Bolling, Connie

              SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION



ORAL HISTORY OF CONNIE BOLLING
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
August 8, 2003

 
MR. MCDANIEL:  Ok, let's just start out and you just tell me that, ok?
MR. BOLLING:  I'm Connor Bolling...
MR. MCDANIEL:  Start again, I'm sorry.
MR. BOLLING:  I'm Connor Bolling. I'm 95 years old, and I came to Oak Ridge in 1943.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Tell me about when you first came here. What were the circumstances? What were you doing before?
MR. BOLLING:  I was teaching school up in Virginia about Coalville, Virginia, I was teaching science. I was heard about Oak Ridge, but they didn't call it Oak Ridge. Later on it was named Oak Ridge. It was called Clinton Engineer Works. The reason I went and wanted to come to Oak Ridge was they said that it would end World War II if I could come and help build and work on a plant that would build the bomb. But they never used the word bomb. They said whatever they was going to do would end the World War II. MR. MCDANIEL:  Be sure and look at me. Be sure and look at me. So, so you said your wife didn't like it.
MR. BOLLING:  My wife, she cried about it. She didn't like it, for me to go off and leave her with my young daughter. She said, “You go off down there and you don't know what might happen to you. I will be needing you here, because it's hard to live just by myself, and I would like for you to not go.” I let it go at that, but I began to study that I ought to go because they said it would end the World War II. 
MR. MCDANIEL:  Ok. So, when you came to Oak Ridge -- be sure and look at me when you're talking -- when you came to Oak Ridge, what did you do? What was that first ... ? Tell me about that first day here. Tell me about your first day in Oak Ridge.
MR. BOLLING:  My first day in Oak Ridge, I did not have a place to; they did not have a place to shelter us. There was about 500 men, engineers and scientist. We came and there wasn't any housing for us. The farmers in the immediate area, they took in some of us to live with them, and 500 of us men had to stay in one big barracks they called them. They didn't have any partitions in the barracks, there was just barely room to walk through between the cots. We had a head house, later on that building was made into the city government, and it housed the city government. At Security Square in Oak Ridge is at Bus Terminal Road. The reason they called it Bus Terminal Road is that's where they gathered all the workers all over Oak Ridge, and about 75,000 people lived in Oak Ridge then, and they had a main terminal, and that's why they called it Bus Terminal Road, Avenue. We stayed in this building until they built homes for us, and we had to go to school while we stayed in this building. Pretty soon they had enough houses for us to, finally they gave us a house. All the houses were cemesto buildings. They thought that 12,000 of those houses would be enough to house all the workers here in Oak Ridge, but they had to bring in hutments and trailers and set them up. Right outside of K-25, they put up hutments and trailers, and they even had a theater down there right over looking K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Tell me about those hutments. Describe those for me. What were those hutments like? What were the hutments like?
MR. BOLLING:  They were drab. They just held one family. The trailers, sometimes two families lived in trailers. A great number of people lived just over looking K-25, and they even had a theater there, right close to K-25. My father in-law worked down there, and help them keep, help running the place, my father in-law did.
MR. MCDANIEL:  What was your first house? You and your wife's?
MR. BOLLING:  My first house, they gave us a pretty good home, because we were really had to go through a whole lot. They gave me a B house, and the houses were named alphabetically. There was the A house, B house, C house, D house and an E was a kind of a little apartment building. They built a lot of those buildings to house the 75,000. Then they built dormitories to hold the 75,000. Two hundred people could stay in a dormitory, and they built 77 of these dormitories. That's unbelievable, 77, and 200 people could stay in them, each one. They built four right close to where Jackson Square is, where that big building is. They had four or five big dormitories just for women, and they were right there where Jackson Square is.
MR. MCDANIEL:  So, what did you do at the plants?
MR. BOLLING:  Well, they sent some of us to Livermore, California, to learn from E. O. Laurence, who built the first calutron, that made the material U-235 and U-238. E. O. Laurence out there, invented this machine that would separate the weights U-235 and U-238, and it was called a calutron, and they didn't tell us where we were going, and Oak Ridge wasn't named. They called it Clinton Engineer Works. They took some of us out west and they just kept on, and finally one of them said, “Oh, we're going to Shangri-La,” and then we got out there. Well, we didn't know any of the people that was, and they were the scientists that, I can't remember just what their names were, but they didn't even have name cards, and there wasn't any writing of anything, and Oak Ridge wasn't mentioned. 
