: It was hot! [LAUGHTER] It was still warm when he was here visiting. But it was a big event. There was thousands of people out there in the desert. But it was very thrilling experience to see the President come.
Bauman: Sure. So, you said you were working on the shipment from ’57 to ’72. So did that process change much over those years, other than shifting from—
Craig: Well, yes. In about ’66, we quit making weapon components at Hanford. And the process moved to Rocky Flats entirely.
Bauman: So that part changed.
Craig: Yeah. That part changed. But the plutonium buttons didn’t.
Bauman: And so then in ’72 then, how did your job change? What did you start doing at that point?
Craig: Well, take a break for a sec.
[VIDEO CUTS]
Bauman: Sure, that’d be great. Do you want to go ahead and do that now?
Craig: Hmm?
Bauman: Do you want to go ahead and start that now then? Start talking about that?
Craig: Yes.
Bauman: Okay. That’d be great.
Man one: All right, just a moment. Okay, we’re rolling again. Just start whenever you—
Craig: Okay. Well, let’s see, I need the face page of this. Okay, I’m ready.
Bauman: Go ahead.
Man two: We’re rolling.
Craig: The other significant activity that I was involved with was in 1968. The site was in a state where we had 149 single-shell waste tanks and 28 double-shell waste tanks. Actually, that’s not quite right. There were four short of that on the double-shell. And these were boiling waste tanks. The others were not boiling waste. But it was all liquid, and we were concerned about the integrity of the tanks and the lifetime of the tanks. And so at that time, the Atlantic-Richfield-Hanford Company, ARCO, was the contractor. And two of their engineers, Sam Beard and Bob McCullough and I co-authored a document that was called “The Hanford Waste Management Briefing.” And the purpose of this was to explain the Hanford situation to our headquarters—our AEC headquarters staff, and Congressional staffers who were then going to be funding what is now known as the Tank Farm projects. And this document was a briefing document, and the key—one of the key charts that we were particularly proud of is to try to show people how complex the business of the Hanford waste system was. And this chart shows what happens to a ton of uranium that’s been irradiated and then processed at PUREX, and the wastes that come out of that whole process. And some of it’s boiling waste, because of high levels of radioactivity that are in that particular section of waste, and some was non-boiling. For example, you’re dealing with—for that ton of waste—680 gallons of non-boiling waste and 220 gallons of boiling waste. And in the non-boiling tank, you have 900 pounds of salts, chemical nitrate—nitrates and so on, and about 350 curies of radioactivity. But in the boiling side, there’s 230 pounds of salt, but 300,000 curies of activity. That’s why they’re boiling. And then there was a low-level stream that had like 55,000 gallons of waste that went to a crib—a crib is like a septic tank—tile field—and the swamp, which is just an open pond. There was another 560,000 gallons went there, but their radioactivity was less than a tenth of a curie. I mean, it was just negligible. On the solid side, there was about ten cubic feet of solid waste. There was about 10 million cubic feet—I’m sorry—of gases that came out. And here’s the number that it was radio—a surprise to everyone that it was published. It was secret then, but it’s been declassified since. Out of that ton of fuel came 530 grams of plutonium and four grams of neptunium. So the chemical process that started with a ton of material and ended up with just a very small amount. So it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Because these wastes were boiling, we’d started building—had started building double-shell tanks. A double-shell tank is a steel tank within a steel tank within a concrete barrier. And this diagram in that briefing document showed what a double-shell tank was all about. These were million-gallon tanks. And in those days, it was about a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half a gallon to build those tanks. A million-million half dollars for one of these big tanks. Far, far, less than what they would cost today.
Bauman: Yeah.
Craig: At any rate, we made this presentation to the staffers and the ultimate activity was to remove as much as water as we could from the single-shell tanks so that we ended up with a salt cake that was not going anywhere. We isolated cesium-137 and strontium-90 by another chemical process, carried out in B Plant, to bring those short-lived emitters of radiation to a point where we could encapsulate those in steel cylinders. That was done and they’re stored. I think they’re still stored that way, but I’m not entirely sure. I kind of lost track of what’s happened since. We also built—were recommending that they build four more double-shelled tanks and that’s why the number finally grew to 28 double-shell tanks. And then, of course, it ultimately led to the pretreatment plant that’s in the process out here now, and the Waste Vitrification Plant.
Bauman: You mentioned one of the reasons for doing the report was there were concerns about the integrity of the single-shell tanks. Were some of them leaking at that point, or just concerns that they might leak?
Craig: I think at that point there were some that had displayed a little bit of leakage, yes. There’s other documents that showed some leakage, but, again it wasn’t into the concrete overpack, if you will. There was some, of course, got into the soil column, but it was not a series breach, and it wasn’t any radioactivity that got down into the groundwater. But we were afraid that it would. I mean, 1968, these tanks have been—the initial ones—had been built in 1944! ’45, ’46. So there was some that were approaching the end of life, and those tanks are still there today. And that’s why they’re so concerned about trying to remove some of the waste from these tanks and process it.
Bauman: So, who initiated—was this ARCO or AEC that sort of initiated the study that you helped write?
Craig: Oh, I think it was—collectively, the Hanford folks at engineering—folks on both sides of the contractor and the government were saying, we got to do something about this. Anyway, I think that’s about all I want to say about the creation of that document. I thought it would be interesting for you to look into if that ever showed up in the REACH literature as the kickoff document to get this thing going.
Bauman: Right, right. Yeah. And did you continue to be involved after this report in some of the tank—waste management end of things?
Craig: Yes. Actually, I had some side activities that I got into first. From 1968 to 1972, I was the plutonium leasing officer for the government. There was one in Oak Ridge for uranium, and I was the plutonium one for the US. And basically, what I was—what we did is we created a lease document, so the 125 commercial organizations, 40 government agencies, and about 450 colleges and universities could have plutonium material. And we would, in effect, rent it to them for a use charge. Wasn’t very expensive, but it was a charge. More importantly, if they lost any of it, they had to pay for it. The largest users of that lease program were the two reactor fuel contractors. One of them was Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation in Apollo, Pennsylvania. And the other one was Kerr-McGee in Oklahoma. They made reactor fuels for the breeder program at Oak Ridge, and the Fast Flux Test Facility here.
Bauman: Oh, okay. Interesting.
Craig: So that was a way for them to have this material. For the next nine years, I continued to be involved with the PUREX and Z Plant, and the management of both site materials—all of the different types of materials that we had: uranium, and plutonium, and so on. And those materials were about $500,000 to $750,000 in value. I’m sorry, $500 to $750 million in value. But it was a management process. Then later on, from 1981 to 1985, I was able to be involved in the last big development program that I had while I was working for the government. It was called the Spent Fuel Management Program. Now, during this time, the AEC had been in charge—prior to this time, the AEC had been in charge of both the Defense orientation of radioactive materials, and also the development of commercial power reactors. And there was a political hue and cry from about 19—let’s see—1974, I think it was—that the commercial reactor stuff should go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a new agency. And then, of course, a few years after that, about 1978 I think it was, the—oh, by the way, when the NRC was created, they changed the name of AEC. It became ERDA: Energy Research and Development Administration. And then about four years later, they changed it again to the Department of Energy. Well, now we had the government on our side—DoE had an obligation to kind of help the nuclear power industry deal with the long-term disposal of their spent fuel. I mean, as the fuel is burned up in their reactor and is no longer useful, eventually it was going to be encapsulated and sent off to Yucca Mountain. Well, until Yucca Mountain got authorized and built, then they needed an interim storage, and so we developed a concept called the at-reactor spent fuel storage. Several of us—myself and somebody from NRC, and somebody from Battelle, the contract who was working with me, and somebody from the Electric Power Research Institute, representing the power industry—I think that’s about it—we all went off to observe some dry storage in casks in Germany. We brought that technology back to the United States. We worked with the NRC to get it licensed. And now the power reactors of this country are using at-reactor storage in basically steel containers that contain the spent fuel and are just sitting on concrete pads, and the radioactive decay heat is dissipated into the surrounding environment. But all the radioactivity is very well contained in these casks. Hopefully, eventually Yucca Mountain will open. It was part of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that I was involved with in those days. The whole purpose of this act was to create a long-term disposal. And NRC was involved in licensing that long-term disposal, and the nuclear power industry was to pay a fee for all this fuel that they were generating to help pay for this. Well, then all this got stopped because of the politics of Nevada and the—it’s going to be restarted, because there was a lawsuit that was settled recently that said that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act should be followed.
Bauman: Right. So, you were involved with that in—
Craig: I was involved in—
Bauman: About ’85?
Craig: --all that kind of stuff.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Yes. And then I left the—at that point, this will be—okay, you can go back on. At that point in 1985, I left the government, went private, went to work for a packaging—an engineering and design company that designed high-level waste shipping containers for use on transportation. They started off—their first big project was the Three Mile Island cask, to move that waste. And then from that, I marketed to the government a high-level waste—any kind of high-level waste that could be put into a cask and removed. And then the TRUPACT-II cask for use in transferring transuranic waste, or primarily plutonium waste, from the government sites to the waste isolation pilot plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. And from there, I got involved on a couple of other organizations. Eventually, in 1991, I went to work for Lockheed. In 1996, Lockheed, along with—well, Fluor Daniel was the primary contractor, but we were on the Fluor Daniel team, and Lockheed was to manage the Tank Farms. So we came full circle, and I helped Lockheed win that contract.
Bauman: Right, you did come full circle.
Craig: So then, Lockheed moved me from—I was then living in Federal Way, and Lockheed rewarded me by moving me back to Hanford and letting me work on the Hanford site in ’96. And I did that until December of 2000. And there I was involved in the new contracting method. Instead of cost-plus-fixed-fee contracting, it was cost-plus-incentive-fee. And what we would do was we would create a document for a scope of work, a performance agreement. And the contractor would say, here, DoE, this is what we’re going to do for you, and here’s how long it’s going to take. And DoE said, okay, if you do that, we’ll pay you this fee, and if you don’t get it done on time, we’re going to cut your fee. And if you don’t do it well, we’re going to cut your fee. And my job was to, at the end of the work performance, was to write up the actual work done in a document to present to DoE that says, okay, pay us the fee. We were very successful in getting our award fee. And then I gave it all up in December of 2000, after 43 years.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Cut.
Bauman: That’s a long, fascinating career. Can I ask you questions, kind of go back?
Craig: Yeah, there’s a couple of transition spots I’m kind of worried about, that I kind of sound like an idiot.
Bauman: No.
Craig: I want to—is there any editing we can do?
Bauman: Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. If there’s any issue we can go back to it later. It’s not a problem. I wonder if I can go back—and this is really interesting stuff, fascinating career. I wanted to ask you just about the community, when you arrived here in 1957, what was Richland like at the time? Could you talk about that a little bit? And did you live in Richland, or--?
Craig: Oh, yes. Yes. We were allowed to rent from the government a B house—half of a B house on Haupt. This was June 1957. And by then—a couple of months—the government started selling off the town to private citizens. And we were in the first block to be sold. The senior owners in the other end of the B house bought the B house. And at that time, we moved to the other side of town, into a ranch house, because that had been sold to its owner. This is kind of an interesting—are you recording?
Bauman: Yeah.
Craig: Oh, okay. This was kind of interesting, because the ranch house that the owner—I mean the resident who was able to buy it bought for like $7,700. And then when we bought the ranch house, I think we paid like $9,500. And of course, those ranch houses today sell for over 100. The town was very—initially of course, it was very caste-oriented. I mean, if you were a contractor, management, you got to live on the river. If you were a lowly government GS-7, you got to live in a B house. And there was a certain level of, you know, if you weren’t in this class, you weren’t part of it, you know. And I think that’s changed dramatically over the years. It doesn’t make any difference who you work for and how much money you make and all that stuff. People have changed for the better.
Bauman: Anything else about the community that stood out to you at the time?
Craig: Well, the first thing that Richland did was they had to celebrate their founding as Richland. They set off a mock atomic bomb, and it was a bunch of fanfare out in the park, and made a poof of smoke that was to represent a mushroom cloud.
Bauman: So, was this at Howard Amon Park?
Craig: Yeah. It was.
Bauman: Anything else that—memories that stand out, either about in community of Richland, or your work—any stories or memories that really stand out to you that you’d like to share?
Craig: I think I’m kind of—
Bauman: Good? [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Completed.
Bauman: All right, well I want to thank you very much. This was really interesting. I appreciate you coming in and sharing stories about your work, and all that you did out there. I really appreciate it.
Craig: Well, you’re more than welcome. I feel confident that this waste document that shows particularly how much plutonium was made, that was a very revolutionary thing. I mean, the idea how much of material you got out of a ton of uranium was—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Very classified. And to see that declassified and whatnot. It’s—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Kind of mind-blowing. But there’s the document. And it’s legitimate to talk about.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Not sure I want it on the local news tonight, but—[LAUGHTER]
[VIDEO CUTS]
Craig: Details, but I know that he was—
Bauman: Yeah. So, just let me know when you’re ready, all right? We can—
Craig: So this was August, ’76. I don’t know the exact date.
Bauman: That’s all right. I mean, the exact date we have, so—
Man one: Okay, we are ready.
Bauman: Just whatever memories or knowledge you have about it.
Man one: We’re rolling. Whenever you’re ready.
Bauman: Okay. So I don’t know if you want to talk to us about the McCluskey incident and your involvement in that?
Craig: Well, at the time, I was responsible for the Z Plant operations. And so, one morning, early, about 4:30 in the morning, I get a call from the plant that there had been an accident out of the plant, and I needed to get out there. And so I threw some clothes on and got a government car and went out to the site. What had happened was the plant had been operating on the recovery of americium-241 as part of the reclamation activities. And it was a chemical process. Inside this chemical process were criticalities tanks, small tanks like this, long, inside of a glovebox. Earlier in that summer, there had been a labor dispute, and the plant was on strike. And so the process had been shut down. Well, what was going on was americium was loaded onto the ion exchange medium inside this long column. When the dispute was settled and we had several days of reviews, conducting interviews with the contractor people, are you ready to restart? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? And finally they were authorized to start. Well, what happened is that when they poured strong nitric acid on that ion exchange column to take, you lose off the americium. The americium had decayed the resin beads of the ion exchange medium ‘til it was kind of an organic gunk. And that acid reacted with it, and that violent chemical reaction blew open that column. It breached the glovebox, and it sprayed chemicals and americium all over Mr. McCluskey. And he was taken to an initial decontamination spot onsite, and then downtown. But my job, when I got there, was to fend off the media. What had happened—as soon as this became knowledge, and the media got hold of it, here they come in helicopters, landing inside the secure area of 200 West. The guards were going nuts. I mean, here’s these people that are not supposed to be there! Eventually, they didn’t do anything but try to manage it and bring them over towards the building, the end of the building, where behind the building walls was this processing cell where everything had taken place. And they were standing there, I was standing there outside talking to the media, trying to explain what happened. And I had an alpha copy machine. I was standing there, showing them that there was no contamination on my feet, there was no contamination around. They were panning everywhere with their cameras, and they found a sodium hydroxide feed tank that had just a little bit of salt cake around the valve on the outside. Non-radioactive, nothing—I mean it was a nothing tank. And they filmed that like it was the biggest thing since sliced bread. And I remember I went through all this and—to find out that it made the national news. But I didn’t get to see it, because I was out there. [LAUGHTER] But it became a non-event. It was not a disaster, there was containment, there was—all the safety things worked as well as they should. The public was never in any harm. But that was a—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So, what happened, then, with the room, or whatever, where the incident took place?
Craig: Oh, they sealed that room off right away. And then it remained sealed up until very recently, when they went in and took it apart. And processed it for disposal.
Bauman: Did you know Mr. McCluskey at all?
Craig: No.
Bauman: Okay.
Craig: No. He was a chemical operator. I didn’t know who he was, hadn’t met him. But it was one of those things that—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: --Happened.
Bauman: Well, thanks, again for sharing that story. Glad we remembered to do that.
Craig: What was funny about it—I was trying to stand up. I used to be able to do this. I could stand there and hold my foot up and balance. And then I realized I couldn’t do that.
Bauman: Oh, watch the microphone there on your—
Craig: Oh, yeah.
Tom Hungate: You’re rolling.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Dr. Roderick Coler, retired MD, on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dr. Roderick Coler about his experiences as a doctor in the Tri-Cities area during the Hanford time.
Roderick Coler: Right. And you can—everybody calls me Rod.
Franklin: Rod? Okay, great. Everybody calls me Robert.
Coler: Yeah. Robert.
Franklin: So, Rod, as an early medical specialist in Kennewick, how did you come to Kennewick as a place to practice?
Coler: I heard about Kennewick remotely from patients when I was in the Veterans Administration Hospital Residency Program in Portland.
Franklin: In Portland, Oregon?
Coler: In Portland, Oregon.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: And I was dating a ward secretary by the name of Thelma who later became my wife. She said that we should go where you’re needed.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: So when I got a call from Dr. Ralph deBit who was one of the early general practitioners here—he suggested that I drive down and have lunch at the old Kennewick General Hospital. So Thelma and I drove down, but the car stalled when we got to Umatilla. I went out and started hitchhiking so we wouldn’t be late for the lunch. Nobody picked me up. So Thelma said, get behind that bush! [LAUGHTER] And I went and hid behind a piece sagebrush. She went out and stuck up her thumb, and the first car that went by picked us up and took us to the Kennewick General Hospital for lunch and I was on time. My first experience in Kennewick. Looked pretty rustic. But the five general practitioners here needed an internal medical specialist, and I was finishing that specialty. So I was welcomed. They provided me with an office, and the first three months’ free rent. It went smoothly from there on out. I came to practice where I practiced for 58 years.
Franklin: 58 years. And that was in 1947?
Coler: And that was 1948. Mm-hm.
Franklin: Okay. Great. So when you said Kennewick was very rustic, can you kind of elaborate a little more on that?
Coler: [LAUGHTER] There was just a main street, Kennewick Avenue, and 1st Avenue. And after that, the avenues weren’t very well traveled. But there were a number of houses around, and it looked like a comfortable place to practice. And the old Kennewick General Hospital certainly needed some medical supervision and a medical specialist. So I was happy to look at this as a place to come. It kept me in the West. I was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: That is my place of growing up. And I wanted to stay in the West.
Franklin: Why is that?
Coler: I don’t know. There was a certain sense of adventure when you’re in your 30s and you’ve had three years of service in the Air Force, and you’ve come back, and you want to settle down, and you’re through with your training, but you don’t want the big city, even though Portland is a lovely town. But it would be a slow place for an internist to get started.
Franklin: Why is that?
Coler: Because so many doctors just stayed. After their training program in Portland, they just stayed on in Portland. Because it felt like home and felt comfortable. But Thelma said, go where you’re needed. So we came down at the invitation of these five general practitioners. And Dr. Ralph deBit is a piece of history in himself.
Franklin: Can you—oh, sorry, go ahead.
Coler: So we decided then after seeing two or three more places that—Kennewick and the Tri-Cities was the place we wanted to practice.
Franklin: Great. What other places did you visit?
Coler: Well, I went over on the coast where I ran into three days of straight rain, over on the Portland coast. [LAUGHTER] The Washington coast was desolate. And I found the dry side was much to my liking.
Franklin: Interesting.
Coler: Mm-hm.
Franklin: You mentioned that you’d been three years in the Air Force. So were you a doctor in the Air Force?
Coler: No. No, I went into the Air Force as part of weather training. The Air Force was gearing up for a much longer war—this is World War II—gearing up for a much longer war. They wanted to keep a cadre of young men available to train. So they put me in a year of mathematics at University of Washington in St. Louis to study pre-meteorology, which was all mathematics, up through higher numbers. A lot of things that I never would need or use. But then I went out and took six months of weather forecasting, weather observing, and became a weather observer, which was a non-commissioned officer position. So they kept telling me that you would get your rank in the military after you got to your base of work. But I kept being assigned around to training stations and finally I ended up in Coral Gables and had a wonderful time exploring the Everglades, because I only worked eight hours a week out there. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: As a weather observer. So I was very happy to have that experience, even though I never was commissioned as an officer, which they had promised me would be at the end of my training.
Franklin: Interesting. Great.
Coler: I still have specimens that I’ve collected from the Everglades, down there. Snakeskins, different plants. And I attended a course in botany of the Florida peninsula while I was there. And it got me interested in the out-of-doors.
Franklin: Interesting. So, returning to your work at Kennewick, what exactly—forgive my ignorance and maybe some of the ignorance of the people watching this later—what is an internalist exactly?
Coler: So an internal medical specialist is someone who specializes in the skin and its contents.
Franklin: The skin and its contents, okay.
Coler: From the standpoint of the diagnosis of diseases and their treatment which are not orthopedic and not surgical. But that includes everything from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. And it generally doesn’t include childhood diseases, although I saw some very interesting cases.
Franklin: Such as?
Coler: Such as malaria—in Kennewick. Not from the mosquito biting up here, but the mosquito bite carrying the malaria virus down in Central America, and then the patients coming home and coming down with fever here. Fever, chills and anemia.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: And finding the parasite in their blood.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: We had a good lab at Kennewick General Hospital.
Franklin: So you mentioned early on that you came and you worked with—sorry, can you mention the doctor that brought you up again?
Coler: Dr. deBit, Dr. Ralph deBit.
Franklin: Ralph deBit. And can you elaborate, maybe, on the state of medicine in Kennewick when you came here in ’58?
Coler: In ’58, the five general practitioners were very busy and they wanted an internal medical specialist to refer the difficult or diagnostic problems to. There weren’t too many doctors in those days who were willing to move to the smaller communities. They all seemed to want—the specialists wanted to stay in Portland and Seattle, Spokane. But I was very happy to come to Kennewick, and they were very happy to send me their difficult cases. [LAUGHTER] Because in those days, generalists, or general practitioners as they were called—we don’t have any more today. It’s called family practice today, and it requires a much more rigorous training period than it did in the days of the old GP. But the GPs would take care of something like—would see something like 20 patients a day. And maybe four new patients every day. So they didn’t spend much time with them. If it wasn’t evident what the patient suffered from and what the treatment was going to be, then they were happy to refer the patient to somebody who would deliberate a little more.
Franklin: Okay. So how did—did you see patients from Hanford?
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about working with patients who worked at Hanford?
Coler: So HEHF, or Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, had a cadre of doctors which saw patients who worked at Hanford. When I came to town, Hanford workers had to go to that doctor first, and then if the problem was elaborate or detailed or difficult, such as active tuberculosis or a desert fungus infection like coccidioidomycosis, then they would send the patient to me.
Franklin: You kind of laughed a little when you said that last one.
Coler: Well, because that disorder is a fungus infection of the lungs that’s only seen in the Sonoma Valley of California or other desert areas in the United States.
Franklin: Wasn’t there an outbreak of that recently up here? They closed a bunch of county parks in Washington?
Coler: I’m not aware of that, but may be true. Yeah.
Franklin: Okay, interesting. I guess fungus and desert isn’t something that I would assume would go together.
Coler: Well, that’s right, because you’re thinking of something that grows in moist areas.
Franklin: Right.
Coler: Like a toadstool, yeah.
Franklin: Right.
Coler: But this was a fungus that is blowing in the wind.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: And if you pass through and drive through those areas when the wind is blowing that particular fungus in the air, you run a high risk of catching one of those desert fungus disorders.
Franklin: I imagine then that they like loose sandy soils.
Coler: Yes. Loose sandy soil that blows, yeah. We didn’t have any up here, but they would come in from California.
Franklin: Okay. Interesting.
Coler: Yeah.
Franklin: So the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation—can you talk a little bit more about that? Do you know much about its origins, or if it’s still around today?
Coler: Well, when the Hanford operation got going, they immediately put in a medical service. They had a superintendent, and they had a cadre of three or four doctors who saw the patients who worked at Hanford. So generally, these were well patients. Generally, they had rashes or they had emotions, or they had injuries from falling, scrapes and wounds, and occasional pneumonia. And sometimes patients would come to work there, because the workforce, remember, during World War II, even at the end of the war, was chosen from people who couldn’t find a job elsewhere, frequently. The country was well-employed, and to find labor and to find the lower jobs, below supervisory jobs at Hanford was difficult. We got patients from the deep South, patients that had migrated in and who sometimes had not been found eligible for work in the war effort elsewhere.
Franklin: Okay. Just going to refer to some of your notes here that you brought me.
Coler: Mm-hmm, sure.
