Stokes, Lloyd

              ORAL HISTORY OF LLOYD STOKES
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
July 19, 2011
 
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is July the 19th, 2011, and I am in the home of Lloyd and Betty Stokes, and I’m talking with Lloyd. Lloyd, thanks for taking time to talk with us today.
Mr. Stokes: You’re most welcome, Keith.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. I have interviewed you several times before, and I know some of those good stories I want you to tell, but before we get to those, let’s just start at the very beginning. Tell me about where you were born and where you were raised, and about your family and where you went to school.
Mr. Stokes: That’s a big calling. I was born in West Frankfort, Illinois, June the 17th, 1935, and one thing I guess I need to tell you, this was during World War II, not when I was born, but my early life and schools, and Dad’s jobs, and we moved. In growing up, I went to ten schools in twelve years, if that tells you anything.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: And so I have lived on Palmer Street, where I was born, moved to 707 East Fourth Street, and from there – well, while we had the older brother, he was born, also on Palmer Street, Marion, I was born, we moved to the Fourth Street address, and had a brother, Jack Edward, was born, then had another sister while we lived there, Mona Faye was born. That was in, let’s see, I was in ’35, the older brother was in ’34, Jack was in ’36, and then the sister, I believe, if I’m not mistaken, was born in ’38 or ’39, and then another sister in ’40, and then my youngest sister, the sixth child, of five siblings, was born six weeks before we moved to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: So that would have been about the middle of May.
Mr. Stokes: We moved into Oak Ridge July the 4th, 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So what did your dad do that he – 
Mr. Stokes: Okay, he was a coal miner; his father was a coal miner in West Frankfort, Illinois. Actually, my grandfather moved from Arkansas along with a bunch of other men. When they tried to organize coal mines in Bates, Arkansas, they were unsuccessful, and as a result of that, before Taft-Hartley, they were all fired.
Mr. McDaniel: They probably got run out of town, didn’t they?
Mr. Stokes: So the friends picked up as a unit and moved to the largest mine at that time in the world, or at number two, in West Frankfort, Illinois. Granddad retired from the line, and my dad and uncle both worked in the coal mine. When World War II started, Dad left the coal mines and went to work for the government in the NYA, National Youth Administration, teaching people to solder, silver solder, weld, machining, and the government had rented the building, and Dad oversaw that building and the students, training them for the, I guess, war production efforts.
Mr. McDaniel: And he had learned those skills working in the mine?
Mr. Stokes: In the mine, yes. He was basically a mechanic, but a mechanic at that time could probably do everything. If it was electrical, they’d solve that, and he taught that, but that was in probably ’43. And what happened, Dad was classified 4-F due to his eyesight, bad eyes, and had six children, and that was an exemption as long as you worked what they called a war production job and the NYA was war production. So oil refineries, he and my uncle picked up and were gone a few months working oil refineries and other jobs. And finally, in January 1944, he and my uncle moved to actually Oak Ridge to go to work in Oak Ridge, but they lived in Knoxville, one bedroom along with, I think, five other people bunked in one bedroom. Houses were unavailable in January of ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now, what did he do when he came here in that January?
Mr. Stokes: He hired in with Tennessee Eastman, worked at Y-12, and the secrecy that was around his job, he never really talked a lot about it, but from the description that I heard him occasionally mention, I assume he was a calutron mechanic.
Mr. McDaniel: Mechanic or maintenance person for the –
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, and he worked, and he said, “We removed those big things,” and, of course, they didn’t know what the –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Stokes: – “Removed those and we cleaned them,” and I imagine he was in on the, I guess, processing the uranium, scraping it off the plates and so forth, from his stories.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So that was in January of ’44.
Mr. Stokes: And the family moved down.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, had you planned on coming down? I mean did your mother tell you that, you know, when he came, did he plan on coming down, or just going to wait and let him see how it worked out first?
Mr. Stokes: It worked out, and he said, “It looks like we’ve got a good job.” Of course, our family, both sets of grandparents at that time, were there local, her parents and his parents, and she didn’t want to come, and wasn’t happy when she got here. 
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah. Of course, we moved into a TDU up at 574 West Outer Drive.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, what was a TDU?
Mr. Stokes: It was a two-family unit –
Mr. McDaniel: Temporary dwelling unit, I guess is the –
Mr. Stokes: – three bedroom. Yeah, temporary dwelling unit and dusty roads. Oh, it was –
Mr. McDaniel: Was it mobile? Was it like a portable-type thing?
Mr. Stokes: No, no.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay.
Mr. Stokes: They’re still in existence up on West Outer Drive. There was an entrance to each end that was used for the two families that lived in them.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I see.
Mr. Stokes: They also had four-bedroom units. Most of those were down in the West Village area.
Mr. McDaniel: So you had a three-bedroom unit.
Mr. Stokes: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And you had, I guess, a bedroom for the girls, a bedroom for the boys, and a –
Mr. Stokes: You got it, and a lot of bunk beds.
Mr. McDaniel: A lot of bunk beds. So there were how many boys? Four boys?
Mr. Stokes: Three boys and three girls. And then Dad and Mom.
Mr. McDaniel: And how old was your mom and dad then?
Mr. Stokes: Let’s see. Dad was born in 1911.
Mr. McDaniel: So he would have been –
Mr. Stokes: Thirties.
Mr. McDaniel: – thirty-three.
Mr. Stokes: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Thirty-three when you all moved.
Mr. Stokes: And Mom was born in 1912.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so thirty-three, early thirties, with six kids.
Mr. Stokes: That World War II thinned us, too. They were thin. Everyone was thin back then. It was, I guess, activities and staying busy. Living conditions.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, they probably didn’t have anything to eat after they fed the six children, did they?
Mr. Stokes: Well, yeah. We raised gardens.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were about nine when you moved to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Stokes: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you go to school when you first came that fall?
Mr. Stokes: Okay, I went to Highland View. Went in, and it’s a pleasure to go back and see those same little commodes and urinals that I used when I was, I guess, fourth grade.
Mr. McDaniel: You and your brothers and sisters went to Highland View –
Mr. Stokes: Highland View.
Mr. McDaniel: – and then where did you go to school after that?
Mr. Stokes: Went to –
Mr. McDaniel: Jefferson?
Mr. Stokes: – no, no. Went to Linden, lived up on – see housing was scarce, and we were still trying to get housing and get located, and Dad thought he wanted to be a mechanic and start a garage. This was after the end of the war, and moved off reservation, and there were some issues with not allowing us to go to school if you lived off-site. Of course, Dad challenged it every way he could, so we ended up missing part of a school year, and went to Donovan School. Now, you talk about a school.
Mr. McDaniel: Where? Donovan?
Mr. Stokes: Donovan, at the base of Windrock Mountain, right across the valley. The conditions were primitive. No air conditioning, no lunchroom, no running water; outdoor privies. A coal stove in the middle. We stoked the coal stoves and carried out ashes.
