Jernigan, Harold

              ORAL HISTORY OF HAROLD JERNIGAN

Interviewed by Jim Kolb

January 12, 2005 
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb:  Okay, Harold, let’s begin by having you tell us first how and why and when you first came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mr. Jernigan: Okay. I came here in 1943, visiting with my father that had came to work here, and at that time – it’s the first time I’ve talked about this in a long, long time, so it’s coming out – at that time, during the war, I grew up in Livingston, Tennessee with my family, and as a younger person, I had a bit of a problem within my family, with my father. And I had decided to go out on the world on my own, and at entirely too early of an age, but I was living at that time in Dayton, Ohio, and working there during the war. And previously with Dad, I’d been in New Jersey, working in Heinz Tomato Ketchup, so I was bouncing around and trying to find something in this world. Anyway, my father came here, and my mother joined him in their home; they got one of the early houses. It was on 218 Highland Avenue, and he actually was assigned that house before it was completed. I had come here to visit them for the first time and decided that I didn’t really like it at all. It was just not a place for a young man trying to find his world. I came back, though, and I entered school here.
Mr. Kolb:  High school?
Mr. Jernigan: High school here, and that was in ’43, I think, ’43, ’44. I get a little confused as to when it was because it was the school year. It was the first year of school here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb:  Okay, that would have been ’43.
Mr. Jernigan: ’43, then.
Mr. Kolb:  Fall of ’43.
Mr. Jernigan: And I worked – I went to school for a short period of time here in Oak Ridge High School and just was not able to handle that and left again and went back out into the country. Came back here in, it must be ’44, and visited with the, you know, stayed around, came back in. And in January of ’45, I went to work up on the Castle on the Hill here, and so that’s what brought me here.
Mr. Kolb:  Okay, and what did you work in?
Mr. Jernigan: I was working in the Castle on the Hill, and I was working in a reproduction department and doing photostatic work and they – people understand the photostatics now; that’s where the big copies – 
Mr. Kolb:  Copies and things like that? Prints?
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, and prints, and we did everything there. I started out doing photostatic work, photograph work, and then we had all the productions of the printing property, things that went on there. I stayed on there until April of ’45. I was approaching my eighteenth birthday, so I decided I’d rather get in the Navy than take the chance of going into the Army at that time. And so I asked relief from the promise. I had to get permission from them to leave at that time because of the [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb:  Okay, now what time was that then? Was the war still going on?
Mr. Jernigan: That was – the war was still going on, in ’44 – 
Mr. Kolb:  Five.
Mr. Jernigan: Five, yes.
Mr. Kolb:  It was before August, wasn’t it?
Mr. Jernigan: Right, it was before August. It was in January of ’45. Back in April of ’45 is when I left there to go into the service, and I joined the Navy in April of ’45. It was interesting in that, not knowing what was going on here, I became real popular when the bomb was dropped. And they say, “Oh, that’s where Jernigan was from, yeah.” I was actually in California, being hurled into the – loading up or getting ready to leave for [the] invasion of Japan when the bomb was dropped. I was aboard a ship going there to – when the war was over, when they signed the peace, they kept us going, and I went on from there. But in the earlier parts of Oak Ridge – 
Mr. Kolb:  What did they do, turn you around and bring you �� 
Mr. Jernigan: Oh, no. No, no, no. We wished. Yes, we went all the way on over and stayed there, and it was much – people over there wanting to come back.
Mr. Kolb:  With ‘there’ being what? Japan?
Mr. Jernigan: In Japan, yes.
Mr. Kolb:  You actually went to Japan, okay.
Mr. Jernigan: I went into Japan. I first went to Samara Island, and they put us there to try and determine what to do with us, ’cause it was on a troop ship going in. And then I was transferred from there out to Tokyo Bay, and picked up my first ship there. It was a destroyer escort, Miles C. Fox, DD 829, and those things stay in your mind. And I’ll never forget the entrance, going into Japan at that time and to Tokyo, going into the bay. You could see the mountain range off to your right with all of the caves back in it where they had their weaponry in there, and they could just shoot down right on the ships and we’d have never been able to get a ship up through there or anything else without blowing the place totally away. And they were embedded so far in those caves, that we’d have never got them out, so it was, to me, as bad as the bad that the bomb, the use of the bomb is, in our mind today is. I just hope we never have to use anything like that, but I’m convinced in my own mind that it saved my life, and many other thousands of people, Americans and Japanese people. And at the time it was the right thing to do, and we would hope that the country could learn to live without this type of problems.
Mr. Kolb: As it turned out to be the truth.
Mr. Jernigan: Right. I stayed on there until ’46. Yes, I was discharged in July of ’46.
Mr. Kolb: Now what was your actual assignment in the Navy?
Mr. Jernigan: In the Navy, we were doing escort duty, and we were minesweeping, cleaning up the channels, and just regular patrol up and down, for the time. We still had a lot going on at the time. And just general escorting and taking that tack. It was doing a lot of – the main thing, the worst we had to do was we had to find a lot of the mines that were still floating loose, and we’d stop and have to break out the small arms and the other weapons and set them off by firing into them, and just jump and try to hide, and keep some of the shrapnel at times from coming back down on you there, but it got in pretty close. And the hazard of them being there at the time, we knew we had to prevent some. Actually, our duty was to be with – it was an escort program. I mean, the way they set these up in the war at that time, they’d taken a normal destroyer and stripped all of its torpedoes, so we did not have torpedoes, and put a lot of radio equipment and radar equipment on, and we were assigned to an aircraft carrier. It was usually three to four ships assigned to one aircraft carrier. And the plan was that then what we did was the destroyers, the escorts would go out over the horizon, escorting the carrier back behind us, and we were the eyes ahead of time, and so if we ran into problems, we could radio back and they would assign the planes, and then we escorted them back, the planes, when they were coming in. A few times the planes crashed, you know, in landing, and we had to pull them out and get them back and this type thing. It was just a cleanup after the war was over. And we come on back. I do remember seeing when I first went in there the air, the aircraft carrier where the peace was signed, you know, the [inaudible] ship was still there, and what have you.