Franklin: So, here we go. I had a question here. So as a part of your 53 years practicing medicine, did you treat families who reported to work at Hanford, and what were your experiences with them and overall feeling towards the work at that site?
Coler: Generally, these were healthy patients. Hanford Environmental Health took care of the workers out there, but their families frequently had to seek medical care in the general practitioners and specialists who were out in the community. So we had good surgical help, and we had good diagnostic help. So I was not a pioneer in any sense of the word, but it was interesting, because I knew I was seeing unusual cases that never would be seen by me if I had stayed in the big city.
Franklin: Can you—without compromising any personal or medical information, can you talk a little more about some of those unusual cases?
Coler: One time I was called up to Kahlotus—I was called up north of Richland to see a woman who was in a stupor. The doctor could not hear a heartbeat. I went up on my afternoon off, on the call, to see her in consultation. Went in to find a woman lying down, weakened, hardly able to talk, and whose heartbeat I couldn’t hear with the stethoscope. I presumed that she had a pericardial effusion. That is, fluid was impacting—fluid in the heart sac was impacting the heartbeat and preventing the heartbeat from being heard, and from being effective in creating circulation by the heart. So I asked for a trocar, which is a big needle, and as I was about to insert it under the ribs, I felt something hard poking me on the other side. I looked down and it was a gun. And her husband was there in the emergency room, and he said, if she dies, you die. She was already very weakened and very—looked like she was on her way into shock and dying. And I plunged the needle through there with a little Novocain, and drained the fluid from the heart sac. And the heart began to beat again and the blood pressure came up and the pulse rate came down, and she woke up. The husband put his gun away. But those were the wild West days.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: This was in the Prosser Hospital Emergency Room. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] So that’s one. But I have many. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Please.
Coler: Another one was—a patient ran in the front door of the old Kennewick General Hospital—didn’t wait to go through registration. Ran up the stairs and jumped into a bed and said, call Dr. Coler, call Dr. Coler. So the nurse called me and said they had this hyper excitable patient with a pulse rate of 160 and tremulous and pale and sweating, and we don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he jumped into bed and said to call you. So my office was across the street from the old Kennewick General Hospital. So I ran over there, ran upstairs to find the patient exactly as the nurse described. I figured that the only thing that would do that was that he was on some kind of a stimulant, metamphetamine, but in those days we didn’t have that problem. Or, he had a rare, very rare tumor of the adrenal glands, which was secreting too much adrenaline. Now, the nurse laughed at me, because she knew from her medical studies in nursing that nobody ever sees a case like that. I mean, there’s one per state per every ten years in the United States. [LAUGHTER] I mean, it’s rare. But I drew blood from the—I had the laboratory draw blood for the tests. And then I gave him an antidote for epinephrine. And his pulse rate came down, and he quieted down. We went to x-ray, saw the outline of a tumor near the adrenal gland. And where the adrenal gland would be near the kidney. And I got Bobby Luxon—Robert Luxon, who was a very dashing surgeon in town, to see him. And they operated on him here and removed the biggest adrenaline-secreting tumor that had ever been seen in the state of Washington, according to University of Washington records.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: So that was an interesting case.
Franklin: How big was the—
Coler: It was fist-sized.
Franklin: Wow.
Coler: A fist-sized tumor.
Franklin: That’s amazing.
Coler: Now, somebody would say, well, how did it get that big without having symptoms in the months leading up to it? Well, in the months leading up to it, he didn’t squeeze it to put the adrenaline into the blood stream all at one time. He was being treated for hypertension, and spurts of hypertension, but nobody suspected when he came to me—or when the nurse called me to see him—that he could have an adrenaline tumor. Rare.
Franklin: Yeah, sounds like it. That’s really—that’s really amazing. Any other interesting stories?
Coler: Interesting cases?
Franklin: Yeah.
Coler: Let’s see. Something unusual was happening every three or four months in the practice. But now that’s kind of faded away. Except for the bizarre anemias—pernicious anemia—saw two cases the first month that I came to town. And I was amazed, because I thought, this is a center for pernicious anemia. Or maybe it has something to do with Hanford radiation. But it was simply that Dr. deBit had saved up two cases to wait ‘til I came to town, and then he sent them to me to make me think that this was a haven of unlikely and unreasonable diagnoses. [LAUGHTER]
[W. E. JOHNSON[EM1] ]
Franklin: Part of—one of these points in your notes here mentions W. E. Johnson, who worked for GE and then was the Atomic Energy Commissioner. We actually have a collection of his files on the project.
Coler: Mm-hm.
Franklin: So I think it’d be great if you could talk about this bit here about W. E. Johnson.
Coler: He was a much-respected administrator. But I saw him in his decline.
Franklin: Okay. Yeah, it says here he suffered from progressive dementia?
Coler: Yeah, he had a progressive dementia problem, yeah. He one time got on his horse and rode out across the country, not knowing where he was or how far he had gone. Maybe after he had gone about seven or eight miles, he was lost. Didn’t know where he was. So he simply had the good sense to put the reins down on the horse’s neck and let the horse go back to the barn for feeding and rest, and take W. E. Johnson with him back to the ranch. But they had a ranch up north of Richland.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Yeah, I’ve seen pictures of that ranch. I’d heard of his love for horses, but I had not heard of that particular story.
Coler: Mm-hm.
Franklin: Did you ever see him as a patient or—
Coler: Yes, yeah. I saw W. E. Johnson as a patient on a regular basis at the end of his career.
Franklin: Okay. And that would have been when he was beginning to suffer from progressive dementia.
Coler: Yes, dementia. And we tried some medicines that were popular at that time, but nothing helped. Yeah.
Franklin[EM2] : So you raised your family. Did you have children when you came to Kennewick?
Coler: No.
Franklin: Okay.
Coler: No, I was engaged to Thelma Cook from Portland. We were married soon after I came to Kennewick. Went back to Portland, had a nice wedding—colorful wedding, nice family. Then she and I settled in to Kennewick and she, being a secretary, managed the secretarial services of my office. And without that, I probably would have gone broke. [LAUGHTER] Working 18 hours a day, gone broke. But she was a—she had a good business head and made the practice pay. We raised four children here. I have three daughters in Portland, and I have Clark Coler, who is chief of staff at the big hospital in Portland.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Coler: Yeah. Yeah.
Franklin: So what was it like—I guess sometimes people talk or you hear about kind of the shadow of Hanford over the Tri-Cities. What was it like to raise a family in—being kind of somewhat connected, seeing Hanford workers, but raising a family in these communities in the Cold War? Were there any events, or anything that was unique to the Tri-Cities that kind of stands out to you?
Coler: No, it was a good rural area to raise children. They were well-behaved, and joined the clubs at the high school. And came up through the system here. They’re all quite successful. I’m very proud of three daughters, employed and married in Portland, and Clark, at the Swedish Hospital in Seattle.
Franklin: Oh, great. That’s wonderful. How much—seeing Hanford patients, you must have had some idea of the work at Hanford. Did you have a pretty good idea of what was happening at Hanford? Or what was your knowledge and your thoughts and opinions about the work at Hanford?
Coler: When we tried to recruit doctors to come to the Tri-Cities, they knew that the radiation was surveyed, and patients would be—and people would be safe here. But the wives had this abject fear of radiation. They didn’t want to raise their children within 50 miles [LAUGHTER] of a reactor, because they had heard that you could have babies with small heads or you could have deformities, and that it would be a terrible place to raise a family. I remember having two or three medical doctors and their families and their wives come over, and I would take them on a tour of the Kennewick General Hospital to recruit doctors to come here. And the doctors were very enthusiastic. Over luncheon, they were talking about how interested they would be in coming—a growing community, and practicing medicine here. And we were able to supply them with offices and get them started, even though there weren’t any clinics—everybody was in private practice. This was before the Richland Clinic accumulated their staff from the existing doctors in Richland. But the wives were afraid of radiation. One time, when I had three doctors and their wives come over from Seattle to see about moving here to practice when they got through with their training, a windstorm came up and we had a dust storm off the Horse Heaven Hills. And in those days we had dust storms spring and fall. But it was such a beautiful clear day when we began, and by the time we were finished with the meal, you couldn’t see 40 feet outside the window! [LAUGHTER] Because of the blowing dust. I got thank-you letters from those doctors—those three doctors, but I knew that their wives had canceled any possibility of their coming.
Franklin: Kind of an echo of the termination winds—
Coler: Yes, the termination winds, right.
Franklin: Wow. That’s interesting to hear about that so much later.
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: I like to ask about events—big events that happened in the Tri-Cities. And one that always seems to—usually left an imprint on people’s minds was President Kennedy’s visit in 1963. Did you—were you able to go see President Kennedy, or did you hear about the visit?
Coler: Yeah, I heard about the visit, but I was on duty in the emergency room that day. And we had so many visitors who came and needed help with their heat exhaustion that I was busy in the emergency room and didn’t get out to Hanford to see him.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Coler: But I was well aware of his presence.
Franklin: Right.
Coler: And it was in the newspaper. Of course, a big picture of Kennedy.
Franklin: And his presence probably caused you some extra work then.
Coler: Yes. People that weren’t used to the heat just filled the emergency rooms when we had a special day, such as the boat races. When we had the boat races, people would come from out of town and they weren’t prepared for our heat.
Franklin: Oh. And so that would be kind of a yearly—
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: A yearly influx.
Coler: So we’d have two doctors on-call for the emergency room.
Franklin: Okay, makes sense. I see here that you have left your mark at the Kennewick General Hospital in terms of a medical center in your name?
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: Can you tell me a little about that?
Coler: They named the first medical center where doctors could practice the deBit Building. That was a place where doctors could come right out of training and, without sinking a lot of money into building or renting an office, they could be put to work and see how they liked it. The organization, the hospital, would then benefit from them admitting their patients who needed to be hospitalized into that institution, as well as having staff meetings and having all of the positions filled for the hospital board. The hospital board at Kennewick General was made up of non-hospital people. But I served on it for a number of years and could advise them on medical matters.
Franklin: Okay. And I see that you also—there’s also a Rod Coler Center for Senior Health—
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: At Trios as well?
Coler: Yeah, yeah. So they named that building after me simply because I was here a long time, and I’m still around.
Franklin: Right! [LAUGHTER] Well, I imagine it would have something to do with the quality of work that you performed as well.
Coler: Uh-huh.
Franklin: In some of my preliminary notes here, it talks about the poor—you’ve talked a bit about the excellence of deBit and a couple other doctors that you worked with, but I’ve also heard that there was, in general, kind of a poor standard of medical care in the area when you arrived.
Coler: Yes.
Franklin: Was that to do—
Coler: This had to do with surgery. We had a surgical problem at Kennewick General. It was quite evident soon after I came to town and began to read charts and look at records and do consultations that the surgical services were poor and sometimes not very well diagnosed and treated. So I predicted that the Kennewick General Hospital would close by the state reviewing our records at Kennewick General if we didn’t do something about that. So Dr. deBit, again, made me chairman of a committee to go through the charts of all the doctors for the previous couple of years. It was quite evident who was causing the mayhem at Kennewick General Hospital. [LAUGHTER] He was soon moved on.
Franklin: Ah.
Coler: In those days, you couldn’t take away his license to practice, because you would be sued for preventing somebody from working—from interfering with work. We didn’t want a lawsuit against us. So we were able to move him along. But each hospital that looked into the records of that particular surgeon refused to take him, too. So he actually had to retire.
Franklin: I see.
Coler: Yeah.
Franklin: Kind of a forced retirement.
Coler: Yeah, a forced retirement.
Franklin: Interesting.
Coler: But we had—in Robert Luxon, who came to town about a year or two after I did, he was an excellent diagnostician for surgical conditions and also an excellent surgeon. So our reputation was saved, and Kennewick General went on to become quite a good surgical center and referral center for surgery. As was Richland, and Pasco. Dr. Ray Rose in Pasco was an excellent surgeon and diagnostic man. He’s passed now. He’s gone. But he was a close friend of mine and we did many mountain hikes together.
Franklin: That’s great. I guess the last thing I’d like to ask you about is I see that you live in a historic Kennewick home. Can you maybe talk a little bit about your home and its importance in the history of Kennewick?
Coler: The home on Canal Drive was built out of town of Kennewick in 1914. And was the home of a gentleman who was a salesman and trader. He built his home. And when my wife spotted that house, we were living—when we were married and were living downtown Kennewick, we drove by it one day and she says, turn in here. And I said, why? She said, just do it. Turn in here. So I turned in the road that led across the field that came to the old house on Canal Drive. It was just west of Yelm Street—Yelm, Y-E-L-M. It sat by itself; there were no other houses when it was built out west of that. But she spotted that old home and we pulled in and I went to the door and knocked on the door, thinking this is crazy. You just don’t knock on a door and ask somebody who comes to the door, do they want to sell their house. That’s not the way it’s done! [LAUGHTER] She said, I want to live in that house! Knocked on the door, an old man came to the door, and when I asked him he said, yes. He said, in two months I need to move to Chicago to be near my children, and I would be very happy to sell you this house. At that time, he thought that maybe the house might be worth $20,000. This would be with—this was three acres of land on Canal Drive and an old house that had three bedrooms, and a second floor, and a large kitchen which most farm houses did not have in those days. When that house was built in the 19-teens, 1915, 1914, kitchens were small. But that house had a generous kitchen. My wife fell in love with that house. So when we came back to talk to that man, he had turned it over to a realtor. And now the price was $40,000.
Franklin: Ooh.
Coler: [LAUGHTER] And he was selling—but it took me a long time to pay that off. Yeah. We had to borrow the money and pay the bank to buy the house. But raised four children in that house now.
Franklin: And you said—
Coler: And we were the third owner.
Franklin: Okay. And you still live in the house today?
Coler: We still live in that house today.
Franklin: I bet it’s worth a bit more than $40,000.
Coler: Yes. Well, the land is.
Franklin: Yes.
Coler: Now, several people said—oh, it’s a beautiful place overlooking the Columbia River and on a knoll above Canal—above the river, and above the park. We would need to—many people say that they would take down the house and build an apartment building there on it. Because it’s right next to the apartment buildings at Yelm Street. But we like that old location—I do, and I don’t know what my children will do with it when I’m gone. So I’m 91. My father lived to 101. So I have a chance to go on for a few more years.
Franklin: Yes, you do.
Coler: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Well, Rod, thank you so much. This has been a great interview and I’ve really enjoyed talking with you.
Coler: You’re welcome, Robert. I really enjoyed this myself. Thank you.
Franklin: Great. Thank you.
Ronald Palmer: Yeah.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Ronald Palmer on October 26th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus on Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ron about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Palmer: Ronald A. Palmer. R-O-N-A-L-D; A for Alan, A-L-A-N; Palmer, P-A-L-M-E-R.
Franklin: Great. So, tell me how and why you came to the area and to work for the Hanford Site.
Palmer: I came to work at the Hanford Site to work on glass for immobilization of radioactive waste. I came here in 1979, November, and worked in the 222-S Building out in the 200-West Area.
Franklin: 222-S. Is there another name for that building?
Palmer: It was next to the REDOX building. It was the laboratory that supported REDOX in the early ‘50s.
Franklin: Okay. And what drew you to—or how did you become a glass person?
Palmer: My technical background. Went to Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Earned a degree in Glass Science. My first job out of school was in Jersey City, New Jersey working for Metro Containers, a firm that made glass jars for beer bottles, mayonnaise jars—those kinds of things. As a quality control engineer, I mainly broke things. I got interested in why glass broke, why and how it fails, and in order to learn more about that, I went to graduate school and did a dissertation on fracture and failure of glass. My thesis advisor at the University of Florida was Larry Hench. Dr. Hench had been the chair for the National Academy of Sciences on what it is we thought we should do with radioactive waste. Turns out, if you put a glass guy in charge of figuring out what to do with nuclear waste, glass gets involved. So I wound up talking with the folks at the—the company running Hanford at that time was Rockwell. They asked me to come out and work on the glass project then.
Franklin: How long did you work on the glass project?
Palmer: I worked on the glass project for just a couple years. Then the funding for that disappeared, and I joined the Basalt Waste Isolation Project, the repository project that was going on at the time.
Franklin: Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Palmer: At the time, the Department of Energy was looking for an underground repository site to permanently dispose of the radioactive waste. There were other sites involved, but the basalt project was one looking at the geological formations underneath the Hanford Site as a place to store the radioactive waste. The basalt flows, which are basically the lava flows left over from the Cascade volcanoes. We built a laboratory in 2221—I’m sorry—2101-M Building in the 200-East Area. It had been a big warehouse and we built a laboratory there with electron microscopes, spectrometers of various types. We were basically a geochemistry laboratory. We were looking at the properties of the basalt rock underneath, in the formation underneath the Hanford Site and the relationship of the properties of those rocks with the glass compositions that we expected to make. So we did some experiments that involved glass and the rock, and simulated ground water, those kinds of things.
Franklin: You mean storing glass in the rock, or--?
Palmer: Well, the glass was expected to be the waste form. So, when you dispose of the waste, you put the waste form—which, what they’ve eventually done is they make the glass and they pour it into stainless steel canisters. The design we used were two foot in diameter by ten feet tall stainless steel canisters. So with the glass in there, you expect, after several thousand years—[LAUGHTER]—the canister has become compromised, and you worry about the reactions between the water, which may come in to the repository, and the glass, and the rock.
Franklin: And so what did you find about that situation? Or can you describe a little bit more the work or the results of that work?
Palmer: We were looking at ways to perhaps slow down the in-flow of water into the repository. One suggested method was to backfill the holes that you’d drill into the ground to put the canisters with a bentonite clay. The water would come in, and it would first see the clay, and the clay would have a tendency, when it gets wet, to swell, and to slow down—if not stop—the in-flow of the water, and therefore extend the life of whatever waste form you’ve put into the ground. So--
Franklin: Okay—oh, sorry.
Palmer: So we looked at various options that we might design into the repository to minimize the eventual damage that you will expect to have happen from water coming into the repository.
Franklin: So that clay, then, would kind of act to plug the leak of—
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: Interesting.
Palmer: The term we used for that would be engineered barriers.
Franklin: Engineered barriers.
Palmer: So you’d basically find materials that would help keep the water out, and design that—that would be an integral part of the repository design.
Franklin: And were these results adopted here on the Hanford Site or elsewhere, or--?
Palmer: The repository program—the basalt project continued, I think, until 1987. Let’s see. The original Act of Congress that was involved with nuclear waste was in 1982. And that provided for the investigation of three different repository sites. The basalt site underneath the Hanford facility; a formation of a material called tuff outside of Las Vegas, which is called the Yucca Mountain site; and they were looking at various salt formations in Texas and New Mexico and Louisiana and other places as a third potential site. By 1987, they had determined that it was too expensive to look at all three. It’s not cheap to do that sort of research. And they narrowed it down to the Yucca Mountain site outside of Las Vegas. So at that time, I think the other repository sites’ projects disappeared. I was gone from the project by then. I left the project in 1984, so—
Franklin: Oh, okay. And where did you go when you left?
Palmer: I went to—I was out of the nuclear waste business and went to 3M in Minnesota.
Franklin: Okay. And what did you do there?
Palmer: I did research on new glass compositions. In particular, a material called bioglass, another topic of research for my former professor, Dr. Hench. He invented a material called bioglass, which chemically bonds to bone in the body. And as now, it’s being used as a dental material. Not as a solid piece, but as a powder to help with the bone’s—recession of your bones if you’ve got gum disease and that sort of thing. You can place a powder of the bioglass, and then it will help the bone grow back a little bit.
Franklin: Oh, wow, interesting.
Palmer: It’s also being used in toothpaste to help fight gum disease and that sort of thing. So. But I did a little bit of that work for 3M, but not—I also worked on some composite materials that they were designing.
Franklin: So now you’re kind of back in dealing with—later on, you returned to dealing with radioactive—nuclear waste. So can you describe that transition back?
Palmer: I joined West Valley Nuclear Services—there’s a site that’s now called the West Valley Demonstration Project thirty miles south of Buffalo, New York. And I spent 15 years there. During that time, we tested a mockup of a glass melter and how we would run the process. And then built the actual melter and closed that in a hot cell where no one would go to work on it inside. So we had to make sure that the melter would operate remotely without having to send someone in. The West Valley site had only one tank of radioactive waste, compared to the 177 here at Hanford. So it was a fairly straightforward project. We were able to determine the chemistry of the waste in the tank, and that made it easy to just design one glass composition that we used. We made glass—we made radioactive glass from 1996 to 2002. And made 275 canisters—the canisters being two foot in diameter by ten feet tall. And those canisters are now stored—they remain at the West Valley site. Eventually they’ll go into a repository, assuming some repository is eventually made.
Franklin: So did it take six years to vitrify—or sorry, I guess I should ask you—that process is vitrification, right?
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: So that’s the right word to use?
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: Okay, so it took six years to do that for one tank of waste?
Palmer: We designed the process to be small and relatively slow. To fill a canister when everything was up and running smoothly was about two-and-a-half days. Whereas the facility running at Savannah River right now—Defense Waste Processing Facility, DWPF, they fill a canister in less than a day. At the Savannah River site, if I remember correctly, had 53 underground storage tanks. So they’ve got quite a bit more than we had at West Valley. And also a variety of compositions, so they had to change the glass composition as things went along. They’ve now made over 4,000 canisters since 1996.
Franklin: Wow. So then it does really depend on the chemical makeup of the tank as to what type of—
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: So which is why, I guess Hanford’s waste poses a problem in that aspect.
Palmer: Yes, yes.
Franklin: Because of the unknown nature of—
Palmer: Yeah, and at Hanford there’s also a wide variety of compositions in the waste tanks. So the glass compositions can be very different. So you really need to know what’s coming in from the tank the next day in order to make the right mix of raw materials to make the right glass composition. And it’s tricky. Also, if you have to go from one composition to another, you have to know what you have in the tank before you add the new stuff, because the composition is going to change. It’s hard. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Do you think that vitrification is the right choice for Hanford’s waste, given its myriad of compositions in the tanks?
Palmer: When Dr. Hench did his analysis of materials to use to immobilize waste in general, glass is clearly the most versatile. There are other waste forms. There are crystalline ceramic waste forms, there are composite waste forms—a wide variety of things that you can use to immobilize the waste. But the processes for those waste forms are much more complicated. It would be very difficult to, say, design a—one of the waste forms is called a tailored ceramic, where you design crystalline components of the ceramic to immobilize specific radionuclides and that sort of thing. It’s hard enough to do for one composition, but to do for 177 compositions, that would have been very difficult. The glass is clearly the most versatile. Is it durable enough? The expectation is that the glass—the waste form in the repository will stay—the radionuclides are supposed to stay within the repository boundaries for 10,000 years. That’s the bureaucratic boundaries that we have to design for. Some people say, yeah, it ought to be a million years. But who would believe us if we predicted a million years? [LAUGHTER] We have trouble believing ourselves when we’re predicting 10,000 years because it’s tough to run that experiment. From the standpoint of glass lasting that long, there are some researchers out there that have been looking at archaeological glasses that maybe may have been in the ground, say, 1,000 years. And try to look at what glass composition—what the glass started out as. In fact, somebody has done an experiment where they’ve excavated the dirt around the glass object and analyzed what is in the dirt that might have come from the glass leeching out and that sort of thing. They’ve also discovered in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, glass bottles, amphoras, those kinds of things that have been at the bottom of the ocean for 1,000 years. And you can still drink wine out of them. [LAUGHTER] So we like to think if the folks 1,000 years ago made glass that lasts at the bottom of the ocean for 1,000 years, maybe we can on purpose design glass that will last for 10,000 years.
Franklin: Interesting. Why was there the shift—so you started to—you came to work in glass immobilization, and then you said the funding for that program ended. Why was there that shift there in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s?
Palmer: Well, if I remember correctly, the project I was working on was sort of under the table. [LAUGHTER] If I remember—the Pacific Northwest Laboratories—this was before it was a national laboratory—had the responsibility of developing the glass waste forms. And what we were doing was just a very small project compared with what was going on at Battelle Northwest at the time. I think somebody caught us doing that, and they said, you shouldn’t be doing that; that’s Battelle’s job. So they found something else for me to do.
Franklin: Oh, right. So Hanford’s vitrification plant is in the news a lot and is kind of plagued by cost overruns and delays. Being a vitrification expert, is that kind of—I mean, I’m not looking for you to criticize them or anything, but is that kind of the norm? Should we have been prepared for how complex this process is? Do you think maybe that that wasn’t communicated or are there actual kind of real problems with the processes being instituted here, in terms of efficiency and actually handling the mandate?