Mr. McDaniel: So how long did you go there, a year?
Mr. Stokes: It was part of one year.
Mr. McDaniel: Part of one year?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, and Lucy Scarborough was the teacher.
Mr. McDaniel: So you went there and then you moved back into Oak Ridge?
Mr. Stokes: Moved back into Oak Ridge. Moved to 106 East Judd Lane, a three-bedroom flattop. We were there a while. We went to Linden School. Dad got a “D” house at 324 East Farragut, and I went to Elm Grove with my brothers and sisters, and then I guess we left there. It’s still there. I went to the old Jefferson Junior High School.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Where was that located?
Mr. Stokes: It’s where the playground is now for, I guess, West Village. They moved the school actually further west, but there’s a playground off of Robertsville Road. The old steps are still there.
Mr. McDaniel: I thought that was the original Linden.
Mr. Stokes: Oh, it was. I’m confused.
Mr. McDaniel: That was LaSalle.
Mr. Stokes: That was Linden.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s where the soccer fields –
Mr. Stokes: The old Jefferson was where Robertsville –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Okay.
Mr. Stokes: – the old, brick building was still there with the aluminum fire escapes. I guess to be code, they had to put fire escapes on from the second floor classroom, and they built a temporary extension onto Jefferson, and also a second gymnasium was added to the school. After the war and several years later, they tore the old gymnasium, they tore the old school; it was a fiberboard, made like the original Oak Ridge Hospital. You could kick a hole in the wall with your foot. It was very fragile. They tore that down and built a new school back and forth.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, and now was that Jefferson that they built back there? Was it called Jefferson?
Mr. Stokes: Jefferson Junior High School.
Mr. McDaniel: Because they didn’t –
Mr. Stokes: It was, but –
Mr. McDaniel: – the new Jefferson wasn’t built until, gosh, what? 
Mr. Stokes: – much later.
Mr. McDaniel: – The ’80s maybe, something like that, the ’70s.
Mr. Stokes: The old high school was used temporarily back in the, I guess, late ’40s, early ’50s as a junior high school, when they got the new high school built. The students left the high school on the hill, Jackson Square and went to the new school, and then the junior high school went to the old high school, and eventually it was also torn down.
Mr. McDaniel: Now they shut Linden down at one point, because I know in the mid ’50s, about ’58 – 
Mr. Stokes: It was empty.
Mr. McDaniel: – it was empty, because that’s when the Clinton –
Mr. Stokes: that’s the Clinton bombing, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: – bombing, and the kids came there, and I guess that would have been the LaSalle –
Mr. Stokes: Yes. Right.
Mr. McDaniel: – location, right, for Linden.
Mr. Stokes: But like I say, there’s a playground there now, and that was part of the schoolyard, where the school was.
Mr. McDaniel: So you ended up at Oak Ridge High School, I imagine, and –
Mr. Stokes: Oak Ridge High School.
Mr. McDaniel: – graduated.
Mr. Stokes: Three years, played football, had two brothers played football. We’ve got a legacy at Oak Ridge High School. Three brothers played – I wasn’t very good, but played two years – graduated in 1954, so I was there ’51, ’52, ’53, played football, and we’ve had two sons that also played football that graduated in ’78. Let’s see. They played in ’78 and ’79 and ’80, Mark, All State, First Team, and so forth, Coach Hale, two state champions in a row.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: Then the younger son, who graduated in ’83, Greg, also played football two years.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back to your childhood in Oak Ridge. What was that like? I mean I’ve heard you talk about you and your brothers would get out and just run, and go run the reservation. It was like a big playground.
Mr. Stokes: Until they opened the gates – 
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about that.
Mr. Stokes: – in March in ’49. We had the largest playground in the world. My brothers and a gang of people would leave home and stay gone all day long. The old farms, the old farmhouses were still here that we would explore, or walk, hike. Of course, we had Poplar Creek and Brushy Creek right over the hill, but we –
Mr. McDaniel: You’d go catch frogs and tadpoles.
Mr. Stokes: – sometimes we’d catch fish. My younger brother and I got interested in Indian artifacts, and of course all the bare ground, even in Oak Ridge and over the hill, you could pick up Indian artifacts, and of course we started our Indian artifact collection on Brushy Creek and Clinch River. But anyway, we played. I guess every neighborhood – we had the playgrounds, of course. That was the City Recreation and Welfare Association, which I’ve got to compliment, I guess, AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], actually MED and the Army when they started it. They had a very active program for clubs and activities, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and we would play in the neighborhood. Basketball courts, washer courts, the place, of course, cleaned off every neighborhood, and you’d have to dribble a ball and shooting baskets, and the next thing you know it would be fifteen or twenty kids playing. If you got tired of that, you shot marbles or pitched washers, all kinds of –
Mr. McDaniel: So they had one of those playground areas for every neighborhood, didn’t they?
Mr. Stokes: Well, the official playgrounds were at the schools but if there was a flat place large enough in between houses, and I guess this was at every place I lived in Oak Ridge at different places, it was a community in addition to the official playgrounds. And, of course, baseball, and this was all sponsored. The city had hobby shows. It’s almost unimaginable the activities that were created here to keep the people happy.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, and it was all sponsored by the government, or the –
Mr. Stokes: The playgrounds, yes. And of course I was a Boy Scout. We didn’t get to go off the reservation much. I went off the reservation I think one time, a week at Camp Pellissippi in 1949. I still have my badges and certificates from that. But I belonged to Troop 325 here in Oak Ridge. The scoutmaster is still alive, C. F. Harrison, and I have acquired photographs of him, of us, so I guess the World Jamboree 1950, including this place, my patrol and our troop, sponsored by the VFW, built for that 40th anniversary, and I say that because we have just celebrated our 100th anniversary, and I built a collection to display at AMSE, the American Museum of Science and Energy, for that, being a scouter.
Mr. McDaniel: So you’re a member of the 40th anniversary of Boy Scouts.
Mr. Stokes: 40th, and with displays in Loveman’s at Jackson Square, and I’ve got those photographs as part of my collection, and it’s amazing what you can collect and build, the stories that existed here.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you guys just ran all over the place and just played. What did your parents think?
Mr. Stokes: Well, usually, a bunch of children, and the crooks couldn’t get in. We were behind the fence.
Mr. McDaniel: The criminals couldn’t get in, so it was safe.
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, and we did slip off reservation occasionally. The little store outside of Oliver Springs Gate, and we would slip down and watch the horse monitored fence, and look this way, that way, and when it was clear, we’d slip through the barbwire fence to buy candy when they had it at that little grocery store off reservation.
Mr. McDaniel: Really? Well, that leads me to a good story. I’m sure nobody had much money back then –
Mr. Stokes: No.
Mr. McDaniel: – so how did you get money to buy candy?
Mr. Stokes: You want to hear that story?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, tell me that.