Mr. Kolb: What carrier was your ship assigned to?
Mr. Jernigan: Gosh, I can’t recall it right now.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I just wondered.
Mr. Jernigan: It was shifting around.
Mr. Kolb: Well let’s go back – 
Mr. Jernigan: Let’s get back to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, let’s go back to Oak Ridge, and tell me [about] the time you worked at the Castle on the Hill, where you lived, kind of your early experiences in the early Oak Ridge era.
Mr. Jernigan: I was living at 218 Highland Avenue with my parents at that time, and thankful to say that my father and I found mutual grounds and everything has been fine for – settled down, but while I was working here, it was quite interesting, and my work was interesting in it. As I indicated, I was doing some photostat copying, and I would have to go in in the morning and I’d get a stack of papers and load in the camera, to take the pictures with, and ninety-nine percent of everything that I was shooting was marked top secret, but most of it was newspaper clippings. It was articles out of the newspapers talking about a certain ship left the harbor so-and-so today and something like that. It was that type of breakdown in the security system, and a lot of this was reported in the newspapers and so forth, and I guess their security was wanting to keep track of things like that. Many other things that went on, none of us knew really what we were doing and why. We had – the main form of printing material then – a lot of people didn’t – is the old mimeograph machines, and we had to type all the things on the wax copy card. We had a large number of those there, and I worked with the mimeograph machines, then was promoted on up to supervisor of that unit in the thing. Worked for a person who was a great man at the time, was Bill Smith. He was head of the Reproduction Department. 
Mr. Kolb: How many people were in the department, like there was, roughly, just roughly?
Mr. Jernigan: Oh, I guess thirty, forty people, something like this.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, pretty good size then.
Mr. Jernigan: A pretty good size. And at the time, a lot of this was people that – you know, when we printed a manual or printed a copy or instructions or anything, it had to be hand-assembled, and a lot of the people – that was women mostly – that sat at the tables, they’d pile the page numbers down, and we’d hand-assemble this, date it all, and then hand-staple it together, and go that direction, so it is hard to understand how you could accomplish a whole lot then. And we had just many, many things. And then offset printing had come out, so we had quite a bit of that started while we was there. So I had I guess, oh, at least ten or twelve mimeograph machines there going all the time, and boom, boom, boom, boom, and putting it out and the women and the people working them. They were all power driven at the time. They were power driven.
Mr. Kolb: We’ll stop here a minute.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well just tell me a little bit more about the living conditions.
Mr. Jernigan: Then the living conditions here was, I was on the Highland Avenue – of course, the interest of all young men was the opposite sex, and [the] female population was very high in this city here. And it was always a lot of fun. But mostly I would go to the roller rink. There was one at the corner of – 
Mr. Kolb: Jefferson and the Oak Ridge Turnpike.
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, at Jefferson, and there was one that used to be in Jackson Square.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they did? A roller rink?
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, a roller rink, down on the Turnpike. It wasn’t there too long, I don’t think, and we have, of course, the drive-in movies, and it was off Illinois Avenue there. And we had – 
Mr. Kolb: Tennis court dances?
Mr. Jernigan: Actually, I didn’t go to much of the dances, because at that time I had three left feet. Not two. I was never really able. And I tell my wife and other people that I was a little bit too timid to get out and do things like that, and they said, “Not you!”
Mr. Kolb: No, not anymore.
Mr. Jernigan: But it was that way. And we had a lot of picnics that we went to, we found ways of making our own softball games, and it was something doing all the time. And that was the interesting point of it.
Mr. Kolb: How fast the town was changing.
Mr. Jernigan: Well, it was, twenty-four hours a day it was daylight here almost, with the activity going and with building the houses, and they would have floodlights out and they were doing that all the time. And speaking of that, you may hear a little hammering and knocking here on the rooftop because they’re putting a new roof on the house today, so if we hear some gun-slaps going off, why, it’s that and not anything else.
Mr. Kolb: You’re not in firing range.
Mr. Jernigan: Not at all. I think the interesting part of it is, was what it was really like when – I wasn’t here, went into the service, came back, and I was here then. I was eighteen, I was nineteen years old, I guess, when I got back, and I shortly got married after I was here, and my first house that my wife and I moved into was on, down close to where the Civic Center is now, and it was a trailer park, the mobile, a little small trailer that we had there. And we had – 
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t really a house.
Mr. Jernigan: No, it was not a house. It was a trailer. And it’s interesting, then, that I’ve lived all over Oak Ridge in almost every form of housing that they had, I’ve lived in. But we were there for a while in the house there. Oh, and reading some of your materials reminded me of some of the things that – you know, where we shopped and stuff like this, that I recalled. I don’t recall it and remember it too well, but we had an outdoor, covered shopping area down close to Wally’s, one of the stores there was called Tuliptown at Oak Ridge. I mean, down at Grove Center, that was the name of a store in Grove Center, grocery, you know, supermarket type. But one of those was a place down in Midtown, we called it, that was there, and it was a grocery with a dirt floor in it, you know, it was just put up with temporary sidings and what have you, and it was a dirt floor and it was moving, and it was lines for everything, of course. But that’s some of it that was quite crazy, I think. I don’t know, that’s about all I can think of.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, getting around, did you ever ride the buses much?
Mr. Jernigan: Oh, continuously. Everyone rode the buses. Generally, when you’d get on the bus, you would have to tell the driver where the route was that he was supposed to be driving, because maybe he had left, you know, had a day off, and they’d put three more streets in and more houses while he was gone, so he wasn’t able to find his way through a lot of the time. We’d say, “No, you were supposed to turn here.”
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you knew more than they did.
Mr. Jernigan: Yeah, the town was growing so fast and everything. It was just amazing.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, that was turnover in people too.
Mr. Jernigan: It was turnover in people.