Palmer: I’m a little surprised it’s taken this long. I was back here after we finished the work at West Valley, I came out to the Project that was—let’s see, Bechtel had just taken it over along with—it was the Washington Group then. And I came out—the Washington Group was the organization that was running the West Valley Project, so we were brother organizations. So I came out to work with some of the folks in the group to try to put together procedures, figure out what we expected to have happen over the project. So I remember coming back here and I think I still have a bumper sticker that says Glass in 2007. [LAUGHTER] I probably got that in 2003. So I’ll hang on to that. For it to have gone out this long, I don’t know. I do know for having spent a lot of time at West Valley, the West Valley Site, instead of—well, here the Hanford Site is 570 square miles. The West Valley site is 200 acres. [LAUGHTER] The Department of Energy folks, who were our overseers, were right down the hall. They’re not miles away as they are out here. West Valley’s also in the same time zone as the DOE headquarters in Washington. It’s not 3,000 miles away and three time zones away. I think geography means a lot. [LAUGHTER] When you’ve got the folks you’re working with and have to solve their problems, when you’ve got them down the hall and you can talk to them day in, day out, it makes it so much easier to get the job done. And then when they can call their folks in Washington where things have to get done in a relatively straightforward manner, I think that helps quite a bit. So it’s the fact that Hanford is so big and it’s so far away from the people who ought to be thinking about it more. But they’re in Washington, DC—what do they care about what happens in Washington State. It really—it’s not primary in their minds. So you sort of get sent to the back of the room.
Franklin: Oh. How does that compare, though, with—you said the Savannah River site has created about 4,000 canisters. How long has that process—has there been similar delays or situation there? How come that process is kind of up and underway—or can you describe—I guess my question is, can you describe the similarities or differences between what’s being attempted here and what’s being attempted at another large site like Savannah River?
Palmer: Savannah River always seemed to have priority over Hanford. Probably because it’s closer to population. And the environment around the Savannah River Plant is a lot wetter--[LAUGHTER]—than the desert out here. So if the tanks leak out here, they leak into the desert. If they leak at the Savannah River Site, they leak into the Savannah River, which feeds several million people. So the Savannah River Site did get more attention in the early days. They’ve done a very nice job getting their plant up and running. We worked closely with them when I was at West Valley. We talked with them all the time in terms of their day-to-day almost troubles and tribulations. We designed—the melters were designed a little bit differently and the canisters were a little bit different. The West Valley canisters had a large mouth and it was a 16-inch opening. Pretty easy to hit the hole with the glass coming out of the furnace. The Savannah River canisters had a much smaller diameter hole and that led to different processes for welding the material shut. But we could compare notes in how you’d do that and how the melters worked. We were operating in parallel, I think—let’s see, if I remember right, Savannah River started their process up in March of ’96 and we started in June.
Franklin: Okay, so you were doing the same thing at the same time.
Palmer: Right.
Franklin: So they’ve vitrified a lot of their waste, but there’s still no current long-term repository. Waste is still being stored at individual sites, waiting. So really, that’s kind of the other step of this process, right, is finding a—or what are your thoughts on that situation, on the—do we need one or two major long-term repositories to kind of collect all the waste in one area, or is better to keep it spread out at its separate sites?
Palmer: It’s going to be wonderful when we get all the liquid waste out of the tanks and immobilized somehow. I’d like to think that—I’m a little prejudiced—that glass is the answer to that. And now that we’ve got the tank empty at West Valley and the material in glass, and Savannah River will get there eventually—they might be halfway through? I’m not quite sure how long they’re going to take to get it done. But it’ll be nice to have those canisters of high level waste somewhere, and the high level waste out of the ground. And with any luck it’ll happen here at Hanford, too. There’s no rush to get those canisters of glass into the ground. We expect that they’ll be stored safely somewhere in some kind of a building, some kind of a structure, that will keep the water out, keep the animals away and whatever else. So you kind of hope that that’s going to happen. And if there—there’s talk about reopening the Yucca Mountain project again. It was always kind of funny—everybody complains that they shut it down a few years ago, and that that was a political action. Well, picking Yucca Mountain was a political action in the first place. In 1987, when they decided to go to just one repository, if you look at the state of Nevada versus the state of Washington versus, say, the state of Texas, Nevada has the least number of representatives in Washington. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Ah, a-ha.
Palmer: So it basically was a political act to create that there. So it doesn’t bother me that it was a political act to have shut it down. It may be reopened again. Harry Reid, who’s the senator who asked President Obama to shut it down—Harry’s retiring. So maybe it’ll reopen. I remember, maybe 25 years ago, I went to a PTA meeting, the New York State PTA meeting, and the national president was there. She was from Las Vegas. And I asked her about Yucca Mountain. She said, you and I need to talk. [LAUGHTER] She was not happy about Yucca Mountain, and she was amongst those who were really fighting against even looking at the site. There was a—let’s see. When I was in Minnesota, it was about 1985, I believe, the Department of Energy was looking at a potential second repository. They were looking, first of all, at those sites out west. And then they started to look at granite formations, say, in New Hampshire. The Canadian Shield, which is outstate in Minnesota. So there were folks agitating in Minnesota—oh, my god, they’re going to bring nuclear waste here. And I remember going to a meeting of the local congressman and hearing people shouting about it. And I sort of—on the way out, I mentioned to him, I said, why don’t you just let DOE come in here and discover that it’s really not the place to put it? One of the main things you need to worry about is how do you get all the materials that’s elsewhere to the repository? And the weather in Minnesota in the winter’s not so good. [LAUGHTER] It would make it difficult to bring material in. And in addition to the weather interfering with construction of the facility to begin with. So there were a lot of good reasons not to put it in Minnesota. So it was just a lot of fun to watch the action going on with the anti-nukes, locally, and as well as the people who might have been more in favor of it. I also remember there was—one of my colleagues at the basalt project was back in Boston. I think he was at MIT, giving a talk about the repositories. And he said he noticed some of the kids in the back were sort of dozing off when he was talking about repositories in Nevada and Washington and that sort of thing. And then he suddenly mentioned that—maybe in New Hampshire. And he said—the kids sat up and paid attention all of the sudden. It’s up the street. [LAUGHTER] In New Hampshire. Yeah. So it gets people’s attention when it’s close at hand.
Franklin: It’s a real nimby issue.
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: How did the work at Hanford—your work at Hanford—kind of inform your later work? Because you started your private sector career at Hanford, right?
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: So how did that inform your later work?
Palmer: One of the most important aspects of handling radioactive materials is a quality assurance program where you—those of us were doing research on the basalt project, our first thought was how do you do quality control, quality assurance on research? How do you ensure that your experiments are right? Because you’re supposed to be investigating unknown things, so maybe quality control, quality assurance, is too much controls on your process. When it first was imposed on us, we were very concerned about how we can do that. But then we talked to the folks who were quality assurance experts, and they said, oh, what we really have to do is control the process. Control—make sure if you’re using a particular instrument, a spectrometer, whatever, make sure it’s been calibrated, make sure it’s working properly, make sure you have standards to compare against your unknowns. So the quality assurance aspect of it actually made our work a whole lot better. We had to think about it a little harder, but that’s okay. [LAUGHTER] In fact, when I moved from here to 3M and did research there, I kept those thoughts in mind: okay, I need to do research on new materials, on new products, that sort of thing—but how do I set up my experiments so that I know I’m getting the right answers? Or defensible answers, if not the right answers.
Franklin: Where at least you know the process is defensible.
Palmer: And that turned out to be an important part of my work at West Valley. So learning that quality assurance was a good thing has been a big help to my later career.
Franklin: Can you describe Hanford as a place to work?
Palmer: [LAUGHTER] It’s a different place. It was first very strange to get out here and you see people on the corner waiting for the bus and everybody’s wearing a badge. That was a—coming, especially from a college campus—that was a very different experience. I guess I got used to it, but I wasn’t happy with the atmosphere that that sort of creates—having to wear a badge and that sort of jazz. And I remember when I was at 3M, there was somebody coming in and wanted to make everybody at 3M—I worked in their research facility in St. Paul, which was several dozen buildings. They wanted everybody to wear—somebody was coming in proposing that everybody at 3M wear a badge, for corporate security and that sort of thing. My opinion of that was that would change the atmosphere of the research park. Later in my career, I worked for Corning, Incorporated in Corning, New York, and they’ve taken it to an extreme, I think. [LAUGHTER] When you get up from your desk, you’re supposed to turn your computer off. Because even the guy next to you isn’t supposed to see what you have on your computer screen. And you have to wear a badge, and you need the badge to go from building to building. Or from parts of the building to other parts of the building. It created an atmosphere that I wasn’t happy with. I felt that it’s necessary at Hanford, where you’re working with hazardous materials all the time. But I wasn’t—I thought that in a corporate world, I thought it was a little bit of overkill. But the folks at Corning, Incorporated have decided that—[SIGH]—they need to have everybody keeping their mouths shut whenever they needed to keep their mouths shut. Although if you go out at night and you sit in a bar, and you listen to the guys talking at the table next to you, you might find out some things that you—[LAUGHTER]—you wouldn’t find out hanging around the quarters of the research park. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford?
Palmer: Most challenging, I think, was—some days, getting to work. Taking the buses out to work. Although that, eventually, once you get used to it, you get reading done on the bus. There was—for a couple of years, I lived in Kennewick, and I took a van pool. So I would get up in the morning walk to the corner, and pick up the van, and spend an hour and then spend another hour at the end of the night, coming home. At the time, I subscribed to two magazines: I subscribed to the New Republic, which was weekly, and on the left side of the political spectrum, and I subscribed to William F. Buckley’s National Review, which was every two weeks, and on the right side of the political spectrum. I was obscenely well-informed. [LAUGHTER] Because I read them cover-to-cover, because I had the van pool time day in and day out. I worked with a lot of interesting folks. And I’m spending this week here getting together with some old friends. Since we were done making glass at West Valley, a number of those folks are out here now. And about a dozen of us got together last night, and it was a lot of fun to see some folks that I hadn’t seen for ten years or so.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great.
Palmer: The aspect of working on a project that the whole world thinks they know about—oh, nuclear waste. One of the things—the most common comment you get is, do you glow in the dark? And it doesn’t matter—that happens at technical meetings, that happens at PTA meetings, that happens on planes going back and forth. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: It happens to me every time I go to a conference. At least once. Somebody thinks that they’re the first person that thought of that joke.
Palmer: Yes. [LAUGHTER] So it does make for interesting cocktail party conversation. Because everybody has an opinion.
Franklin: Yeah.
Palmer: And—why don’t we just put it on a rocket and send it? Well, rockets never explode, right?
Franklin: No!
Palmer: [LAUGHTER] And even before Columbia and Challenger had their problems, I went to a meeting in Cocoa Beach, Florida down the street from the Cape, and remember talking to someone who worked at Cape Canaveral for a long time and some of the tests that they did. They had one rocket that they called the Titusville Express. Titusville is the next town over, and the rocket went up and hung a right, and fortunately went over the city of Titusville into the water. But that’s not what it’s designed to do. So if you put radioactive materials on those kinds of things, you’re going to make a mess in the water someplace or wherever it comes down. So one of those—a glib, easy answer to—the further away you are from the project, the more answers you have to solve it. That’s true in a lot of different ways. People have—oh, we can solve that problem. It’d be easy; just do this. Ah, well, no. [LAUGHTER] So that makes a lot of fun. And now, as we’ve been talking about now writing a book on the history of this topic, and it’s a lot of fun digging in the background and trying to figure out how people 100 years ago were treating radioactive materials. As they started to understand that, yeah, we ought to take into account time, distance and shielding and those kinds of things. It took a while for them to figure that out, and people got hurt, and died from not knowing.
Franklin: Right.
Palmer: And in some cases, though, I’m finding as I read more, there’s a lot of cases where they did know, but they just left the door open [LAUGHTER] on the cyclotron, that sort of thing. Some of the guys who were working on that were basically cowboys. They just treated it like your standard, old—oh, whatever’s going on in the laboratory, and okay. The stream of electrons in the cyclotron, if they left the door open, somebody was getting irradiated, but they didn’t think—you couldn’t feel it, so what’s the big deal? But you need to keep that door closed. It’s kind of funny to read about the people who—smart people, gone on to get wide renown in physics and that sort of thing—but they left the door open on the cyclotron because they didn’t figure it was a big deal. Or they were just careless.
Franklin: Right, or maybe had a sense of invulnerability--
Palmer: Yes.
Franklin: --when it came to their own mortality.
Palmer: Physicists have a way of thinking they’re invincible.
Franklin: Were there any major events that happened if the Tri-Cities while—I guess you only lived here for five years?
Palmer: Yeah.
Franklin: Were there any major events in the Tri-Cities when you lived here that stand out to you?
Palmer: Mount St. Helens.
Franklin: Oh.
Palmer: It was May 18, 1980. And we had been watching—over the previous year, we would be able to see some of the minor eruptions that had been going on. And I think—if I remember right—it’s 160 miles from here. It was Sunday morning when it happened, and somewhere around 8:00 or something like that. My wife and I were in the grocery store. We were way in the back of the grocery store, and a friend came in and said, wow, did you see what the mountain did this morning? And—no. We’d been inside whenever it happened, and came out and you see these puffy clouds. It kind of looks like cauliflower. The ash falls in like pockets. That day everybody basically stayed inside, because our cars outside got covered with dust. I talked to a friend who went to work that day and took the bus out to the 200-West Area. And he said you couldn’t see the front of the bus from the back of the bus inside the bus.
Franklin: Wow.
Palmer: So it was a dusty day. They had just bought a new fleet of buses that were all air conditioned. The ash chewed up the air conditioning. So we didn’t have that new fleet of buses that summer, so we all rode un-air conditioned buses that summer. And a lot of people wore the face masks for most of the summer going out on the bus during that summer.
Franklin: Oh, wow. So how—did that impact the work at Hanford at all?
Palmer: I don’t know that it impacted the work to speak of. It certainly woke us up to Mother Nature’s power. I remember there was someone here who had—a photographer—who had been going back and forth to Seattle, and he would stop at the St. Helens area and take pictures. He’d gone over the Saturday before. I saw him give a presentation on this afterwards, so this is all secondhand sort of thing. He stayed—he decided he’d stay the night on the south side of the mountain. He took some wonderful pictures the day before from that particular angle. The next morning, it blew, and when it blew, he was facing south, away from the mountain. He didn’t hear a thing. Because the explosion went north and all the sound and all the ash went north. He was talking to somebody and the guy said, look around. He turned around and he could see the plume going off. And he went back to the same places where he’d taken pictures the day before, and had the same picture as the explosion is going on. So it was quite an opportunity for that guy to get those kind of photographs.
Franklin: No kidding.
Palmer: Then the police were coming through, chasing people out. You got to get out of here. Because the snowcap was melting and the floods—the Toutle River, I believe, was being overflowed. He had to get out of there in a hurry, although he kept stopping every once in a while, taking pictures. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: As any good photographer would.
Palmer: Yes. And the cop would come and say, you’ve got to get out of here. And I remember we—later that summer, my father came out to visit. My father was an eighth grade science teacher. So we had a good time taking pictures and collecting ash for his science class and that sort of thing. We drove around the south end and came up Interstate 5 and saw the destruction from the flood, and drove over to where the Toutle River had washed out some small bridges. And you could see where—the river had gone down to its normal level, but you could see it was ten foot up on the banks, and then there was a mark about ten feet up in the trees above that where the water level had been. So it was mighty powerful.
Franklin: Do you have any memories of the social scene or local politics or other insights into Tri-Cities life?
Palmer: We were part of the Jewish community—Temple Beth Shalom. It’s a small temple. There’s not a whole lot of Jewish folks here. But they had been here along—from virtually the beginning of the Project. The temple was founded in 1950. When we were here around 1980, there were still people who were part of that founding organization.
Franklin: Wow. I’m sorry, where was that located?
Palmer: Thayer Street, south of Lee.
Franklin: Okay.
Palmer: I haven’t been there for a while, so it’s—and I understand they’ve remodeled it. So I’m not sure I would recognize—I think I would recognize the building if I were to drive down it, but I haven’t done that yet. I may do that later this week. There were quite a few interesting people who were part of that organization. There were chemists and engineers who worked out at the Site, and were also part of that organization. There were doctors in the local community who were part of that congregation. And I still have friends who are part of that here, and I expect to see them this week. We didn’t do a whole lot of other things. I was—it was just my wife and I when we came out here. We had a son—my wife’s named Ellen Goldberg Palmer. My son was born here. My older son, Michael was born August of ’82. So he has roots here, but I don’t think he’s ever been back. [LAUGHTER] So one of these days, we have to bring him back and see where he was born and that sort of thing. We later had a second son born in Minnesota. So my sons are connected to the two biggest rivers in the continent. One the Columbia, one the Mississippi. Although neither of them really remembers having been near them. They were both raised in Buffalo, so they don’t remember much about either Minnesota or Washington State. We were very much involved with the synagogue. There were also quite a few mixed marriages. I’m not Jewish. We decided we’d raise the kids Jewish, but that’s all right. That wasn’t a problem. But there were a lot of other mixed marriages as part of the synagogue. Because of the wide range of beliefs of the synagogue, it was always an independent organization. There are a variety of Jewish movements—the two major ones are Reform and Conservative. Reform being a little more liberal; a Conservative rabbi would never have married my wife and I, because they just don’t believe in that—in intermarriage. And we had some trouble finding a Reform rabbi that would do that. But the synagogue remained independent for many years. Until something—it was never clear to me exactly what happened. We took a vote and it was always 50/50, and they decided not to affiliate with either the Conservative or Reform movement. But then somebody decided, we really need to do something. So they had another vote, and it went Conservative. So they needed to have—they felt they needed to do something with the Sunday school and have some sort of official imprimatur of one of the movements. And that caused a split. [LAUGHTER] Especially among those of us who were mixed marriages. And we had a meeting a couple of weeks later in our house, mainly because we hadn’t had enough money to buy furniture for the living room yet, so we had a place where we could have lots of people meet and have chairs around. We actually created another synagogue for those of us who felt we should be more liberal than the conservative end of it. And that went on for a couple of years. I think it’s consolidated again. But I don’t know exactly what the status of the synagogue is now. So even amongst small congregations, you can have big divides. There’s a joke that somebody told me. They sent a Jewish astronaut to the moon to establish a community. And they ask him, why two synagogues? And he said, well, that’s the one I go to, and that’s the one I wouldn’t go to on a bet. [LAUGHTER] So you can always expect—three Jews in a room, you’ll have ten opinions. [LAUGHTER] But politics? I don’t remember much about—I wasn’t much involved in that. I was too worried about day-to-day working and family life. Because I was new at both. I didn’t worry too much about other things. But, yeah, Mount St. Helens was the big one, and our relationship with the Jewish community. That was the two big social parts of our life while we were here.
Franklin: Okay. Could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Palmer: Not very much. The work we were doing was publishable. We did have to worry a little bit about the composition of the waste. I think some of that might have been proprietary. Because knowing what was in the waste would give information about what was in the material that created the waste, which was for plutonium to make bombs. So I think some of that information might have been proprietary. I didn’t have to worry about it because I didn’t work on that part of the business. I do remember, at the Battelle library in the 300 Area—which was a wonderful place to go; the books there were—it was just a fun place to look around—there was a room down the hall that you had to have special permission to go in that had a lot of the processing information that was proprietary. And I always wanted to go in there, but I don’t think—my clearance wasn’t high enough. We had Q clearances then, and I don’t think they even have that anymore out here.
Franklin: Yeah, not to my knowledge.
Palmer: But the secrecy aspect didn’t affect me very much.
Franklin: How has the attitude towards nuclear waste disposal changed from 1979 until now? Both within the industry and without?
Palmer: I think a lot more people know about it than before. Especially because of the national hullaballoo over Yucca Mountain. People worry about that a little more than they—they probably didn’t know they had to worry about it. [LAUGHTER] and suddenly there’s a big squabble over it, so, gee, maybe I should worry about this. The other facility that’s been in the news lately is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, WIPP. About two years ago there was an accident there. It was a small explosion underground and they needed to figure out exactly why it happened and now what can they do to prevent it from happening again. So I don’t think it’s up and running just yet. They’re still sorting out new procedures and that kind of thing. But, yeah, people are hearing about it more. I don’t remember anybody really—I mean, if I talked with old friends about nuclear waste in 1979, they’d say, say what? They really didn’t know what was going on and they had no idea of where the materials were located. But nowadays, they do worry about it more. There are folks with the nuclear power plants, we all know that there are the spent fuel being stored at all the nuclear power plants and folks are starting to be aware that—is this the right thing to do? There may be—it seems to take time for people to want to solve problems. [LAUGHTER] It’s just—it’s like the kids in the MIT classroom. Okay, that’s Washington State, I don’t need to worry about it. You know, wait a minute, it’s in New Hampshire; maybe I do need to worry about this. And if you suddenly realize that, yeah, that nuclear power plant down the street? Okay, there’s no radioactivity coming from it, but there is this other stuff that maybe can cause a problem.
Franklin: There’s spent fuel being stored there in the area that wasn’t designed as permanent storage for it.
Palmer: Right, right.
Franklin: How has the approach to nuclear waste disposal changed from 1979 until now? Or has it?
Palmer: I don’t know that it has. I’d like to think we’re smarter about it. I’d like to think that we have better solutions for it now than we did then.
Franklin: Such as?
Palmer: The immobilization processes. Eventually we’re going to have to ship the materials from one place to another. They’ve done tests on shipping casks and designed them so that they’re not going to fail. And there are folks who are still working on new designs for shipping, say, spent fuel—I’m sorry, I think it’s called used fuel now—from reactors where they’re stored now to—there may be some intermediate storage facility, or some permanent storage facility. I suspect that we may eventually go to some kind of an intermediate storage facility. And where that would be is a hard question to answer. They’re now looking at the process of siting a repository at—I forget exactly what the buzzword is for it, but it’s basically an informed—that’s it—informed consent of the community. For instance, in order to site the WIPP project at Carlsbad, New Mexico, they basically got buy-in from the community. From the mayor to the chamber of commerce, to the local citizens. There are other folks in the state of New Mexico who would rather it not have been there. But they live in Albuquerque, and that’s a couple hundred miles away. So now you worry about, what do you define as community? Is it the people who live in Carlsbad? Is it the people who live in New Mexico? Is it the people who live in the Southwest? So the concept of informed consent is absolutely necessary. But defining it is very hard to do.
Franklin: Right. Because you don’t always get to choose—as a project planner you don’t always get to choose who has buy-in or who feels like they should. You don’t get to exclude some people just based off of your own—they get to choose whether or not they feel—
Palmer: Yeah, and in the past, we’ve done horrible things where we just ignored people. There are places in the Southwest where they had uranium mines. And downstream from the uranium mines were the Navajo. There were—I’ve read somewhere, I’m assuming it’s true—is that there was never cancer in the Navajo Nation until there was uranium mill tailings nearby, coming in the water supply from upstream. The informed consent, will hopefully help us not ignore some people who ought to be part of the process.
Franklin: Right. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Palmer: We tried. We tried really hard to do the right things. I do remember—hmm—early ‘80s, Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 as President. He was a little more hawkish than Jimmy Carter before him. I got promoted to a manager’s position, and I got invited to—the vice president of the Site, who every once in a while got new managers together to give them a little lecture and welcome to management. [LAUGHTER] And I remember him saying something about—yeah, Reagan’s going to put us back to work. We’re going to build more bombs and do all that sort of thing. And I think I said at that point to myself, I got to get out of here. [LAUGHTER] Because if that was going to be the attitude—I mean, cleaning up the mess is one thing; building new stuff that goes boom in the night? Nah, I didn’t want any part of. And that was—some of the reputation that those of us who worked at Hanford is that, you know, yeah, we want to make more bombs. No, a lot of us are here because there’s a mess to clean up. And we were chemists of all kinds of varieties who wanted to know: okay, what is it that we have to do to make this not a problem anymore? And it’s a good intellectual problem to try to solve, and an engineering problem to solve. And we don’t want to make new things that disrupt the community. We want to take care of the mess.
Franklin: What about the—there’s kind of an inherent contradiction in there, though, right? In that you find joy in solving the problem and fixing the problem, but without the bombs—without the desire to make the bombs, we wouldn’t have the waste to clean up, and you might not have come here. You’re certainly—your life, part of your life’s work is encapsulating waste, which—there is waste from energy plants, but you seem to have spent much more time dealing with waste from production plants. So I understand maybe not wanting to see new—more new waste being produced, but that’s kind of an interesting relationship that I think you have with waste.