Mr. Stokes: Well, for one, the story I haven’t told you, my brother and I got up early in the morning and sold The Knoxville Journal at Oliver Springs Gate –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Stokes: – the workers coming in. We sold those papers by the – I don’t know how many, but workers coming in that wanted a paper, well, we had the paper.
Mr. McDaniel: How much did the paper cost?
Mr. Stokes: Oh, goodness. It seemed like it was a nickel, five cents.
Mr. McDaniel: How much did you make off of it every time you sold one?
Mr. Stokes: Probably a penny or half cent.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was saying, about a half a penny or a penny probably.
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, there’s so many stories. We had a paper route when we lived off reservation for a while, and we probably had twenty customers, and we’d walk probably two mile –
Mr. McDaniel: For twenty customers. [laughter]
Mr. Stokes: – and make fifty cents a week. But back to what we’d do for money, we worked, of course raised gardens and things like that. We collected bottles – bottles back then had deposits – along the roads, especially by that side of the gate, and you’d show your pass and get out and walk, and I won’t tell you about the whiskey bottles we found, but we, of course, wouldn’t pick those up. But people getting afraid coming into the gate, and they’d dispose of anything that had remaining. But we picked up drink bottles, and I think it was two cents a bottle.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: And the story I guess I really need to tell you is my dogwood stick story.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, tell me that story.
Mr. Stokes: My younger brother and I, of course I guess we ran together more than the older ones and with other people, but we carried dogwood sticks in our pocket, about this long, about I guess a quarter each or a little larger, and we would go up to the boardwalk where people were waiting on the buses, and those boardwalks were nailed down. They had pegs and were nailed to the pegs, where you couldn’t get those up and there was cracks in those boardwalks, and people getting the change out of their pocket would lose it and it would bounce through a crack. You could walk up to a bus stop and other places, commercial places, and see coins down in those cracks that you couldn’t reach. Well, we would take one dogwood stick, push down on the coin, and it would stand up. You’d take the other dogwood stick, which was split, put it down over that coin, pick it up –
Mr. McDaniel: And put it in your pocket.
Mr. Stokes: – and have change for candy. We were I guess in probably elementary school or junior high school when we did that. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Weren’t you afraid of those big rats? I’ve heard stories about big rats under those boardwalks, or was that later?
Mr. Stokes: We didn’t have that much food, so there couldn’t have been many rats.
Mr. McDaniel: I heard that those boardwalks, especially out in the communities, they’d have big old rats that’d be living underneath there, and at one point they had to tear them up just to get rid of them.
Mr. Stokes: They had I guess around the boardwalks, the garbage at every house, and the story I haven’t told you, it was primitive conditions, really, at best. No air conditioning in the homes, everything had either coal, and some had oil, but our stoves were coal-fired, and they’d have to, in the winter, stock those and empty the ashes, and so forth. I’ve even got a procedure here in my collection, my Manhattan Project collection, that tells you how to dispose of your coal ash and how to maintain your garbage in the city of Oak Ridge. Now, this was early.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did they collect garbage?
Mr. Stokes: They collected garbage. You had garbage cans out at the road. They had, I think, a procedure, I’ve got a recreation department procedure that tells all the sports, all the organizations they sponsored. I’ve got so much Manhattan Project, and I enjoy getting that stuff out and reading that. It’s amazing the organization and activities that were sponsored and encouraged here on site and, see, I belonged, in high school, belonged to the DeMolay’s. That’s a Masonic order for young men, and the Boy Scouts. I don’t know if I told you I’m a forty-four-year scouter, and I’ve been with one troop, Troop 129 that meets at First Baptist Church, sponsored by the Kiwanis, for thirty-four years. I’m not as active. I don’t camp anymore. My two boys got to Eagles, and that made me very happy, but I felt an obligation to continue to work for the scouting. It’s a good organization.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Tell me about Shep Lauder.
Mr. Stokes: Shep Lauder.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah.
Mr. Stokes: Don’t cross him.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about him.
Mr. Stokes: “Don’t sit on my pool table.”
Mr. McDaniel: Who was he, and what did he do?
Mr. Stokes: Okay. Shep Lauder was a coordinator for the recreation program, and he ran most activities. We had rec halls – Jackson Square, we had Midtown, Jefferson, and all over town – and also recreation halls in buildings. The Midtown Community Center is where I first met Shep, and he oversaw the Wildcat Den. That was a place that students could go study, play checkers – of course, we didn’t have any TV back then – and play pool. But the Wildcat Den, where it’s located now in the Midtown Community Center, is the third location for the den. The first one was at Jackson Square in a building – I forget the name – but the second one was in an old cafeteria building of Jackson Square, and this one was at Midtown Community Center, where our organization, ORHPA [Oak Ridge Heritage & Preservation Association], of course, now meets.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Stokes: He was strict. I never will forget. He was a little man, had I guess the hair here, completely bald, and he didn’t put up with any nonsense. Didn’t allow sitting on the pool tables, no roughhousing, and he had his rules all laid out, and it was a very nice place to go, and maintained and controlled. But Shep ran, at the recreation program, all these halls and did an excellent job. One side note: during my Manhattan Project collections, I purchased two of his hats –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Stokes: – and I’ve got those in my –
Mr. McDaniel: He was famous for wearing those hats, the fedoras.
Mr. Stokes: – and he wore a hat the whole time over this little, shiny head, and the hats are small. I couldn’t wear one. I’ve got so many stories.
Mr. McDaniel: How did you get his hats?
Mr. Stokes: Dave Miller had Townsite Treasures downtown and Dave was going into another business and was closing out, and his dealers were selling out, and I went in and was talking with I guess one of the owners of the mall that they lease from Dave, and he said, “Do you need to buy some Manhattan Project things,” and I, of course, buy when I see things, and said, “I’ve got two of Shep Lauder’s hats,” and these people were involved in the disposal of his estate after he passed. So I’m the owner of two Shep Lauder hats.
Mr. McDaniel: I’d say you’re probably the only person in the world that owns any Shep Lauder hats.
Mr. Stokes: Well, I’ve got collectibles that you couldn’t believe, one of a kind in the Manhattan Project collection. The bus schedules, 1951, my younger brother and I fooled around in the town, and it was cold, the best I remember, and we went in the Central Terminal to warm up a little bit, and I looked over on the wall and here was this little tri-fold about, oh, two-and-a-half by four, in bright colors, a whole rack. And you opened those up, it had the complete bus route and the times they would be at different streets and on the front, it was like Bus #8 to Jefferson, Johnson, and Jackson Square central terminals listed on there. Well, I picked up I think it was eight or nine of those and put them away in my junk, and made a display this year at Secret City Festival around the American industrial transport, and those transfers, and I even paid $70.00 to have a bus stop recreated, a sign, from what I could see in a photograph. I had some Ed Westcott photographs that Don Honeycutt pulled for me and let me enlarge, blow up, and so we try to tell – at the Manhattan Project, the Secret City Festival, we try to add something every year, another little story.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, let’s go back and talk about – let’s see. What was I going to ask you about?
