Osborne, Barbara

              ORAL HISTORY OF BARBARA OSBORNE
Interviewed by Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, Ph.D.
September 25, 2010 
[Editor’s note: Audio cassette recording.]
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: It is September 25th, 2010, and this is Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, the Coordinator for the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History interviewing Barbara Osborne in her home. Barbara, your family came to Oak Ridge from Michigan in 1949. What was your family doing prior to arriving in Oak Ridge and why did you move to Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Osborne: We lived in Birmingham, Michigan, where my father worked either in Detroit or in Pontiac, depending on the office that he was in. After the war, the jobs were all given to the veterans, where he had not been allowed to go into the military because his work was too important, so he had to find another job. This is just – they said it wasn’t fair, but this sort of thing just happened. A friend of his who was in Oak Ridge wrote him and said come and apply for a particular job that was open here. So he came down, applied for the job, got it and came back and moved us to Tennessee. We had never – I had never been out of the state of Michigan before, so it was very different. I heard all sorts of wild tales from kids at school and wild tales about what Oak Ridge was going to be like: mud and people making booze in the bathtub. And part of this was true. Mud was true, but the other I never found.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter] What are your memories? You came to Oak Ridge when you were in high school, and then right after you moved here, the city gates opened. What are your memories of the opening of the city gates and the parade?
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, huge crowds! I think the only people that I know of that weren’t there were the rest of my family. I’m the only one from my family that went to the parade, and I don’t know why they didn’t go. I guess they just didn’t want to get stuck in a crowd. But I went down, and I was standing in front of the old Jackson Square Post Office watching these movie stars go by, and they looked so glamorous, and it was just excitement. I had watched Queen for a Day, which you’re way too young to know about, so seeing Jack Bailey in person was really exciting, and of course Rod Cameron was every bit as gorgeous as he was on the screen, to say nothing of Marie McDonald, and she had a beautiful fur coat on. That was when it was okay to have a fur coat. So it was just really, really exciting. And the bands were good, and, you know, just everything, the whole atmosphere was just wonderful.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What was it like to go to high school when you moved here?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, I’d never heard a real southern accent before, and I’d never heard an East Tennessee accent. And a lot of them had never heard a Michigan accent, which I had never thought of as being an accent. The first day I was in school here, I could not understand anything anybody said – any of the students said to me. I could understand the teachers, but I couldn’t understand the students. So when I was being shown around the school by one of the girls, I never did understand where she said the lunchroom was, and so the first day I went without eating lunch because I was too embarrassed to ask, try to ask anybody else, “Where do I go to find the cafeteria?” Because I just simply couldn’t understand what they were saying to me, and I was scared to death, and you know, just your usual teenage angst I guess.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What did the teenagers do for fun?
Mrs. Osborne: Back then, not everybody had a car like they do now, because there wasn’t much of any place to go except the Snow White Drive-In, which was the headquarters for all dating purposes at that point. If you had a date, you usually wound up there getting something to eat, and if you didn’t have a date, you wound up there with friends, driving around to see who did have a date [laughter], and that’s just where it was happening at this point, which is very – it’s so much like Happy Days, to be honest, and so peacefully innocent compared to today’s happenings, I think. If somebody drank, it was a big thing, not a common thing. You know, it was just, “Oh, what a terrible boy that must be.” You certainly never wanted to date anybody like that, where, I don’t know, standards seem to have changed a whole lot.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, that brings up an interesting question, because Oak Ridge was dry at that time, so how did people acquire alcohol?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, they brought it in with them, however they could. There were people that made regular runs over to North Carolina to try to furnish alcohol for a party, and they would cover up the stuff in their trunk however they could, hide it under spare tires, I don’t know. One of the stories was about hiding the bottles of liquor under a sleeping baby in a baby bed in the back seat of the car, and of course you didn’t want to disturb the baby by searching under there, so they managed – I don’t know if the child, how the child could sleep on top of it, but obviously it must have been well padded. And supposedly that really happened. But some people got caught and they got in serious trouble, and some people didn’t get caught. I imagine it depended on whoever was the guard at the gate or whether or not you happened to know the guard at the gate, you know, just all sorts of things go into this.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: I heard that the taxi services also were providing a source.
Mrs. Osborne: That I know nothing about. I wasn’t even aware there was a taxi service at that point.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Okay. What kinds of transportation services were there in ’49?
Mrs. Osborne: There were buses, and it cost ten cents, and they went all over town, and you could transfer from one bus to another. So I could go home – I walked to school from where I lived, but I could go home with my friends by just having a dime and getting on the bus with them and go and spend the afternoon at someone’s home, even if they lived out on the west end of town. So that made it very simple.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Did the teenagers ever go outside the city for activities, like, to hike in the Smokies or anything?
Mrs. Osborne: They did, yes. I did more of that when I became a senior in high school. I was extra young as a junior and probably the youngest person in the class, so my parents were very strict with me and I didn’t do a lot of that, but later on, yes, I can remember going to see Rock City, and going to Big Ridge, going swimming and being in a canoe that got turned over, and you know, the guy lost his shoes [laughter], but he learned to never dive out of a canoe.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter] That sounds like a fun trip.
Mrs. Osborne: And that’s where we had senior skip day back then. That was before it got dangerous. It’s probably in the last five year period before it got dangerous.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What do you mean by dangerous?
Mrs. Osborne: A student was killed on one of the senior skip days a few years later. They went somewhere in an automobile and were killed.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: In a crash?
Mrs. Osborne: Yes. So, that’s when the school started really, you know, everybody had to do – if you went anywhere, it was by bus with the whole group doing the same thing, and we went to Big Ridge for senior skip day. I remember senior skip day. I loved that place. It was a lot of fun back then.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Were you involved in any organizations as a teenager here?
Mrs. Osborne: As a matter of fact, I was involved in Bridge Club, and I didn’t even know how to play bridge. I was involved in Maskers also; I was in several plays, and scared to death to stand up in front of an audience, but determined to try to get over it. And I played the mother. Only one time did I ever get to play a romantic lead. The rest of the time, I was always cast as the mother or the friend or something like this.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Do you remember the names of the plays?
Mrs. Osborne: I really can’t. I can remember the name of – the only time that I played the romantic lead – who played opposite me, and that was the drum major at that time, Bob Barrett. And I remember my name when I was somebody’s mother. I was Mrs. Chickester. But what was the name of the play?
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, it’s not too important. I was just curious.
Mrs. Osborne: I wasn’t good, I’ll say that. I was not good.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh! [laughter] What did you do after you graduated from high school?
Mrs. Osborne: My father said, “Get a job.” And he, either he or my mother, found out that the drug store that they got their prescriptions filled at, Elm Grove Drug Store, was looking for a counter clerk, and so I went down there and applied for a job, and they hired me, and I worked there that summer, and if ever a job made you appreciate what a college education could do for you, that was it. It was so hot; there was no air conditioning, and you were on your feet the whole time and busy the whole time you were there. I was the soda jerk. I made wonderful milkshakes and sodas and, you know, all kinds of things. And [I was] very carefully watched by the man who owned the store to make sure I didn’t put an extra scoop of ice cream in any of my friends’ things. So, you know, I was honest to a T, absolutely, or honest to a fault, I guess is the term. And he wound up really liking me and asking my parents as I went off to college, you know, “When is Barbara coming home? I want her to work on such-and-such a weekend; I’m having a sale,” or, “When,” you know, “Can she come back then? Can she work over Christmas?” This type of thing. So he liked me and I liked the fact that I didn’t have to do that for a living.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Because then you went to college, right?
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, yes, I went to Tennessee Wesleyan the first year. And my parents thought I was too young to go, and I really was, emotionally, too young.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You were seventeen?
Mrs. Osborne: Just turned seventeen during the summer. So off I went to Tennessee Wesleyan, and the minister, our minister from First Methodist Church took me and got me registered. He got my parents to say – give me permission to go. And moved into this very old dorm with a dried up little old lady dorm mother, and I wound up becoming the only – there were only two of us that started – we started in the winter quarter, because it took the minister that long to get my parents to give me permission to go. They just didn’t want me to leave that soon. And so only two of us started school in the winter quarter. So she was my roommate, the other girl, and she lasted two weeks and went home. So I was the only person in the entire school with no roommate, and that’s kind of a lonesome way to be.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What were the dorms like? Did they have – I mean, they didn’t have air conditioning, right?