Palmer: Yes. I wasn’t around to make the decisions in the first place. I’d like to think that I’m around to make some personal and professional decisions now. Let’s say, when you go to the grocery store, you have these plastic bags. I—in the back of my car—I always have with me the reusable fabric bags when I go to the grocery store.
Franklin: Yeah, me too.
Palmer: So I don’t create the mess in the first place. I think that may be one thing that I’ve learned, looking at the history of what we’ve done with radioactive materials and radioactive waste, specifically, is that we could have done better if we’d have just thought about it a little bit. There’s new problems all the time coming on. There’s new industries coming on. Genetically designed organisms—genetically engineered organisms, those kinds of things. There’s nanomaterials. All these are new industries, and we hope that they’re thinking about the potential for problems. Having worked a little bit with some of the folks in the nanoparticle business, they were looking at those problems from the beginning. When they’re designing their materials, especially in the ceramics field. I know people who were there, at the beginning of designing new materials, and they were absolutely looking at potential harm that the materials might do.
Franklin: Do you think that same kind of forward-thinking was there at Hanford, during the World War II or Cold War, but that the importance of the initial mission overweighed concerns about the legacy of nuclear waste?
Palmer: Yeah, they were in a hurry. So cleaning up garbage was, at best, a second thought. They got it out of the way, and put it somewhere where it wasn’t going to bother anybody for a while. They’ll worry about it later. And it took them a while for later to show up. They suddenly noticed—I think it was about 1973, when they noticed, oh, there used to be 100,000 more gallons of waste in that tank than there is now. I wonder where it went. That was also the time when organizations were created to look at environmental issues. The EPA was founded in—what, I think it was about 1970? It was one of Nixon’s—
Franklin: That sounds about right.
Palmer: One of the good things that Nixon did. EPA and OSHA for that matter. I remember doing things as an underground in the laboratory that you cannot do now. I mean, using benzene to clean glassware. Not going to happen now, but it happened in the ‘60s as a routine thing. That’s how you cleaned the glassware, was boil it in a pot of benzene, because it did a nice job of cleaning the surface of Pyrex.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, I’m sure it did.
Palmer: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Wow.
Palmer: Yeah. That was another thing, is that I probably got exposed to more dangerous materials working in a chemistry lab than I did working in a radioactive lab. [LAUGHTER] I know we took care of doing things in 222-S. Although there were some laboratories I didn’t really want to go into. [LAUGHTER] But you learn how to do good science and good laboratory experiments from the folks—the woman who worked with me as a lab technician, Sadie Kunkler, had been there since before I was born [LAUGHTER] in that laboratory. She started working there in 1950. So she had 30 years of experience of how to work in a laboratory, and how to—
Franklin: This was here at—
Palmer: At Hanford, in 222-S. She taught me a lot, an awful lot, in terms of how you work in a laboratory. There were parts of laboratory experiments that I was not competent to do. [LAUGHTER] But she was very, very good in the laboratory in terms of making sure things were clean. And when you’re doing experiments where you’re trying to measure small amounts of material being leeched out of a glass with water, everything needs to be clean. The water has to be pure. If you’re looking at dissolving glass, it’s mainly sand, silica. If you know anything about the dust that’s in the air, it’s also sand. So your materials—in order to do a proper experiment, you need to keep the dust out. Otherwise, your experiment is not going to be a—
Franklin: Well, you have to purify your water, too, so there’s no silica in the water.
Palmer: Right, right.
Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about before we—?
Palmer: We covered a lot of stuff that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. [LAUGHTER] Thank you.
Franklin: Yeah, thank you.
Palmer: I’m going to be talking to some other old friends this week, and I will—I think you know some of them. Steve Buckingham is one who’s been part of this program. Michael Kupfer is another one that I worked with at 222-S. I hadn’t—I called him yesterday, and he wasn’t sure who I was—again? What? We haven’t talked in—I haven’t talked to him in over 30 years. So, we’re going to get together and talk some more. And I’d like—Mike was here and had some very interesting experiences in the lab, working in glass and other projects. I think he might have some interesting things to say. There was one thing I think that actually got me the job. Working with glass at high temperatures is a tricky thing to do and one of the crucibles that you use is platinum. When I was in graduate school, somebody in the laboratory was making glass and used, as a centerplate in the furnace, silicon carbide. Silicon carbide can take the heat okay. But if you happen to drip a little bit of glass on the silicon carbide centerplate and have it next to the platinum crucible, the platinum crucible will dissolve. What happened in this particular case, the guy left the crucible with glass in it in the furnace, and he came back several hours later and it was gone. You allow the furnace to cool and you take out the centerplate, then you can see a ring of platinum that had been the crucible. It was now part of the centerplate. When I came out to Hanford, and went out to dinner with the folks who were interviewing me, they mentioned that they had a problem—they weren’t sure what happened. They had a bunch of—maybe half a dozen crucibles on a centerplate. And some of them dissolved. They caught it before they were all disappeared, so I eventually got to see it. But some of the crucibles had been eaten away. Because I had that experience before, my response was, oh, you used the silicon carbide centerplate. And they said, yep. And I think that got me the job. The fact that I had had that experience and so—that was the kind of experience they were looking for. Someone who would not make that mistake. Because those little platinum crucibles are, you know, 1,000 bucks a piece or more.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s not a cheap material to work with.
Palmer: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Kind of a happy accident, huh?
Palmer: Yeah. Well—a happy experience for me to have that available in my list of things that I’ve done.
Franklin: Yeah, especially during an interview. Well, great, well thank you so much, Ron. It’s been a great interview.
Palmer: It’s been good, thank you.
Franklin: Okay.
View interview on Youtube.
Douglas O’Reagan: First of all, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us?
Stanley Goldsmith: Stanley Goldsmith.
O’Reagan: Okay, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Goldsmith here on March 21st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Goldsmith about his experiences working at Hanford. Okay. Could you tell us about your childhood up through—just briefly tell us about your life up through college and entering the Manhattan Project.
Goldsmith: At Hanford here, or at Los Alamos?
O’Reagan: Before that. Your life before the Manhattan Project. Where were you born?
Goldsmith: Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia. In 19—March 25th, 1924.
O’Reagan: Can you tell us about your life before the Manhattan Project? Up through college?
Goldsmith: Well I—
O’Reagan: Why don’t I move closer, that might—
Goldsmith: I was raised in Norfolk and went to Virginia Tech to take—to get a chemical engineering degree. I entered Virginia Tech in 1941, and I graduated in 1945.
O’Reagan: And then you entered the Army, is that right?
Goldsmith: After graduation, I was drafted into the Army, and assigned to the Manhattan District of Engineers. Eventually, after waiting in several different places for my clearance, I wound up at Los Alamos, where I worked from 1945 to ’47—1947.
O’Reagan: Did you just find out about what the goal was once you arrived?
Goldsmith: Yes. After I got to Los Alamos, we were told what the objective was, and all about the problems. This was different than the other nuclear sites were. This mission was kept secret.
O’Reagan: What element of the project did you work on at Los Alamos?
Goldsmith: At Hanford?
O’Reagan: At Los Alamos.
Goldsmith: At Los—I worked on processing the uranium-235 for the first atomic bomb.
O’Reagan: What did that involve?
Goldsmith: That involved converting uranium oxide that had been enriched with 235. That involved processing it from an oxide to a fluoride so it could be reduced to a metal. And then machined into the shapes they needed for the bombs.
O’Reagan: Were you figuring out your process as you went?
Goldsmith: No. The process had been pretty well established. This was more like just individual laboratories processing individual amounts of u-235 to get it to the point where it could be reduced to metal.
O’Reagan: Who did you work with?
Goldsmith: What?
O’Reagan: Did you work with anybody?
Goldsmith: Yes.
O’Reagan: Who else was in your lab?
Goldsmith: That was a long time ago. Let’s see. There was Al Drumrose and a Purcell—I don’t remember his first name. There were two other—well, maybe a few other more people. But I guess I just don’t recall the names.
O’Reagan: So what brought you to Hanford?
Goldsmith: What got me to Hanford? I left Los Alamos to get a graduate degree in chemical engineering. When I graduated, I got a job here at Hanford as a nuclear—as a reactor engineer.
O’Reagan: How did you hear about the job?
Goldsmith: Well, I knew about Hanford, and I sent out letters of inquiry about positions that may be open here and at other sites. And I got the position here in 1950.
O’Reagan: So you wanted specifically to work at Hanford or other sites—what was—did you have specific goals of what you wanted to do?
Goldsmith: Well, I liked what Hanford had to offer. So there was no question about that. They satisfied what I was looking for.
O’Reagan: What were your first impressions of the area?
Goldsmith: Well, it was shocking to say the least. It was like out in the wilderness. And when I arrived in 1950, General Electric operated the whole site, including the housing and all of the utilities and so forth. They assigned me a house that—I don’t remember what the rent was, but it was very inexpensive. And then in 1960—let’s see, it was about 1960—between ’61 and ’65—they divided the work at Hanford among several—among four or five contractors. One of them operated the laboratory, one of them operated the nuclear reactor, and one the separations plant. I stayed with the laboratory.
O’Reagan: Could you walk us through an average day when you first—say in 1950 or ’52—what sort of work were you doing?
Goldsmith: What sort of work?
O’Reagan: Mm-hmm.
Goldsmith: The average day—you want me to start back there?—is that my worksite was located about 20 miles from Richland. You could take a bus operated by the plant, or you could drive. But you had to go through an entrance gate—entrance—not a gate, but a station. And then we had to show our passes—badges. Then we went out to the site where we were working. In this case, at that time, I was working at F Reactor. As a reactor engineer, I rotated positions at the different reactors. So the work was—you asked me about the work—the work was, I thought, extremely interesting. And I felt very fortunate in that I felt like I was on the forefront of a new technology. By the time I got up here, there was a lot of emphasis on the peaceful use of nuclear power. I got involved in work for improving the nuclear fuels that was currently being used. This was because I was with Battelle then, and Battelle had a joint contract with the DoE where they could use part of their facilities—well, the major part of the facilities were for DoE work. But they also had a contract which they called 1831, and that was for doing private work for industrial corporations involved in nuclear work. I spent a lot of time on that, trying to—my group was trying to improve the performance of the fuel. Wanted to get higher powers. So that the fuel—we could produce fuel at a faster rate—I’m sorry, produce plutonium at a faster rate by increasing the power of the reactors. I worked as a reactor engineer for about four years. Then I took the position of manager of nuclear fuels research and development. We worked on developing or designing nuclear fuels, analyzing the fuels that had been used in the reactors to see what improvements could be made. Let’s see. We had a lot of interactions with the commercial fuel designers. As I mentioned, there were two contract billers. And this was done on the 1831, which allowed Battelle to use some facilities that were DoE’s—some facilities on the plant in their private work. So I’m trying to think about the timing, now. The main—after working on DoE projects for about five years, I worked on a private project that was sponsored—that was funded by Exxon—they’re now called Exxon Nuclear. They were interested in getting into the nuclear business, because they had a lot of claims on land that have uranium. They wanted—they decided to utilize those claims. Get the uranium, then processing it for use as nuclear fuels. So at that time, I think there was only one Exxon employee involved in this. They took over part—a major part of that, as Exxon Nuclear—took over a major part of Battelle. We were moved out of the buildings that DoE built, and we were located in Uptown in Richland in the industrial—just completely isolated from the other nuclear work that was going on. We designed a nuclear fuel for Exxon Nuclear which evolved into their first commercial fuels. During that time, Exxon Nuclear began to have their own staff. But we stayed with them until about 19—early 1970s, we worked with them. And then their own employees could take over from then. After that, I worked on fuel cycles. On seeing if we could design different types of fuels with different types of materials, like thorium, on the fuel cycles. And we—let’s see. This was work for DoE. And we continued that work—my group continued working for DoE. They were working on the nuclear reactor regulation, on NRC. We had projects with NRC. Our main project was DoE. And here again, I was telling you--[COUGH] Excuse me. I was still involved in nuclear fuel development. We did a lot of work for NRC and also for DoE. This was on helping them understand and approve their review of new nuclear fuels in reactors—nuclear fuel design. So we were working on both sides of the street: with the regulatory side, and the DoE development side. And then in 1980—excuse me just one minute—I should have jotted these dates down. In late 1980s, I worked on a DoE program on nuclear fuels—on nuclear fuel cycles, where we were looking at different way of utilizing the nuclear fuels so that they would last longer and that they would be safer. Then after that, I was assigned to Battelle Columbus, because I had worked through this project. It turned out quite successful. And Battelle Columbus had a contract with DoE to perform research on finding a nuclear repository—nuclear burial site. I was the Battelle manager of that program for about four years. We looked at the—examined the potential nuclear sites in New Mexico, Louisiana, Georgia, and here at Hanford. This program went on for about four or five years, and then DoE selected the Nevada site at Los Alamos—not Los Alamos—at Las Vegas for the site to bury the spent nuclear fuels. That program lasted for quite a while, but I left it in 19—after four years, because I didn’t want to move down to Texas, which was one of the sites that was being considered. So I moved back here to the Hanford. I worked on miscellaneous programs after I came back to Hanford. A lot of them had to do with the nuclear fuel cycle and the nuclear waste disposal—nuclear waste treatment and disposal. And I did that type of work for about four years, and then I retired in 1987? 19—yes, in 1987. And I left Battelle, and went to work for an environmental engineering company in Washington, DC, who was working on the same sort of thing. They were technical support contracted to DoE headquarters. So I was there until—let’s see. I was there until about 1994. And then I had to just—I still continued to work even though I was retired from Battelle. I had actually moved back to Battelle and was hired by Battelle as a consultant so that I could retain my pension and the salary for the job. That went on until about 1992. And finally, I retired for good. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s a very brief and sketchy description of what I did here at Hanford. One thing that—a little sideline you might be interested in. You asked about what Hanford was like. When I first came to work here, there were very few facilities that could be used at Hanford. I was not—I didn’t need anything special to do my work; I didn’t need a specially designed building structure. But I did do work on design and that work was done—the group was assigned to the Hanford High School. [LAUGHTER] Let’s see, where else? As I said, I had worked at most of the reactors that were operating at that time. Oh, there’s one thing that—I want to back up a little bit until about 1975. I got in—my group got involved in plutonium recycle. This was a program that DoE sponsored, a fairly large program, in which we were trying to recycle the plutonium that was not being used in bombs. Plutonium—to show that it could be used in nuclear power reactors. And we actually had a plutonium recycle test reactor built here onsite to test the fuels, the mixed oxide. We called it mixed oxide fuel because it’s plutonium and uranium oxide. And the reactor, which was the PRTR, Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, was designed specifically to try to test, get information on mixed oxide fuels. Let’s see. I moved around a lot. After about five years on that program, I moved on, I think, to working for Exxon Nuclear, to assist them in their program. Now, Exxon Nuclear was so sensitive about their work being exposed by DoE that they moved many of the facilities that they used at Battelle, they moved them to different sections. We had offices at the old—what was it—the woman who had all of this fabric stuff? It was in Richland, it’s right in downtown Richland. And we took the top floor of one of the buildings that had already been built. And of course, there, we only did calculations because they had no facilities for taking care of irradiated material. That was an interesting time, too, when we were off on our own, so to speak.
O’Reagan: They did that because they were afraid of the Department of Energy taking their knowledge?
Goldsmith: Well, they were concerned there would be some link—crossover—inadvertently, perhaps. The DoE could claim that some of the work done by Exxon Nuclear was done by DoE. And they didn’t want that to happen, so they completely isolated themselves.
O’Reagan: Did that hurt your work?
Goldsmith: Did that work?
O’Reagan: Did it impact your work, being isolated like that?
Goldsmith: I’m sorry?
O’Reagan: Being isolated, did that impact your work? Did it slow your work, or did it cause any problems?
Goldsmith: No, it didn’t cause any problems. We were able to move our whole group out into the new facility in downtown Richland. So were other groups—nuclear physics group, and the other groups that went into the fuel cycle. But that was an interesting time, because we were really developing commercial nuclear fuels. The design that we had come up with was the first nuclear fuels that Exxon Nuclear had marketed. They marketed to—I’ll think of that in a minute. But anyway, we got involved in—since I mentioned earlier that there were very few Exxon Nuclear employees involved in this program—that we actually got involved with the Exxon Nuclear people who went out to market their product. That was at the time when we ran into some very interesting commercial situations.
O’Reagan: What makes one nuclear fuel better than another nuclear fuel?
Goldsmith: Well, they were made primarily from uranium, and they were oxides. They were made into compressed pellets. Now, some of these were different—some of these were specifically made for boiling-water reactors, and others were for pressurized-water reactors. There was a design difference in the two reactors. One of them—the power level was about the same, but the design of the fuel and the way it was structured was different. That made a difference in the fuel for the two types of reactors. After we got involved in working for Exxon Nuclear, when our contract with them expired, we became very much involved in working only for DoE and NRC. I think I mentioned that to you. We—oh, we had contracts—my group had contacts with practically all the commercial nuclear fuel design people, and we provided them design support, and we did testing for them. So we were pretty much involved in the nuclear industry by then.
O’Reagan: How secretive or how classified was your work?
Goldsmith: After—when I moved to Hanford, the classification was almost—was very slim. It was very lax, because with the dropping of the atom bombs, then all of that came out, what the bomb was made of, and some ideas what the design of the bomb was. So by that time, it had pretty well leaked out, the security was relaxed on that, also. So that wasn’t—that was no longer a big problem. There were still some residual problem in security. In fact, the Russians, of course, wanted to get into the nuclear industry business. They wanted to know—well, this backed up into the weapons program—Cold War program. They wanted to know what powers we read our plants at—how many megawatts. And they actually took measurements of the Columbia River and calculated from that what powers we were obtaining. So that was when the Cold War was going on.
O’Reagan: How did you hear about that?
Goldsmith: Hear about what?
O’Reagan: The Russians testing the waters.
Goldsmith: Oh. I think we had—our security people kept an eye on what was going on with the Russians. And this is one of the things they found out.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. What was life in the Tri-Cities like back in the 1950s and ‘60s outside of work?
Goldsmith: Well, it was pretty plain in a way—several. Because there weren’t many things to do. There was only one theater, and there may have been one or two grocery stores, and I think there was one real estate agent. That was the case with most of the various businesses. There was maybe one, or two at the most. There was not much in the way of entertainment. I mentioned that we had one theater. People—the workers at the plant—developed their own entertainment—sources of entertainment. They formed all kinds of different clubs. One of the most popular club was the bridge club—competitive bridge. We played that in one of the commercial buildings that had an open space that we could use. Another was the Richland Little Theater. And then there was a Richland opera—Light Opera, also. And there were—of course, golf was a big activity, because there were already several different golf courses. So that was taking off. There were other activities like that where you had to build them yourself. You may have gotten a little support from DoE, but you couldn’t depend on it. So we had to make our own source of entertainment and relaxation.
O’Reagan: Did you play bridge? What was your entertainment?
Goldsmith: Yeah, I got involved in playing bridge. This was duplicate bridge. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that’s a form of bridge that is competitive. It’s still—it’s played in such a way that everybody—each couple gets to play against another couple, and they rotate during the evening, so that other couples play the same cards. The competitive part comes in as to who comes up with the best score at the end of the evening. [LAUGHTER] And that was quite controversial. Particularly when a man and woman were partners—they would—they had no shame, or no hesitant to getting into arguments at the bridge table. So that was a big deal. Even now there’s a lot of bridge clubs that are playing here—duplicate bridge is what it’s called.
O’Reagan: Where did you live throughout your time at Hanford, or in this area?
Goldsmith: What’s that?
O’Reagan: Where did you live? Did you move houses?
Goldsmith: Yes—well, yeah. At that time, they were building houses like mad. I lived in one of the government houses in Richland—old Richland. Then I moved into what they called a ranch house. Those were a government house that was one story, and it had three bedrooms. There was some furnishing that came with these houses. The rental on it was very nominal. And as I recall, we were provided—many of these houses, or most of them were heated by coal. DoE actually—at that time, it was actually GE who ran the town—provided free coal. They would come around periodically and dump a load of coal for you to use in your houses.
O’Reagan: Sounds dirty!
Goldsmith: Huh?
O’Reagan: Sounds dirty! Seems like it would get you messy. All the—dumping the coal, is there a coal dust that would come up?
Goldsmith: What’s that?
O’Reagan: When you burned the coal, would it be dirty? Would it make a lot of smoke, I guess?
Goldsmith: Not too bad. They must have used a hard coal that gave out less smoke. I don’t know that—it wasn’t like an industrial company where they had large facilities that generated a lot of steam, a lot of smoke. This was kind of dispersed. So we didn’t have an air problem at that time. We had—now the other thing that they did to make life easier—we had our own transportation—public transportation system. You could ride on the buses that they had for free. So that was to make life easier for the employees.
O’Reagan: Must have been a lot of buses?
Goldsmith: What?
O’Reagan: Must have been a whole lot of buses.
Goldsmith: Well, most of the buses were actually used to go out to the Area—to take the workers out to the Area, because there’s where you had a lot of people to be transported. The civilians, or the private people, had—many of them had their own cars. So didn’t use the bus.
O’Reagan: Was it different when you were working on commercial energy compared to when you were working for the Department of Energy?
Goldsmith: Yes, there were quite a lot of differences. We were able to produce fuel designs and produce developmental fuels in a much shorter time than DoE, because there was a lot of paperwork involved in going through the DoE process. In fact, one of the DoE people at headquarters who was in charge of reactor development said he was very upset because he couldn’t—he was in charge of the fast reactor, the FFTF. And they were struggling to try to get the thing going. He was very upset because he couldn’t understand how we were able to get fuel for Exxon Nuclear, and they were still struggling. They’d been struggling for a long time. [LAUGHTER] So he wanted to know what we were doing. Well, what it was, we didn’t have to jump through all the loops that you did.
O’Reagan: Was it finding the uranium, the procurement that was the problem? Or just write paperwork?
Goldsmith: No, the problem that DoE had was that they had a bureaucracy that kind of controlled things. And that always slows things down. It took them about twice as long to develop the fuel for the Fast Flux Reactor than it did us for the commercial reactors.
O’Reagan: Hmm. Let’s see. Have the Tri-Cities changed much in the time you’ve been living here?
Goldsmith: Oh, yeah. It’s been amazing how it’s grown. The Tri-Cities now is like a normal city. The nuclear influence is much less, because we have so many other businesses now involved for our economic base. As I had mentioned earlier, there were usually one kind or maybe two types of business or entertainment or something like that. When the commercial people came in, they opened as many stores as they wanted, or that were needed. So that was one big thing. Another big thing was the housing development, the real estate. I remember up until 19—let’s see, about 1965, GE was in charge of everything, including building houses. [COUGH] Excuse me, I’ve got a cold. When they opened up the lands, part of the land, surrounding territory was owned by the Department of the Interior—it was government owned. And then they made those available to the public for building houses and other types of structures. The demand for these things was great enough, so the building was really at a peak. Now, even now, you take a look at the housing—the amount of housing that’s going on, and take a look at the commercial businesses, like drive down George Washington Way, you see all these new businesses or restaurants or that sort of thing. So it’s really changed. Richland was all on this side of the Columbia River. That was one of the boundaries for Richland. But then the Columbia River curved around, and there were—on the other side of the river, there was nothing but sagebrush. But some entrepreneurs had bought land there, and then when they started to build, they had lots of land to build on. That was no problem. There’s a whole new part of Richland that’s on the other side of the river that wasn’t there until probably about 1965 or so. That’s when it started. So there’s been a growth of industry. The highways have been developed. There’s new industry that’s come in. So we’ve developed quite a good industrial base now, and it’s still growing.
O’Reagan: Are there any—to ask an open-ended question, are there any moments or stories that come to mind that you think are worth telling about your time working at Hanford?
Goldsmith: Well, I told you about how we had, early on, we had offices at the Hanford High School. That was—we made a lot of fun of that, when anyone called you at the high school, we said this is the Goldsmith class of ’41-’42. There was a lot of—amazing amount of work that was done on animals to use those as some of the basic studies for the effect of radiation on animals. Now we don’t have any of those studies going on. But let’s see. I’m trying to think of something that is unusual. A lot of it was—practically all of it was unusual.