Mr. Stokes: The youngsters running around?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, that, and there’s one thing specifically I was going to ask you about.
Mr. Stokes: It wasn’t the Little Atoms Club, was it?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, maybe it was the Little Atoms Club. Tell me about the Little Atoms Club. They offered things at these theaters, right?
Mr. Stokes: Well, the Little Atoms Club was sort of a get-together place, and they opened to all youths, and they’d always have a serial. That’s where somebody comes in and falls off a cliff, and you’ve got to go back next week to see if –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, in a movie.
Mr. Stokes: – they hit the bottom, in a movie, a cartoon, and always some type of show, a magician, yo-yo – 
Mr. McDaniel: Duncan yo-yo.
Mr. Stokes: – in this particular – and I wish I could find my yo-yos, but they were wooden Duncan yo-yos, and the Filipinos had those and they would carve those – your name, a bird, whatever you wanted on those in about two or three minutes.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: Oh, they were tremendous. But they could have two or three yo-yos at one time, walk-the-dog and all the different things that you could do, rock-the-cradle. But this particular time, they had, I guess, a yo-yo demonstration, and the next week, if I’m not mistaken, they had a magician.
Mr. McDaniel: Now how old were you at about this time?
Mr. Stokes: Oh, I was in probably junior high school. And all the screaming kids, and it was a place that we tried to go, and save our pocket change, and it was probably fifteen or twenty cents to get in. But we went –
Mr. McDaniel: You and your brother went, is that right?
Mr. Stokes: – my brothers, Jack and Marion, went in. They had a magician this particular week, and he hypnotized, as well, and he’d ask for volunteers. Several people raised their hand and came up on stage, and he said, “I want you people to put your hands together,” and of course all the volunteers put their fingers together like this. And I wasn’t noticing what my brother was doing, but the people on stage, he says, “I want you to push,” and he went through his spiel, “The harder you push, you feel your tips touching together,” and he said, “The harder you push, though seemed like they’re locking together,” it was like they’re locking together, and finally he said, “Now, as you try to pull, they still seem to be getting tighter and tighter. Now try to pull your fingers apart,” and of course they couldn’t. They were hypnotized, and they were actually putting pressure, but I had my brother, and I looked over and he was like this. I says, “What’s wrong?” and he said, “My fingers are stuck. I can’t get them apart,” and he was part of the audience.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: I never will forget that, and that was Marion.
Mr. McDaniel: So you reached over and pulled his hands apart –
Mr. Stokes: I reached over and pulled it, easiest thing. But stories, stories, stories, I’ll tell you, Boy Scouting, Camp Kromer.
Mr. McDaniel: Now where was this, Camp Kromer?
Mr. Stokes: Camp Kromer?
Mr. McDaniel: Un-huhn.
Mr. Stokes: It’s located where the city services building is located, and one of our favorite places was the East Fork of Poplar Creek. Actually, it’s less than a block east of the city services building, in behind the K-Mart and the buildings out there. Wade – we even had one scout named Roy Deehart, who is now a Ph.D., was a NASA doctor, got his Wilderness Survival Merit Badge there, and part of that is gathering food, and he went out into the flood plain and would get crawdads to boil and eat. Of course, the floodplain of Poplar Creek, this had to be 1947, 1948, 1949 it was, and we did a lot of camping. It was fully supported by the Recreation Welfare – actually, the army. They brought the big tanks of water and would mow the sage fields, and had a bunch of scouts, and I’ve got, in my scout collection, photographs of Camp Kromer and scouts and the activities around that –
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: – that occurred right here in Oak Ridge, it was Camp Kromer –
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mr. Stokes: – and that was named after, the camp, an army captain who was active in Scouts, and he basically became a colonel, a captain or colonel –
Mr. McDaniel: Kromer.
Mr. Stokes: – K – it was spelled with a K.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you stayed in Oak Ridge, and your family stayed in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Stokes: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Did your mom and dad – how long did they stay in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Stokes: They moved to Farragut in 1953, and of course, my younger brother and I – older brother graduated in ’53 – we were not out of school. Of course, we were still playing football. So what we did – we couldn’t live off the reservation and play football –  Dad moved and we moved in and lived with an uncle, Uncle Raymond – Ray – and he had a couple other children at home and we used that as a residence and continued to play football.
Mr. McDaniel: For how long, a year?
Mr. Stokes: Part of a year. We would go home weekends and Dad would come I guess down the Turnpike sometimes after football practice and pick us up and take us out there, but our residence was really here in Oak Ridge so we could play football.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly. So you graduated high school, and then what happened to you?
Mr. Stokes: I graduated high school. All kind of good things, I guess. I went to Tennessee Tech, majoring in personnel management. Took some courses in engineering drawing. That was always one of my favorite subjects in high school and junior high school. But took that, and people said, “Well, you’re crazy taking engineering drawing,” but I was a business major – accounting and economics, and so forth. Went two years, but while I was there, I didn’t live on campus. I lived off campus, and I’ve got some tremendous memories about living on First Street in Cookeville, Tennessee, heating our room in the winter with a fireplace. And it sure got cold, and didn’t have a car, and of course we walked, and the ashes and the cold, and it was a real experience. But had a roommate. There was about sixteen guys, boys young men lived in this old house retired postmaster, and we had some time. I was in ROTC. I shot on the rifle team, and we traveled all throughout, it was the second year of the Tennessee Tech rifle team, and I discovered sometime later they’ve got a Web site –
Mr. McDaniel: Really?
Mr. Stokes: – of all their total, they won several national championships, but this was a second-year and not a letterman sport. But, anyway, we traveled and did that. I was also on the drill team, called the Rebel Rifles, along with my roommate, and we’d go to the Cotton Carnival and all the parades and football games, and we’d do that in college, and every chance I got, of course, I would come back home, hitchhike, and always go back on a bus because my mom felt better –
Mr. McDaniel: That you went on a bus. Right.
Mr. Stokes: – riding a bus back to Tennessee, and it took about two, two-and-a-half hours to go from here to Cookeville.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, because they had to go –
Mr. Stokes: It took longer than that sometimes.
Mr. McDaniel: – Highway 70 through Rockwood and up the mountain, and –
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, but they hit every, the Midtown –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh yeah.
Mr. Stokes: – they hit every wide place in the road, stop, the bus driver would go in and get a cup of coffee and drink a cup – passengers load and disembark, and it was a laid back attitude.
Mr. McDaniel: It was, wasn’t it?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: I remember I did that same thing coming home from college in Nashville once, and of course this was in the ’70s, and I took a bus and it took six and a half hours on a bus to get from Nashville to Kingston.