Mrs. Osborne: Right.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So what was that like? Did you live in your room, or did you have a sleeping porch? What was that like?
Mrs. Osborne: No, you lived in your room, and the rules there were very different from what they are now. Your parents had to sign a paper saying you could get in a car or you couldn’t get in a car. My parents refused to sign saying I could get in a car, so therefore I was not allowed to ride with anybody anywhere. They also – the dorm mother came around and made sure that you – or tried to make sure that you cleaned your room every week, and that your bed was made every day, and I was one of the biggest problems, because I decided to rebel on all the things I had been taught at home, and never make the bed and never clean the room. My parents got quite a few phone calls that year about their rebellious daughter [laughter]. But I joined the Tennessee Wesleyan Choir, and got some absolutely marvelous experience there and wonderful praise from the choir director, who was a real stickler. He kept saying things like, “If there are any more altos like you in Oak Ridge, send them to me!” So I really enjoyed that and we did different shows. I worked in Maskers there at Wesleyan. The choir went on choir trips singing at churches around in different parts of Tennessee. We sang with the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra on Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. What else did we do, things that were big time for me at that point? It was just lots of fun. Oh, yeah, we put on Sigmund Romberg’s The Desert Song, and I learned to love Sigmund Romberg’s music through that, which I still have, a love for his music. But that was a terrific experience, the music part. And I started taking Botany because my father insisted I had to take a science; I had to major in a science. So that was my way of rebelling against, you know, not taking any of the, what I consider the harder sciences, Chemistry or Biology or something. Botany, I was doing it my way, which is very silly. There were no jobs in botany, or at least very few, but I didn’t really care; I was just having fun.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Sounds like it. So after college, you moved back to Oak Ridge and got a job here. Where did you work and what was it like to work there?
Mrs. Osborne: I actually didn’t finish college. My father had me drop out after two years because I failed typing. I couldn’t stay awake; it was at eight o’clock in the morning, and I didn’t go to bed early enough to. I would just be so bored I would sit there and go to sleep with my hands on the keyboard. You don’t pass doing things like that. So he was really upset with me after being an extremely good scholar all my life, to fail a typing course. And so he made me go to Knoxville Business College and get a steno degree and then get a job. So after – I spent a year or nine months over in Knoxville, going to Knoxville Business College, hating every minute of it, and then I applied at the plants, which were run by Union Carbide at that point, and they started giving me all kinds of tests when I went in for filling out – I took the usual typing test and shorthand and then they started having me take some other tests, and I could not understand why. Then they called me to say I had been hired to work at X-10 to be a computer operator on the first computer to be in the Southeast. I had no idea what they were talking about, because I’d never heard of a big computer – a little handheld calculator, maybe, or a tabletop calculator, not handheld back then, but not a computer. And I went home and told my father and mother this and my father just about jumped out of his chair, he was so excited, because he knew all about this. Being in the Budget Division of AEC, he knew what the thing had cost and all about the logistics of it, the whole thing, and he just thought that was the most exciting thing and the fact that his daughter was going to be working on it, which was the most exciting thing he ever heard of. So I was hired to be a computer operator on the ORACLE, which was the first large computer in the entire Southeast. It was built in Argonne and then shipped down to X-10 for the Math Panel at that point, and for the rest of the people at the lab to use, but it was going to be run by the Math Panel. And this was way before the little chips that are now used, the micro chips and all this stuff. It was all cathode ray tubes and just a huge, huge, huge thing, and used paper tape to feed all the information in and took forever to – you had rolls and rolls of paper tape and all it took was one little torn hole to ruin your entire program and completely change the meaning of the whole thing. So it was a constant trial and error sort of thing back then. But it was exciting.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Sounds a little frustrating.
Mrs. Osborne: It was frustrating, but that’s how everything starts. And it was exciting. I loved it. I loved learning about it, I loved working on it, and the more I worked on it, the more I wanted to do, so I wound up finally not being an operator. They hired some young men for that, and I was changed to becoming a programmer for the ORACLE. Now, the ORACLE stood for Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine. That’s O-R-A-C-L-E, yeah. And that’s what it stood for, and that was before FORTRAN, before any of the early languages. So people out there were writing subroutines; we were shifting binary bits back and forth to do everything, to do additions, subtractions, multiplications, writing little routines to accomplish what people later accomplished in one word or one bit or this type of thing. So it was a very exciting time, and I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of that. Met a lot of people.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What was it like to work in your office there?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, in my office, it was quiet, but when I worked on the computer, I was sitting at the console of this enormous machine that was probably, golly, I don’t think it was as big as a football field, but it was close to it, and it was just banks and banks and banks of these cathode ray tubes, with this enormous console in front of it. At least compared to what they are now, it was enormous. And where you’re flipping all kinds of little toggle switches and doing all sorts of things, and you’re working with all the best minds in the laboratory who were coming to put problems on and doing different things. And you’re sitting in front of a huge, great big plate glass window, which, seeing as I was twenty-one and single was kind of exciting, because everybody that I worked with had a single friend, it seemed like, and they were all walking by with their single friends and saying, “Would you like to meet her?” So it was like being in show business almost.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, you were – so, you were the only woman working in your area, then, right?
Mrs. Osborne: I was the only one right then, yes, for the first year. Now, there were women on the Math Panel, but they were definitely mathematicians, and I was not a mathematician at that point. I just sort of moved into that later. And evidently it was the test that they gave me that showed that I could do this or could handle it, that this was one of my strengths, so I always thought, how nice, had no idea what I was doing.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter] That system of computers, cathode ray tubes, must have generated an enormous amount of heat. How did they cool that?
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, well, a lot of air conditioning. Very, very definitely a lot of air conditioning. And they checked whole banks of the tubes every single morning. The computer was down every morning for maintenance, and they would discover that something – there’d been one tube blinking the day before, so who knows. At first it didn’t even run at night, you know, there wasn’t the need for it. And then as they began to find more uses for it and more uses for it, they started doing things at night out there, and I can remember riding out there at night with some physicists to help them with their programs, run them, and getting stopped by some of the, well, they were the guards there back by the plants, because physicists were not necessarily great drivers, the ones that were really good at some of the other things, at least these particular ones. They were brilliant men, and I’m not saying that about all physicists, but we used to, as a young woman, we used to group them. Physicists were the ones that walked into doors and walked into people and this type of thing.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: How funny.
Mrs. Osborne: And I married a physicist who never walks into doors or walks into people. I thought he was an engineer because he was just so neat and everything. But, yeah, we used to definitely pigeonhole the guys that walked down the hall to get coffee: “Oh yeah, that’s a chemist, you can tell,” or you’d see him hit that wall, “He’s a physicist,” or – this sort of thing. It was a good place to be young.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Do any of the people that you met – you said you met some pretty, fairly big names, you know, scientists there. Do any of them stand out in your mind?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, the head of the Math Panel was a well known mathematician who wrote books and whatnot, Austin Householder, and he was one of the shyest men you’ve ever seen in your life. He might have been a brilliant mathematician; he was a brilliant mathematician. I can remember trying to read something that he had written one time and just, it was so far over my head, it was ridiculous. So he was definitely brilliant. But then there was a – several, what I would call big time – they became like vice presidents or assistant directors of the lab or something like this. I did meet Alvin Weinberg a time or two. And then there was Bob Sharpie, who was an assistant director, and he was an interesting man. He wound up becoming the head of some big company here in the United States, and, you know, multi-millionaire type person, becoming very well known. But at that point, he was just, what I thought was an extremely egotistical, hard to get along with person, who was an authority on a lot of things. And there was a program going on on television at that time called The $64,000 Question. There was a young high school girl who was on this show who was doing very, very well, and I can’t remember what her exact deal was, that you picked the field you want the questions in. When you got to the $64,000 question, which was the top one, you could have an authority come in and help you with it, and she picked Bob Sharpie to be her authority to come in. So we were – everybody in Oak Ridge was glued to the T.V., if they had one back then, to watch that. And they won the $64,000, she did. So he invited her and her parents to come and tour X-10, and I have a picture of them. And she’s just a normal looking girl, wearing glasses, everything – but obviously she was going to wind up being extremely good at whatever science she went into, and I never knew whatever happened to her. I hope she was a real success. But it was interesting to see, you know.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: I bet. Now, while you were working there, you met your husband.
Mrs. Osborne: Yes.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Tell me how you met him.