O’Reagan: How about something mundane, but it’s still kind of unusual? Or maybe a day in the life later on in your work?
Goldsmith: Well, I mentioned the general public had to develop their own recreational activities. We have—I don’t know—we have a lot of parks and fields. Like some of those baseball parks are very good. I didn’t appreciate how good they were until—I have some relatives who live in Maryland, and we visited them, and we went to see their children’s baseball game. But they had just an open field, nothing like we have. So that’s been—the recreational things have improved quite a bit. Of course the boating is still a big deal. I really—as I said, there was so much growth going on that it’s hard to pick out any one area. Excuse me. The recreational areas have increased. You know, we’ve grown more; we’ve built at least two new golf courses, and these were very good golf courses. Then the other thing is some of the building of private homes around the golf courses. That has been—we live in a community there that probably has—what would you say, Joyce, about 800 people? Something of that sort. And it’s very nice. There’s two such communities. One of them is called Canyon Lakes, where we live, and the other is called Meadow Springs. That’s been developed—highly developed. We both have very nice golf courses.
Joyce: After you retired, didn’t you work with the people from Israel, the First Defenders?
Goldsmith: Oh, yeah, that was an interesting little program. That was after I retired, and I was re-hired. Battelle got a program from the State Department to help—to develop ways for the First Defenders on a terrorist site could make a better determination of what happened. And they did this on a worldwide basis. Mainly, underdeveloped countries, but one country that they had and they were anxious to get involved because they had firsthand information—they were anxious to get Israelis involved. Because they had a lot of first defenders. The program consisted of sending a team of people over to Israel and tell them what the program was about. And then Israel was to send about 20 people over here for a month. And then we were using the training—the HAMMER facility to do the training. I got involved because when the Israelis came over, they asked me, since I’m Jewish, they asked me if I would help trying to make them feel comfortable and so forth, take care of their dietary laws. And again, they were very pleased. And it was fun, it was interesting to see how they had become sensitized to terrorism. For instance, they stayed at one of the hotels out there. It’s right outside of Columbia Center Mall. And early morning, a bus would pick them up and take them out to the HAMMER site. After about two or three days, the bus driver said—no, someone said are we going to take any different routes? And the bus driver thought they meant for sightseeing. But they didn’t want to establish a pattern for terrorists to see what their schedule was. So they finally got him to change the route out to Hanford itself. But that was interesting, because the view of the Israelis who had been submitted to so much terrorism and the view of the other countries that we trained but who had not been submitted were completely different. Like night and day. So that was interesting experience. They show you the difference between our view of being careful about terrorism. As I said, these people were housed—excuse me. These people were housed in one of the hotels close to the Columbia Center—close to the Columbia Center Mall. They would go into the mall, and they were appalled to see that people were allowed to go in and out of the mall carrying all kinds of backpacks and all kinds of packages where it’s not being inspected. Because in Israel, they inspected anyone who was carrying a package of any sort. And they would be examined. So that was an interesting insight on how the different countries treat terrorism.
O’Reagan: And the training was about how to respond to a nuclear accident, or a crisis?
Goldsmith: Well, this program was called the First Defenders. And these people were doctors, they were scientists, they were firemen and so first. They were a mixture of who would come to the site where an attack had been made. That’s why they called them the First Defenders. They—let’s see, what was I going to say? They were very—the ones that were really involved in anti-terrorism were very conscientious and good about it. We had some interesting things that arose as part of this program. As I said, there were nations from all over the world that were involved to a certain extent. And we had the Indians, from India, coming over, spending a month. They were put up in the Hanford House—Red Lion Hanford House. They got a call one day from someone at the Hanford House wanting to know if we could talk to these people about how to keep the shower curtains inside of the showers, because they would keep them out and they would flood the whole area. So there were strange incidences like that. I’m sorry, Joyce?
Joyce: About when Bill Wiley was here and you worked at Hanford Battelle in Quality Assurance. Did you share any of that?
Goldsmith: The quality--?
Joyce: Uh-huh.
Goldsmith: Bill Wiley was a very—I think he was very influential and left his mark on the site, because he wanted to develop this environmental molecular laboratory, the rows of buildings out there, the new rows. And that opened up a whole new set of doors for Battelle to grow. They went into more basic stuff. Up to that time, we mainly focused on working on problems with nuclear reactors and nuclear fuels. But this was completely different from that. This was basic science that these laboratories allowed us to get involved in. And it’s opened up a whole new area. I think Battelle, and Hanford in general, has benefited from it, because they get a lot of extra programs that they wouldn’t have before.
O’Reagan: Were you involved with these basic science programs?
Goldsmith: No, I started in nuclear fuels and nuclear reactors most of the time I was here. But I didn’t get into any of the basic science programs.
O’Reagan: Did you want to say anything about this Oppenheimer letter, maybe introduce it for us?
Goldsmith: He was a very nice guy, and he was very considerate, and everybody liked him. He was very friendly—friendly in a reserved way. He didn’t go around smacking people on the back, but you knew he was warm and he remembered names. After the peace was declared, I think it was that later date in 1945? No, not 1945. At any rate, after the war was over, and things settled down, he sent out a letter to some of the people who worked on it that thanked them for their effort. And he sent me one of those letters. And I’m very impressed with it, because he knew what I was doing. Because he could mention that in his letter. I’ve been very proud of that letter. That’s what that is all about. It may not be much to many people, but to people who have been involved in the nuclear industry, I think it has some impact.
O’Reagan: Did you ever meet any other Los Alamos or other Manhattan Project veterans who weren’t from the Hanford site when you worked at Hanford?
Goldsmith: When I went to Hanford did I ever--?
O’Reagan: Meet any other people who had been at Los Alamos?
Goldsmith: No, there are not too many people here, just a few people here. I’m hoping—I’d like to know—I wanted to put something on Facebook about seeing how many people from Los Alamos who actually worked on the bomb still are around. Because I don’t think there are too many. I was—I got my degree when I was 21, so—and then I immediately went to work and have done that since then. But I’ve lost track of most of the people. I think they’re probably dead by now. [LAUGHTER] But if there’s something that comes up from that, I’d like to see.
O’Reagan: All right, well thank you so much.
Joyce: Thank you.
Goldsmith: You’re welcome. Thank you.
View interview on Youtube.
Victor Vargas: We’re rolling.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Stephanie Janick?
Stephanie Janicek: Janicek.
Franklin: Janicek.
Janicek: Just like it’s spelled.
Franklin: Okay, Janicek. On January 24th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Stephanie about her experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Janicek: Stephanie Anne Dawson Janicek. Stephanie is S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E. Anne, A-N-N-E. Dawson, D-A-W-S-O-N. Janicek, J-A-N-I-C-E-K.
Franklin: Great. So tell me how and why you first came to Richland.
Janicek: My family came to Richland in 1949 when I was seven years old and I was in the first grade. My father had been a Montgomery Ward’s manager in the ‘40s and he managed stores all over the state of Washington. And he was so successful that they wanted to promote him to a regional position where he’d be traveling a lot, and he said I don’t want to do that. So he and another Ward’s manager who decided to be a silent partner talked to officials in Richland and decided that they were going to be the first store to open in Uptown Richland. The area had been set aside, there were no buildings; it was just empty lot. And the downtown area was too small and crowded, so they wanted to develop Uptown as sort of an outdoor mall, if you will. Dawson Richards was the first store built and opened. And it opened in June of 1949.
Franklin: What was your father’s name?
Janicek: Grover Dawson.
Franklin: And was Richards the silent partner?
Janicek: Jim Richards was the silent partner. He owned an orange grove and walnut trees in California, and so he was down there. They owned the store 50/50 for many years until my brother bought out Mr. Richards. And he would come up occasionally to see how things were going. But Dad was doing a great job, and everything was going well.
Franklin: So tell me more about Dawson Richards store. What kinds of products did it sell?
Janicek: Dawson Richards started out as a men and boys clothing store. And they had a little logo of a man wearing a suit and a hat and a little boy with a cap and a coat, because boys wore coats in the old days, you know, when they went to church. It said Dad and Lad. That was one of the early symbols of the store. And so it was a really interesting store, because my father wanted to cater to all the men in the area, most of whom worked at Hanford, regardless of their station in life. And so, for instance, he had two lines of suits; the expensive suits were made by Kuppenheimer and the less expensive were made by Timely. He had two lines of shoes. The good shoes—or the more expensive shoes, rather, were Florsheim’s, and he had Winthrop shoes for the everyday guys. And he did the same with sweaters and pants and shirts and neckties and pajamas and socks and everything you can think of. He also had—because there was almost nothing. Everybody had to go to Seattle or Spokane or maybe Yakima—I don’t know what was in Yakima in those days—to get their clothing. And especially the managers at Hanford. So they were tickled to death that they had a store that they could shop at and be very finely-clothed. And he—my dad—specialized in, oh, talls and shorts and stouts. He catered to every single size, and if he didn’t have your size, he would get it for you. And I remember one of the signs in the store said, OshKosh, because my father carried OshKosh B’gosh overalls. He really wanted to have clothing for everyone. Regardless of their station in life. And it became a wonderful gathering place. People would just come in to talk. My father was very outgoing, and we would have gatherings of high school kids, because he also carried letterman jackets, letterman sweaters. He sold the chenille letters and numbers for the cheerleader and song leader outfits. When Christ the King opened their Catholic school for kids, the students wore uniforms, and my father sold, at very deep discounts, the corduroy pants and white shirts and navy sweaters that the boys wore at the school. He really wanted to provide whatever the community needed and it worked out quite well.
Franklin: Okay, great. So there wasn’t—were there any men’s stores or stores of a similar type in Pasco and Kennewick at the time?
Janicek: There was—I don’t know how old the Sid Lanter’s store was in Kennewick; I think that was probably there most of the time. I don’t know if it preceded Dawson Richard’s or not. There was a small men’s store in downtown Richland. I might be able to remember the name of it later on. But just at this moment, it is—oh, was it something like Harvey’s or—I don’t recall. But my father’s was such a good sized store that he had wonderful variety. He had Pendleton woolen shirts and jackets, and he had Jantzen’s sweaters and swimsuits. Carried a lot of name brands that people were comfortable with.
Franklin: And you said that was the first store in the Uptown area?
Janicek: Yes, it was. And the next store that opened was a sporting goods store right next to Dawson Richard’s and it was originally called Frank Barry, which was the name of the owner. And a few years later that was sold and it became BB&M Sporting Goods, which was owned by three gentlemen with the last names of B and B and M. And then some years later they moved up the street. Dawson Richards was on the Jadwin side of Uptown Richland, and they moved farther up the street. I don’t know—is there a—I don’t think there’s a BB&M now, is there? No, it’s gone. Okay.
Franklin: I’ve only been here a year, so—
Janicek: Oh, okay.
Franklin: My memory is—
Janicek: Okay.
Franklin: I don’t have a long institutional memory.
Janicek: And you know, if we had time, and I’m sure we don’t, I could walk you around the entire Uptown area and tell you most of the stores that originally were there. The other oldest store was the Spudnuts shop. God bless them, they’re still there.
Franklin: Yes, they are.
Janicek: And still the same family owns it.
Franklin: And still very delicious.
Janicek: Yes, yes.
Franklin: So the Uptown was the first commercial—major commercial district in Richland, right?
Janicek: Yes, it was. And because they had wonderful, big parking lots all the way around the stores, people could just park and walk all the way around the square and get everything they needed. We had Stanfield florists and Parker hardware, and banks, and there was once a grocery store there, we had a theater—we had—everything you needed, you could get somewhere. And several shoe stores, jewelry, china and silverware—just—they just filled in everything that a person would need so that nobody had to go to Spokane or Seattle to shop anymore. Unless they really wanted to.
Franklin: How long did your family own Dawson Richards?
Janicek: Let me think. My father sold to his manager, his long-term manager, George Anderson, and George’s family. They bought out my father in the early ‘70s. And the store actually closed—ironically, the store closed in 1999 on its 50th anniversary.
Franklin: So it was open for exactly 50 years.
Janicek: Yes. And the gentleman who bought it—it’s now a much smaller store. The gentleman who bought it retained the Dawson Richard’s name, which tickled me to death, and he still sells tuxedos and letterman sweaters and jackets. And he also rents out tuxedos for weddings.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Janicek: Then there were years when my father bought out the building—oh, I don’t know, bought or rented—the building next to Dawson Richard’s and they opened a women’s department called Lady Dawson. And so from inside Dawson Richard’s, you could just walk through to the ladies’ department. That was successful for a number of years. Eventually, they closed the boys’ department and then they closed the women’s department, and in the end, Dawson Richards was just men’s clothing.
Franklin: Was that, probably, just because of competition from larger department stores?
Janicek: Yes, we knew when Columbia Center was built that there would start to be more competition. Just a lot of people were going over to Columbia Center and while they were there they did all of their shopping. So a lot of people made a point of coming to Dawson Richard’s for one reason or another, but not necessarily for kids’ clothes.
Franklin: Ah, it stopped being the destination in terms—
Janicek: Correct.
Franklin: Because there was now competition.
Janicek: Yes, yes, yes.
Franklin: Whatever part of Richland that is.
Janicek: Yes. My dad had a policy of hiring as many high school kids as he could to sweep the floors, giftwrap at Christmas and Father’s Day and special events. So it was a really interesting gathering place not only for high school kids, but also they would come home from college and come back to see everybody. You know, if you wanted to see who’s who. And my father’s birthday was on Christmas Eve. And so everybody would come back and anybody who had ever worked at the store and not goofed up too badly, he would hire them just for two weeks. And they would see each other, and it was—and everybody came to see who’s home from college. And they would stand around and sing Happy Birthday during the day, and he’d have cake and punch in the backroom. It was very celebratory. Just lots of fun. A lot of fun to work at Dawson Richard’s or to just hang out there. The girls came in to get the chenille letters and numbers for their pep club and cheerleader outfits. People came in whether they bought anything or not. And he didn’t care, because he just loved people. It was a fun place to grow up.
Franklin: Did anything change in terms of the store, Uptown, or—when Richland became a private—yeah, a privately-owned city?
Janicek: Not specifically that I can think of. I was in high school at the time, and I remember that Richland became a Model US City. We had a day at Richland High School where a number of the seniors shadowed a Richland official for a day. So we had somebody shadowing the mayor and each of the city council members and the fire chief and the police chief and the city engineer and all of that. And went to—I was the city librarian for a day. And we all went to the city council meeting, in celebration of Richland becoming an independent city. And the other thing that I remember is that we were able to buy our house. Because always we rented. Richland was very much subsidized by the government. We had free garbage and free utilities and—I don’t know if the phone was free, but—just a lot of things that they took care of for us in the good old days.
Franklin: Right. But you said they—do you think the attitude was more celebratory, or did the people miss some of those amenities that had been provided for?
Janicek: I’m sure that people missed some of the amenities and realized it was going to cost them more money to live than it used to. But they—I think they also appreciated having choices. Originally, when we came, you can’t live in Richland unless you had a job, because everybody rented their house from the government. If you didn’t have a job, you left. So if people went to jail or were alcoholics and just didn’t—excuse me—[COUGH]—didn’t measure up, then they were booted out of town. So there were a lot more choices for people. We—old Richland, no one had a garage, because the city—the government didn’t build garages; they just built houses. And so nobody had an attic. Nobody had grandparents living there. It was all young families. Which was interesting way to grow up. I’m sorry. [COUGH]
Franklin: It’s okay, and there’s water right next to you, too.
Janicek: Oh, splendid. I didn’t even see it.
Franklin: What other kinds of civic activities or business activities was your father involved in?
Janicek: Well, as I said, he started out with being on the city council and being elected mayor, because he was very outgoing and because of his experiences as a store manager for Montgomery Ward’s, he was kind of a natural leader. So he was involved for a few years with what later became United Way. He got on the school board in about 1951, and he was there for 13 or 14 years. The people on the school board kind of took turns being the president, but he got involved in a lot of school things. He was a co-founder of the Bomber Boosters. He was instrumental in the first and the second remodeling of Richland High School and the building of the Dawald Gym. And he was one of the schoolboard members who advocated for building Hanford High School, which was very controversial, because a lot of people just wanted all their kids to grow up as Richland Bombers. That was kind of a sacred thing to be in the old days. It was sort of like, those other people, they have to go to Hanford. But that worked out. Hanford was an unusual school, because it was high school, junior high, and grade school—all 12 grades, well, plus kindergarten. Then later, when Sacajawea was torn down and rebuilt up in the Richland Village, then they removed the grade school from Hanford. And then Chief Jo Junior High School had been closed for a number of years, and they remodeled it and reopened it. And then moved the junior high kids out of—I don’t think—I think Hanford is just high school now, and all the junior high kids are back in either Chief Jo or Carmichael, which is what it was when I was growing up. So he was mostly involved in things having to do with kids and families. He sponsored a Little League baseball team, he sponsored and after-high school basketball league for young men who lived and worked around the Tri-Cities, and—what else did he do? Oh, his business sponsored all of the broadcasts of the Richland Bomber football and basketball games. He was very close friends with all of the coaches at Richland High School. In the old days, when the Richland Bombers went to the state basketball tournament, they were driven in cars. And so my dad and the coaches would put a couple of boys in the back of the car and drive over to Seattle. It was a four days, double-elimination, huge tournament at the Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the UW campus. So, he got to know all of the players as well as the coaches. Just loved that—more of getting to know everybody in the community. He just was that kind of guy. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Okay. Well, that’s great. So tell me about growing up in the government town of Richland and what kind of—what your impressions were when you first moved—
Janicek: My earliest impressions—we lived in south Richland for the first year and a half. We lived in an F House, which is a single-family two-story. And our street was only one block long—Atkins. My first recollection is that there were no garages, so everybody parked in the street. But everybody—families only had one car. The men didn’t drive to work at Hanford; there were buses that came through. There were three shifts, so Hanford was running 24 hours a day. There were three shifts: the day shift, the evening shift, and the overnight shift or graveyard. So the buses would come through and pick up the workers at corners and guys would all be there with their metal lunch pails and you’d see them going off. And then they’d come back, I don’t know, nine or ten hours later and drop them off, because it was quite a drive to Hanford. So the family car stayed at home, but a lot of them—and most of the mothers stayed at home. Very few women worked; some of them worked at Hanford or in some of the businesses, but most of them didn’t. And a lot of them didn’t drive. So the cars just sat there all day and were only used after Dad came home from work, or to go shopping on Saturday, or to go to church on Sunday. There were a lot of churches in the community, which I thought was kind of interesting. Lots of denominations. My family was Episcopalian, and it was a few years before we got our own church, and so the Richland Lutheran church let us have our services in the basement of their church. So our services were on folding metal chairs with little kneeling pads on the cement floor. It was a little chilly, but it was very kind of them to let us do that until we had our own church. But there were—and we had a lot of Protestant churches called Central United Protestant, Southside United Protestant, Westside United Protestant. But actually, if you asked someone or looked carefully, one of them was more Methodist, one of them was more Presbyterian; some of them, I didn’t know what they were. They weren’t in my neighborhood and I didn’t know kids that went to them until I got to high school. It was a very insular community in a lot of ways. You knew all the kids in your neighborhood, and all the kids in your school, which was—they were neighborhood schools. If you went to church, and most people did, you knew the kids that were in your church. But as a young child, we had no idea what everybody’s father did. We knew that most of them worked at Hanford, but we had no idea whether the father was a truck driver or a manager or a clerk or a—you know, scientist. That was beyond us. We never asked, and nobody ever talked about it. So, the kids in my class—when my class graduated in 1960, there were about 417 of us. And for the most part, if you didn’t ask, you didn’t really know what the other parents did. I knew most of the business community and a lot of those people had kids. People that owned the stores, and groceries and gas stations. One of my best friends in high school was the step-daughter of the man who managed the Desert Inn, which is now the Hanford House. It was neat to sleep over at her house, because she lived in the hotel. [LAUGHTER] And you could swim in the pool, and you had all your meals in the hotel dining room.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Janicek: It was really different. Most of the time, there was no public transportation. There were a few years when there was a city bus, and I don’t know—I was young; I was maybe fourth grade, fifth grade, and I remember taking the bus in the summertime to the city library. And I would sit and read books all day in the library, and then I would come home at dinner time. It was one of the things I loved to do, because I was a very bookish person. And then one year, they stopped having the buses. I don’t know whether they—and it only cost—I don’t remember if they were free, or they cost a dime or something, but it was certainly not restrictive in any way. That was fun. I remember just—even as a pretty young kid—that the Richland Community House on George Washington Way had pool tables in the back for the adults, but every Friday night they had square dancing for the kids. So all the kids would go and learn to square dance. There were a number of callers and you’d be there for a couple of hours. That was a really fun community thing to do, and that was a way to meet people who didn’t live in your neighborhood or didn’t go to your school. The town was full of young families with young children. I think the only older people who were there were either highly skilled technical men who came with their wives and either they didn’t have children or the children had already left home before they moved to Richland. Then some of the older couples, the man was in management. A few of the older couples, the women were scientists or engineers or technologists. There were some, you know—we now are learning—some highly skilled women out there that kind of disappeared into the woodwork. Nobody knew anything about them. One of the curious things that I did not realize for many years is how—I don’t know what to say. Almost everybody in the community when I was growing up was—I hate to say it—but they were white. And I didn’t know any—I didn’t know any, any blacks, any Asians, any—well, there was one Hispanic family that went to my high school, two girl cousins, that were in my class in grade school. And then I guess they must have moved to another part of town, because then I didn’t ever see them in junior high or high school. There were a few black families that I got to know, partly because they would shop in my father’s store, and partly because—when I went to Chief Jo Junior High, the PE classes were separate: girls’ PE and boys’ PE, and they had a big curtain they drew down the middle of the gymnasium so that we wouldn’t see each other in our shorts or whatever it was. But there would be a six-week session where we danced. And we all learned how to waltz and, I don’t know, whatever the jitterbug had evolved to in the ‘40s—or in the ‘50s, rather. That’s when Fats Domino and Chubby Checker were coming out, and eventually Elvis. So we were all learning to do the twist and all those things—they were fast and loud. And that was fun, because if you had that in PE for six weeks, you learned how to do that stuff, and you didn’t feel like such a dorky wallflower. There was one boy in my PE class who was black. And so when it was time for the dancing, everybody would choose their partners. And I was the tallest girl in the school and wore glasses until the ninth grade when I was the first person to get contact lenses. But anyway, so he and I were usually left close to the end of who choses who for a dance partner. Which was perfectly fine with me. I didn’t care. I didn’t have any prejudices, any reasons to feel any different about him than about anybody else in the class. And he was actually polite and nice and, you know, dressed nicely and cleaned up. He didn’t talk much; I think he was probably more shy and scared than I was. But it was an interesting experience, because—it was fine with me, you know? We danced, talked a little bit. But it was the only time I ever saw him. I didn’t—I don’t think we had any classes together. So I didn’t run into him very often.
Franklin: Did he go to the school with you?