Mr. Kolb: And this was while you were working at the Castle.
Mr. Jernigan: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So did you have a lot of turnover in the staff up there too?
Mr. Jernigan: No, not a lot. We had all the same crowd there that was there when I worked the first time, the majority of them, the same person, and I remember when I was discharged and came to Oak Ridge, when I got back here, I went up to visit my friends that’s at the lab, I mean up the hill there, and was talking to Mr. Smith, who was the supervisor of the whole department, and I’d gotten home like on Friday, and went up there on Monday to visit them, and he says, he leaned over to his secretary and says, “Harold is going to work for us,” I mean, back to work. 
Mr. Kolb: He just assumed you were going back?
Mr. Jernigan: He just assumed that’s what I was there for. And I went to work the next day. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you did go back there.
Mr. Jernigan: I went to work there the next day, and stayed there for several years.
Mr. Kolb: Were you planning to do that?
Mr. Jernigan: No, not really, considered it, but I never drew any of my – gave me something to feel good about – I never had to draw, you know, to participate in the – oh, what was it we called it? It was the twenty, they paid us, like, twenty dollars a week or month back then if we was unemployed, G.I. [inaudible], so unemployment. So I never was out without a job at all, and everything, and always have been.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you had been trained, and so you went right back in, and it was good for him and good for you.
Mr. Jernigan: And so I went right back in after I left. And it was good work there, and it was a lot of fun, you could meet a lot of people. I remember seeing – you know, you’re right there with a lot of famous people that you knew afterwards was famous.
Mr. Kolb: Like whom?
Mr. Jernigan: Well, all of the people there – 
Mr. Kolb: Course, Colonel Nichols, I’m sure.
Mr. Jernigan: Nichols, yes, I never knew him. I knew him when I saw him, but I was just another face somewhere with him, I’m sure. But when I was there the last time, we had gotten into doing an interesting project that we had color film. It was new at the time, and especially the sixteen millimeter machines that we set up.
Mr. Kolb: Movies.
Mr. Jernigan: Movies.
Mr. Kolb: Now, this was during the war?
Mr. Jernigan: No, the war was over. The war was over, and Wescott was the main photographer for DOE, AEC and all the different names, although in our department, we also had a photographer. And I ran across, just a few days ago, I was going through some old pictures and ran across a group shot of us that was there, and I remembered that he was more on special assignments and stuff like this. But the interesting thing about this film is that we had – it exists somewhere right now, the film does, I’m not sure just where – and the story on this is that years after, I had gone to work at Y-12 later in my career here, and I was working with fusion energy group; I was an electronics supervisor there. And we were doing lunch bag programs and talks and a few things like that, and I had  gone back over to the Castle – and in the meantime, the old building had been torn down and the new building was built – and I was talking to the head of the place then, and he had told me about someone else – he was on the planning commission here too – but told me about some film that he had found over there in one of these rooms, and he had turned it in to them. So I went over, and going through the stuff and trying to get some pictures of it, I asked about that, and we found it, and it was a large, large tin of movie film, about twelve inches, a little spool or something a little larger maybe, and I was, this was the type of work I was also doing at the lab. I was doing the photographs and what have you for our division there and putting this together, so I took a look at it, and it was some film that we had shot back in the early days of Oak Ridge, and I’d turned it over to the Y-12 photographic department. At one time, I know they had it down at the museum, but that was about the time the museum did away with their photographic department down at the museum. And so, I’m not sure just where the thing has ended up at.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Harold, tell me a little bit more about the living conditions. You know, Oak Ridge was in a dry county, and did you, your parents or you have any – you know, how did you deal with this, or did it affect you at all? I mean, maybe it didn’t affect you at all.
Mr. Jernigan: Well, I made a few trips down towards Harriman, and come back in.
Mr. Kolb: And you got through the guard all right?
Mr. Jernigan: Got through the guard okay, and we had different ways of getting through the guard from time to time, and, you know, it���s – 
Mr. Kolb: It’s a little excitement there.
Mr. Jernigan: Anyway, there was a little excitement there, and later, after the city was opened up, we still were a dry area, as you recall, and it had that type of problems with it. But we did get – you know, you could go down to – oh gosh, I’ve forgotten the name of the place up where the – Harriman, up where we used to go up to, they’d sold this, it was – 
Mr. Kolb: It was a package store of some kind?
Mr. Jernigan: It was a package store. They had it there; we could store it. A lot of it, you know, you could also go through the cabs and whatnot.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, bootleggers.
Mr. Jernigan: Bootleggers. There’s an interesting story with that. It’s that in the latter years even, when the city had been moving and going for some time, and we had tried to have legalized votes and so forth, I used to have a communications company, that I serviced and took care of two-way radios for all the police and the cab companies and the different things in about seven counties here. I had the Yellow Cab here in Oak Ridge, and when a unit was not working or something, they had problems with it – and back then the coverage for, even with the cab companies, we did not have all the cell phone towers and things like this that we have today. And I went down, would go down and, you know, check a unit out or something like this that they were having trouble with, and [the] way my company operated was kind of a flat fee per unit, and they were a hundred percent coverage for everything, that I would replace and keep it for a certain amount. And I would always try to keep it [in] top condition, because it saves you a lot of calls from time to time. But I’d usually go out on River Road and, out going along the River Road there, there’s a steep mountain that, if you could make back to their base from there, I knew that the unit was working well.
Mr. Kolb: This is River Road out, off of Kingston?
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, off of the rowing here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Melton Lake Drive.
Mr. Jernigan: Yeah, Melton Lake Drive, yes. So I was out there one day, and I got a call back from the base and they said, “Harold, have you got car so-and-so?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “What about bringing that back in here. Someone left something in it.” And I looked back in the back seat, and there was about three or four cases of whiskey. 
Mr. Kolb: Just sitting there?
Mr. Jernigan: Just sitting in the back seat.
Mr. Kolb: You were driving around with it?