MR. MCDANIEL:  So, they sent you out there to learn, to be trained on how to build a calutron?
MR. BOLLING:  They sent us on a big plane. 
MR. MCDANIEL:  But they sent you out there to learn how to build -- how to build the calutrons.
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah. How they ... They showed us how that calutron worked.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Oh, ok.
MR. BOLLING:  And they trained us, and then we came back to the Y-12 plant. We had to teach for a whole year, teach the operators how to work those calutron machines, and for one whole year that is all I did. Then they gave me an engineer’s job, and the job was to oversee a whole building that had 96 0f those calutrons running, and it was my job. If one of them failed, well, my job was to tell them to pull that unit out, and let me look at it, and I would tell them what caused the failure. Well they would run one of these for maybe about five days, calutrons, and when it run out of charge, of raw uranium, it quit working. The operators, they didn't know what they were doing. They were told to hold that cubical they were operating, just hold it on the certain numbers. They didn't know what they were doing even. But they had to do that, and had to know how to use the heat that melted the raw uranium. There were just 7/10 of good that came out of the raw uranium that we run from. 7/10 of 1%.
MR. MCDANIEL:  So you knew, you knew what was going on, didn't you? You ... 
MR. BOLLING:  I knew, as soon as I got to teaching about it, I knew that uranium, I had heard about Einstein. Einstein was the man that, and his crew, they learned how to split the atom at the Stagg Field in Chicago, under the building. Einstein whispered in the President, FDR's ear, that they had learned to split the atom, and if they did the right thing, and operated it right, it would end, it would make a disastrous bomb that would explode. Well that was when Roosevelt, FDR, went into action. He chose Leslie Groves, General Leslie Groves to run the project, to make this material, and he chose the company, Tennessee Eastman, to do the work that made the bomb. Now Tennessee Eastman robbed all of the schools around there, in colleges, and in high schools. Anybody that was studying science or teaching science, like I was, they reached out and they got them. We were close to Tennessee Eastman up in Kingsport, and I was eager to come, but my wife wasn't.
MR. MCDANIEL:  So ... once you got here, you trained for a year, I mean, you trained and you taught for a year.
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Taught them and then you ran one of the buildings. Which building was it that you were in charge of?
MR. BOLLING:  Well they had five Alpha buildings, Alpha One, Two, Three, Four, Five and I worked in Alpha One building first. A very funny thing, when we went over there, they had said that we had lost our Z, and that was the electro magnetic thing. But we didn't know it, but finally they told us what it was, but they had to use that figure to keep it secret.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Go ahead ...
MR. BOLLING:  I want this, the reason I'm doing it, it ought to be put down in history to in the future.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Absolutely.
MR. BOLLING:  That is what Ms. Sonia said.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Absolutely.
MR. BOLLING:  I felt a lot better then, than I do now. MR. MCDANIEL:  I'm sorry. We won't keep you too long.
MR. BOLLING:  The ... I did a movie up in a studio, they got me to do a movie called, "Peace," and it was 30 minutes long, and I like to do that because they paid me.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Oh, yeah, sure, I'm sure. (laughter) So, anyway ... So, they ... So, let me ask you: You worked there and you were using, you were running the calutrons and were separating the two uranium elements.
MR. BOLLING:  Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:  And you knew what was going on.
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:  So, were ...  Do you remember the day that they announced that the bomb had been dropped and what everybody knew about Oak Ridge?
MR. BOLLING:  I was an engineer on the evening shift, three to 11, and it was up about 10 o'clock in the evening that I heard that they dropped the bomb. The operators, they left their cubicles running, and they just left their cubicles running and they stopped them, and they didn't even clock out. They ran to their cars and got into their automobiles, came to Jackson Square where the press was there: NBC, CBS. They had the lights going by that time, and everybody was happy that the bomb was dropped. But we dropped leaflets over the city that warned them, if they would have given up, well there wouldn't have been a war, if they had just a given up. They dropped leaflets over the city, and I have one of those leaflets. In fact I have four. MR. MCDANIEL:  Is that right? Well, we'd love to be able to take a picture of it and use it in this movie. How did you feel? I mean, how do you feel now about, you know, do you feel it was justified about the U.S. dropping the atomic bomb?