Mr. Stokes: It took forever going up the old winding roads, but especially if you got behind a truck, ten mile an hour all the way, and the same thing on I guess the west side of Cookeville, over there. People don’t realize the condition of the roads that were here. The quickest way to get to Knoxville was the old Lovell Road, which was a series of patches all the way through, and of course it went by every house out through the country to Kingston Pike, and then you go Kingston Pike into Knoxville. And I guess Clinton Highway, what I call the new Clinton Highway, was built about 1948, and that’s when they tore up a lot of peach orchards, 1948, but it was also a concrete highway that wound through the country.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow. So you graduated college –
Mr. Stokes: No, I didn’t.
Mr. McDaniel: – you didn’t graduate. Tell me what happened.
Mr. Stokes: What happened.
Mr. McDaniel: They kicked you out. [laughter]
Mr. Stokes: Well, Dad, of course, was paying for an older brother and me, out at Tennessee Tech, and he was always a single provider working, and by this time he was into supervision. He’d been promoted to supervisor, and this was K-25, a Maintenance supervisor, and in the summers – this is another story – while I was in college, I got a job as a student trainee for the Maintenance Division. I worked three months each summer to build money for college, and after my freshman year and after my junior year, I worked, and after my, I guess, sophomore year. I worked three summers and my job – I inventoried, I drew simple mechanical drawings. I worked for a division director by the name of Dave Mahiggin, Maintenance Division two years, and in the third year, I worked for Electrical Maintenance, or actually Instrument Maintenance with Jack Goodwin, and he went with Carbide International, of course. But inventory and lead detectors, and whatever they had they wanted it run down, and they had a maintenance shop, of course, in every building, every process at K-25. I got to go into places that – the seal shop. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard anybody talk about seal shop.
Mr. McDaniel: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Stokes: Secret process to this day to make the mechanical seals. The barrier manufacturing, as well as the 1401, where they, I guess, tore the converters down and took the spools out, reprocessed; they rebuilt compressors in that building. It was about a hundred – I’m trying to think – four hundred feet wide by a thousand feet long, a tremendous building, built for the maintenance functions there, and that’s been an advantage of doing this, I guess, the education and the people I worked with, I believe I learned something every day that I worked at the plant, and that was 40 years.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow. So you worked there in summers –
Mr. Stokes: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: – and then what happened?
Mr. Stokes: – three summers.
Mr. McDaniel: And didn’t you go in the service?
Mr. Stokes: No, I’m still in ROTC, but went to six-week summer camp at Fort Campbell. That’s another story –
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I bet.
Mr. Stokes: – 101st Airborne. Crazy people, but good. I love my military people, but they worked us hard. But I guess, by that time, I found me a sweetheart. In 1958, we started dating – Betty, my wife. I was still trying to go to school at UT and finish my junior year, and while I was there, I needed another job, needed more money, and so I went to work for Tull Auto and Machine Company, and this fellow, at the bottom of Bearden Hill, had contracts with Huntsville. Of course, I was at UT by that time, in my junior year. I had dropped out of Tech and moved home. But to make more money, to finish the story, I started working keeping books. I was in personnel management, accounting, economics and so forth three years, so I got a job at Tull Auto and Machine Shop in Bearden, and of course that was on the way to and from UT from there at that time living on Kingston Pike in Farragut, and what I would do, I would get off school, come out and work – billing, collecting, payroll, timekeeping. By the way, people, topnotch machinists making two dollars an hour back then.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, but I would do that, and I was getting a few hours doing that, and Ray Tull says, “You need a little more money, more hours,” he says, “I can arrange that.” I said, “Well, what have you got?” He said, “Well, I’m short out here, if you could learn to use a micrometer, height gauges,” and what I did, I learned machinists tools –
Mr. McDaniel: Now, what were the two things you mentioned, the micrometer –
Mr. Stokes: Oh, the micrometer, height gauges, vernier caliper.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, height gauges. Okay.
Mr. Stokes: It’s a machinist’s tool.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, a set of machinist tools.
Mr. Stokes: And of course Dad was a machinist, and we’d get to the table at night and he’d help me. And so I was doing inspecting on critical parts that he was making for the projects, the Huntsville – Space Program. This guy contracted everywhere. You couldn’t believe the money. I was doing the billing, so it was a critical job, and I learned a lot there, and learned how to use – he said, “Well, let me teach you how to use a Bridgeport.”
Mr. McDaniel: What’s that?
Mr. Stokes: A milling machine. It’s very handy, and I used that, by the way, at Beta 4 at Y-12 in my job. It’s a later date.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, a later date. Right.
Mr. Stokes: So I learned to use a lathe and other jobs, set up for welders anything to get more hours, and of course more income, and got that, and I got enough experience there that I took a test at Carbide, evidently passed it, and was hired as a machinist assemblyman in the assembly division at Y-12. Went to work November 30th, 1959 at Y-12, a machinist assemblyman. Bargaining Unit, but the union that had that was the Boilermaker Operators. The machinist assemblymen and electricians didn’t want it, so the Boilermaker Operators got that, and we had the 7,500-ton press, the winch ovens and hot tanks, and almost the whole of Beta 4 building, except heavy machine shop, we had assembly, and we did every operation on, I guess, preparing for work on weapons. I walked in there and I never will forget, a guy named George Peach and Henry Carey, I walked into their offices, got my new badge on. They hired about thirteen of us this one day. They were building this Assembly Division up to start manufacturing weapons components, and I walked in and on the wall, I guess a half-scale drawing, detailed, he says, “Here’s what you’re going to do, right here.” And what it was, it was the last hydrogen bomb weapon to be built.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mr. Stokes: And my experience qualified me to – and of course, like I say, I learned every day I was on all the jobs I had through the years. Of course, I wore coveralls and dressed and went over to the assembly division, and I don’t know – this you can read about, tracks down through the center of I guess the assembly area, with carts that’s probably five feet wide, six feet wide, to put these components on through the build process down this assembly line.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, it was a five-ton train, or actually two five-ton trains.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Stokes: Anyway, every operation, I don’t want to get into a lot of detail but the components, we put those together to make the actual weapon and of course I’ve got books here that shows pictures of them. But it’s the old what they call the D-41.
Mr. McDaniel: So you all actually assembled the weapon –
Mr. Stokes: We did. Even – we got it all together, stacked up, and all types of spatial operations done were right there on our tracks, a lot of turning and welding and things like that. We’d get down to the end and had a paint booth. The old guy came in from Nordson and said, “We need somebody to volunteer to learn how to spray paint and use this re-circulating paint system to paint these weapons.” And, of course, we had the ladders and stuff, and the ventilation. We painted – 
Mr. McDaniel: You painted the weapons.
Mr. Stokes: – two coats of gray and one coat olive drab, and then all the lettering.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, were the letters painted on?
Mr. Stokes: Spray painted with jet packs, had little jet packs for those, but that Nordson re-circulating unit, I learned it. There was two of us went down with the factory man, and they let us teach a couple more people, so there was four dedicated to do that.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now let me ask you, and it might get to a point where you can’t tell me, which is fine, but – so once they were done, once they were completed here, where did they go after Oak Ridge?