Mr. Jernigan: I was driving around all over town.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, boy, would’ve been embarrassed.
Mr. Jernigan: But it was always interesting, too, that quite often, people that you would know would come down and when they saw me working there, it would tend to embarrass them, that they would pick up something from the station there. And that’s a whole problem there that they had.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it went on.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: What about the City Club in Oak Ridge? Do you know much about that?
Mr. Jernigan: Well, yeah, a bit. And back in the times we were talking about earlier, about the alcoholic problems and being in a dry area, at the time, I was serving on City Council in Oak Ridge. And several people felt that it was just not right, with – at the time, the most that you could get at that time – and this is not in the old, old times of Oak Ridge, but it was middle history, I guess, and something along that – that we had the Country Club. And if you were a member of the Country Club, they served you down at the ninth, eighteen hole. You know, you could go down and get drinks or what have you; it was quite easy. So, there was other people that felt that that’s not really equality, and not the fair thing to do if you’re going to do it, so we worked with Gene Joyce and with the City Club that was in the – what’s the building up there that they were in?
Mr. Kolb: Alexander?
Mr. Jernigan: The Alexander Inn. I mean, it was a City Club that we had put together. And to solve the problem, you could join the City Club for a – 
Mr. Kolb: Anybody?
Mr. Jernigan: Anyone. Anyone could come in and join the City Club, and it was like a ten dollar fee, and that fee indicated that they would keep, always keep ten dollars worth of, I call it ‘beverages,’ there for you if you wanted it. That was legal for them to do it that way. So you could go there, and you could order drinks and what have you, and theoretically, when they would mix you a drink, they would charge you for mixing the drink, and then they would replace that amount of alcohol that you wished to keep there.
Mr. Kolb: And that was legal to do that?
Mr. Jernigan: It was legal to do it that way, and so we did that. That was the first place we – also I was active in, when we legalized local stores, package stores here, there was a lot of indications of how many stores we should have, and that’s one of the questions that we used to talk about. A very important, influential person in Nashville felt that we ought to limit them and have only one or two stores, and so we decided that, no, we would let the market serve it, and that’s the reason we had for so many years here, we had so many different stores. And it’s begun to work itself down now, but this influential person was able to go down to Nashville and come back and had his license to open up, of course, before we had anything to do with it. So then we decided, when we’d make it, you know, we were trying to create it, what it was, that the city was talking about having only one store in town, in the early days, and make that a city owned store. And the city could serve, could have more money, offset the taxes and so forth. So that’s the reasoning that we got into all that and had so many stores open.
Mr. Kolb: But this time, you talk about having, trying to get one city store open, how far back did that go?
Mr. Jernigan: How far back was this?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, not WWII probably?
Mr. Jernigan: Oh, no. Well, WWII was over at that time. Yes, that was back, oh, yes, that’s when we first got package stores into town. And we had a referendum, and it passed and everything; it was time to go that route.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well, that’s interesting. There’s another interesting thing about Oak Ridge and that’s how the locals, that is, the native Tennesseeans interacted with all the non-natives, the people that came in from all over the country, all over the world. Of course, you were a Tennesseean, so maybe you didn’t, but did you notice, or were you treated any differently, or did you notice any, you know, bias by the locals, the real natives, if you went to Knoxville, if you went to Clinton, or whatever, dealing with merchants and that kind of thing? Did you ever feel any lack of acceptance there?
Mr. Jernigan: I think everyone felt it, yes. Everyone that lived here felt it or experienced it, surely. It’s almost that anyone that lived or worked in Oak Ridge was a little bit of a stranger. I recall back then, of course, everyone had to have a badge, you know, you wore. Even the kids in schools had a badge they had to wear. The only good thing about that is that your in-laws couldn’t come visit you without getting a pass to get them in, so you knew they were there; they’re not going to drop in on you, uncalled for. But if you were going into Knoxville to do shopping or anything or going anywhere outside of the reservation, if you forgot to take that badge off, you’d find yourself standing there waiting at the grocery store or something like this; back then, you were just more or less ignored and what have you. But if you’d put it away before you got there, you were okay. They had no problems with it. A lot of that is understandable, and I’m sure that you understand that TVA came in here in the thirties. They came here and built Norris Dam. Now, those people in the reservoir area of that Norris Dam, they were all displaced. A lot of those people, where did they move? Down into the valleys here and where Oak Ridge is. And then less than ten years, within a ten year time spell, they’ve shown up here again and said you have to leave, and moved out, and then they saw other people coming in and living and working, so there’s a bit of resentment there, and we still face it. It���s not nearly as bad, but there’s still some of it there.
Mr. Kolb: It was sort of a jealousy?
Mr. Jernigan: There was a jealousy. It was a sort of a jealousy, but Oak Ridgers, as – gosh, what was his name? That Elza Gate, Paul Elzy.
Mr. Kolb: Paul Elza?
Mr. Jernigan: Elza, yeah. He made a statement one time, and it’s so true, that the Oak Ridgers tend to think that they are a rare jewel that had been dumped into the mud of East Tennessee. And there’s a lot of truth in that statement, you know, that we are all this – we have more doctors, we have this, you know, and so forth.
Mr. Kolb: Well, was it also the fact that the natives had not had a lot of previous contact with outside people, so anybody coming in was different.
Mr. Jernigan: Was different, was different.
Mr. Kolb: And it wasn’t whether they were rich or poor, they were just different, and we didn’t understand the way they talked or the way they acted.
Mr. Jernigan: There’s a lot of truth to that. There’s a lot of truth, yes.
Mr. Kolb: And they weren’t used to that. And maybe they thought, well they’re getting better treatment ’cause they’ve got these good jobs in Oak Ridge, or, you know, it’s a kind of thing.
Mr. Jernigan: There’s a lot to that, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I’ve been told by different people – not everyone experiences, but I’ve been told by, like, Colleen Black, who’s from Nashville – her family’s from Nashville, talked perfect good Tennesseean – but she felt it, or her family felt it, even though she was from Tennessee, so it wasn’t all that much different culture, just they were in the project.