Janicek: Oh, yeah, he went to Chief Jo. Well, you have to remember that when I first moved to Richland, there was Camp Hanford that was a military camp north of town. And there was a—at one time Richland had the largest trailer park in the country. And I’ve forgotten now—I think it was 50,000 trailers. I think, for the most part, those trailers didn’t have kitchens or bathrooms, because people ate in—maybe they did. I don’t remember, because I wasn’t in them. But they had big mess halls where people ate and they fed—I mean, they had constant food. They were either cooking or cleaning up all the time because they couldn’t feed everybody at once. And then they had bathhouses in among the trailer camp where people—just kind of like when you go to an RV park, you go to the toilets and sinks and showers. And I don’t know—maybe some of the larger trailers had those things. But I know there were small trailers that didn’t. They looked like campers, with no plumbing and—I don’t even know what they did for lighting. But between the military and the construction workers who lived north of town, there were some black families. And so I have no idea what that fella’s family did. But then we had the Brown family. When I was in junior high and high school, we had two basketball stars. And basketball was as big at Richland High School as it was in the state of Indiana. [LAUGHTER] We were Hoosiers West, maybe, I don’t know. But Norris Brown and his younger brother, CW Brown, were outstanding basketball players. They played on the Richland basketball teams, and they were among those basketball players that my parents and the coaches drove to Seattle for the tournament every year. They were the nicest guys. Now, the—I don’t think there were any black girls in Richland at that time, but there were a lot of black people who lived in Pasco. And so they did their socializing, I think, with people who lived in Pasco. And I didn’t know for many years that Kennewick was a—I don’t know, they call it, now they call it a sundowner town, that all the blacks had to be out by the time the sun went down. Had no idea! But there was a place where kids went to dance on the weekends and it was called Hi-Spot. And they would advertise on the radio, and everybody listened to the radio. That’s how you found out what all the popular music was. And so they would advertise: everybody come to Hi-Spot for dancing and—I don’t know. I never went, so I don’t know, but I’m guessing maybe they had light refreshments there. Anyway, everybody was invited to come. So, Norris and CW Brown went with girlfriends who I’m assuming were from Pasco, and they were thrown out because it was after dark, and this was in Kennewick. Richland was horrified. I mean, number one, we had no idea that Kennewick had these laws. And number two, these guys were our heroes. They were winning basketball games for us, and they, number three, they were extremely nice and polite and good students and—you know, there was absolutely no reason that you wouldn’t want to have them at a teenage gathering. I think—and this is only my person opinion—but I think that that’s where a good deal of the Richland/Kennewick rivalry started. Because the Richland people were so incensed that our heroes were thrown out of town. And that was in the late ‘50s. Let’s see. CW was one or two years ahead of me—two, I think. So that would have been, like, I don’t know, ’56, ’57, ’58. And Norris had graduated, but CW was on the team that in March of 1958 won the state basketball championship, which was just the hugest thing that had happened to Richland, probably since the beginning of time. It was just a really big thrill. And I was at that tournament, and I was at that game. And it was the biggest thing that had happened to me, too. I was so excited for my team. Because always the state had been dominated by all of the Seattle and Tacoma teams, for the most part, and sometimes a couple from Spokane. And so poor little old Richland that was stuck out in the desert and nobody knew about Richland in particular and nobody wanted to go there. [LAUGHTER] What are these kids doing in our sacred basketball tournament? And we won the whole thing. And that was just very exciting. And CW Brown was on that team. Another member of that team was John Meyers. John Meyers was this—he was built like a Douglas fir. He was just big all over—tall and large. And he was the star of my dad’s Little League baseball team. His father was the assistant manager. And he regularly hit homeruns and broke the bat. Regularly. I used to go to a lot of the Little League games, and that was really fun to watch. John Meyers was a star on the basketball and football teams at Richland High School. He played at least two sports—I’m not sure about baseball—but at least he played two sports at the University of Washington where he went for four years, and then he was drafted into the NFL. He played most of his career for the Philadelphia Eagles. So we had a local celebrity. One of several local celebrities that we had. So that was a really—I just loved following sports, and then, I, myself became a Washington Husky. Went with them to the Rose Bowl which John Meyers played in, in January of 1961. And then I ended up marrying a guy from Notre Dame, and so we’re big football fans. [LAUGHTER] We’ve had Seahawks tickets for 19 years. [LAUGHTER] Just was destined to be, I guess.
Franklin: Yeah. What do you remember about civil defense in the Tri-Cities? Do you remember going through defense drills at school?
Janicek: What I remember—there are two different aspects that I remember. When I was—most of the time, after the first year-and-a-half of living in south Richland and going to Lewis and Clark, we moved to north Richland and I went to Jefferson grade school, and then Chief Jo Junior High and Richland High School, which we always called Col High, and most of us in our hearts, it’s still Col High and not Richland. But we would have air raid drills maybe once a month at Jefferson. And we would—every class would march out into the hallway where we would lie down on the floor next to the wall. We would lie absolutely flat on our stomachs with our head resting on one arm, and I think maybe that was partly to protect our eyes. And then the other hand behind our necks to protect our spinal cord, I guess. I’m not sure that would have done any good if the Russians had actually bombed us. Because we truly believed that there was a good chance that we were going to be bombed by the Russians. We truly did. And so those were serious, civil defense drills.
Franklin: You mean we as in you believed the Russians would bomb America, or Hanford specifically?
Janicek: Well, we thought that the Russians would bomb America, but that Hanford was a really good target. Because of—by then it was known that we were creating the plutonium for bombs and all of the nuclear activities going on out there. And we thought that, if Russia really wanted to take over the world, that they would want to take out all of the nuclear facilities so that we wouldn’t be able to fight back or build up our defenses to eventually fight back. The other thing I remember—excuse me—[COUGH]—about civil defense is that every so often, we would have drills where every neighborhood was told where to go, get in your car and drive out into the desert to get out of town, get away from Hanford. And they would have those—I don’t remember—maybe once a year. I don’t think we had them more often than that. But you were always cautioned to keep your gas tank at least half full, because there wouldn’t be time to go fill up if we all had to evacuate town. Now, I suspect that there was a second reason for those drills, and that is in case anything went wrong and something blew up at Hanford, like Chernobyl. We had an inordinate amount of faith in our government and our scientists and engineers and our leaders at Hanford, and believed they would keep us safe. And Hanford actually has an amazing safety record. Very few things went wrong and caused any difficulties. But I suspect that if something had happened at Hanford, that those evacuation routes would have—and those evacuation routes were marked for a number of years. Eventually the signs all disappeared. But you knew where your neighborhood was supposed to drive to.
Franklin: Interesting. Where was your neighborhood supposed to drive to, do you remember?
Janicek: Well, it was long before I was old enough to drive a car: I was in grade school. And I didn’t even know where I was when I was out of town. I didn’t know which way was up, down, or west, or south. I’m guessing, since we lived on McMurray in north Richland, we probably went west.
Franklin: Ah. And when we moved up to north Richland, did you also live in an alphabet house, or did you—
Janicek: Yes, we lived in a Q house. The houses on McMurray were all Qs and Rs. And they were all three-bedroom, one-story houses with a full basement, whereas the old houses—the old alphabet houses, As and Fs and many of the others—had a half-basement and then a three- or four-foot high wall in the basement of cement blocks, and then there was dirt behind that. And then some people, after they bought their homes, would dig out—it was called digging out—the basement. But we had a full basement, and really nice backyard.
Franklin: And is that the house that your parents bought when Richland—
Janicek: We were living in that house and then bought it, yes, when Richland sold. One of the tough things about living in Richland is that there was no air conditioning. The houses had swamp coolers, which also were called squirrel cages. They were great, big, huge things that attached to a window and made a lot of noise. It sounded like metal blades going around, very noisy, and water ran through them to cool the air. Well, that made the houses not—it didn’t cool the houses that much, but it made them very humid. So, sometimes, you forgot you were living in a desert or a semi-arid desert, because it was very humid along with the heat, and very uncomfortable. But my father’s store had refrigerated air conditioning. It was one of the first buildings to have that. I’m guessing that the hospital and—well, no, the hospital used to be little funny buildings. I’m guessing maybe the hotel had it, and maybe some restaurants. But, yeah, that was another reason that people liked Dawson Richards, because it was cool inside on hot days. [LAUGHTER] But that was difficult. And we had a lot of summers when the temperature was over 100 degrees. And, like now, we had some winters when it got down far below freezing, down to -10 or even 0 a couple of times. One of the other interesting weather things about living in Richland in the olden days is when you had the big dust storms, or the termination winds as some people called them, you would have great big huge clumps of sagebrush flying through town about five to ten feet off the ground. And one time, a sagebrush—I have never seen this since—a sagebrush as big as a Volkswagen lodged in front of our front door, and we couldn’t get in and out our front door. Because it had blown in and was kind of stuck to the doorknob and whatever we had around the front door. And we couldn’t budge it. We couldn’t grab a big enough piece, or reach in far enough to grab one of the main stems or limbs of the sagebrush to pull it out. So we’d all have to run around and go in and out the back door. But the worst part of the winds, or one of the worst parts, was the dust, because it got in your eyes. And people were starting to get contact lenses. And that was just absolutely murderous, to have all that dust blowing in your eyes and getting behind your contacts. And people would go around with tears running down their faces from--[LAUGHTER]—from how painful the dust was in their eyes. And people wore sunglasses day and night to try and protect their eyes. Of course, as Richland built up and got more civilized and more of the empty lots became houses with yards and grass and trees and flowers, then the dust was not as thick as it used to be. Some of the dust storms were blinding. They were like blizzards. Oh, and that reminds me. My first winter in Richland, the winter of ’49-’50, we had a blizzard that was so bad they would not let any children leave the school until their parents came and picked them up. Well, the dads worked at Hanford and travelled by bus, so it was a while before—I imagine they probably let them go home early to get their kids. I don’t know that, but I’m guessing. And we would all be waiting at the school until the parents showed up. It was not a problem for my parents, because I’m sure in a blizzard they weren’t selling any clothing, so they just came and picked us up. But it was really bad. I just read—the old Richland Bombers have an online Sandstorm. The Sandstorm was the school newspaper, and we have an online Sandstorm that comes out every single day of the year. And it mentions birthdays and anniversaries of people—married classmates—and announces deaths of classmates and also of favorite teachers. Somebody in the online Sandstorm only a day or two ago wrote about—and I never heard this story before, so I do not know if it’s truly true—but wrote about a father who came and picked up his little boy at school during the blizzard, and didn’t have a car. And so they were walking home and they got lost in the blizzard and were found frozen to death the next day. I had never heard that before, but I could believe that, because you could not see anything. Absolutely. It was dreadful. I remember that. I have a real good visual memory, and I remember exactly what that looked like. It was fearful.
Franklin: Wow.
Janicek: Yup.
Franklin: Wow.
Janicek: Yup.
Franklin: So you said you graduated in 1960.
Janicek: Yes.
Franklin: And then later on you came back to Hanford?
Janicek: Yes, I went to University of Washington for four years. And I developed this passion for Afghanistan. So I decided the only way—and I had spent a summer in Europe and did all of that and had a good time. But I don’t know why, I really wanted to go to Afghanistan. I had studied about it, I had written reports, read books. So I joined the Peace Corps and I said, don’t send me any place but Afghanistan. Well, in those days, you took all the tests and if they decide you were qualified—they’d never had anybody ask for Afghanistan, but they had programs in Afghanistan. So I went through Peace Corps training for three months and then went to Afghanistan. And I taught English in a girls’ high school. While I was there, I met and married my husband, who was from New York and Notre Dame, and I never would have met him if I’d stayed in Richland or even in the state of Washington. So we had this very unusual Afghan wedding that was written about in the paper last year when we celebrated our 50th anniversary. So we came back and he went to graduate school at Purdue. So we lived in Indiana from ’66 to ’78, twelve years. And our three children were born there. And then we lived in Indiana. His parents were in New York and mine were in Washington, and the kids never knew any of their relatives, they never got—and we said, well, this isn’t good. So we want to go one way or the other. There were a lot of reasons why we didn’t want to live on Long Island. It was overcrowded with traffic and polluted air and polluted water, and just a lot of reasons it didn’t appeal to us. So we came out to visit my parents, and my husband interviewed at Hanford and got two job offers. So we ended up moving to Richland in 1978. So for marrying a guy from New York who you met in Afghanistan, I never would have thought that my children would graduate from my high school. But they did. So we had three little Richland Bombers in the family besides their mom.
Franklin: And where did you live when you came back to Richland?
Janicek: When we came back, we moved into an A house on Thayer. And it was an A house—that’s the two-story duplex—but it had been converted by the previous owner into a one-family house. So we had more bedrooms and more living space and an unusual-shaped yard, and lived on Thayer, a half a block from Van Giesen.
Franklin: What did you and your husband do at Hanford? Because you said you—
Janicek: Well, he’s a mechanical engineer. So he started out doing mechanical engineering things. He was involved in robotics. He spent most of his career in the Tank Farms and was a design authority for a number of years before he retired. I began as a tech editor. Became a tech writer editor, and then had several stints as a manager of editors and word processors. And we were producing all of the huge reports coming out of Hanford, mostly reporting on cleanup. Cleaning up spills in the ground, cleaning up buildings—goodness. I worked on documents that were 6,000 pages long. Mostly online editing. When—at the height of the publications flurry at Hanford, we had 100 employees in our department. About 50 editors and about 50 word processors. But as time went on, the editors started editing online, and then we didn’t need word processors. Originally we would edit with a red pen, and then the word processors would type in all of our changes. But that morphed into just editing online. I absolutely loved my job. For 27 years, I worked with engineers and scientists and technical people. I felt like it brought me closer to my husband, because I had no technical background at all. But I had very good communication skills and had studied three other languages, and so I have a lot of good ideas about how English should be spoken and written. And really enjoyed doing that for 27 years.
Franklin: 27 years. So then you retired in 2005?
Janicek: No, I retired—he went to work in ’78; I went to work in ’80. So I retired December 2007.
Franklin: Okay. And how many different contractors did you work for?
Janicek: Well, when I originally came, we both worked for Rockwell. And in fact I worked on the Rockwell proposal when their contract was up. And that was a fascinating experience, because I got to work with national vice presidents of Rockwell. We spent the last three months at a secret facility in Downy, California putting the proposal together. I got to walk through a mockup of the shuttle—the space shuttle that they had built. Oh, now I forgot the question.
Franklin: The different contractors.
Janicek: Oh, yes, yes, yes. So after Rockwell ended up—it was a political thing, and Rockwell lost that contract. The contract went to Westinghouse and Boeing. Westinghouse was already here, but they won the larger contract that Rockwell had. And then the computer functions, including the editing and the graphics and all of the communication things were given to Boeing as a subcontractor to Westinghouse. So then my second employer was Boeing Computer Services. And then the next eight years or so later, the contract was up again, and that was when they went to about 13 different contractors, half of them inside the wall so to speak, and half of them outside. And at that time I went to work for—my job was still the same, and all of my management was the same, but it was just a different name on the paychecks for the company that owned us, and that was Lockheed Martin. And I was still working for Lockheed Martin when I retired.
Franklin: How had Richland changed from when you had graduated to when you came back and began to work for Hanford?
Janicek: Well, first of all, when I came back, a lot of the business had moved to Columbia Center, and there were empty buildings, and aging businesses in downtown Richland. It had spread out a lot in all directions. People were living in West Richland and in South Richland and in North Richland and all over the place. And that’s just Richland. I mean, Kennewick grew enormously; Pasco has grown enormously. So I had to kind of get used to driving and living in a much bigger city. And I have to laugh at myself, because even today, I mostly drive—I have it in my mind, a skeleton of the roads that I used when we lived here, when I first got my driver’s license in high school and drove around the Tri-Cities. And I kind of stick to those roads, because they’re the ones I know the best, and you know, they’re my old favorites. But one of the things I noticed is that a lot of people moved into the Tri-Cities who didn’t necessarily work for Hanford. And so you didn’t have that little small town, we’re-all-in-this-together feeling. You know, when people first came to Richland to work at Hanford, as I said, there were no grandparents, no relatives. We all kind of stuck together because nobody knew anybody; we all came as strangers and we came from all over the country. And so there was a real closeness. And I see that in the older classes that write into the online Richland Bomber Sandstorm every day, the alumni newsletter. By the time my kids were in high school and graduating, a lot of that closeness was gone. You didn’t know everybody in your neighborhood; you didn’t know everybody in your church if you went to church; you didn’t know all the kids in your classroom; you didn’t necessarily know the parents; you didn’t know whether your friends had younger or older brothers and sisters. It just was a lot more socially scattered, I would call it. One of the things I’m pleased about is there’s a lot more diversity in the Tri-Cities now. You have people from all parts of the world, all races, colors, creeds, religions. Which is really good. I have to laugh at my kids, because we made sure they grew up without any prejudices. They have had friends—they’re all adults now in their 40s. They have had friends of all different colors, races, and creeds. It tickles me to death that we succeeded in raising them that way, because it’s only right. What else is different about the Tri-Cities? Well, every day I open the paper and I read about businesses I didn’t know were there. All the years I worked at Hanford, I didn’t have time to go driving around and shopping and looking around. So I—there are dozens and dozens of restaurants I’ve never been to. One of the things that really confuses me is, because the Tri-Cities has grown so rapidly, there are many, many, many neighborhoods that I’ve never heard of the street names before. And when I hear about something being on a certain street, I have no idea where that street is. I have to get out the phone book and hope I can find it on the map. And I’ve also noticed that there are—in the old days, there was a lot more respect for Hanford than there is now. There are a lot of people in the Tri-Cities who are very anti-Hanford. They think either it’s evil or—well, it’s dangerous. That’s always true. We had—when I lived—when I worked at Hanford, we had a really good safety culture. We had safety drills, we knew what all the different sirens meant, whether they meant shelter-in-place or get out and run for your life. What’s going on and what are you supposed to do about it. I think some of that safety culture is lost, because the people who lived and worked here forever have been laid off or have retired or moved on one way or another. We don’t have that close confidence anymore that we’re all doing the right thing for the right reasons, and keeping each other safe. Some of that has been lost, and I see sometimes that people—new hires come in—and I saw this when I was working there—that sometimes new hires would come in, and they wouldn’t take safety as seriously as we thought they should. And, you know, once in a while somebody does something careless that gets them in trouble. There were very strict rules, and I edited a lot of those safety documents about procedures: how you did things, how you had to do things, double-checks and triple-checks on things that sometimes people kind of rolled their eyes and thought, oh, yeah, here we go. But in fact, those things kept you safe if you followed them correctly.
Franklin: It only takes one accident to—
Janicek: Yes.
Franklin: Do you think that that record of safety or the view of safety and the approach to safety changed as Hanford’s mission changed from one of production to a little more kind of opaque mission of cleanup?
Janicek: I don’t think so, because the people actually involved in the cleanup or, like me, I was reading about all of the dangers in all of the cleanup as I was editing the documents. I think that a lot of us were always impressed with how dangerous it could be and how close we were to somebody goofing up and causing an accident. And certainly, I think right before we came here was when they had the McCluskey incident where Harold McCluskey was badly exposed. It’s just astounding to me how well they were able to clean him up and keep him alive and how long he lived, and he actually died of a condition that he had before the accident ever happened. And that actually boosted my confidence that they were doing all the right things. I’ve been in buildings—I had a Q clearance for a while—I’ve been in building that were very restricted and—not passwords, but keypads and patrol and safety people and intelligence people and all kinds of things to try and prevent terrible things from happening. Whether it was just luck or whether it was good management, those things, for the most part, didn’t happen. I mean, Harold McCluskey was the only one—there have been some accidents where people have fallen and died or have been badly injured. Or I remember one time when they were cutting into a pipe that they didn’t—either they didn’t have the correct information or they didn’t take it seriously. And they cut into this pipe that was supposed to be empty and harmless, and it was full of hot burning steam. It hit these two guys right in the face. I don’t remember if they lived or not; I’m suspecting maybe they didn’t. But I’ve—that was a few years ago when—I just don’t remember now. Many of us have always been aware of the potential for accidents. Sometimes people coming in from other places, if they didn’t work in dangerous situations before, they had to adjust their thinking or they might get in trouble if they—every once in a while, either a person or a company self-reports that we screwed up and didn’t do something right. And they don’t do that often enough. I mean, we have whistleblowers with personal issues, and we have whistleblowers with true concerns and who have honestly seen something that needs to be corrected. I’m sure it’s very difficult to keep all of that in mind. We recently toured B Reactor, which was a fascinating experience. When you look at that huge, big thing and all of those fuel rods. And if you think about what little, innocent thing could have happened or some switch accidentally flipped and what it could have caused. You know, we all remember Chernobyl. I worked—I was in a volunteer group called the Hanford Family that was formed when they were shutting down N Reactor and it was about the same time that Chernobyl happened. A lot of people were really scared and concerned that the same thing could happen at Hanford. So I became their editor and communications person for this group. And one of the things I did was research and interview an expert and find out why it couldn’t happen here. And one of the things was the difference between boiling water reactors, BWR, and pressurized water reactors, PWR. And what they did at Chernobyl, you couldn’t do here. The reactor would not let you do it or it would shut down. And how these guys had overridden their own safety controls. Again, they didn’t take safety seriously enough or they didn’t understand the principles behind what they were doing and what they were causing. It was a terribly frightening time. But I published this lovely three-fold pink brochure about why Chernobyl can’t happen here, what’s different about our reactors from—and then we were just down to N Reactor and the power reactor, the Hanford Generating Station at Energy Northwest. It was an interesting experience to learn that stuff and to put it in language that regular people could understand and to hand it out at functions. We went to a fair in Yakima; we had a couple of things—big—I don’t know—exhibitions or shows that occurred in the Tri-Cities, and we had our little booth and handed out our information and told people about why that couldn’t happen here. That was an interesting experience. For a non-technical person, I appreciated getting information and putting it into a form that regular folks who didn’t work at Hanford or have any technical background could understand. I have no idea how effective the brochure was. But it was interesting to do.
Franklin: Interesting. Did you do any other public relations work when you—at your job at Hanford? Or was that a—
Janicek: Well, most of the time, I was editing big reports. I started after a very short period—I worked for several years with the BWIP project—Basalt Waste Isolation Project. That was the concept where we were going to bury the waste deep in the basalt. I first edited and then managed the editors who edited the environmental restoration—no, environmental assessment document and the—oh, goodness. Now I’ve forgotten what it was called. Two different versions, one of them was six volumes long about how we were going to safely contain the waste, and some of it had to do with Nevada, which has since [LAUGHTER] In fact, a lot of the waste was going to go to Nevada, and Nevada shut that off. I did have a very interesting experience. I was on a national committee that worked with DOE orders and directives. It had to do with information management, because Hanford and the other government facilities that did things nuclear had to send copies of their reports to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were kept and managed by the government. Some of them were classified and some were not. Most were not. This group would get together sometimes once a year, sometimes two or three times, and go over the DOE directives and bring them up to date on how to manage all this information. And I ended up writing parts of a DOE directive and editing other parts. I think you can still get those online. And I can open that up and see my very own words there. It kind of tickles me to see that. That was a really interesting project. And I got to go see—I got to go to Bethesda, Maryland and see where all of the energy reactors, like the one that we have at Energy Northwest—how they have to report in—I don’t know—I think every hour to let them know that everything’s all right. And I got to sit at this huge, big console where all of these Hanford and Oak Ridge and Argonne in Illinois and WIPP project in New Mexico and the Nevada Test Site and—anywhere there was a reactor, all the lights flashing and the buttons and the hourly reporting in. They actually monitor that to be sure that nothing—there are not going to be any surprises or any Chernobyls. That was kind of an interesting thing to see.
Franklin: Oh, cool.
Janicek: It was.
Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about in your interview?
Janicek: Oh, I remember the Columbia River floods. Before we had all the dams and maybe even before the dikes were built—I’m not sure when they were built. The year before we moved to Richland, I lived—we lived in Vancouver, Washington. And there was a little community on the floodplain between Vancouver and Portland on the Columbia River called Vanport. When the river flooded, the spring of ’48, the water came up—maybe to the roof lines of those—it was low income housing and I suspect it was for guys who had just gotten out of World War II and were trying to build their lives and they had young families. The flooding was—it was just really terrible. I remember that and the pictures, partly because my father was one of many people who volunteered to patrol against looting. They would go out at night in motorboats. And he had a pistol that he kept for years. [LAUGHTER] We knew where it was hidden, but we never told our folks that we knew. [LAUGHTER] And we never touched it. Because they had to evacuate everybody, of course. And I have no idea whether people died or were injured during that flooding. But one of the memorable aspects of it was that there was a Jantzen Knitting Mill in that same area. And Jantzen’s old logo was of a woman in a one-piece bathing suit and a swimming cap diving. And she was—it was a huge sign and it was on top of the Jantzen building, and when the flooding came, the Jantzen Knitting Mills flooded and she looked like she was diving into the water in the flood. It was just really cool! [LAUGHTER] It was a picture they showed all over the United States. So then the next year, we came to Richland in the spring of ’49 and people were all talking about the ’48 flood and how bad it was. But I remember a couple of floods that were just about as bad after we moved here. At that time, the only way to get between Richland and Kennewick was on what we called the old river road, which goes through Columbia Park now. And so that road completely flooded. You couldn’t get through there. So leaving Richland, you would have to drive south over the hills and there were just—I don’t know, farm roads, probably—and go all the way around to get to south Kennewick and then come back into Kennewick. And even worse if you had to go to Pasco. Because the flooding really messed things up. And then some of those river floods would pick up a lot of trees and limbs from the shoreline, as the—and they would have rattlesnakes on them. For some reason, because of how the Columbia River turns when it gets to what was then called Riverside Park and is now called Howard Amon, a lot of those trees and tree limbs would lodge into the bank and all of the sudden we had rattlesnakes all over the park. So that was kind of interesting. [LAUGHTER] Scary! Opportunity for people to go out and see snakes or capture snakes or get rid of them, because rattlesnakes are serious business. But that was one of the things I remember about some of the problems with climate that we had in the good old days.