Mr. Stokes: Out the back door.
Mr. McDaniel: Out the back door?
Mr. Stokes: [laughter] I can tell you. It should be nothing secret. We put them on a cart, a dolly, and we actually moved – I think the machinist assemblymen, the boilermakers, actually moved everything, and also because it was so critical on moving those, some of the parts went to X-ray and other places, but we would load those onto boxcars, wrap them, desiccant, of course, end caps and all of that went on.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, how big was that weapon? I mean let’s say, how long was it?
Mr. Stokes: You couldn’t put it in your pocket.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, I know that, but I mean –
Mr. Stokes: This particular one, I think the weight – I’ve got books that’ll tell you – five ton, about five ton.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, but what was its dimension? How long was it?
Mr. Stokes: Probably – 
Mr. McDaniel: Eight, nine feet?
Mr. Stokes: – oh, no.
Mr. McDaniel: It wasn’t?
Mr. Stokes: It was a big thing.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, and I want to say probably twelve feet or longer – 
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Stokes: – and you can see them in the museum –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly.
Mr. Stokes: – D-41, and it was the last hydrogen-type weapon, and I won’t go into the detail of the materials and stuff like that, but –
Mr. McDaniel: Right, I understand.
Mr. Stokes: – a lot of critical operations. We had special rooms for mixing and –
Mr. McDaniel: Now, let me ask you a question, and of course it left Oak Ridge without having the fissile core.
Mr. Stokes: Oh, no, yeah. Primary.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, right.
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, the primary – and I can get into a little bit of that later –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, that’s okay.
Mr. Stokes: – that’s another story. But the 41, we loaded that in a boxcar, had to wrap it in plastic, put desiccant in, and it was a process, a procedure.
Mr. McDaniel: You put what in?
Mr. Stokes: Desiccant to keep it dry, and of course that end caps, it sealed it, rubber seals, and it was a big weapon.
Mr. McDaniel: So if that train crashed someplace, it would just be a big pile of stuff, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t come apart, it would be right there, but it would be –
Mr. Stokes: It would have to be a tremendous crash to take what we built apart.
Mr. McDaniel: So I guess the skin of it was just, what, welded or riveted together, I mean, the outer shell?
Mr. Stokes: The outer shell, we used a Buckeye pneumatic and pinned it together.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I don’t understand what that means.
Mr. Stokes: That’s another special process that we used. Anyway, a Buckeye pneumatic was – you put rings on, everything had to be concentric, and it got even worse in the other project. But we would put this ring on that was fit for a Buckeye pneumatic, which was an air-driven tool about that long, and it would go in, after you measured and got your critical dimensions. You didn’t want to ever drill too deep, and it was a delicate operation. It went in, drilled and reamed it as it came out, and that was to make it receptive to a pin of the same material to be put in, and of course there’s welding, and my head is too full.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. So you worked on that assembly line there, and that was at Y-12.
Mr. Stokes: Y-12, Beta 4, 1960 – let me get it straight – 1962, the Machinist Boilermakers merged with the Machinists Union and we became machinist assemblymen. We were boilermakers in Beta 4. That took us to Beta 2 in the other building – 99 and 98 in the other buildings, where we had components and processing. But I’ll tell a story, before we got through that 41 program, we started the D-38, and it was the components assembled for a Titan Atlas missile.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, and that was the Cold War. We didn’t miss schedule, we worked. And that’s one thing I’ve got to say: we had people of every craft that had been in the past, and you talk about friends and good people, caring people wanting to help the Cold War effort. A lot of times, you see people that won’t go to work, “Well, I’m union. I can’t.” If we saw a buddy that needed help on a process, we would jump in and finish that, and no grievances. We were a team dedicated to, I guess, building components for a national effort. But before we got done with the D-41, the 38 program, which was a missile for the Atlas Titan, we also built that completely.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you?
Mr. Stokes: Completely –
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: – into the re-entry vehicle.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: And of course that’s all type processes, special processes, and I don’t know how much I can talk about, but you can see pictures and display in museums, but it was a unit, and you couldn’t believe the critical process we would start, and it also had tables, rotary tables, and had what they call pots, and the pots fit the contour of the parts.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mr. Stokes: Uh-huhn, and you would have to set that up, you would have to true your pot up, indicators, you’d have to level your pot indicators, and of course we used mechanical tools or machinist tools like you wouldn’t believe. We would do that and stack that unit up. Of course, there’s welding operation, all types, operations to assemble the components for that, and the last operations on that was the abalation tube, which was the re-entry vehicle, was not painted, but it had to be potted, and we did the potting. They built an X-ray booth in our area where they could X-ray that potting for voids and make sure they met standards. Every weld sample, every glue bond, we had to make samples. They had to pass pull tests, quality, you would not believe –
Mr. McDaniel: Wow. So you worked at Y-12 for a while, and then –
Mr. Stokes: Well, it gets better.
Mr. McDaniel: – right. Go ahead.
Mr. Stokes: That’s Beta 4. In 1962, we merged unions and they moved me to Beta 2, and Beta 2 was sort of a different critter. It had its own weapons program, the 47 and some others, smaller weapons that we weren’t assembling there in Beta 2, but it also had three dry rooms, environmental rooms, and I was still Bargaining Unit at this time. You ever seen a spacesuit?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Stokes: They were olive drab, the bubble, pigtail, probably had second generation, third generation surplus from the space program, and we got to go into the rooms where we assembled the inner components of these weapons.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, the very inner – moisture was critical. If you got to thirty-five parts-per-million, you shut down and come out.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Thirty-five parts-per-million, everything, and of course you’d do all operation setup, indicators and stack. They had a procedure for everything you do. You had a follow book for everything you do. You didn’t miss a step. It had windows around. You had a Carbide inspector behind – you had a man on a window shelf keeping names and stuff, “This part, this part.” You didn’t vary. If one unit was bad, they’d all be bad; they’re all good, they’re all going to be good.
Mr. McDaniel: And he would watch you do what you were doing?
Mr. Stokes: The Carbide inspector was watching to sign off. The DOE inspector, in a lot of cases, had to be there sign off, especially when the parts were fissile, going together. We did that and built those, and I learned – probably we had four beam welders, electron beam welders, three Hamilton Standards. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those.
Mr. McDaniel: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Stokes: Oh, a lovely piece of equipment. If you had something that was a test sample that was ten, fifteen mil, put it together, close it up, pump it down, vacuum it, and I’m talking about ten each vacuum pumps, if you know what the – like so, and the fusion pumps, but to pump that down and get to certain limits and just crank up and make your settings by procedure of what you need, and you could weld something ten to fifteen mil, thousandths of an inch, or you can turn it around and put something circular or different to me, set it up in rotation, and you look through the glass, like so. It’s electron beams, and they stack up over the surface so fast, it creates heat, and of course we had probably a welding development group in our building with us, and we continuously did setup for them and so forth, and they wrote the procedures and got those all worked out. But we had the electron beam welders, and they were specialty. We had what they call a blue goose, which was a vacuum chamber, regular weld, teed weld, big.