Mr. Jernigan: Now, of course, Colleen, I don’t know here; her sister is our next door neighbor, Jo Ellen Iacovino, is our next door neighbor. They grew up down where K-25 is, down in Wheat community.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, Happy Valley, but they were from Nashville before that.
Mr. Jernigan: And they were from Nashville before that, but that’s where they experienced the town that way. And I’d never been to Happy Valley until after the war was over.
Mr. Kolb: Did you see it?
Mr. Jernigan: No, I’d never seen it until after the war was over. Now, my wife Helen has lived there and worked there.
Mr. Kolb: So what you saw, did you see it before it was knocked down?
Mr. Jernigan: No, I had not seen it before it was knocked down.
Mr. Kolb: And I came in ’54, and I never even knew about it until just a few years ago.
Mr. Jernigan: No, I knew about it, and I knew where the, you know, I can remember seeing old areas, some of the water lines, some of the pipe, you know, and this type of things that was there that was just moved.
Mr. Kolb: But you saw the remnants of it.
Mr. Jernigan: The remnants of it.
Mr. Kolb: But Helen did experience it; that was unique.
Mr. Jernigan: Well, those of us that lived in Oak Ridge had different passes. I had one that was not acceptable down there, and I think possibly that those that lived there could come into Oak Ridge and back. I think their badge would take them both ways.
Mr. Kolb: Well this brings up another big – something that’s – that whole area – secretness, that different people didn’t know what other people were doing; they were not allowed to know, and you were not supposed to talk about it. How did that affect you and your family, the fact that this was so secret and hush-hush? 
Mr. Jernigan: I don’t recall being really affected at all with it. I do remember that we talked about, you know, every time we’d go to a movie, there was a short preview talking directly to the people that live here – this is just a little thing that they used to show that all the movies before a movie started, back in the earlier days – that you’re here to do a major thing for your country, and I don’t recall just the wording of it, but it was “Don’t ask questions. You know what you need to know.”
Mr. Kolb: I never heard that. So the Army used that.
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, the Army used that, you know, to help spread the word.
Mr. Kolb: I know the billboards were all there.
Mr. Jernigan: And the billboards was, all the way in, hush-hush, and this bit.
And really we never knew it. And as I said earlier, in my working at Castle on the Hill, no one really knew, and we didn’t talk much about what’s going on, other than on the light side, the joke side, that they’re not making anything. Everything, all this is coming in and nothing’s going out.
Mr. Kolb: Did you hear some of the jokes about explaining what was going on and why they were here, that kind of thing?
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, right, you’re right, there’s all those type of jokes, you know, and you knew that this was just – 
Mr. Kolb: Building the front end of the jackasses to be sent up the washer?
Mr. Jernigan: Right, and all of these different things that was kind of going. And you’d take it that way. And a little of this I think was to cover, because those that did know what was going on were very, very few. And some of us may well have wanted people to think that we knew more than we did think, so we would make those jokes more easily to try to cover our own thing.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know about the Army intelligence spies in the community and in the workplace, that there were such people?
Mr. Jernigan: We knew that they were – I don’t know that there were spies here.
Mr. Kolb: Well, they were listening, they were monitoring.
Mr. Jernigan: I knew that. It was not uncommon for someone to be working, and then they just don’t come back to work the next day.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they were terminated?
Mr. Jernigan: They were disappeared. I mean, there was no questions. I mean, they just vanished.
Mr. Kolb: Well, they weren’t killed, were they?
Mr. Jernigan: No, they weren’t killed. We all assumed that security removed them for some reason and they were taken, something like that. And we knew that there was a lot of security around. And I guess in knowing, I may have been more knowledgeable about, what I told you earlier about the photostatic work and the paperwork that we went through, a lot of it was regular mail that had been opened and read and photographed and sent on. There was a lot of this that would go on. But you never talked about that. I don’t know that I ever told anyone that before or not. But it was little things, and newspaper clippings were always amusing. I now recall looking at some photographs that we were processing and I developed a lot of film and things like that up there also at the time during – 
[Side B]
Mr. Jernigan: What were we talking about?
Mr. Kolb: About the secret stuff and the security.
Mr. Jernigan: Oh, about the secret stuff and the security of this. I remember seeing a lot of photographs of these conveyor belts, with a lot of rock laying on it, you know, of some type of rocks or something like this, and I looked at that and I thought, what are we doing with all those? We can’t make anything out of rock. We’re not making any concrete, we’re not making it –
Mr. Kolb: What was going on here?
Mr. Jernigan: I don’t know where they were coming from, but it was just photographs that we were, we considered important, or someone did.
Mr. Kolb: It was part of the process.
Mr. Jernigan: See, most of the atoms, I found out later that those were some of the mines that were doing it, you know, where they were mining the ore to do the separations with – 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, to get the uranium?
Mr. Jernigan: Yes. That’s what I think it was, where they was processing it and something like that. But there were so many things going, and you didn’t, you really didn’t need to know, and the public took it quite well.
Mr. Kolb: Well, the other aspect was, in terms of the social aspect, the fact that there was a gated secure area of town that the parents could feel safe about their children going around and – 
Mr. Jernigan: Yes. We never kept our house locked. We never kept the house locked. It was open.
Mr. Kolb:  – that they wouldn’t vanish.
Mr. Jernigan: Yes. So, that’s a good thing about it.
Mr. Kolb: So when it came time to, however you wanted to do away with the gates, it was not too acceptable for a while, I understand. Do you remember that period, how that happened?
Mr. Jernigan: Well there’s a lot of people that – you mean by the public, or by the – 
Mr. Kolb: Public in general, yeah.
Mr. Jernigan: Well the public in general were a bit fearful, were not comfortable in doing away with the gates, because then they weren’t sure what’s coming in.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, normalcy was not accepted.
Mr. Jernigan: And normalcy was not accepted very well. 