Mrs. Osborne: First week. We were taking a bus – there was a bus that ran out to the lab – and so because you didn’t have a car you rode the bus. And when I went down to the bus stop, there were two of my friends from high school waiting for the same bus. So we were standing there talking and up came this nice young man to talk to one of the girls that I’d gone to school with, and she introduced him to me, and it turned out that he was dating her at that point, or had had a couple of dates with her. And I thought he was really cute. And that was how I met him. And then we had all been asked to be ushers at an Oak Ridge Playhouse play later in the week, so we decided, well, we would – definitely none of us have a date for that, we would all do something together afterwards. So my parents dropped me off at the play. Actually the plays were at the Oak Ridge High School Auditorium right then, which was the old one up on Kentucky Avenue, and when I got there, I found out every other – there were four of us as usherettes at that point – the other three had each gotten a date. I’m the only one that turned a date down and didn’t have one. So they were all going somewhere afterwards and I was not. Fortunately, friends of my parents were there at the play and gave me a ride home. But Morris always said – Morris was the date for this one girl, and he always said he felt so sorry for me standing there that he decided he wanted to ask me for a date. So I think I was his pity date [laughter].
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter] How funny.
Mrs. Osborne: But he never would ask me for a date far enough in advance. He would, you know, say, “How about could you go out,” he’d call on Friday, “Could you go out with me on Monday night?” Well, I already had a date Monday night. He had to call earlier than that. So after he asked me twice for a date and I turned him down each time, he said he wasn’t going to call me again, but I suggested what about such-and-such a night, when I was free, and so we went out then and that was the start of something that never stopped. By the fourth date, I knew that he was going to be the one that was going to – I was going to fall in love with him and make a big difference in my life.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Did you have some similar interests?
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, he was president of the Young Adult Fellowship at First Methodist Church, and I had always been very active in church. I was going to Kern Methodist Church at that point because it was closer to my home. So we had that and the fact that we both worked at X-10 and we were both going to school at night and we both liked to go to the swimming pool. We did a lot of going to the swimming pool on weekends, and going up to the Smokies and driving around or hiking or both, having picnics on weekends, also. And we were both small town. In fact, he was even smaller: he’d lived on a farm all his life. So it was definitely a reciprocating thing.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And then you got married here.
Mrs. Osborne: Yes.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Tell me about the wedding.
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, it was a very small wedding. Morris was in the process of doing some experiments with his job in solid state physics at that point, so we had to time the wedding between experiments. Because when an experiment was running, somebody had to be out there with it at night, and because the other people that were working on it all had families, he was the one that would be out with it at night. And a new husband doesn’t necessarily want to be spending the night out with an experiment. So we got married on a weekend that was at the end of one experiment and before the next one started, so we could have a honeymoon in there. And we had a very small wedding at Kern Methodist Church at eleven o’clock in the morning, because that was before air conditioned churches, and it was in July and hot as blazes. Everything stuck to you because it was just so hot. It was mainly the people I worked with and the people he worked with and some of the people from church and friends of my parents and a few of our friends, mutual friends, and we had a reception downstairs, with just cake and punch and nuts and mints. That’s what used to be – you know, I can remember it cost ten dollars for the flowers. It cost ten dollars for the cake, because the lady that made the cake was just going into the business and that’s what she charged for this lovely cake. And a friend went over to Farmer’s Market and bought the flowers over in Knoxville and then decorated the church with them and then carried them downstairs for the reception. And I mean, it was – we got married – I used to say we got married on a dime and that was just about it. So, that’s why we had a big fiftieth wedding anniversary, because we had such a small wedding. But it certainly lasted.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And you had said something about, instead of rice, they threw something else at you.
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, they threw the paper chad from the tapes, from all – typing all those tapes for the computer. They’d been bagging up all those tiny, tiny little bits of paper that came out, and they were sort of a greasy paper, oily, and they had bags full of the stuff. It looked like it was just pouring rain when they were throwing this. And it got – the best man drove us away from the wedding in his mother’s car, and the car just got plastered with this stuff, and his mother never could get it completely cleaned out. [laughter] She wound up trading cars, I understand. And I was wearing a big white lace hat when I left on the honeymoon, and it was just full of these bits of little tiny round bits of paper chad, you know.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Where did you all go on your honeymoon?
Mrs. Osborne: We went to Panama City, Florida. And it rained all week.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh.
Mrs. Osborne: So we didn’t get much of a suntan.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Where else have you worked in town? You’ve worked in a number of different places.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah. Let’s see, when the children – we had three children, and I quit work when I was expecting the first child because I was having a lot of problems, so – and at that time, you stayed home with your children. You didn’t go back to work unless you were really an expert at something. And I was certainly not an expert at anything. So I stayed home as a mother, and then sixteen months later I had a second child, and then three years later I had a third child. So I was pretty busy. I stayed home until the third child went off to school. So when he went to school, I went back to work as an instructional aide at Linden School, was hired by the principal there that had been there for many, many years, and was just a wonderful lady.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What year was that?
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, golly.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: About.
Mrs. Osborne: About 1965.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Mid ’60s.
Mrs. Osborne: Around ’65, ’66, something like that. And so I worked there half-time as an instructional aide, so I was home when the children were home, and I could either drive them to school or pick them up from school and bring them home depending on whether I worked mornings or afternoons. I worked in third grade at least three of the years, and I worked in sixth grade one year. Got to go to Tremont with the sixth graders and teach crafts, which was – that was a wonderful week. It was one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life. I’d been to Tremont as a mother, but to go as an instructor was even more fun. So I did that and I left Linden School because my husband was picked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to go to Germany as a guest scientist for two years to work at Kernforschungszentrum outside of Karlsruhe, West Germany. And so we moved the three children and our dog over there for two years, which was not an easy thing to do at that point. Our oldest son was a senior at high school, our daughter was a sophomore, and our youngest child was sixth grade.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So this was in the ’70s.
Mrs. Osborne: This was, you know, we went over in 1975, so yeah. I’m sorry, I must have gone back to work – I did not go back to work when I said I did. I must have gone back to work about ’70. Ah, okay, that makes a difference, yeah, sorry about that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s all right. Was it hard to – you said you brought your dog over to Germany. Was that hard to do back then, or was it easy?
Mrs. Osborne: It was very hard, because the Laboratory had made the reservations for us to fly over, and they made the reservations – we were going to change planes in London. It was going to be like a twenty-one hour trip, changing planes in London, and that’s when England had a complete shutdown on no animals coming in.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Osborne: If you brought an animal in, it would be put to death. And so we were just terrified about what was going to happen to our dog, which – he was a member of our family, definitely. We’d had his mother before him and had him since he was born. And I can remember when we got off the plane in London, we could see his crate being unloaded, and we were just sitting in there watching to see what they were going to do with it. And when we saw it go onto the plane going to Germany, that was such a relief. I don’t know what we would have done if they hadn’t done that. But they were having an outbreak of rabies in England at the time, and that’s why they had just shut down everything completely. But that was terrifying. And the children were already so upset about going that that’s all they needed was to find out that the dog might be missing when we got there. And there were people – when we got to Germany, I remember seeing, there were some animal crates going around, empty, on the carousel. Fortunately, ours still had a dog in it.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Osborne: And he was so glad to get out of there. But that was the hardest – they would not, back then, they wouldn’t allow animals up in the plane. He had to be down in baggage, which was not heated really or air conditioned or – you know, it was just really, really bad. So we were lucky he survived. 
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: But the Germans were pretty dog-friendly, weren’t they?
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, very much so. Our dog had so many friends over there. We had friends that Morris knew from work there that wanted to keep him for every trip we went on, and we would come back – he was a dachshund, just a regular sized dachshund, and we tried to keep him fairly sleek, because they do have back troubles, and every time we came back from a trip, he would be just like a football.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: Stuffed to the gills, round as all get out, and have garlic breath from all the wurst that they’d been feeding him. He just loved those German friends and they loved him. Oh boy, “He is just such a good dog, he just loves staying with us.” Yes, he did. He got spoiled rotten. And we’d have to run him all over the place to get him slimmed down again, get him back on dog food. And, “I don’t know why you feed him dog food. He really likes salami better.” Well, yes, he does.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: A little too much. What are some of your other memories of Germany?