Mr. McDaniel: So you worked there doing –
Mr. Stokes: This was during the Cold War and, like I say –
Mr. McDaniel: – during the Cold War, Y-12.
Mr. Stokes: – there was leak detecting, we had tanks, put them down in – filled them with helium, and leak tight peanut valves out the ya-ya. You know what a peanut valve is?
Mr. McDaniel: Uhn-uhn, don’t know.
Mr. Stokes: Okay, Fulton in Knoxville built thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of those things. They’re a seal and they’ll leak detect, and if you leaked a thimbleful of gas in thirty years, we could detect it.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah. Well, you don’t want any in-leakage, and these things will be stored for long periods of time. And anyway, I’m still Bargaining Unit, wearing the spacesuit, got two trips to Dover, Delaware when they started developing a new suit. ILC, International Latex Company, they manufactured a new generation, but these old suits, then, you had to fold, roll and go in through a dry room with a pigtail on and just the air you got in your bubble here. And we had some people climb the wall.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah, claustrophobia. Couldn’t wear it.
Mr. McDaniel: Couldn’t do it.
Mr. Stokes: Yeah. Anyway, I did that, and the Standards, and we had a lot of specialty equipment. But, anyway, I was promoted to supervisor in 1968, and became supervisor over the same people I’d been working with. And it worked fine, and enjoyed, like I say, friends, work people. We didn’t have any union problems, not at that time. I worked Beta 2 – oh, I didn’t tell you: at the same time we’ve got all this going on at Beta 4 and Beta 2, we were building test weapons.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mr. Stokes:  Ploughshare, well, all the tests on inner components for test weapons, gas buggy. You can get books and read all the tests, and I’ve got those, by the way, that I’ve collected over the years from DOE. But, anyway, at – the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore technician would come in, and they would assign either boilermaker operators or people to work with strain gauges and setting up what needed to be done for components. And if you read books, a breaker, a gas buggy – they was talking at one time about building the Panama Canal. We built a few weapons. They weren’t weapons, actually. They were peaceful use, and they, of course, cancelled that pretty early in the program and decided they wouldn’t do it. The gas buggy was to go down in the earth and explode them in a gas formation, drill down and tap it and see if the gas would be radioactive and if it could be used. There was a lot of tests on that. But anyway, we built – basically, this was through the, I guess, ’60s and up into the ’70s – most of the test weapons, assembled the components for those, and I enjoyed working with the people from when I was a Bargaining Unit, and as a supervisor, too.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, let’s move on from there.
Mr. Stokes: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: You left Y-12 and went to K-25, didn’t you? When was that?
Mr. Stokes: It was in November 1975, the best I recollect. They took thirteen supervisors. They were getting ready to start up the centrifuge. They had been working on the centrifuge since World War II, I guess, and small, small, larger, larger, and I went over, along with twelve other supervisors and our department head, Bob Alexson, the lady you’re going to interview, was our department head. They sent him, as well, and I guess we had – Bill Wilcox, of course, was in centrifuge. They were over in the main office, and we were out in the work area at 1200, Building 1200. So I went in initially and they weren’t ready to build and part stuff. They were still manufacturing parts, we were, Carbide, at that time, rotors. And so we had actually three bays where they’re doing different operations, and the last bay was balance stands. When you manufacture a rotor that fits inside a centrifuge, they had to be balanced, critical balanced, high speeds.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. Otherwise, it’d blow apart, wouldn’t it?
Mr. Stokes: It would, and we also did tests. That’s another story: destructive tests. But we spent about four or five months going through operations – they had the procedures written – making JSAs. I never got so tired of doing JSA – job safety analysis – in my life, and of course we had – you’d write in that area that you – and we wrote the JSAs, and that’s where I got my safety experience. It came on later, writing job safety analysis for all the work that went on. I ended up as a balance stand supervisor for about four months, and they decided they needed an assistant general supervisor over the balance stands, which was – I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed at 1200, how tall it is?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Stokes: Okay. We had four balance stands there that we balanced, and also the final assembly stands for the machines. This was CTF, centrifuge test facility. That was next-to-the-last built. So we got that, and, in the meantime, we have Goodyear, Boeing and Aero Research people coming in to start watching and get used to the operations, and so forth, and we eventually ended up with building the last 120 machines we built, Boeing, Aero Research – and made I think it was forty machines a piece, shipped the parts in, and by that time, they had also assigned me and Bill to a new facility, check stands, check balance stands for rotors over in 1225, another building, K-1225, and so I also had that in my assignment to get that and had 24/7 supervisors, and that became a real problem on trying to sleep at night. Got a machine in trouble, get the calls. But, anyway, we got that, had a successful build. Those three vendors watched us assemble their machines, and it was in our area, our people, our supervision, and we built a hundred and twenty machines, and it was a CPDF, Centrifuge Production Development Facility.
Mr. McDaniel: How big were those machines?
Mr. Stokes: About fifty feet long in a five-ton train, and big and fast. But all the internal components, I was in on the cap assemblies, and again, I’ll tell you, you can see pictures of these in books, cap assemblies and the things that went together, setting all the internal components where they worked and did their separation process with the scoops, and we had to set those and build those, and my people built those, assembled them for them. Anyway, we ran those about a year and a half successfully. I think we pulled one or two back out and did a trim balance. They noticed on running those that they were starting to run out a little toward where you didn’t want it. Of course if it got out too much, it would, of course, wreck. So we pulled those out and trimmed those, but around about a year and a half, and in 1983 they started laying off people. We completed the build, and the layoff – we moved most of our people. The ones that had done us a good job went to Y-12 or X-10, and they become, you know, friends, and went over and we eventually did that, and then I transferred at that time to I guess Centrifuge Division Safety Officer. I had all the safety meetings, safety inspections and oversight for that, and also, I was chairman of the, I guess, Safety Review Board. Any change in the procedure with a centrifuge, or material or any change had to be reviewed. I had about five engineers, and we would do an evaluation, come to a conclusion, I would do the write-up and submit it to the division director, “We can go with this,” or, “We can’t go with this because,” and that was a lot of headaches in that. And we never had the division director do anything we didn’t recommend as far as safety, so it was I felt like a very good system, the safety review board. And I moved from there to X-10, and here I’m safety officer for about a year and a half. In 1985, I think it was August, if I’m not mistaken, moved to X-10 to the maintenance division. I was interviewed. They said, “You got safety experience, you got this, this, and this.” They said, “Well, you’re a little weak on radiation,” and of course we had criticality, safety analysis, and all types of stuff I had written up. I was totally familiar, but as far as using the meters and stuff like that, we had technicians do that, and so they sent me to school for about a month. “Okay, you got your radiation.” So I took over as safety, radiation, environmental, and industrial hygiene for eight hundred and fifty people.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: The division director says, “Now, you know what needs to be done. Any issues, any problems you have, communicate with me or let my secretary know, and I’ll get a hold of you.” So did that and it worked fine. I worked for George Oliphant, a swell man. Evidently, when he retired, I went to a fellow by the name of Jerry Hammontree, and of course I had a lot of responsibility. But I could go in in the morning, take care of my e-mail, my communication, and I was my own boss. I knew what jobs were going on, and of course I monitored exposures and would try to keep those balanced between the people that are earning the same pay and the rotation and monitor that, and had a lot of duties, but I was free in the afternoons, normally, to go out to all the different jobs and monitor. With our plant people, we had the industrial hygienists and safety people on the plant level that would be right at the job, and I was able to go in and work with them to coordinate, and if anything came up, I’d notify my division director. Let’s see, I worked sixteen years at Y-12, I worked ten years in the centrifuge, and I worked fourteen years at Oak Ridge National Lab as Environmental Safety and Health Officer, and retired.