MR. BOLLING:  I feel very justified about making the atomic bomb, because they were killing hundreds of our troops in the islands of the Pacific. I don't recall the names of those islands.  But I had a brother there, and they were trying to enter into Japan, and several thousands of them would have died if we hadn't dropped the bomb, and they were so happy about it. They wouldn't give up until the second bomb was dropped and 140,000 people were killed, innocent people, and soldiers too, in the cities, 140,000 in one, and 120,000 in the other. That made about 270,000 killed. I felt a little bit bad about it, the innocent people that died, and tears came to my eyes many times because so many helpless people, children and women, and old men. It hurt me terribly bad, but then I thought about what we were losing, and what they did to Pearl Harbor, but “vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord,” but that was a… I had a good time, I really enjoyed the work. I enjoyed it.
MR. MCDANIEL:  So, what did you do after the war? I mean, did you still work at the plants after the war?
MR. BOLLING:  I still worked at the plant and I help make the bomb parts, and I handled the bomb parts daily. I even plated Cadmium on them to keep them from being, you know, lit up the poison. I electroplated them, and also, I was in charge of the vault that stored them in Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Now this would have been?
MR. BOLLING:  In Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Yeah, and it was what? Plutonium? Was that what it was? Uranium, plutonium?
MR. BOLLING:  It was uranium. 
MR. MCDANIEL:  Uranium.
MR. BOLLING:  You had to have U-235 and U-238. One was plutonium, and the other was uranium-235.
MR. MCDANIEL:  So, that's what you did is you kind of made ...
MR. BOLLING:  I made the, helped make the parts, and I learned how to do all the parts, of how you take care of the salvage, and I had to learn that. Salvage was a great thing back early, because it was the material was so precious and we couldn't get enough of it until K-25 came online. When K-25 came online, they made it, I guess, a hundred times faster than what we were doing it with the electromagnetic separation, a hundred times.
MR. MCDANIEL:  My goodness. Well, so what was living in Oak Ridge like in those days for you and your family?
MR. BOLLING:  Well, I first got to tell you that they terminated 10,000 people, just a few a month or so, after, from Y-12, just a month or so after they dropped the bomb, 10,000. They gave them their pink slips, and I knew that I was going to keep mine. Let me have a sip of water.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Sure, go ahead. Go ahead. How are we on time, Chad? [Conversation off camera]
MR. BOLLING:  They had small Army buses. The Army ran everything too, in Y-12. They were a part in it. They called them U.S. Engineers, and they had gathering buses, small Army buses, that gathered the workers up. They had bus stops all over Oak Ridge, and they picked the people up and brought them down to the terminal. I never in my life seen as much smoking. It was so rotten in the big bus that held 100 of us to transfer us to Y-12. They drove the bus through mud, knee deep almost, right into the middle of Y-12. Of course the guard had to come by up the aisle and check our badges and let us out. Then they took us hundred, it held a hundred, this old drab Army bus, and they let us out in the middle of Y-12. Everything was mud. You talk to anybody and that the first thing they will say nearly, mud, mud, mud. I got tired of it. The people in Knoxville knew who we were. We would go there and we would have mud on our shoes. They became pretty jealous of Oak Ridge, because Oak Ridge got meat, where they couldn't get meat. They had beef cattle in there that fed us, and everything was rationed, very closely rationed.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Hmmm...
MR. BOLLING:  Hang on a second... 
MR. MCDANIEL:  Sure.
MR. BOLLING:  ... failure ... I talk pretty poorly on account that I don't feel good.
MR. MCDANIEL:  That's ok. You're doing fine. You're doing just fine. Like I said, we're just about through. What was life like in Oak Ridge for you and your family? Did you and your wife have children?
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah. And it was great. They had shopping centers about six shopping centers where people could walk to, because gasoline was rationed and nobody could get gasoline, and they would walk to stores. In Oak Ridge they had six of these centers that had a big grocery store, and they had a drug store. But the biggest one was in Jackson Square. It had a real big grocery store, and it had, there wasn't any clothing stores in Oak Ridge, but Samuel's was the first store that was placed when Oak Ridge was built, Samuel's, and that was the only place we could buy clothing for about two years.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Now, you were ... I mean, you were what? Thirty-five when you came?
MR. BOLLING:  I was 30 ...
MR. MCDANIEL:  So you were an old man. The rest of the young people ...
MR. BOLLING:  I was an old man when I came.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Excuse me?