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, the weather. It got dark so early. It would be, in the wintertime, it would be dark – by the time our children got off the school bus, it was already dark. So playing outside, there wasn’t any such thing. And it was dark when they left for school in the morning. Just all kinds of things like this. And where we were, we didn’t have a lot of snow. The temperature’s something like Oak Ridge, except a little bit more – it rained every single day, and you didn’t have the sunny days. Like, Oak Ridge is wonderful in that we have these beautiful sunny days in the middle of winter that just restores your faith in humanity and life. Everybody needs this, and in Germany you did not have this. It was just gray, day after day after day. Of course they had lots of celebrations and lots of parties and Fasching was huge, huge. Fasching was a time of parades everywhere and lots of people dressing up and we went to special Fasching parades and villages over there where they had people all dressed up in these very old masks, witch masks, wooden ones, and went around dressed as witches and poked their brooms at the dog – you took your dog everywhere in Germany – and would give out candy to the children, you know, scare them and then give them candy, this type of thing. Everything was just so different and it was so clean over there; it was wonderful. You were responsible for keeping the street in front of your house clean, and I was responsible for keeping the stairs and the landing – we were on the second floor of a house, where we were living, and I was responsible for keeping that mopped. Now, some things were very, very hard. The German washing machines back then – this was in the days of polyester, and a lot of our clothes were polyester, and the German washing machines started with cold water, heated the water up to boiling, took like two hours to do a load and sort of boiled the clothes, so what happened to polyester was terrible. We did not ever buy a German washing machine. We wound up getting permission from the American Army base there to use the laundromat on their base, and that was absolutely wonderful, that I could go in with quarters and use the washing machines, and use the quarters for the dryer and whatnot. Because I was doing the laundry for a family of five, the number of pairs of blue jeans that I had every week and the socks, having two sons who played basketball and a daughter that played basketball, the number of pairs of socks that I had every week was astounding, and we lived on the second floor, as I say, so I got to carry all this stuff up the stairs back into the apartment every day. And after I damaged my back over there, I wound up having to leave the laundry in the car. And when the kids would come home from school, I would ask them to all carry the laundry up the stairs and bring it up so I could take care of it. And they would [complain], “Oh, that’s terrible having to do this,” [and I would reply], “They’re your jeans; you bring them upstairs.”
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s right. So did your children enjoy school in Germany and did they learn German?
Mrs. Osborne: Our daughter did and our youngest son wound up enjoying it. Our oldest son did not. He just couldn’t make it. We had assured him that if he would just try, that if he couldn’t make the switch, we would send him back to graduate with his class here, because he was a senior in high school. And he just could not make the change. So we sent him back to Oak Ridge by himself just about New Year’s. He had to be back for a whole semester in order to graduate with his class at Oak Ridge High School. So some friends of ours that had a daughter his age had said he could stay with them. He didn’t know them that well, but he came back and stayed with them. It was very, very hard on him. I would never do that again. I don’t know how we would handle it if it ever came up again, but that was, for him, it was a bad, bad year.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s too bad.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, it is too bad. The other two wound up making a switch. Linda wound up becoming very good in German and Paul wound up enjoying himself. Now they were going to an American school on the Army base. We had promised them – there was no school that taught in English around there, and we only had six weeks notice that we were going to be going, moving over, so we had no time to learn the language ahead of time. So we had assured them that they would be going to a school where they would be taught in English. So they went to a military school, which was a terrible school. It was not a good one at all. After going to the Oak Ridge schools, it was a real, real letdown. The first class we ever took our oldest son into, it was an English class, and there were guys sitting in there reading comic books, getting credit for reading comic books, and David had been in advanced classes at Oak Ridge High School.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh, that must have been just awful.
Mrs. Osborne: So the teacher just said to us, “Get him out of here as fast as you can; send him home.” So that’s another reason that he wound up going home. So he did okay scholastically, but emotionally it was just really not good. He was too young to be away from the family.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Did Morris enjoy his job in Germany?
Mrs. Osborne: Yes. It was not easy. They spoke English to him and spoke German to each other, so that he had to really learn fast and try to get really good in order to know what was going on, and it was not easy for him, either. We were the first of several families that were sent over for this project, and it was a project to have the – like, Morris was supposed to be working with people over there who were working on the same type of thing that he had been working on here at the lab, so that they didn’t have to duplicate the same experiments and whatnot. They could share information back and forth, which obviously makes sense financially as well as other ways, so that’s what it was all about, and we learned a whole lot by being over there, found out how insulated we had been living in our little puddle here in Oak Ridge, that we thought we were big time stuff because there were people here from all over the world and actually we weren’t all that big time stuff. When you get out in the world, you find out. So we learned a lot of different – did lots and lots of traveling, went to Holland and Belgium and Spain and Egypt and Italy, and we have all the usual things: got robbed in Italy, got sick in Spain. And went to Czechoslovakia, which was a closed-in country back then and that was on a – actually, we joined a military tour, or one that was sponsored by the officers’ wives club, this sort of thing, so it was very inexpensive. And did the same thing – went to London. I took the kids and went to London for three or four days and went to the ballet and just did all kinds of – the museums and whatnot. Just did a lot of things so that they had all kinds of advantages over people that never get to do any of these things. And I had all kinds of advantages this way. I loved the traveling. I loved going to different castles and seeing all the churches and the age of the cities. Like, they’d be having their thousand year anniversary. And that’s when the United States was having its two-hundredth.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Bicentennial, yeah, I remember that.
Mrs. Osborne: We were having a really big celebration and everything, and Elvis Presley died while we were over there, and that was a big thing in Germany, too. I was just amazed at how much the Germans loved him. But he had been in Germany when he was in the military. And I was in a German American woman’s club in which we had a little cooking group of eight ladies, and we took turns cooking. The American ladies would cook one month and the German ladies would cook the next month, and then exchange recipes and whatnot. Jimmy Carter was elected president while we were over there and he had cheese grits. Well, they had never heard of cheese grits, and they wanted to know what they were, so we fixed a brunch for the ladies in our group, the German ladies, in which we fixed cheese grits and sausage balls and eggs and this sort of thing, like you would have a southern – and biscuits and whatnot. And they did things like – everything that they did had lots of liquor in it. We had Black Forest cake, which has a whole bottle of Kirschwasser in it, which is, whoa, that stuff burns all the way down. I think you could light the cake on fire.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: And just lots of things like that, and had some of the most wonderful mushroom soup that they made one time, just some things that you would never have had an opportunity to try otherwise, just heavenly. And you learned what some of the customs were. Anytime you have a coffee over there, you end the coffee by serving something alcoholic just before you send everybody home, which is not what’s done in this country.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Yeah, that’s not what we would do. It’s sort of backwards from what we used to do.
Mrs. Osborne: And we were always scared to death that we would get stopped by the police on the way home. But you couldn’t insult them by saying no. At least we never would have done that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, what did the Germans think of the cheese grits?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, it was all right, but certainly not all that good. They couldn’t understand why he would want that served at the White House or for his inauguration, whatever it was.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Hard to explain to people what soul food is, right?
Mrs. Osborne: [laughter] Yeah. But they appreciated finding out some of these things. And we had just a regular picnic for them one time with hotdogs and hamburgers and potato salad and the whole thing, just as they were trying to do typical dishes for us that they would use. So it was fun exchanging.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well that’s interesting. So when you got back from your trip to Germany, where did you work?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, I was very restless when I came back and I had been to so many wonderful, wonderful museums, that I thought, I want to work for a museum. So I went down here to what was then the American Museum of Atomic Energy, which is now the American Museum of Science and Energy, and I got a job. And the longer I worked there, the more responsibility they gave me. I started out working in the gift shop and working as a – doing one or two of the little audience shows that they had. I did the genetics show with the animals, and then I wound up – they were giving me more things to read and more things to read and wound up doing one on reactors. I think I told you that when I found out that I had this physics class from Harvard in my audience one day around the reactors, I decided, oh boy, you better get back to school if you’re going to answer questions from people like this. So that’s when I decided to go back to school, and I went back to UT and started after twenty-five years of being out of school, just signed up for a full load. I continued working at the museum the first year and then I had to quit because I just had too many labs and everything to have time for that. So I went back for two years, loved it, just loved going back to school, because that’s one of those things you get your pats on the back, just right away. Here’s your grades. You’re either doing well or you’re not doing well, you know, you have something. It’s so different from being a housewife and always sort of wondering, “Did they really like that meal?” Because the one that didn’t is going to tell you about it, but if they did like it, they’re not necessarily going to say anything. Going back to school is really a positive experience; it was for me. And I really enjoyed being around the kids. They treated me like I was practically one of them. They loved to borrow my notes because I took very good notes and much better than they did, and they like to study with me for exams and stuff. 