Mr. McDaniel: About time, wasn’t it?
Mr. Stokes: Forty years, three months and one day. I worked longer than I had to. All I needed was eighty-five points, and I had a hundred and fifteen.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: I sure did, but I was a young guy. I was only 63. But I had gone to work so young that it worked fine, and like I say, I never quit learning.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess that 115 points means you get a big, fat pension, don’t you? [laughter]
Mr. Stokes: No pay raise in almost twelve years, so I backed up.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I understand.
Mr. Stokes: But, anyway, I’ve got to compliment the – I saw a change in the – I don’t know how I should address that. The –
Mr. McDaniel: Management style?
Mr. Stokes: – yeah, between plants.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, the relationship between –
Mr. Stokes: Y-12, Cold War, the dedication, the people, the best people in the world, the supervisors, and we worked as a team to accomplish what we needed, and you 
didn’t miss shipments. You didn’t miss, and like I say, there, we worked 24/7 around the clock to get what we needed done. Made a lot of friends fishing at Carbide.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, let’s stop there.
Mr. Stokes: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: I want you to take about five minutes and tell me – you talked a lot about the activities, your historic preservation activities and you’re collecting things such as that, but tell me what you’ve been keeping yourself busy with after retirement. Take just a few minutes.
Mr. Stokes: Children, grandchildren, and they’ve been traveling. I’ve got all four college activities. This one son, Mark, played football, like I said earlier, and Greg did also but he was on the ’79-’80 state championship team, a hundred and eighty pound, six-foot center, and loved football. We went to every ballgame, wherever it was. Both kids, we’ve always supported them. They won twenty-three games straight in 1980. After winning the first state championship, won the second twenty-three games straight, and of course the playoffs and all that, but the son, and I’m so proud, nominated First Team All-State. A little guy, though, that’s Douglas, you know, 6’4”, 6’3”. First team All-State. All-East Tennessee, All-Tri-State, First Team, and so proud of that, and to expand, schools – the wife and I volunteered at the schools – PTA, cakewalk, spook houses, building – I’ve got some stories about borrowing a casket and breaking it, spook house – but the activities – scouting, and I’d take a week or more every year in the Scouts, and of course I got two Eagle Scouts. The longest trip I guess we made was a World Jamboree in Calgary. We toured the whole west, 5,800 mile, for a hundred and thirty-five dollars.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: That’s gas and food. Stayed in army bases, missile bases. It was all planned and that was in 1983, and we got a write-up on that, but a tremendous education for our scouts, and an opportunity to meet scouts from other countries. In schools, Tremont, I took a week’s vacation every year in the sixth, went with whatever student it was, child, to Tremont with the teachers, and did tree mycology and helped the teachers on that. Scouts, like I said, we – it was eighteen days I took on this Canada trip. Music, all four children in the third grade started music. We had concerts. We’re busy now, but we were busy then with activities, with children, the football games, and that continued even after they graduated, with their activities in school. And of course, Mark went to Austin Peay with Coach Hale. Lettered four years playing for Coach Hale at Austin Peay.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: Yeah. At one time, let’s see, we had Mark, Greg, the younger son, Lisa in graduate school, and I guess Mark’s wife in Austin Peay. At one time, we had four children we were paying for in college.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? My goodness.
Mr. Stokes: And we got into, of course, needed more money, and the wife went to work. The first twelve years of our children growing up, she didn’t work, except at home. We wanted to be homeroom mother and the activities of the children. So she eventually went to work – she’s a nurse – but we needed more money. We got into furniture refinishing. Of course, we’d been doing it for ourselves. I bought air compressors, and here comes my Y-12 experience with the spray gun and so forth, and mixes.
Mr. McDaniel: So you did refurnishing furniture. Is that right?
Mr. Stokes: We did, and big time. It helped us supplement school. Needing money, you can’t believe how the wife and I – I hauled bark, I spread bark, I painted houses. I don’t know how we had time to do the things we were doing. And, of course, take a kid, and I dug – I was into archeology. I dug two years in the summers on the Cox site with UT, ten-foot squares. A lot of dirt in a ten-foot hole.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mr. Stokes: And did that, and –
Mr. McDaniel: Well, we need to wrap things up here, Lloyd.
Mr. Stokes: Oh, you haven’t heard all the stories.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, I know. We’ve been going for almost an hour and a half, so –
Mr. Stokes: But Oak Ridge, our community organizations, we didn’t get into those, it’s a place for children, obviously, and I wouldn’t take anything for it. It’s a special place, a special place in our heart, the friends we have, the people that are still here, and of course we’re losing a lot of those people and that’s sad.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly. Jasmine, did you turn this camera on? I’m kidding. [laughter]
Mr. Stokes: We can do it again.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m kidding. [laughter] All right, Lloyd. Well, thank you so much for taking time. Maybe we’ll do a part two with you.
Mr. Stokes: It’s the organizations and things we’ve done, and the things we do since we retired, the Elks, Boy Scouts, Masons, East Tennessee Preservation Alliance, and the wife and I own our history in Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation. She and I joined early enough we got to write the bylaws, and got into that. In 2001 I think we joined. [inaudible] We were both board members up there, six years apiece, owned property, and we camped when we had time at the lake property.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Stokes: We gave our kids an education –
Mr. McDaniel: I bet you did.
Mr. Stokes: – and the many, many trips that we made, with that, California and different locations for childbirth and the grandchildren, we’d always turn that into a family get-together and we’d kind of make a side trip and visit, and it’s still that way. My kids, the oldest daughter, from Charleston, South Carolina, Debbie from Memphis, Collierville, and Mark and his wife from Signal Mountain all came in to help with Secret City Festival this year.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s good. That’s good.
Mr. Stokes: It helps the old folks.
Mr. McDaniel: It sure does.
[end of recording]