MR. BOLLING:  But I had done well in college, and I got good schools to teach and I taught 15 years before I came to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL:  You taught science?
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah, and English, some English.
MR. MCDANIEL:  What was ... ? Is there anything else you want to talk about? You want to, you know, you can. You want to look at your notes, that's fine.
MR. BOLLING:  Well, one thing I would like to tell you. There wasn't a motel, and I didn't know the name motel. There wasn't any fast foods in Knoxville, no motels in Knoxville, just two hotels, the Farragut and the Andrew Jackson. We had to sign up at the Hyatt in Knoxville, at the Daylight building, and the only fast food was the Krystal, and that was it.
MR. MCDANIEL:  So when you came, you went to Knoxville first, right?
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Tell me about that day.
MR. BOLLING:  We would go to Knoxville to go to get shows and entertainment, and also to go to operas, and be entertained. I always liked to go, they had the midday Merry-go-round, and that is where some of the greatest country musicians came from. Chet Atkins, for instance, came from the Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Well, so you lived in Oak Ridge all your life, then, for the last 60 years, so far.
MR. BOLLING:  Sixty years.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Yeah, 60 years. And you raised your kids.
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Where did you live? Where did you live? What part of Oak Ridge?
MR. BOLLING:  Off of California Avenue. on 104 Cedar Lane.
MR. MCDANIEL:  104 Cedar Lane. Well, is there anything else you want to talk about? You can. We've got time.
MR. BOLLING:  Well, I would like to tell you how fast they built homes in Oak Ridge. They averaged one house each hour around the clock, the cemestos. They had built a house every hour, because these cemesto houses, they were prefabricated. They would bring a whole C house in on one truck, big Army truck. I guess there were 50 carpenters groups, and plumbing groups. They ran these very largest of shovels, that would -- graders -- turn-a-pull they called it. It was a great long something that would just tear and level a whole area where they would want to build a road.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Is that right?
MR. BOLLING:  Yes, sir. They'd tell us, we were wanting, we would ask them where we going to go out west -- I believe I told that -- and they said Shangri-La.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Right, right. 
CHAD: ... ask him the generation question ...
MR. MCDANIEL:  Sure, sure. The, you know, your generation, you know, the generation before, you know, they... World War II was really, I mean, it brought the country together. You know, it brought, especially here in Oak Ridge, I mean, it brought a group of people in from all over the world, literally, for one purpose and for one job, to do something.
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:  And the whole country was around you. I mean, I don't think we've had that in the last 50 years again since then. And certainly young people, today, that's one of the reasons we're doing this is so they can see what happened. What would your advice be to young people on the ... on their feelings about America, their feelings about, you know, a sense of patriotism.
MR. BOLLING:  I think that our people would think that we were correct, and patriotic to set the bombs on those two cities. I think that was a good thing to do, but it was a kind of a sad thing, but it was the best thing for us to do. Japanese, they committed the first murders at Pearl Harbor, and I have been going to schools and high schools, where they could understand about the bomb, and I was talking, and when I got through I was explaining a whole lot better than I am talking now. I spoke for about 10 years on the Oak Ridge Museum, lectured you know, but I lectured at one of the high schools. I didn't notice, but I got through telling about this war, and when I got through and was walking out, there was a Japanese boy, I'd called them Japs, and he took a run at me and he kicked my shins, and terribly embarrassed that high school.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Is there anything else you want to tell about?
MR. BOLLING:  The reason they chose Oak Ridge is because that it was in a hidden valley, and also it was close to water. Y-12 was in a real hidden valley, and K-25 was not. X-10 was not in a good place, but Y-12 was, they were just going to have one plant here, when they decided to be here, and that's the reason they built 12,000 cemesto homes. They thought that would be enough houses, and it took 75,000.
MR. MCDANIEL:  My goodness. Do you believe the John Hendrix story?
MR. BOLLING:  No, I don't.
MR. MCDANIEL:  (laughter) Ok. I just thought I'd ask you.
MR. BOLLING:  No. Somebody dreamed that up.
MR. MCDANIEL:  All right, I think that's... I think that'll do it. I think we're through. I think that's everything unless there's something else you want to say.
MR. BOLLING:  I wrote my wife, when I came down here, they didn't have houses for my own time, and I wrote my wife a letter every day, and I have those letters.
MR. MCDANIEL:  Is that right?
MR. BOLLING:  Yeah.
[End of Interview]