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You probably still knew how to do shorthand from the old days, right?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, actually, no. It had been twenty-five years, and I just – actually it had been thirty years since I had done that, and I had never really used my shorthand, so no, I really couldn’t do that. But I certainly was really good at other things, and I just took things that I enjoyed and wound up getting my degree in Botany and doing some lab work for one of the botanists over there that was a lot of fun. I mean, it was a lot of work, too, but it was fun to do it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wound up trying to grow a strain of something or other and when she, my professor, examined what I had been carefully – every time, every week – dividing and spreading out on another Petri dish and dividing and this sort of thing, she found I was growing an absolutely terrible strain of staph [Staphylococcus]. [laughter]
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh, no!
Mrs. Osborne: We had to autoclave the whole thing.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: How funny.
Mrs. Osborne: But I’d done it well. So, I said, “How could I have gotten that?” And she said, “Well, everybody has staph on their body.”
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Contamination.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah. And even though you’re running your hands under these lights to – you know, you’re washing and everything and then you’re running them under the special lights before you’re putting them under the hood to work and everything. But evidently I’d gotten a staph bug in there. But she caught it and no harm done. And I had certainly learned the procedure even though I hadn’t grown the right thing. So that was interesting. 
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What an interesting experience. [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: [laughter] Ah, yes, a student like me is really – oh, and I’d learned – one of the really exciting things that I did, we had a lady professor, assistant professor, that taught one of my lab courses that specialized in spiders. So she was going to have us specialize in spiders that quarter. We had to go out in this field when it was all wet with dew and whatnot and try to trap spiders, crawling around on our hands and knees. And I thought, if my bridge club could only see me now: I’m out here crawling around in the mud trying to find spiders, which I absolutely hate and trap them in this little glass jar and then dot them with a dot of color. [laughter]
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Interesting.
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, it really was. So I had lots of good stories to tell back in those days.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter] And then after you graduated, what did you do?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, after I graduated, I wound up getting a job at Oak Ridge Public Library. A friend of mine was the director there.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And that was Connie Battle?
Mrs. Osborne: That was Connie Battle, and I had known her for thirty years. No, I hadn’t known her for thirty years at that point.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: How did you know her?
Mrs. Osborne: We had started out in a babysitting club together with our children way back when I had the first child. We didn’t have grandmothers and people around that could babysit, and so a lot of the mothers banded together, like, twenty-five, thirty mothers would band together into a babysitting club, and took turns keeping the books. A different woman kept the books every month and you took calls from people who wanted a sitter and calls from people who were available to sit, and you matched them up this way. And if you used a sitter for three hours, you had to sit for somebody for three hours. And so it didn’t cost you anything. You had a well-trained mother that was sitting with your children, so you didn’t have to worry about them, and back then this was just really important, because everybody was getting by on as little as possible and wanting a good sitter, so this is what we did. And so I had met Connie in this, and we had formed a bridge club way back then. Well, she said they needed a clerk at the library and why didn’t I come and interview. So I did. And I didn’t want to be a library clerk per se, but then she explained that probably the circulation supervisor would be leaving within the year and they thought I might be interested in that job and that the experience of being a clerk for six, eight months would certainly stand me in good stead, seeing as I didn’t have a library degree. So I did that. I worked as a clerk, and then I became the circulation supervisor, and was that for like ten years. And that was my – and then I had to retire because I’d worn out my knees at that point, particularly one knee. I was on crutches at that point.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What are some of your memorable experiences from working at the library?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, I learned how tough it is to tell people they have to pay for overdue books when the reason their books are overdue is because their husband had checked them out and then had died. And I was not allowed – because the money went in – all the overdue monies went into the City general fund. I was not allowed to forgive a single nickel of an overdue thing. And that is so hard to find out the reason these are overdue is because “I didn’t even think about the fact that, you know, we had these out when John died.” And of course you would normally say, “Well, don’t worry about it; we’re just happy to have them back.” Nope, I had to charge. That was really hard. And then there was the day that there was this nice young man that was obviously going to college and didn’t have much when he came in and he had his backpack, and he started taking these books out of his backpack, putting them up on the counter, bringing them back, and as he did, these huge roaches went crawling off, just running off from these books.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh, gosh!
Mrs. Osborne: And I’m standing there, waiting to take his books, with roaches running all over the place, and without even thinking, I picked up one of the books and started going bam, bam, bam. [laughter]
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: I didn’t want those roaches running around the library. And I had to take the book back and wash it well, but we had plastic on it. He was so embarrassed.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, did he even know? [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: Yes, he was just embarrassed to death that obviously where he lived had roaches like that, and they’d gotten into his backpack. And if the rest of the public had seen these things running off, they would have just been screaming.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh, that’s great.
Mrs. Osborne: So that was one of my memorable moments. And then there was the man who brought a book back in a plastic bag and said, “I think you might want to throw this away.” And I’m saying, “Why would I want to throw the book away?” [He said], “Well, it’s not a good book. I don’t think you want to have it.” [I said], “I don’t think we have the right to judge whether a book is a good book or not.” [He said], “Well I still think you ought to throw it away.” I kept trying to find out why, and finally it turned out that it was because he had dropped it in something very, very bad and had tried to wash it off somewhat, put it in the plastic bag and brought it back. Needless to say, we threw it away.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: People are more fun. And then there were all sorts of just lovely people that came in that I hadn’t seen for years: people I’d gone to high school with, people that had been friends of my parents, just lots of wonderful, wonderful people that it was such a pleasure to see and to renew acquaintance with and to help. And they love the library. Oak Ridgers really use their library a tremendous amount. It’s very, very important to them. And it’s a very good library, frankly. And I know you want to hear about the man with the shoe fetish.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: If you want to tell it. [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: It was a nice young man who had some mental problems that I had never heard of before. I had never heard of a shoe fetish before. And he pigeonholed me one day back in the stacks asking me to help him find something. And while we were back in the stacks, he started admiring my shoes and saying he’d “love to get some like that for his mother and what kind were they?” And I couldn’t remember what kind they were, so I, being very accommodating, pulled one off to see what the brand was, at which point he grabbed it out of my hand, and then I had to try to get the shoe back from him, and that’s when I realized something was wrong. And I was so embarrassed. I finally got my shoe back and went running back into the back room and told somebody about it, and everyone started laughing. And I had just met the man with the shoe fetish. And evidently, most everybody had met him sooner or later there and I had just run into him. He never did anything terrible; he just liked shoes. And it was embarrassing, very embarrassing. [laughter]
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: Never took my shoes off for anybody else.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What was the library like back then? About how many people worked there?
Mrs. Osborne: About the same number that work there now, I think. I don’t think they’ve been able to add or subtract much of anybody since I was there. It was not computerized at that point, so there were a lot of mundane jobs that had to be done, like we had to put date due cards in every single book that was checked out, book, record, whatever. And we had to every – that’s when people were checking out lots of records. And we had to check every single record when it came back in to see if it had been scratched or warped or something or other, because, it’s amazing, the number of people who didn’t understand that the LP records, if you left them in a car, even for ten or fifteen minutes, would warp.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Yeah.
Mrs. Osborne: And they would have to pay for them then because the library, obviously, had paid for them. So a lot of things that took a lot longer to do back then – we had to take a book card out of the pocket, back pocket, of every book, so that we knew what was checked out and what wasn’t checked out, because now you can just, you know, key it into the computer and “Oh, oh yeah, that book’s checked out,” you know, “And it’s due back a week from Wednesday” or something. Well, then, we couldn’t. We would have to go through all of these cards. So we had cards that had to be alphabetized every single morning, and it was from all the things that had been checked out the day before. So you alphabetized them, and then you worked them in with the other cards. And so if you were not able to alphabetize, you couldn’t work at the library. That was one of the tests that was given to every page, every clerk, everyone that went to work there. And it’s amazing the number of young people that could not alphabetize. So being a page at the Oak Ridge Public Library was a real leg up also. That was a good job. It was hard, and if you were a good page, you were capable of doing almost anything in life. That’s the amazing thing about it. Because you had to be able to work with people, get along with people, you had to be able to do things quickly, you had to be able to be very agreeable and just – taking the truckloads of books out and putting them in the right place. Every once in a while, we would find that we had just all kinds of books out of place, and we would find we had a page who was being lazy. They were just taking them out and just sticking them somewhere, which involved, then, either my retraining, talking to them about changing their way or else firing them, one or the other, depending on what they were willing to do. And we had volunteers that came in that helped put the books up also, and every once in a while we would have a volunteer that absolutely could not put them in the right place. We’d have to find a different job for her or him, without hurting their feelings.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: How many pages and volunteers did you manage?