Mr. Kolb: But it did happen eventually, yeah.
Mr. Jernigan: It did happen, I think, eventually, and Oak Ridge has changed a great deal, from looking at it today.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember the big ceremony and celebration for the big gate opening, when they had the dignitaries there?
Mr. Jernigan: Oh, yes, oh, yes, I remember, I was there, I was there, and – 
Mr. Kolb: Taking pictures?
Mr. Jernigan: No, I don’t think I made any pictures. I had some pictures, you know, some way or another and lost track of it. I recall being at the, out at Elza Gate, when they opened the gate there, I mean, when they did it, with the little, the fire, you know, the big ceremony that was there, and then the parades back – 
Mr. Kolb: And Marie McDonald.
Mr. Jernigan: Marie McDonald, and I was trying to remember the cowboy that was here, that he’s deceased now, the big dance that they had down at, or the big party they had down at Grove Center, at the Recreational Center there. And that’s something else we didn’t mention, of all the recreational facilities, buildings, it was open. But this movie star that came here, he got a little bit too much liquids, and in a lot of people’s mind made a little fool of himself. But he’s deceased and gone now, so that’s – he’s not the only person in the world that���s done that either.
Mr. Kolb: In public or whatever, yeah. But talk [about] recreation, I mean, you mention – [I’m] aware that you’ve done – I’ve forgot what you said, bowling or – 
Mr. Jernigan: Oh, bowling and some roller skating and softball.
Mr. Kolb: And then the rec hall was where they had public, was the biggest place to have a public – 
Mr. Jernigan: Then they had bowling, and – 
Mr. Kolb: Did you know Roscoe Williams, Roscoe Stevens, who ran the Oak Terrace back in the early days? When I came in ’54, he was like a father to me. I ate down there at the Oak Terrace every night. He got to be real good – 
Mr. Jernigan: Yeah, he was a real person who made a name here, and a lot of people know him. 
Mr. Kolb: He was a nice person.
Mr. Jernigan: Yeah he was, he was. It’s interesting; I hadn’t heard the name.
[break in recording]
Mr. Jernigan: No, I was just going to say that the people [themselves] by living here, and under the conditions that we were – and you’re talking about being more acceptable and being open a little bit more – in that, you recall, there’s a very, very few people that we referred to as doctor, you know, and everyone in the normal world outside, when they have the Ph.D.s and their doctorates and so forth, they’re proud of those, as they should be, but in Oak Ridge, you never knew. And there’s many very famous people that was here, worked, and you worked shoulder to shoulder with them, but you really didn’t realize that they were any different level or personal level at all. So that may be one of the nice things that the early Oak Ridgers acquired, unthinkable. 
Mr. Kolb: Right, there was no caste system.
Mr. Jernigan: There was no caste system at all; almost everyone was equal and everything.
Mr. Kolb: There were people that were more well-off, I think, better off than others.
Mr. Jernigan: That’s a story I know that, I come from a Democrat family, a Democrat, politically part of Democrat, and I’ve been quite active in the Democratic Party here for years. But one of the things with my mother when she was here – and, as I say, she came from Overton County, Livingston; it’s near Cookeville, down in that area. She had never been – there was no social world where she grew up, in that small town and what have you, and she had a large group of children. She had eight children in all, and we had a lot of work there that she did. She had more work. In that day, in the early days with her, I remember that, you know, we had no running water, or anything like this. We had to carry, and we did our laundry outside on wooden things. Then she moved here and started – and she was a very religious person, too. She was active in the Church of Christ here. So she joined the church and got very active and made friends quite fast. But I recall one time she come back in and she was upset and she said that one of her best friends, she had just found out, was a Republican!
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness! Well, she was strong Democratic.
Mr. Jernigan: She was strong. My mother was strong Democratic, and she says – she was such a nice lady – she said, how could she be a Republican?
Mr. Kolb: Except for that, she was all right.
Mr. Jernigan: It really gave her a little problem for a while. It gave her a problem for a little while. But here we did not pay much attention about what a person was one way or the other, ’cause they look at the individual, but – 
Mr. Kolb: “How could you be a Republican?” Yeah, crazy. But, I guess you’ve met other non-Democrats.
Mr. Jernigan: Others, oh – but this lady stayed her good friend until they were both deceased.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, there’s one other topic that I want to touch base with you on, and that’s the Oak Ridge social situation between Afro-Americans and the whites. You know, most people are white here. Did you or your family have much contact with the blacks? I mean, growing up, in your high school years or WWII years, did you have much experience, know much about their experience here, offhand?
Mr. Jernigan: You mean, while they were here?
Mr. Kolb: Yes, here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Jernigan: Not until – as I say, I grew up in Middle Tennessee, and we had black African-American people in the neighborhood, but as a child, growing up, it was never discussed, or I was never taught – I know I got in a little trouble one time for – this family lived up the street from us and I’d pulled a little trick on the kids when they passed my home, passed my house on Sunday.
Mr. Kolb: One of the black children?
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, one of the black, and my mother gave me one of the worst whippings that I’ve ever had from that. She said, you don’t treat people that way, and so we’ve never had that problem. When we came here, when I came here –and this problem was brought here by the federal government also. And I recall in Y-12, when a piece of equipment was removed from a walled area one time, there was still a sign up over where a water fountain had been, said “For Black Only.” And I’d known the problems that they were having. So, Helen and I both have been extremely supportive of equal treatments with them. I feel very confident and very comfortable with the African American.
[break in recording]
Mr. Jernigan: No, as we were talking about the problems of race here in Oak Ridge – and I had never really in the early, early days of it thought of the problem that closely, until it started coming out, back to people here.
Mr. Kolb: Waldo Cohn, who got defeated here, led the charge.
Mr. Jernigan: Waldo Cohn, when he got – and he led the charge for this, integrating the schools, and I think that’s the right way we went. Even then he was trying to – they had a recall election over his doing that, and it’s fortunate it was not successful, I don’t think.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, personally, did you have much contact with blacks?