Franklin: The good old days.
Janicek: Oh, goodness. What else do I remember?
Franklin: Did you go to any of the Atomic Frontier Days?
Janicek: Oh! Yes! Well, especially after we moved to McMurray and I was going to Jefferson School, because Jefferson was right across from the Uptown area and I walked that area every day, knew it very well. And we would have parades for Atomic Frontier Days on George Washington Way. And in the really old days, when there was still a Camp Hanford in North Richland, that parade included—I remember a huge, big—I think it was called Red Dog—looked like a missile or a rocket or something. And then there were some smaller rockets, weapons. And they would haul them through town as part of the parade. And that was kind of fun and interesting to see, because my dad didn’t work at Hanford and wasn’t involved with the military. So that was all new to me and fascinating to see. They had a beard-growing contest. I think the Richland Atomic Frontier Days were usually in August and all the guys would grow beards for the month of August, and they had—I don’t know, some things for kids to do and things for adults to do, and clowns and a few floats. You know, you always had a Miss Atomic Frontier Days, which later became Miss Tri-Cities. That was a rather special event that happened. People would go by and throw candy on all the kids—kids would be there with their tricycles. We would decorate our tricycles with crepe paper strips, or put playing cards in the wheels so they would go click, click, click when the wheel went around and decorate. Sometimes they would decorate up the wagons and put wagons behind the tricycles. So we’d have a lot of tricycles and some bicycles lining the streets of George Washington Way as the parade went by. That was a fun thing to do.
Franklin: Neat.
Janicek: Yeah.
Franklin: Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for talking with us today and sharing your stories about growing up in Richland and working at Hanford. They were wonderfully detailed and I really appreciate it.
Janicek: Oh, well, thank you. I love to think back to the old days and just reading the online Sandstorm everyday kind of tweaks my memory and—old teachers and old friends, and like to pass these things on to my kids who grew up in such a different time and they don’t understand about being afraid the Russians were going to bomb you. [LAUGHTER] Some of the other things that went on that led to me being who I am today and led to Richland being what it is today. And I enjoy talking about it, and I realize that because of my father’s position, not as part of Hanford, but very much as a part of a community, that I have a lot of great memories. Because I’m fortunate to have a good memory, I still remember a lot of people’s names, a lot of businesses’ names, a lot of things that went on. When my father was on the school board, there was a little town and school at Mattawa, which—and those people served—that was when they were building Priest Rapids Dam and Wanapum Dam. So the school board, once a year, would get special, special, special permission to drive—they probably were escorted—to drive through the Hanford Site and go out to Mattawa and they would have one school board session that the teachers and the parents could attend who lived at Mattawa because they had no way of getting in to town for it, and that was part of the Richland School District. Now, today, Mattawa’s completely gone. I mean, everybody left and the buildings are pretty much all gone and doesn’t exist anymore. But I always thought that was very nice and very thoughtful that they arranged to be able to go out there once a year to meet with the staff and the families and see—address their concerns for educating the kids.
Franklin: Yeah. Neat. Interesting. Well, thank you.
Janicek: Welcome.
Franklin: Okay.
Vargas: That it? All right.
View interview on Youtube.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Wanda Munn on November 2nd, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Wanda about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name?
Wanda Munn: Wanda Iris Munn. W-A-N-D-A, last name M-U-N-N.
Franklin: Great. When and where were you born, Wanda?
Munn: I was born in Brownwood, Texas, which is 17 miles from the geographic center of the state on September 13th, 1931. I was a Depression baby. So I had all that background and the joy of being a native Texan.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] How and why did you come to the area to—how and why did you come to work at Hanford?
Munn: Well, in technical terms, I’m a retread. I decided in midlife that I needed to finish a college degree, and I wanted to do it in some discipline that was really challenging and had great contribution capability for the planet and especially for my nearer community. When you make those decisions in your 40s, you have some knowledge of what you’re doing. And it was not an easy one for me to do, although I did an asset-liability framework in my mind of what I could do, what—I was a divorced mother of two children and had the responsibility for a declining mother and a dependent sister. So it was incumbent upon me to do this as quickly as possible. I only had about a year’s worth of actual college credit, most of it at the University of Texas, much earlier in life. When I decided that I was going to go for nuclear engineering, my friends and colleagues were actually horrified. They all could understand my going out to find myself somehow, but a technical degree like nuclear engineering was a real stunner to them. They were fond of saying to me, but Wanda, you’ll be over 40 by the time you get your degree! And my response was, I’m going to be over 40 anyhow. I’d rather have it with this degree than not have it with this degree. So because my prior material was not actually engineering, it had been medicine, I really had to start from scratch. I didn’t have any money and essentially sold everything but the children, and I couldn’t find a good buyer for them. [LAUGHTER] But I tried to do a four-year curriculum in three years and managed to do it. But it wasn’t easy, and I don’t recommend it. [LAUGHTER] Nevertheless, by the time I had finished my engineering degree at Oregon State University—I was living in Corvallis at the time—I had fallen in love with breeder reactors. This was in the mid-‘70s, and in the mid-‘70s, the big game in town as far as breeder technology was concerned was right here at Hanford. The Fast Flux Test Facility was in the process of construction at that time, and it was the most exciting technical thing on the horizon. I was delighted to be able to come here and interview for a position there. And that’s exactly what I did. I became a member of the Westinghouse Hanford team that was constructing that reactor. And never looked back. It was a wonderful choice for me. A very exciting time, building on the shoulders of the giants that we’d had here three decades earlier. And I have never regretted a day of it.
Franklin: Excellent. So, tell me what kinds of work did you do at FFTF?
Munn: I was—for the most part I was a cognizant engineer. Westinghouse had an excellent program at the time of rotational program where you had an opportunity, if you chose to do so, to work in three different aspects of the construction, design, startup process. I originally chose to go into plant operations. It seemed the most exciting to me and we were actually building the structure at that time. We—I did two other rotations which made it possible for me to go all over the site, actually. When I say the site, the site that I’m talking about right now is the FFTF site, what we refer to as the 400 Area. It did not include the old production reactors and the waste projects that were underway by Rockwell Hanford at that time. I had been the cognizant engineer for the reactor system for a variety of the other head compartment systems. For the longest period of time, my responsibility was the sodium systems, especially the sodium testing system and the gas sampling systems. During a long period of time, I also worked in nuclear safety, which, again, took me literally all over the plant. It was a very exciting time. The Fast Flux Test Facility was a flagship. There’s no question about it. It was the most advanced research and development reactor in the world. Not only at that time, but no one, to my knowledge, has exceeded the capability that we had, nor the type of long-term vision that we had at FFTF. It was a specialized group of men and women. More men than women, obviously. That, of course, was another aspect of the times. And if you want me to talk about that, I can a little bit. It may or may not be interesting to your audience.
Franklin: I would love for you to talk about that.
Munn: As anyone who lived through that era knows, a woman with a technical degree was not welcomed, nor did they actually have access to many portions of the engineering technology. There were a few. I was not what I think of as a first wave, but I was certainly the second wave. The first—whoa. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to—
Emma Rice: Overload the circuit?
Franklin: Overload the circuit.
Munn: Cause—yeah, I didn’t mean to overload anything. We—
Franklin: Did we—yeah, I was going to say—so we--
Vargas: No, we’re fine on the camera.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Vargas: It’s battery-powered.
Franklin: Oh, great.
Munn: Okay, very good, that’s fine. We just—I had as my mentors women, several of whom had had careers in the military. It was one of the few real engineering doors that were open to them at the time. And the woman who was the technical vice president for Westinghouse Hanford at the time was Lieutenant Colonel Arminta Harness, recently retired from the Air Force and NASA. She had worked on the Space Program and had known me as a result of our interaction in the Society of Women Engineers. We called her Minta. Minta was the last of the two-year-term national presidents for the Society of Women Engineers. And she and her colleagues had been among those who were not allowed to go into other forms of engineering in the public sector, because they had two routine answers that they heard from potential employers. One was, we don’t have a women’s restroom in our building. And the other, that I thought was probably closer to the truth for most of them was, we accept the fact that you could do this work—not can, but could do this work. However, if our clients knew that the work was done by a woman, it would never be accepted. Now, that probably had some ring of truth to it, but nevertheless, it was almost an insurmountable barrier for those women. But as anyone who knows anything about the social history of the United States knows, in the ’60s and early ‘70s, there was a real revolution in this regard. I think it’s a spin-off of what happened during World War II. It rather astonished people that women could take the jobs that men had left and had done such a fine job with them while the men were away from the country. But it was just assumed that when they returned, of course, they would return to their positions, whatever they were, and that the women would go back and put their aprons on. There’s nothing demeaning about that, except it was pretty infuriating for the women who had shown for five years that they could do these jobs and had done it very, very well, to be told now that—not that they—they would no longer accept that they couldn’t do it, but they were told that they should not do it. And therefore were not going to be allowed to. These were the women who had daughters who were not going to accept that as an answer. So as the social process began to move, and the legislative process began to bring itself to bear, more and more employers were finding it necessary to hire a certain number of women in order to fulfill the requirements of a government contract. This was both an enormous opportunity and a terrible detriment for those of us who were living in that time. That social action, as a matter of fact, was a part of the reason why I had decided to go into nuclear engineering. It was the first time the doors were really open to do that. But the two-edged sword was very easy to see if you stood back one step and looked at it. That is, these women were going into a milieu where the individuals who occupied those spaces had thousands of years of history behind them, of being world leaders, commanders of all they surveyed, and they had only two interactions, they—well, I take it back—three interactions they’d ever had with women throughout their entire lives from the time they were infants. The women with whom they had ever interacted had either been caretakers, sexual objects, or clerical employees. There were no other options. That was their interaction. Now, women had been doing reasonably well in small entrepreneurial businesses of their own for quite some time. But this was a different thing. This was high technology. The fact that people like Admiral Grace Hopper were making the beginnings of the Digital Age come to life were not seen by the general public. That was such an outlier; it wasn’t commonly known. But as those of us who came into this profession during this period of time learned very quickly, the people in power were all masculine, as one would expect. But they had no experience in how to deal with a female colleague. Females, yes. They had females around them and a basic part of their lives forever. But dealing with a woman on a level playing field in a technical way was not an experience that they even knew anyone who could relate to them. So the first thing they thought was, one: you’re only there because you got a leg-up; you’re being given a free ride because you happen to be female. And the other thing they thought is: and if the free ride gives you as much power as we’re afraid it’s going to, you’re going to take my job. So as we went in, we had to do two things. One, we had to prove we really were engineers; we really could do the work. And two, we had to prove to them that we were colleagues of theirs, not interlopers who—we all know the general story about how women got ahead in that time. We had to prove that wasn’t on the slate, and that we were not going to take their jobs. This ain’t easy. And I’m very, very glad that I was older at the time this occurred, because I’d been accustomed—you know, I’d grown up with these guys. I knew who they were. I knew what they were like, and I understood what their lives were. So, it wasn’t hard for me to understand the disturbance that was going on in their intellectual world. But younger women coming in at the time didn’t understand that. They saw this as being some kind of real repression of some sort—an attempt to keep them from fulfilling their potential. This, in my view, was not the case. I still see that quite often, that sometimes women in technical fields have a tendency to think that they’re playing the minority card. But that is, in my view, no longer true. The concerns that I had at that time have long since passed, and I’m glad that’s true.
Franklin: What was—I’d like to step back a bit, and thank you for that. I think that was a really illuminating aspect, and I might have you come lecture my US History class on women in the workplace at some point.
Munn: I’d be delighted to do that.
Franklin: What was—so, going—coming back to your motivation to go back to school, what was it—was there a moment, or when did you realize that you wanted to—when and why did you realize that you wanted to go back to school?
Munn: Okay, now this is really getting down in the weeds here, but that’s okay. The reason I left the University of Texas was to marry. [COUGH] Excuse me. As I think I mentioned. I was in pre-med. I had grown up with great ambitions. It had never occurred to me that there was much that I couldn’t do because I was female. It occurred to me that there were limits to what I could do because of my intellectual prowess, but I had always been drawn to medicine as a child, and had actually hoped to go into psychiatry. Which I’m glad I didn’t do. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is, I left the university to marry. I was 18. Because I had graduated from high school at 16. I had chosen pre-med because that’s what had been in my head for a long, long time. It was science, it was technical, it was beneficial: it was all the things that I wanted my life to be. But marriage interrupts that kind of thing. It takes you to a different kind of world, a different kind of setting. My then-husband was in the Air Force, and so I followed him in the Air Force. He was an enlisted man. He was from a working class blue collar family. No one in his family—a large family—no one in his family had ever gone to college. This made absolutely no sense to me—why one would not advance their education in a period and in a place where it was difficult, but it wasn’t all that difficult to find a way to pay tuition. You know, why not? There’s state schools all over the United States. Choose something and go there. So it was rather difficult on my then-husband, because he was not prepared for college work at all, and I was just fairly insistent that he was going to do that. So he had a great deal of remedial work to do, and this essentially meant that I had spent about seven years of my life trying to assist him in his studies, and essentially support the family in doing so. He did finish not only his bachelor’s degree but also his master’s degree and was in the education field. During all that period of time, I was essentially doing professional work of one sort or another for individuals who held authoritative positions, but whose shoes I could have filled easily. I did not have what I call my union card: I didn’t have a college degree. Further, I did not have the technical training to do the kinds of science and technology that really and truly interested me. So in the ‘70s, I found myself the divorced mother of two, as I said, and with considerable family responsibility. I knew that I could not continue to support what is now a rather large number of people on the salaries that I was able to get as a glorified administrative assistant. By the way, there’s been a change of terms. In that period, the term administrative assistant did not mean a secretary, although my secretarial and clerical skills were very high. That was not the real reason I had the post. I actually was an assistant to the person who held the title, whether it was physicians, accountants, insurance people, academics—that’s what I did. But there’s a factor of about two, sometimes three, in the monthly salary of those individuals and in mine. So you don’t have to be a follower of Dr. Einstein to be able to work out the math. You know, it doesn’t take very long. I needed a professional salary. And besides that, intellectually, I had been spinning my wheels for 20 years. And I was tired of it. I was absolutely tired of it. I wanted to be doing something that was challenging me, and in which my contribution was a contribution. Not a contribution to the person who was doing the contribution. It isn’t that I wanted to be recognized for that; I’ve always been of the school that it’s amazing what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit for it. I didn’t care who got the credit for it. I just wanted to be on the ground floor. That’s all.
Franklin: So for all the degrees—the things you could have chosen in what we now call the STEM fields that would make a solid difference, why nuclear engineering?
Munn: Can you think of anything else that’s more challenging and more imaginative? I can’t. At the time, it took me a while to measure down to engineering. I started with thinking of medicine, still. But when I realized the amount of time and the amount of money that was going to be necessary for me to do that, not to mention the time—the concentrated daily schedule that’s necessary for that kind of thing, given the family duties that I had—it seemed like an impossibility. So I had to rule out medicine. Besides which, it would have taken me seven years to get to the point where I could actually get to hands-on anything. That—I didn’t have that much time. I had to do this in—and I had no money. As a result of that, I really had to do something in a much shorter time. And it seemed to me that three years was all I was going to be able to handle. Now, when you take that away and you start looking at the other science things, the biggie at the time also was computer technology. We were just getting out of the room full of server stages, and every college campus finally did have a computer center where you could go in the dead of night and run your deck which you had typed. [LAUGHTER] It was still unknown to the general public. I happened to own the first 35 that was sold at the Oregon State University bookstore—the first handheld computer. [LAUGHTER] It’s still on my desk, as a matter of fact. But that was—it was an exciting time then, but I—what little I knew about computer technology, I knew the detailed precision that was necessary to do this. I’d already known—had the experience of trying to make a computer do what I wanted it to do instead of what I had told it to do. And knowing that the misplacement of one character could demolish the efforts of a whole deck just did me in. I couldn’t handle that kind of concept. I knew I would not be a good computer engineer. Too much real detail oriented in that. Being a big picture kind of person makes a difference. So I set that aside. The other thing that really seizes the imagination is something that so many people don’t think about—that is the basic requirement for any life anywhere is not food, clothing and shelter. It’s even more basic than that. It’s energy. If you don’t have adequate energy, there is no way you can do any of the things that you have to do to survive. The energy picture right there right then was easily as muddled as it is now, and possibly even more. I had looked—thought about mining, too. It just really sounded dull to me. Just dull. I’d been raised in Texas. Petroleum engineering was a big thing at the time. Oh, for crying out loud, you look around in the dirt, you find oil, you think you might have oil, you drill for oil, you either have it or you don’t have it. Then you either have success or not and you move onto another well. That just—that didn’t sound like much of a thrill to me, either. So long as I couldn’t be there to watch the well come in, what’s the point? This gets—there was, of course, a great deal of hoo-ha about solar, wind, ocean current—all those things were very big in the human imagination at the time. I kept thinking, really? No. Not really. Excellent for specific purposes. Useful? Oh, my, yes. Pursue it by all means. But the biggie? No. I already knew that there were only two concentrations of energy that could possibly serve an industrial society. And I’m all for industrial societies. And I knew that that was carbon-based fuels and nuclear. Well, let’s see. Which is the most interesting of those? Gosh, it didn’t take me long to figure that out. So, to me, it was just a pyramid. You start at the bottom and you work up, and the star of the fleet as far as I was concerned was nuclear engineering. How fascinating can you get?! My word. Totally unknown until less than a few decades before. And now the most incredible amount of power. Energy that we’ve never even been able to imagine, we’ve got it, we know how to control it, we can do whatever we need to do with it. With breeder reactors—hey. The only place I know you can make enormous amounts of electricity and still be creating more fuel at the same time. Don’t know anything else that does that. Highly imaginative, and not getting good press at the time, either.
Franklin: I wanted—and I think you might have answered some of the question, my next question. But you mentioned that your friends and colleagues were terrified that you chose nuclear engineering.
Munn: Yes.
Franklin: Why was that?
Munn: Too hard. Underwater basket weaving, popular psychology, you know, art, the many of the social sciences, the things that do good things for society but don’t require that much in the way of focused knowledge of some sort. That’s—you know, it takes a lot of work, but it takes a different kind of brainpower. We really live in two worlds, you know. C.P. Snow pointed that out in his books quite some time ago. We live in an enumerate world and an innumerate world. There’s nothing wrong with either of those worlds, it’s just that they don’t communicate well. And a significant number of people are math-phobic. Have been most of their lives and probably will be most of their lives. But the only way you can explain most things in science is numerically. So you either see that as a form of language, or you don’t. And I was able to see it as a form of language. Please don’t misinterpret me; I am not a good mathematician. But I do see the mathematic relationships in things. I see the mathematics in color spectra. I see the mathematics in music. I see the mathematics in what we’re doing here right now. And many people don’t see the relationship between these technologies and mathematics.
Franklin: You had mentioned earlier some of the challenges that women of your generation—or in the generation—the time at which you entered the workforce, you mentioned some of the challenges that women were facing. Did you—were there any of those challenges specifically at FFTF, or can you kind of describe how that was to be a woman at this newly—this brand new reactor?
Munn: Yes. One of the things that was very frustrating about it was that we did have a number of women who, in their lexicon, were breaking barriers, and I was glad they were there. They were doing semi-technical jobs. Many of them non-professional jobs, but nevertheless requiring interaction with the hands-on people who were on the floor putting things together, and doing cool things, like being able to stand over the open reactor before it was filled and feel how far it was from one wall to the other. Those are the kinds of things people don’t get to do. I got to do those things. It was wonderful. But we had a couple of things. Women had never been taught anything but dress codes. And knowing how to dress in a true working engineering facility was not a common thing. We would, for example, one of our Society of Women Engineers sections when I was visiting had a woman come and talk—a popular topic of the day was dressing for work. Dressing for work essentially meant dressing like the woman who was speaking to us who was an attorney. Now, the toughest physical barriers that she faced in her workplace were the carpet in the courtroom, trying not to slip down on marble floors. This is not the challenge that we faced in the workplace that we were talking about. So clothing alone became a big item for many of our young women who were coming in. They had been taught to dress attractively and a little bit sexy, you know. Always that little bit of come-on. And it was a bit of a challenge to convince them, first of all, that if you were going to be working in a plant, you don’t even consider wearing a skirt. I’m sorry, you just don’t. You’re not going to be able to walk across the grids. You are not going to be able to climb ladders. You are not going to be able to go where your male colleagues have to go to do their job. If you’re going to do this job—you can’t do it while you’re worrying about your femininity. I’m sorry. You can do that if you want with color. We lucked out there, didn’t we? It’s okay for women to wear any kind of color they want to. So you can be very feminine in your clothing, in terms of color. But I’m sorry, the long tresses that are so popular today? You’re not going to go in a working plant with this lovely, flowing hair that looks so good in a commercial, but is rotten when you’re walking around operating machinery. You don’t want to get pulled into that headfirst. No kidding. So—and there’s the business of the shoes. Even after my plant—the plant that the FF team put together—even after that was completed, in order to get there, if I didn’t want to walk two-and-a-half miles around the plant on concrete, I was going to have to walk across crushed rock. This is an operating plant. You know, we’re not dressed up for Sunday best. We’re working here. So why do you have on those heels? You’re going to have to walk across crushed rock. Why would you do that? I know it looks nicer with this particular outfit—fluff, fluff. But I’m sorry; that’s not why you’re here. So I had—the woman that I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite mentors, Arminta Harness—had what she called the Ten Commandments for a Woman Engineer. Most of them were humorous, but none to me was more humorous than what I believe was number seven, which said, Thou shalt not be sexy at the office, even if thy cup runneth over. I thought that was extremely humorous, and it still remains my favorite commandment to young women going into engineering. Thou shalt not—that’s—wherever else you want to be sexy, you may, but please don’t bring that to the workplace. So I have had one or two confrontations with—in each case, they were a technician or a runner for some of the construction people—but young women who insisted on wearing provocative t-shirts, especially. I’ve made a couple of them rather angry by telling them that I spent a great deal of my life trying to teach the men who are working here that I am their colleague, I’m an engineer, we’re building something together here. What I may think of you or what you may think of me otherwise has no bearing on why we are here. We’re being paid to do this very important job, and it will be done right. Don’t distract these guys with something like this while I have to come along behind them and tell them that this has to be done in a different way. And they’re not listening to me. They’ve still got you hung up in their mind. Tsk. Don’t do that. Those are—they seem a little strange now, given what transpires in today’s workplace and given the clothing that we have now. Frankly, I’m a bit disappointed as an individual that we as women have finally been allowed by the males who occupied those positions to allow us to use the capabilities that we have to perform the same kinds of functions, and yet you have—it never occurred to me that dress, as we see it now, was going to devolve into this, and to me devolve is the appropriate word. Never occurred to me that we would get so far afield from keeping our eye on the ball and staying focused on the task at hand when we’re in professional positions. But, hey. The world moves on. Brave new world.
Franklin: Indeed. Were there any—did you face any kind of discrimination or attitude from your male colleagues at FFTF at first? Or was it—it sounds like you’ve described a pretty congenial relationship. Were there any instances that stand out?
Munn: Well, there were one or two. But they only happened once. When they happened, I felt it was my responsibility both as an older female worker and as a real professional person to clear the air and make it very plain—not try to send double messages ever. And I think—when you’re dealing with human—rational human beings, you don’t have to keep doing the same thing over and over again. All you have to do is clear the air, make the straight statement that needs to be made, and you’re fine. And I have had to tell a couple of my—of people in my management chain, look, the last thing I want to be is where you are. At the time, it was assumed that a woman with a technical degree and an MBA was a really hot ticket. So of course, naturally, what the idea was—came to work at FFTF, and a year later started working at the Joint Center for Graduate Study, which is the origin of the facility we’re in right now. It’s now morphed into Washington State University Tri-Cities. It’s wonderful. But at the time, there were four regional colleges that had been pulled together, interestingly, by one of the people that was very instrumental in that was a man named Leland Berger, who was just—we just lost Lee last week. He was one of the people who were instrumental in putting together the conglomerate of universities to make it possible for the people who were working on the Hanford Site at the time to be able to pursue graduate degrees. It was a difficult proposition for someone who came here, especially if they were going to be a long-term worker, individual leader, here on the Hanford Site. They’re very far removed from any campus. So doing master’s work was very difficult to do. The whole concept of the individuals at the time who put together this consortium of universities was so that people could live here and, sure, it takes longer because you’re working full-time, but evening classes that are taught by fully-accredited universities made it possible for us to do that. So my MBA’s from the University of Washington. Go Huskies! Sorry about that.