Mrs. Osborne: I had eleven people under me, of which – they were – all the clerks were under me plus all of the five pages were under me. So, six clerks and five pages, and that’s the most, like my boss only had one person under her and that was me. And the head of reference only had the reference librarians under her. Because the pages change every year, I was always going through training and retraining, which meant I was working late, night after night, because the pages didn’t come to work till like five o’clock, and I got off at 5:30. Well, if you’re training somebody, you have to be around. So I put in lots of extra time doing that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Sounds like a big job.
Mrs. Osborne: It was, it was. I enjoyed it, though. I liked a lot of it. I disliked some of it. I disliked the autonomy, I guess, the fact that you didn’t have the right to be as understanding as you would like to be. And for me that was hard. As I said I was definitely a square peg in a round hole when it came to that. But it takes all kinds to make a good library, I think.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What was your favorite part of working there?
Mrs. Osborne: The people, working with the people, seeing them, trying to please them, trying to help them find what they wanted, what they needed, help the kids get the help that they needed for different papers, this sort of thing. I was constantly amazed by damage that people would do to books. I had never known that some people would cut pages out of reference books to avoid paying ten cents to make a copy of a page, that they would just deliberately go back in the stacks and do this sort of thing. I had never known that people would take the expensive tables that you have down there, special ones, and carve things in them, so that you wind up having to buy these special heavy Plexiglas tops for all of them to keep them from being ruined. Just a lot of things like this. I just did not realize that you had people like that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: It’s amazing.
Mrs. Osborne: Guess I grew up in a very small, little, little group of not doing things like this, so I was just amazed at some of the things. Every time somebody got something stolen, I was shocked. I actually threw one young man out one night who was being just terrible. He was a guy that had been a big star at Oak Ridge High School in football, but he’d never really learned to write his name, and he’d been in special ed classes all along, so he could print his first name and the first initial of his last name, and that was it. So he liked to hang out in the library. But by this time, he was in his twenties, and he was drinking heavily, and he would come in and want to use the phone. And that’s not a thing you normally do is let people – you certainly can’t leave somebody in the back workroom at night by themselves using the phone. You have to stay by them. So it turns out his important phone call was to a girl he was trying to get a date with for the night. So I told him he had to get off the phone, and he kept on talking and I kept telling him to get off the phone. I finally just cut him off, at which point I thought he was going to hit me, he was so astonished that I would do that. And I beat him to the punch in that I just pointed my finger at him and said, “Get out of here right now. Don’t you come back here tonight.” I was so angry at him because he – I was so busy out at the front desk and he’s taking my time to be back there to try to talk a girl into letting him come over. And he said that was more important, so anyway, he left. And I thought afterwards, my gosh, he could have really hurt me if he’d wanted to. So that was pretty dumb on my part.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You were very brave.
Mrs. Osborne: I think it was more stupidity, to be honest.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, he was probably intimidated by you.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, that’s probably true, because you, you know, if you’ve ever been a teacher, you can sort of draw yourself up and get your teacher voice on.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Librarians can be like that too.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, absolutely. And there were people that tried to steal things that [I] would be just amazed at some of the people, well known people in town that would try to walk out, and their bag would set off the alarms.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Osborne: And then when they’d go back in the stacks with their bag, when they came back through it didn’t set off an alarm anymore.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So you had alarms when you went to work there or was that later?
Mrs. Osborne: No, no, they got that while I was there. They got the alarms.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And they also installed computers right before you left.
Mrs. Osborne: Yep. And they still had the card catalog and the computers when I left, but they got rid of the card catalog right away after that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well some of these libraries, I know that not everything in the card catalog is in the computer system. Were they able to get everything into the computer system?
Mrs. Osborne: I honestly don’t know. I did not ask them. They invited me back as a volunteer to do the same work that I had been doing, and I went back a time or two, and then I thought, wait a minute, this is kind of dumb. If I could not work here because my knees were so bad for pay, why am I coming back as a volunteer to do the very same work? So I decided I would do something else.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So what did you do after you left the library?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, I went back to doing a lot of the volunteer work that I used to do. I had always done lots of volunteer work at different things. I had always – well, I’d taught swimming for the Red Cross for years, enjoyed that thoroughly. I taught the swimming badge for the Boy Scouts, lifesaving badge for the Boy Scouts, taught different classes at church. For the last fifteen years, I’ve been leading classes in helping people find their spiritual gifts that God has given them, which has been just one of the most exciting things to do imaginable, and leading other small groups. I’m a very strong believer in that to have a deep faith in God, you need to belong to a small group, that people help sustain you, help you sustain your faith and support you in all kinds of things. And not everyone is fortunate enough to have a group of friends or people like this. And that’s what small groups do. And so studying and deepening your faith while you are making these relationships or carving out these relationships makes it doubly precious and really sustains you for years in everything you do. It’s been very helpful for me.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s great, yeah. Have you gone back to AMSE [American Museum of Science & Energy] to volunteer at all?
Mrs. Osborne: Nope, no, they always had lots of volunteers and I always thought I would go back there. I did do the voice for one of their Oak Ridge shows way back. I was on recording there.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Do you remember what show that was?
Mrs. Osborne: It was just – they have replaced it since then. I can’t – it was just one of the Oak Ridge shows that – they checked, tested everybody that worked there and I wound up being the one they picked to do it.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: They produced a video?
Mrs. Osborne: It was a slide show. I’m sorry, it was a slide show that they did with the voice going along with it, and the voice that went with it was me. And that went for quite a few years before they changed shows. So now they have professional people that do that, and I have never been a professional voice person.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: But you have experience doing it.
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, I also sing. I used to. Since I quit working down there. I discovered that I’d always wanted to be a torch singer and I love singing some of the old love songs: Gershwin, Cole Porter, and just a lot of the songs from the Second World War and just a lot of things like this I like. There are needs for this in some of the retirement centers and at the Keystone group down here, which is the daycare center for people with problems. Music stays with people longer than any other kind of memory. Singing some of the old songs brings back all kinds of things for them, and I love doing it. We were having cabarets at church also almost every year for a while when we would be putting on a dinner. And then eventually we wound up not doing a dinner; we did just delicious homemade desserts and the show, and selling tickets. So I did a lot of this. I did a little directing and a lot of singing and this type of thing, and then I sang at the Daily Grind, which was a coffee house here in Oak Ridge, and that was fun.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You said that was over where Razzleberry’s is right now.
Mrs. Osborne: Right, right. They’re in the corner at Jackson Square. Yeah, I used to do that on Friday night once in a while. And, you know, you’d end up singing for three hours straight, and that takes a little training to be able to do.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Some stamina.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, and I could do it then, so that was fun.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Yeah, that’s neat. You know, you were here during the sixties, and I think that Margaret Mead came here in the sixties. Is that right?
Mrs. Osborne: Yes.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Do you remember when she came and can you tell me about that?
Mrs. Osborne: I can’t really tell you, because that’s when I was tied in with little children, and so I don’t remember that much about it, to be honest with you. I have read about it since then, but I can’t tell you firsthand.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Do you remember the reaction of people that you knew to her remarks about Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Osborne: Not really.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: I’ve heard that she was critical of Oak Ridge because there weren’t any grandparents in Oak Ridge and she thought that you needed – 
Mrs. Osborne: Oh! Well now she’d be critical of Oak Ridge because it’s all grandparents. [laughter]
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter] I think you’re right.
Mrs. Osborne: You know, she, bless her heart, she just had to be critical of things, and that’s a good point. But a lot of people wound up getting their parents to move here after they had children and said they were staying on here. After their parents retired, their parents wound up moving here and retiring to help take care of their grandchildren and whatnot. But, yeah, I remember she was not – she didn’t seem to find as much joy in Oak Ridge or pride in it as we all thought she should. And then there was a doctor – who was the doctor from Georgia that I used to go to?
Mr. Osborne: Greenblatt.