Mr. Jernigan: Not a great deal of contact because our paths didn’t cross until after integration, after Martin Luther King started becoming more active, and we all started having the ability to move and circulate more into towns and what have you. Most of the people we knew – and as I indicated, I have many, many friends that I feel very, very close with here. And I feel honored that I know so many people and they are strong members of our close friends, my wife and I. We’ve just pointed out that I’ve just attended Will Minter’s wedding recently, as one of the ushers, and he had a nice wedding in Knoxville. Oh, let’s see, and several other places. We have so many good friends that our standard [assumption is] that if we are not invited to most all of the social events, we think they forgot us. We attend four or five different functions a year, every year.
Mr. Kolb: They feel comfortable with you.
Mr. Jernigan: Very, very comfortable. And it is not uncommon for Helen and I to be the only white person in the groups. It’s just [one thing that has] never been a problem. I mean, [we’ve] never thought of anything other than that they’re our friends.
Mr. Kolb: And they accept you.
Mr. Jernigan: You know, they accept us, we accept them, very fully. And I just don’t think – we had an issue in the county government recently, and as I mentioned, I do serve presently as a county commissioner, and it was not a racial problem at all, but we thought it was more on the religious issues – an issue came up in the government, this prayer in school, and the Ten Commandments, and a few other things. And someone made a comment to me, and my argument there was that, well, you know, which Ten Commandments do we publish, if we publish them on the wall or something of this nature? And I said, well, Oak Ridge and Anderson County is not the place that we were forty years ago or fifty years ago. I said, “We have several different nationalities that are here now.” And this person says, “I didn’t know that, I hadn’t thought of anything other than the Baptists.”
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? They said that?
Mr. Jernigan: Yes, and it was serious. I think it was serious.
Mr. Kolb: Show how closed their society – 
Mr. Jernigan: How closed that society was, of that person. 
Mr. Kolb: And it still is.
Mr. Jernigan: Yeah, and it’s still around some places. You’re finding it with the problems that we’re going through now – and I guess the only problem I have, with any racial tint to me about it is that I think that everyone that’s in America should be legal, that works here. I have a problem of our government not recognizing a fair and equal recognition of legal immigrants, different nationalities are treated differently as to where we are, and it bothers me.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you know, it’s a big economic issue there, as we all know.
Mr. Jernigan: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Certain industries couldn’t exist without wetbacks or whatever.
Mr. Jernigan: That’s right, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Well, very good. Glad I asked that question, ’cause that’s, well, you know, I’m the same way. I didn’t have any contact as a child with blacks ’cause there weren’t any, there weren’t any in Wisconsin, where I was raised, and had to grow into it naturally, you know, in time, but glad we did. Let’s just sort of wrap up here. We’re getting close to the end, I think. We’ve talked about the gates opening, and you were on a troop ship when the bomb was dropped, I think, or just before, so you talked about that. Just kind of summarizing, wrapping up, there’re a lot of, well, let me ask it this way: would you say that Oak Ridge is a unique community, and kind of maybe comment on why that might be, in your opinion? Of course, I’ve alluded to some of that already.
Mr. Jernigan: I think it may well be that, as we indicated earlier, in that time –  and I never really had given this a thought, one way or the other, as to why and what we are, talking of the melting pot. It may well be that when we came into Oak Ridge, we were like the frogs that they talk about: if you put a pan on a hot stove and turn the heat on slowly, that frog is going to stay in the water. It will not jump out of the water until it’s cooked almost. Maybe that’s what’s happened to the generation of us that were here in Oak Ridge throughout the time, all brought together by these different workgroups and what have you, and we’ve just grown to be more acceptable, more understanding, without that kind of thing. So I think we are a unique group of people in that form, in that thinking.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Plus, people didn’t have to stay here after the war.
Mr. Jernigan: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And, of course, a lot of them had the jobs, but a lot of them didn’t, and a lot of them had to scrap. But there was the option to leave, and a lot of them didn’t.
Mr. Jernigan: The option to leave, and it’s – they have the sense of being willing to support education. They want the arts. And they want [inaudible]. They’re very supportive of that. And there’re so many things that we’re a bit different over. And it may be that all of this was brought about by that. Even today, education is still supported quite strongly, not nearly as much as it was in the earlier days. [Some residents might wonder], “After my children are all out, my grandchildren are all out, why should I still pay for those things?” And it’s – 
Mr. Kolb: And we’re Oak Ridgers.
Mr. Jernigan: We’re Oak Ridgers. That’s why we need to do that.
Mr. Kolb: Bottom line. We don’t jump ship.
Mr. Jernigan: Right. But it’s a good place.
Mr. Kolb: You mention the arts, and I should have mentioned that sooner, but that, I think, is one of the unique qualities of Oak Ridge that’s so much available, and going way back, I’ve heard people say that that was one of the reasons that maybe Knoxvilleans, particularly, didn’t accept us, because why would they have to start their own orchestra, when we’ve got an orchestra in Knoxville? Why would they have to start a playhouse when we’ve got a playhouse in Knox-? Why don’t they just come over here and go to our playhouse? They gotta have their own. So that was a cause for them to have, to look at us, you know. Well, why don’t they like our facilities, and they gotta have their own? That mentality, I’ve heard people say, you know. And there’s some truth there, but we wanted to have our own, that’s the whole bottom line, we wanted to have our own, and I’m glad we did, and we do. But, you know, that’s the background.
Mr. Jernigan: That may well be, but I think possibly this could have been brought about by the timing of Knoxville and Oak Ridge. Knoxville, if you recall, was a sleepy little town at that time, with the Cass Walker form of mayorship and the terms of his – his group was in the county. Knoxville had deteriorated greatly and gone way down and what have you until the latter years, [when] they’ve seen that it’s a need to do this to bring it back. And I think they will see that it will be supported. The Tennessee Theater that just opened, I’m sure, will be utilized to a great deal, more than it ever was before in the latter part in theater times. I was so pleased to see them do that, and to come up with it.