Franklin: It’s okay.
Munn: Nevertheless—I’m not forgiven. Nevertheless, it was a concerted—a really concerted program, and it was almost impossible to take more than six hours a term, because you’re working full time. And at the time, we were in acceptance, testing and startup at FFTF, which meant that my days were easily ten hours long, and I don’t mean four tens. [LAUGHTER] I mean, work days were easily more than ten hours—ten hours or more. And whenever we had actual tests running, when we had things that were going on 24/7, quite often through the holidays and through weekends, we worked. But that meant classes were relegated to evenings only, and you didn’t have any spare time to do a lot of off-campus work. So we did have a challenge in that regard, but I think most of the people who were trying to do all of those things at the same time recognized that the benefits outweighed the problems that we were having to face in doing it. Scheduler problems are very hard. I was a fortunate person in being able to get by with about five hours’ sleep a night. Did that for a long, long time without any real detriment. But you do burn out on that after a while. We’ve been fortunate in so many ways in this region. The academic opportunities that we’ve had, despite the major problems that we have—not the least of which was isolation, geographically. Not isolation, but harder to get from here to there than it is a lot of places.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Can you describe—
Munn: Did I answer your question? I’m sorry.
Franklin: No—yes.
Munn: Good, all right.
Franklin: You did, and then you actually answered another one I was going to ask you.
Munn: Another eight or ten. Yeah, sorry.
Franklin: So, can you describe a typical work day at the FFTF?
Munn: Yes. Typical work day. Up at 5:30 or 6:00, something like that. Breakfast for the kid or kids still at home. Out the door before 7:00, because the traffic was terrible. The traffic was not just the work folks going out to Hanford; we also had three private sector commercial nuclear plants being built at the same time. So the construction traffic going out to the Hanford Site was pretty scary. You needed to take plenty of time, because heaven knows what was going to happen on the way. By 7:15, needed to be through security. Security is not often a time-consuming thing, because you do it every day and it’s routine. But you know that anything that you’re carrying has to go through the x-ray, and you know that you, yourself, have to go through x-ray. You are likely to need steel-toed shoes whether you take them on or off—whether you put them on at work or whether you put them on beforehand depends on whether you want to take off heavy boots and walk through barefoot or not. And it depends on whether or not there’s any real hang-up on the way in. Usually there isn’t. But, nevertheless, you have to take time to assure that you’re going through security or not. Then the place that you parked was never—it was impossible to park in a place that was near to the security gate that you had to go through. So, there’s a little bit of a walk to get to security, and then from security, there’s a little bit of a walk to where you’re going to be. You’re expected to be in your workplace and working at 7:30. Not just arriving at the facility at 7:30. So if you’re going to get coffee or if you’re going to have to wait a little bit for your computer to boot up, any of those things, you need to be in your office by 7:15, because at 7:30 you are truly expected to be ready to go. Much of the management in my part of the world was ex-Navy nuclear trained, and precision, as far as time was concerned, was important to them. So you learned fairly early that it became important. You didn’t have the enormous amount of flex hours that I observe people having now. That just didn’t exist. By 7:30, you had either documents that you were having to deal with on your desk, or you were dealing with the material that was being incoming by that time on your computer. If you had a computer on your desk, interestingly, it was—I had been onsite for probably five, six years before engineers actually had computers on their desks. That was—we’re so accustomed to that now, it’s interesting to think back, how—in my lifetime--comparatively recently, it’s been. And I was one of the few people who was ranting and raving about that, because most of the new engineers who were just coming out of school had just learned—they’d just been computer-trained. This first batch of computer engineers who were computer-trained at school. The others were completely on the ground for those. So there were very few literate people in terms of computers around in the mid-‘70s. There just weren’t a bunch. We had access to the computer facility down the hall, but you had to get computer time much the way you did in college. There was only one real server, and you had to go there to do what you needed to do. One of the first things I did in the circles that I moved in—the engineering circles I moved in—the first thing that we did at FFTF was the Plan of the Day. We called it the POD, and the Plan of the Day was usually at 8:00, which meant you had time to get your hardhat and walk from wherever you were to wherever the POD was being held. And I took—I had a hardbound journal about this size that I kept notes in. You had to keep notes, because too much was happening in too many different ways and it affected you in one way or another. You need to remember who said that and when it was going to be done. So you took your journal, you put on your hardhat. You had to have your hardhat everywhere you went. I’m sorry about the hairdo. That’s tough. You had hardhat hair if you were working onsite. POD could take anywhere from half hour to 45 minutes. They didn’t like to tie people up, because they wanted—the object was to try to get you to your workplace with your instructions for the day by 8:30. But that’s sometimes hard to do. Nevertheless, Plan of the Day, POD, was first thing. After the POD—not everybody attended. It was rare for me not to attend, for one reason or another, whatever position I was in, something was usually happening and I was required to be there. Certainly, after I went into nuclear safety it was a daily thing. I didn’t have a choice. I needed to be there, had to be there. And the plan of the day often—the individuals who were way up the management chain from those of who were there, quite often would appear to give specific instructions about some aspect of what we were doing at that time which was very crucial. We all were aware of what the timeline needed to be. Project management was key to how things were done in that particular facility. And they were done on time and in budget. There wasn’t any question about it. It didn’t matter what it took, you stayed and did it. And it was a team effort. I was never privy to any discussion about doing it any other way. This was an enormously devoted team. So, after the Plan of the Day, you had your marching orders for the day; you knew what you had to do. And you went to wherever the action was for you that day, and you did that. We took a half-hour for lunch. Depending on where you were, for a brief period of time, you had access to cafeteria food. We had a cafeteria in the 300 Area when most of the planning and engineering was going on there. We had a cafeteria for a short period of time in the 400 Area during construction. It didn’t continue. As many people brown bagged as not. Almost all of us had a lunch pail, and it was not uncommon for an entire group, an engineering group, to remain at their desks and working through the lunch hour—through the lunch half-hour. It was expected that you take a 15-minute break for coffee, twice during the day. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It was expected, otherwise, that you’d be at your desk, or if you were going to leave your workplace, in every engineering group I was in, we had a sign-in/sign-out board at the door of our group structure, wherever that was. And you always wrote where you were going. If you weren’t going to be obtainable at your desk, then you had to be reachable at wherever you were going. So you signed out at the time, and when you signed back in, you erased it. I got tired of writing Reactor Facility when I was going to the reactor, and started writing BRT. This was an enigma for about a week, until finally my immediate manager couldn’t stand it anymore, and he said, all right, Wanda, we know where you’re going but what does BRT mean? It meant Big Round Thing. But it became a common usage. We were going out to the big round thing. We were very fond of the big round thing. We were going to make sure it was built right and that it operated right.
Franklin: And what is the big round thing?
Munn: The big round thing is the containment dome in which the reactor—the Fast Flux Test Reactor itself was located. It’s quite a structure. Probably the safest place that I could find myself. I can’t think of a safer place to be, actually, than in that particular facility. I was—there was never any trepidation about going there, either in terms of construction or machine activity, or in terms of nuclear safety. Never concerned.
Franklin: How did you transition into nuclear safety?
Munn: How did I--?
Franklin: How did you trans—you mentioned that you had started during construction and that later on you started working in nuclear safety.
Munn: Oh, well, it’s seamless.
Franklin: Seamless, okay.
Munn: Absolutely seamless, yes. During the first years, we did not have an engineering building where the engineers themselves could work and stay. It was all constructing the facility itself. It’s a very exciting time, because just moving the huge vessels that had to go inside that containment building had to be barged up the river, offloaded here in North Richland, and taken by tractor across—directly across—the desert to FFTF. Because they weighed so much that it was impossible to do it in any other way. They were in a J sling, transported across. And the lamps and cranes were some of the largest and most spectacular in the world at the time. Those lifts were—placing those huge vessels was a sight to see if one has not been privy to that, then you’ve missed a very exciting—it’s slow. It’s like molasses. Nothing happens quickly. But it was done in a remarkably precise way. But it was entirely seamless. If you were in engineering at FFTF, then as the actual operation of the facility proceeded, your location and what your responsibility was likely changed as well.
Franklin: Okay. When did the FFTF shut down?
Munn: Shut down in the late ‘80s. Only operated for about a year. We went critical for the first time in early 1980. And we did our first power demonstration later that year. So 1980 was the key year for startup at FFTF. You bear in mind, we didn’t operate the way a commercial power plant operates, because we were a research facility. And what we had going on inside of the reactor was experimentation. We were proving that all of the materials and all of the equipment that were necessary to operate a fast reactor could be done safely and within the bounds of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing agreements. So that this could move from a research and development technology to a commercial technology. That’s what we were doing at the time. So we started up and shut down according to what the tests were in the reactor at that time. It was very important that those materials have the length of exposure and the density of exposure that was necessary in order for us to show how that particular equipment or that particular material reacted under the worst possible conditions.
Franklin: Okay. And so how long did the facility operate for as a research facility?
Munn: It operated about a decade.
Franklin: About a decade.
Munn: Uh-huh, yes. And it was closed down in increments. There were a number of individuals and organizations that tried very hard to persuade the Department of Energy that the Fast Flux Test Facility should be continued to be operated as a producer of medical isotopes. It was one of the few facilities that could do that, because of the enormous range of flux that we were able to provide to the material inside. Although it had not been built specifically for that purpose, we were able to show that we could have produced a number of very unusual, very rare, very much needed isotopes. And could pay for about 70% to 80% for the operating costs of the FFTF. The response that we got back was, no, we won’t consider that unless the entire cost could be covered. This didn’t make any sense to me, because the many—there was no other facility in the DOE complex that paid its own way completely. You know, that just—that wasn’t why. The organization was funded by Congress. But we never quite understood the politics. There was general consensus among the folks that I knew that the shutdown was a political activity and not really and truly a technical one. Because we had fulfilled our mission. The original mission was to prove, as I said, that the materials and machinery that’s necessary to operate an advanced reactor could be—could meet NRC requirements. We’d proved that we could do that. And what we were attempting to do was to convince the establishment that there were other extremely beneficial uses for this machine and that we should continue to run it. But since the decision had been made not to pursue the advanced reactor concept in the US—I really shouldn’t get into that, because I get pretty rabid when I think about the terrible destruction that was done to the nuclear technology in the United States during that particular period. But that’s water under the bridge and can’t be undone. But because that advanced program had been shut down, and we had fulfilled the original purpose, then the position was, you’re toast.
Franklin: Was this work taken on in the private sector, then? Because you mentioned—
Munn: It would have been taken on in the private sector. Now, what we do in this country is a little odd. We have over 35,000 procedures a day in the United States that require manufactured isotope of some kind. We get over 90% of those isotopes from other reactors outside the United States. So, we in our medical profession and maintaining the health of the nation rely heavily on other nations’ ability to produce these and to transmit them to us in a period of time where they’re still useful. Because when you’re talking about medical isotopes, you’re talking about short-lived isotopes. They have to be—they have to give off their energy quickly in a precise way in order for it to be useful. If you’re going to keep them for long periods of time, the high density of energy that you need has dissipated because of the half-life of isotopes. Now, we could talk about that for a long time, too. But the sad thing is that we could have had that facility operating right up to this day, in my personal opinion, producing isotopes. And we opted not to do it.
Franklin: Can you—or are you willing to speculate on the political motivations for shutting the program down?
Munn: I think the political motivation is—was then, and still is—more fear than any other single thing. The most commonly misunderstood physical phenomenon in this world, of which I’m aware, is nuclear radiation. We have—we, being the technical community and the nuclear world—have allowed other people to define our terms and define our reality. It was a serious mistake. We spent the first 20 or 30 years of our existence telling people that this was an extremely technical science they shouldn’t worry their heads about; we’ll take care of it. And then when you’re dealing with an educated public—and we do have an educated public here—you’ve sold them short. And you’ve allowed them not to be learning on the same curve you’re learning on. That—to me, that should have happened. And we have technical people arguing about whether or not one additional millirem or gray or whatever unit you want to use is more dangerous than it actually is. And how one of anything can begin a huge cascade of cancer in anybody—this is all statistical garbage. It’s not true. It cannot be. But that aside, you know, we send people to policy-making positions—we elect people to policy-making positions who attempt to do a good job but who don’t know how things like radiation work. And when we have folks with concrete financial agenda going to them saying, these frightening things are happening to people and they’re happening because of this dreadful thing we call radiation, and it needs to be stopped. Then how can you expect a policy to allow an advanced technology to continue when the basic response to the word is fear? We’ve done it to ourselves to some degree. But we’ve allowed policy to continue when it just should not be—perhaps I’m overstating the case, but I don’t believe so. I truly believe fear of radiation is what has hamstrung humanity’s best hope for a continuation of adequate energy supply indefinitely.
Franklin: What about the linking between nuclear and weapons, that was strengthened—started in World War II and strengthened throughout the Cold War? Do you think that might have a role in people’s perceptions of nuclear power?
Munn: Oh, of course it does. One of my favorite comments is the one made by someone much more observant than I that if the electric chair had been invented before the electric light, we would have no electricity today. And I think that may be an apt comparison. We also have a tendency to believe that the effects of that—of nuclear weapons—are much more long-lasting than they actually have been shown to be. But that’s not a good headline, you know? Why bother with that? That doesn’t raise anybody’s ire and doesn’t even start a good argument.
Franklin: It’s not quite as bad as you thought, but it’s still pretty terrible.
Munn: It’s pretty terrible, yeah, there’s no question. So are wars of all kinds. I wouldn’t want to be in Syria right now, either.
Franklin: Yeah. When did you retire from the Hanford Site?
Munn: I left with Westinghouse. I always said that I would. The political and managerial aspect of what transpired changed rather radically when Westinghouse took over the large responsibility for the full site in 1986. Prior to that time, Westinghouse Hanford had been a rather small organization. We only had—what—3,000 or 4,000 employees, and we concentrated in the 400 Area. We were research and development. When the bid was made for the larger contract that covered all of the Site and took in the waste sites, the old production reactors, took on all of the legacy of the World War II—of the original Manhattan Project, a great deal changed in how things were operating. Then, later, in that period when we—when the decision was made to go back to having multiple contractors rather than just one or two, then it became very uncertain in my mind what one was likely to be able to expect to do to fulfill their job requirements. And I had said, always, I came here for research and development on advanced reactors. I have been a part of that throughout our ability to do it. That’s now gone; Westinghouse is leaving the area, so am I. So that means that the end of 1995, I retired and ran for city council.
Franklin: And did you win? Did you make it to city council? Were you city council?
Munn: Yes. Yeah, I was. The next four years, which was a very interesting period in Richland city planning, as well. That’s another whole program. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Can you tell me about some of your professional service? I see that you are a member of Health Physics chapter and a member of the American Nuclear Engineers and a member of the Society of Women Engineers.
Munn: Yes, I’m a fellow of SWE—of the Society of Women Engineers. In 1976, when I became a senior in the department at Oregon State University, I was carrying an incredible load, trying to get through that last third year. But we had been, for a couple of years, we’d had a group of females—female engineering students—on campus that we had wanted to morph into a student section of the Society of Women Engineers. I was elected chair of that group, and that year we did become a full-fledged student member—full-fledged student section. So I was the initiating chair of that student section. The same year, the fellow who had chaired the American Nuclear Society’s already very well-established student section just made the announcement, oh, Wanda will take this for me next year, because we’re having a regional conference and there’s a whole lot that needs to be done. So Wanda can do that. Oh, good. So I was chair of both student sections on the Oregon State campus during the ’76-’77 year. And we did, as I said, we chartered the SWE section and we held the regional meeting for the ANS section. And somehow I managed to survive that. I’m not sure how. But when I came to—I came here—the Joint Center for Graduate Study had an interesting program that allowed an internship during summer for students. And so, as an, actually, still as a sophomore in the summer of ’76, I was here as an intern working in the FFTF offices at the time. And that was the year that this professional section, the Eastern Washington section of SWE was chartered as well. So I happened to be here during that charter. So for all intents and purposes, I’m a charter member of the current section. The Health Physics Society—in both organizations, I have been active throughout my life, both locally, regionally, and at the national level. I was inducted as a fellow of the Society of Women Engineers a few years ago. And I’ve served as—on the nominating committee and a couple of the other national committees for that organization. The American Nuclear Society—I’ve held all of the local offices and still remain in the position of—I’m called the historian. It’s kind of an honorific sort of thing. But I’m still very active in the local ANS section. I’ve chaired the National Environmental Sciences division for ANS. And I’ve received the national award for public information from ANS, along with a couple of other accolades of one type or another. The Health Physics Society, I’ve never belonged to the national organization, but stay closely connected to the membership and to the local Columbia chapter of Health Physics. The two—the American Nuclear Society and Health Physics Society overlap each other in interests so strongly that it’s almost impossible to be busy in one and not busy in another. So those three organizations have been a constant in my life since the mid-‘70s.
Franklin: Okay. Can you talk a bit about—I understand that you were invited to—that you’ve had your hands in both helping with the NIOSH and the EEOICPA.
Munn: Oh, yes.
Franklin: And so I was wondering if you could both tell us what those are and then kind of talk about your involvement. And I guess we’ll start with the NIOSH.
Munn: Okay, NIOSH I think is an acronym that I think is familiar to most people in the technical world. It’s actually the National Institute for Safety and Health that applies to everybody who works—has a workplace—in the United States. NIOSH was chosen to be the governing agency—I should say the administrative agency for a bill that was signed into law during the very latest days of the Clinton Administration. It was put together as a legislation to compensate workers in all aspects of the Department of Energy’s weapons sites during the entire period from the 1943 early activities here to the present. One thinks of the weapons complex as being the three major DOE sites: Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge. The truth of the matter is there are over 230 sites that are covered by this particular act, because there were institutions that ranged from just over a mom-and-pop shop to Bethlehem Steel that were involved in one way or another in what we term the weapons complex. PANTEX in Amarillo is a huge facility as well. The Portsmouth facility. There are—you know, it—as I said, it goes on more than 230 sites. The concept here was that there were people who had been seriously—whose health had been adversely affected by their work in these communities. And of course, there is some of that that’s true. But the real impetus of this bill was to compensate people who had cancer as a result of radiation exposures that they had suffered. Now, one needs to begin, from my perspective, by understanding that there is no evidence of a statistically significant increase in cancers in any of these populations. And yet our Congress says—states that they believe folks have been dying like flies as a result of having been exposed to the radiation that they worked in. This organization was then, in accordance with the law, put together during the first years—first two years of this century. And President George Bush was charged with the responsibility of putting together an advisory board for this group as required by law. So, that was done in 2001. Our first meeting—I was requested by the White House to be a member of that group. I accepted, and became one of the original members of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. This is supposed to be the citizens’ advisory portion of the energy employees act with the long name to which you referred.
Franklin: EEOICPA?
Munn: Yes. Energy Employees Occupational Illness and—
Franklin: Compensation?
Munn: Compensation Act, right?
Franklin: Something like that, yeah. We missed the P, but—
Munn: Yeah, that’s—I’m not sure. That activity has gone on now from that time to the present. I’ve been a member of it during that entire time. It has now distributed more than 13 billion, with a B, dollars to people across the United States who have a situation where they both have cancer and they also have worked at one of the complexes for more than 250 days. And this is not the appropriate place for me to state my real concerns about that. But I do not believe that this is a reasonable approach. The local newspapers are—I shouldn’t say newspapers—the local newspaper is a member of a national newspaper chain. And that newspaper chain just last year or the year before ran a series of articles about this particular action with a great deal of really, really heartrending material about people’s lives that have been ravaged by cancer. And there’s no way one can shortchange that. But I take issue with the assertion that those things are a result of workplace when there’s no evidence to show that’s the case. Nevertheless, that’s a continuing concern, and one of the frightening things that people continue to say over and over again with respect to our technology.
Franklin: Mm-hm. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War and afterwards?
Munn: It was, I like to remind people, a cold war. The purpose of all that was the assumption that if you work from a position of absolute strength, that you can deter the use of the weapons that we don’t want to use by someone else. And that if we’re assured, ourselves, we’re not going to be first strikers, then it gives us a feeling of protecting ourselves by being strong. That is a reality of the time in which we live. It can be changed in a number of ways. And politically, probably will morph into other things continually throughout human history for as long as human history continues. But being here during that time, was—would seem frightening to many people. It was never frightening to me; quite to the contrary, it was interesting in the extreme. But you must bear in mind that I actually was not involved in the nuclear proliferation issues. Quite to the contrary, the technology that I was dealing with was utilizing plutonium—we used mixed oxide fuels—was utilizing plutonium as a fuel to create electricity and to make nuclear isotopes—medical isotopes. And it used the plutonium and the other weapons materials as a fuel to create energy that we needed domestically and at the same time generate more fuel that can be used to continue to generate electricity ad infinitum. That seems like pie in the sky to so many people, but it is not pie in the sky. It’s a technology over which we have control, and we can do it. So, the way the weapons program is viewed is not something I can truly address appropriately, simply because that wasn’t a part of my life. I didn’t—I wasn’t horrified by it. I felt that it was a necessary part of the historic time in which we were living. I agree that we’ve done a good job of ramping that down in terms of nuclear arsenals. But the concept of not maintaining strength in that regard is extremely unwise to me. Being in Richland is living in a cocoon. It’s very much like living in an advanced university community. The people with whom you interact and the things about which you talk, the way your lives are lived is connected to, but not the same as, what transpires outside the cocoon. Because it is so densely populated with people and with ideas that are concentrated on a limited number of activities. So I’ve never felt anything but extremely safe in Richland. I have a hard time getting my mind around the fears that we—in my efforts to provide information to folks, I’m continually running across people like educators and physicians, especially in the Seattle area and in the heavy-population corridor on the west side of the state who are fearful of driving down Highway 240, for absolutely no reason except that they think there’s a mysterious ray of some kind that reaches us all. And they can’t understand what I’m talking about when I say, hey, the heaviest radiation you’re getting is—you’re absolutely right, it’s from the biggest reactor. We can’t control it; it’s completely out of our hands. You call it the Sun; I just call it a great big reactor. Yeah, that’s where you’re getting your radiation. Whether you’re driving down the highway that surrounds the Site, or whether you’re on the beach in Waikiki. It doesn’t really and truly matter. You’re being irradiated.
Franklin: Or if you fly on a plane, right, you’re exposed to higher background—
Munn: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
[VIDEO CUTS]
Munn: If you live in Denver, hey. Or I can move from Richland to Spokane and almost double my external exposure. Because we have very low exposure here in Richland, contrary to popular belief. But the sad thing about this entire time, from my perspective, is the facts don’t matter. What people feel in their gut matters. That’s what’s driving us as human beings; apparently, it always has. Living here is a true experience. I’ve enjoyed it. I’m always surprised when people say there’s nothing to do in Richland. My problem is—probably because I’m continually invested in technical activities of some sort—my problem is, I don’t have enough time on my calendar. But it’s true. It’s an interesting, interesting place to live for a technical person, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. It’s been a fascinating period of life. I’m very fortunate to have lived to be an ancient old lady. Very long in the tooth. And unfortunate that so many of my colleagues have already gone to their reward. Many of us feel highly rewarded, however, for having been here, having been a part of history. I have no feel for how much of this history is going to be written and how much of it’s going to be accurate. We all know, history’s written by the people who write history. And that’s very rarely the technical folks. So, what you’re doing with these oral histories, in my mind, is exceedingly important, not just to the technical community, but I think it’s very important for us now and in the future to hear the actual words of the people who were there. Remember the old—you may be too young to remember the You Are There little snippets of history that we used to get in the movie houses from time to time, and later on television. It’s nice, I think, to see the folks who were there, hear their words, and get some feel of the perception they had of their reality. It’s been a great ride, all the way from Model As to joint activities and the space crafts.
Franklin: Well, Wanda, thank you so much for such an enlightening and well-delivered interview. I really appreciate it.
Munn: Thank you. It’s been a wonderful, wonderful time to be here. Appreciate you, appreciate what Washington State University, and the national system are doing. It’s been a delight. And thank you to the long-gone Westinghouse Hanford Company. That was—and the Fast Flux Test Facility was and will always be an outstanding member of the research and development community. A facility like no other. We were very honored to be a part of it.
Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much.
Munn: Thank you.
View interview on Youtube.