Mrs. Osborne: Dr. Greenblatt, from Georgia. He was a specialist in hormones, and Carbide actually had him come up and talk to all the wives that would go to hear him, about how to go through difficult times in your life, go through menopause or whatnot, or how to help your children out if they were having hormone problems or this type of thing, and he came up, and that’s where I went to hear him. And he was very far out as far as most people were concerned. He believed in having not just shots, hormone shot, or taking pills, but he believed in having them put pellets, hormone pellets, into the abdomen or into the hip that would last for five to six months for people. And he did the same thing for children that were not growing as they should or not developing as they should, and he was a specialist in this down at the University of Georgia, I believe.
Mr. Osborne: I think it was the University of Georgia at Augusta. 
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, okay. So, anyway, I used to have one of his books that he had written, also on this. He was really an expert on this. And I wound up going to him quite a few times. He was an amazing man. All these people that are really amazing have egos, or a lot of them, have egos to go along with it. So they are sometimes their own worst enemy. But it’s amazing how much they know. And Oak Ridge just seemed to have the best of everything back in the fifties and sixties. Back when I was a girl, you didn’t have to worry about locking your doors, you didn’t have to worry about who your children were going with, because everybody that was in here had been investigated and had some sort of clearance or some sort of investigation done. You did not have to – it was just safe everywhere. And one of the really neat things is there were all these greenbelt areas between houses to give you more privacy, so you didn’t have just house right behind house behind house in a lot of cases. And I know where we lived, there was a gravel path that went through the woods and up these – across a little bridge that across this great huge drainage ditch that would just be roaring with water after the rains, and up some steps and up onto Georgia Avenue, and then right over down one of those lanes and down to the – across Blankenship field and up to the school there. That’s how I walked to school. And when you’re coming home from the movie, that’s how you walked home, through the woods this way, and it was perfectly safe because there weren’t any weirdoes around that – at least certainly no weirdoes that anybody heard of or knew about. Everything was completely safe. And as a teenager, this was just so romantic to get to walk through the woods with your boyfriend and be out of sight of your parents this way. I mean this was just really really terrific.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Where did your family live when they moved here? What kind of house did they have?
Mrs. Osborne: We had a “D” house down at the bottom of Fulton Lane. It was the only “D” house on the street, and we had to live in the Guest House for the first two weeks waiting for our things to get here and for the house to be finished. And they finished the house and we moved in, and it was a very, very nice house. It was at the bottom, so we were at the cul-de-sac sort of thing. We had houses across the street. There wasn’t anything at the end but just a parking area and then the woods behind us and our porch faced the greenbelt area. A “D” house was really a lovely house.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: They’re nice and big.
Mrs. Osborne: It was. Hardwood floors, beautiful.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Barbara, I was curious to know if you had any contact with African Americans down at the lab and how they were treated, and maybe you could tell a little bit about what happened when the Oak Ridge schools became integrated.
Mrs. Osborne: My experience at the lab was – there was only one African American scientist at the lab at that point. He was, I believe, a chemist, Mr. Washington.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Charles Washington?
Mrs. Osborne: Senior. He was the one that wound up having the heart transplant and this sort of thing. Anyway, he was the only one out there at that time. And then, after I had been on the Math Panel – I don’t remember how long, I guess just a year or two – they hired a young black woman mathematician – she had her master’s degree in Math – to come and work on the Math Panel. Really a nice young lady. Her husband was a professor at Knoxville College. So when she came, I didn’t realize what a big deal this was, but other people did. When you’re twenty-one, you don’t sometimes realize how important some things are, and it turned out that for her to go to the cafeteria was absolutely terrible, because we were like three blocks from the cafeteria, so you always walked down, naturally, because you couldn’t bring your car in. So you walked to the cafeteria, you bought your food, you sat in there and ate. So you would go to lunch with friends. So when – I can’t remember her name. That’s terrible; I can picture her but I cannot remember her name. But she was really nice, and so we made plans that three of us were going to take turns going to lunch with her so she would never have to go down there by herself, because sure enough, when she walked in the cafeteria, a lot of the workmen would glare at her and make comments and this sort of thing, because there just had not been any black people eating in there and they were not used to this at all. So we made sure that she never had to go by herself to the cafeteria. And this was fine. We had worked [it] out very well, and we enjoyed having lunch with her.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And so the workmen never gave you problems because you were with her?
Mrs. Osborne: No, but it would have been really tough for her to have to sit by herself at a table, you know. They would not have done anything to her, I’m sure, but they would have gone out of their way to make comments or something like that. But the fact that she always had two guardians, more or less, with her made it much easier. So her husband had a birthday while she was working there at the lab. So she decided to have a big party for him, and she invited Morris and I, and she invited this other girl from the Math Panel, Nancy Dismuke and her husband Stewart, to go also. So we decided we were all going to go, wondering what it was going to be like, and so we drove with the – the Dismukes drove, we rode with them over to Knoxville and to the Knoxville College area there where they lived and we went into this party. And everybody in the party had a master’s degree or a Ph.D. except for us, I think. [laughter] Except for Morris and I, that is, because Nancy Dismuke had a master’s. But they were all from Knoxville College, professors, and there were some white professors. I didn’t realize Knoxville College had some white professors at that point, which they did. So it turned out it was really a strange feeling to be completely surrounded by all blacks, because I had never in my entire life had this happen. And it was just – strange is the only way – and I’m sure it was as strange for them to see us coming in when they didn’t know us at all. The other white people that worked at Knoxville College fit in just fine, but we were – they weren’t real sure about what we were going to be like or what we were going to say or do, I’m sure. But we played games and wound up having a nice time. It was a lovely party, with your usual soft drinks and cake and coffee, and this type of thing, and just a happy birthday. Her husband was a really nice guy. She didn’t work for a real long time. She only worked for about a year or two there and then she left. I have a picture of the Math Panel group with her in it somewhere. I’ve got to find those pictures. But you don’t stop and think about it now as how different it was then. Every time she went out to get a cup of coffee, walked in the hall to get a cup of coffee, she knew she was going to be stared at, and that must have been really hard for her. So she had to be a very brave girl to come and work there. But she was, so it worked out fine. Now in the schools, there were some problems after integration in the schools. They of course had to bus some of the students in. They couldn’t have all of the blacks going to one of the schools completely or to just two of the schools. So they were just bussing them in, trying to mix up all of the schools, integrate all of the schools. And there were some problems. I know we had a son in junior high school at that point and he wound up becoming friends with one of the Washington boys, which was – to this day, they still know each other. But when our youngest son went to school, started in kindergarten, it was I guess fairly – pretty integrated at that point, and he would come home from school talking about his best friend that he had at school. He had met this boy called Kenny: “Kenny was wonderful, Kenny was funny, Kenny was smart, Kenny was good at everything, Kenny was just, oh, he was just wonderful.” And they had so much fun together. Well, they had a mothers’ coffee, and so of course I went as mother and we got there, I got there and Paul came running up to greet me and, oh, I had to go meet Kenny’s mother, had to go meet Kenny’s mother. He was dragging me across the room, and there coming, being dragged across the room towards me is this lovely young black lady, being dragged by this cute little black kid. That was Kenny. It never hit the kids that they were not the same color or anything; didn’t bother them one bit. She looked at me and I looked at her, and we started laughing. She had no more idea that Paul was white than I had that Kenny was black. And those kids stayed good friends. I saw Kenny’s mother just last month, I think. And we still, you know, we still know each other, we still talk, even though our sons are now in their late forties. But they stayed good friends for years and years. Paul would go and spend the night at Kenny’s house, Kenny would come and spend the night at our house. He was the nicest kid. His parents were nice. You know, a nice family is a nice family no matter what color it is, makes no difference. And he was funny and he was talented and he was a good athlete too. So, yeah, Paul picked wisely when he picked Kenny for a friend. And I hope Kenny’s mother felt the same way about Paul. So we didn’t have a lot of problems this way. I know there were problems. Teachers had to be super careful. When I worked at Linden in the early seventies, I did run into a little bit of this, a third grader that told me that the reason I was punishing him was because I was prejudiced, really set me back. And when I replied no, the reason I was punishing him was because he wrote all over the walls of the boy’s bathroom – he’d learned this other – I thought, where does a third grader learn about prejudice if he hasn’t learned it from his parents. “She’s just prejudiced; that’s why she’s treating you that way.” And I just thought, what a shame. He’s not learning anything from this, that you’re being punished because you did something wrong. As far as he was concerned it was because I was prejudiced because he was black instead of the fact that he had done something wrong, he had destroyed property, so to speak. And there were some other problems. There were definitely discipline problems. There were problems with children not having enough to eat. But then they started discovering it wasn’t just the Scarboro children; there were other children that weren’t having enough to eat, too.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Yeah, I’m sure. When did they start doing the free breakfasts for underprivileged children?