Mr. Kolb: Led by an Oak Ridger, by the way.
Mr. Jernigan: Right, right. Now, I wasn’t gonna push it. See, I’m trying to play more political than you are and trying to be nicer.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you were in City Council, where that was – Bradshaw had pointed that out, but, yeah.
Mr. Jernigan: Right, right. But it’s a good place, and it’s a good place to live. I wish that – you know, my wife and I both are very fortunate that our children are all local, and I have one daughter that lives in Georgia, that the rest of them are not too far away. I have a son that’s – my son is with the Oak Ridge School System, and he’s the school psychologist with the Oak Ridge School System. And I have two stepsons that’s in Knoxville, and they’re both very active in the arts in the different ways. One is a professional musician in Knoxville, and one is with the photography, and it’s all the same thing, you know, so it’s a good place to be.
Mr. Kolb: Yep, well, are there any closing anecdotes or things you want to comment on in there?
Mr. Jernigan: Not at all, other than speaking of the things that’s here and that we’re doing. I just really wanted to commend you and the other people that’s active in heritage groups, that’s working so hard to preserve the information that we have. That’s one of the problems that Oak Ridge has failed in, I think. At first it came to my mind really and consciously back some years ago, we were trying to have a recognition from the Oak Ridge City Council people, the history, and we were having a special meeting here in Oak Ridge, and Carl West and I were talking [about] trying to locate all of the past people. We had a very hard time finding the listing, even, of all of them. There’s no record that there is anything special or different from anywhere else, but it’s just part of our roots that needs to be.
Mr. Kolb: Is this for the Fiftieth Anniversary?
Mr. Jernigan: No, that was since then. But there’s just so many things that we have not preserved, even.
Mr. Kolb: Physical, physical facilities.
Mr. Jernigan: Just physical facilities, and other items of this way, of history, oral history of people is here. Once it’s gone – it’s a thing like that that I know that I’m trying to pull together, I mentioned to you a while ago, that I’m trying to pull together here, is to preserve some of this, my own family things that I’m trying to pull. I just recently, dawned on me, that I have also a lot of audio tapes that I have recorded, and there’s a kind of a sub-hobby back sometime back, of my family members. And my father, I have a nice recording of him at one time, and I had tried, first recorded him – I put the tape away and then really never listened to it. And then he passed away, and a nephew of mine had been out of the country at the time, and he came back sometime later and he says, “Uncle Harold,” he says, “someone told me you had a tape of Granddad.” And I said, “Well, yes.” So we sit down with it, tape recorder very similar to what we have here in front of us, and I said, I’ve not listened to this tape since we recorded it, I’m not sure how I would feel, and I’m not sure how Helen will feel, nor you will, and the thing. But here is the ‘ON’ button; here is the ‘OFF’ button.” It’s three of us, sat here. And I says, “If anyone wants to hit that off button at any time, it’s off, no questions, no comments from anyone. It’s over.” It’s amazing how, in about four or five minutes there, we were all laughing, and we were enjoying that tape so much. And it’s just almost like having him back for a little while to sit down and just talk to us and tell us some of the things that he had been talking about. And it’s really important. So what I’m trying to do is to pull together some – nowadays, with the computers and all that they have, so much of – is to start burning some DVD, background on them, and put their music and put their type of family, and kind of a little personal family tree for them, and include pictures and voice, and short subjects and things as we can get them through and pulling plugs out of here and there. So it’s kind of a project I hope that I’ll be able to spend enough time on to get that for them plus some other things.
Mr. Kolb: You mention you’ve got other siblings. Are you one of the older of your family?
Mr. Jernigan: Actually, there’s only two of my family left, myself and my sister that lives here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well, then you’ve got – sort of puts the burden on you.
Mr. Jernigan: And that puts the burden – and we are the two youngest. My sister is younger than I, so [it] puts the burden there on us. And I’m just now beginning to realize – I pull things out, I’m gathering – I’m one-eighth American Indian. I can’t trace that back [past] my great-grandmother. I just got something here, just a while back. It was a little family tree of them that’s got her on it. But that’s as far as my mother’s line can be traced back, that I’ve been able to do. I can trace my father back to 1400.
Mr. Kolb: Really!
Mr. Jernigan: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: You were lucky. You have been to Europe, I guess?
Mr. Jernigan: It’s in England. So there’s a lot of documentation in our family. Of course there’s about – I’m not a genealogist at all, but – you have to enjoy it a little bit – but to go out and try to dig all this down, I could never do that. That’s – someone else has to do it. But, as I say, there’s a lot of documentation there: there’s Jernigan Web site, there’s everything out that you can – and there’s a big, big thing, had about, oh probably fifteen different spellings of the name, but they’re all the same thing. It’s like, locally here, there’s a Jarnigan family that’s in – a person that lived in Clinton a long time. There’s a Jarnigan Chapel over there. There’s a lot of Jarnigans that’s in the African American race over there.
Mr. Kolb: You say Jarnigan, is that – 
Mr. Jernigan: J-A-R, J-A-R instead of J-E-R. And so we know that that’s all the same name. So Jarnigan in Clinton was a well-known person in the early days that helped to establish a lot of things when the city was just being started up over there. And he did have slaves, and that’s where the Jarnigan name over there is. There’s some Jarnigans up in, another one, up close to Kingsport there, in the automotive business, or something like that. But it’s an interesting background to trace back, all the way back through until – 
Mr. Kolb: That’s a good hobby to have. I’m glad you – but it’s something you tend to put off, and then you finally say, I gotta do it, better get started.
Mr. Jernigan: Well, I’ve got it in such a mess right now. I hope I can get it out and re-straightened out and go and what have you.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s wrap it up here, and Harold thank you very much. It’s been very, very worthwhile and enjoyable.
Mr. Jernigan: Well, thank you, you’ve been good and easy to talk to.
[end of recording]