Mrs. Osborne: I honestly don’t know, because they didn’t have them when I worked at Linden. The child was allowed to – the one child I was thinking of was allowed to sleep under a table until almost noon because he was so tired. There were like ten kids in the family and one bed, and so he always got pushed out of bed because he was the youngest. So he would come and sleep under this table, and then would – I don’t know if he had to wait till lunch or if when we had recess, whether they could get him something to eat then. But I know that the counselor there at school would take him up and shower him off and find clean clothes for him and this type of thing, because he had no care at home at all, this one child, had not whatsoever, and it’s just pitiful to see this happen. But they could have been a white family.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Right. I also thought it was interesting, you’d mentioned the other day about the other schools, when Oak Ridge became integrated, not wanting to play the teams.
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, yeah. Now, I did not know that until much later that Oak Ridge had a real problem finding teams to play them in the different sports, in football or in basketball because they had integrated. We’re a government town, and so naturally you are integrating. And the other schools around in Tennessee did not want to play a school that had blacks on the team. They weren’t going to have their boys having to get up close and personal and play these guys. So they had an awful time filling the schedules, and they had to offer all kinds of incentives in order to fill the football schedule and whatnot, so that was tough.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And you said you thought they also might have been jealous of Oak Ridge because, being a government town, we had better facilities, better equipment.
Mrs. Osborne: We did at that time. We had better equipment, better uniforms. The poverty level around in Tennessee was – or the poverty, not just the level, but the poverty – was very prevalent, and it showed up in things like teams and uniforms and all this sort of thing, which was not considered such a big deal back then as it is now. Now, everybody knows that the more important thing, part of school, is your football and your basketball. Anyway, but that may be one reason we’re behind the Chinese and Japanese, I’m not sure. But anyway, then it wasn’t that big a thing, and we also, of course, had much better schools. We had teachers that came from all over the place and we had classes – we had science classes that they didn’t have in the local schools around, just all sorts of things here, as well as having drama and art and music and – I’m sure they had music in some of the things, but we had – Oak Ridge schools just had a lot of things that other schools in the surrounding area could not afford, and that was sort of held against us.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And also, you had said something about going to shop in Knoxville and Clinton. What was that like? How did they treat Oak Ridgers?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, I did not shop in Clinton. Clinton was a real little backwater town. It wasn’t worth stopping in, I’m sorry, at that point. Now, it’s a lovely place to go antiquing, and once you found out about Hammer’s, back before they moved particularly, Hammer’s was always fun to go to.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Was Hammer’s a department store? What was that?
Mrs. Osborne: Hammer’s was a local department store that was in this old building with all kinds of little out-of-the-way rooms and whatnot and little steps here and there and roundabout and they would get in truckloads of stuff that maybe came from a fire sale or came from something or other or came from QVC that didn’t sell. I’m not sure where all. And they’d sell at just really, really small prices. I know a girl who got lots of money for college by buying these – what were the shirts that had the duck on it or something like that?
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Izod?
Mrs. Osborne: Izod shirts. She used to go to Hammer’s and buy the Izod shirts, the seconds, and sell them to her sorority sisters at the University of North Carolina for regular prices and make all kinds of money this way. She was very much an entrepreneur and earned a lot of money this way. But that’s the sort of thing that Hammer’s had, if you could get in there. Somebody I know bought a baby grand piano from them. I did buy some wicker furniture from them once, and I used to go over there and get fabric and I’ve gotten, you know, a few articles of clothing there at different times, but now it’s – it still has some good buys, I’m sure, but I’m too old and tired to shop there anymore.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So you said it moved out of Clinton?
Mrs. Osborne: It moved, no, it’s still in Clinton, but it’s out at the other end of Clinton, now. It’s not in downtown Clinton anymore; it’s out just before you get to the river, out past where the fairgrounds are on the other side, so it’s not as interesting. It’s in a normal place now instead of being in a funny little hole place.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So you never went shopping in Clinton, but you did go to Knoxville.
Mrs. Osborne: I did go to Knoxville, and the thing that was so remarkable about Knoxville is the coal soot. I can remember standing on the corner, waiting for a bus, and winding up with black specks all over my coat and my face, and if you touched them, it just spread, because it was coal soot, and it would just grind right into your skin and into your coat, the fabric of it, whatever, and I had never – I mean, we had coal furnaces in Michigan, but we didn’t have coal soot like that. I don’t know if it was a difference in coal or –
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Yeah, it wasn’t ‘clean coal’? [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: I don’t know whether it was cleaner or whether the furnaces were cleaner or what it was, but I thought that downtown Knoxville was really a back woodsy place to have that sort of atmosphere.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So Oak Ridge didn’t have a coal soot problem back when you moved here with your family? Because everybody was using coal to heat, right?
Mrs. Osborne: Everybody was.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And I’ve seen pictures where it was really smoggy in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Osborne: I do not remember noticing that. Now I know that we had the same furnace in our “D” house that everybody had, but I have no idea if it was a coal furnace or not because I don’t remember ever getting coal from a coal truck. So whether it might have been an oil furnace back then, I don’t know.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You didn’t get a coal delivery.
Mrs. Osborne: We did not get a coal delivery that I know of. We had no coal. Now, the cemestos did not. I know the flattops did, because this friend that I used to visit in a flattop definitely had the place where the coal was kept out in front and the little coal stove inside and whatnot, but in the cemesto you didn’t have that. So whether I was just too dense to remember it or whether we had a different kind of furnace – 
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, you remembered it being smoggy in Knoxville, so chances are the problems were worse in Knoxville than they were in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Osborne: They definitely were. They definitely were. And this was in downtown Knoxville on Gay Street, because I was standing on Gay Street because Miller’s was on Gay Street then, and Miller’s was the big department store.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: How did people treat you at the department store in Knoxville?
Mrs. Osborne: Okay, they were fine. It was the kids at school that used to make fun of the way I talked, and one of the words that they always thought was the funniest was the way I said ‘cow,’ and they would always say, “Say ‘cow,’ Barbara. Listen to her. Listen to her, now. Say ‘cow.’” And [I would say], “Cow.” They’d “[laughter].” And I’d think, “What’s wrong with the way I say ‘cow,’” you know, but who knows.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: How did they say ‘cow’?
Mrs. Osborne: “Cyow” or something like that. [laughter]
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: [laughter]
Mrs. Osborne: It’s like [the similarity between the pronunciation of] ‘pin’ and ‘pen.’
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s right, right.
Mrs. Osborne: And they could hear – I could not tell whether they were saying ‘pin’ or ‘pen.’
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: I can never tell.
Mrs. Osborne: But I could tell whether I was or whether – I think I could tell if you were. So it’s really strange. It depends on where you’re from.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s right. Everybody has different speech features. How do you think – you know, sometimes people talk about having trouble with businesses in Knoxville because they were obviously not from this area, and the Knoxvillians knew that and they didn’t really like outsiders. You seem to have a pretty good experience in Knoxville from what I can tell, and maybe after the Manhattan Project, it wasn’t so much of a problem.
Mrs. Osborne: It could be, or it could be the fact that I was young and fairly attractive and I had been brought up to be very polite, whether that had something to do with it, I was always very gracious, and [would say], “Thank you very much,” and this type of thing. So I didn’t have the problems that maybe some other people did.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: How do you think the diversity of the people in Oak Ridge, coming from all over the country, contributed to the development of the community culture that is special to Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Osborne: It made the culture so different from every place else, that we’re spoiled. We think that all other towns are bound to be something like Oak Ridge, that they’re going to have people that are willing to listen to the pros and the cons and then make a decision, that there are people who you can argue with and maybe change their mind that aren’t just completely hidebound and something like this. And somehow, when you get away from Oak Ridge, you find that’s not necessarily true. You get into some of the good old boy stuff, and if you aren’t either a Democrat or a Republican, depending on where you are, why, you don’t have anything good to say or anything worth listening to and so forth and so on, and you’re never going to change somebody’s mind. If you’ve got God and logic on your side, you still aren’t going to be able to change their mind, that there are people like this. Because the majority of people in Oak Ridge are operating from a brain and they have learned through the years – now, I’m not saying everybody, but I’m saying the majority of people that you run into here are people who have used their minds and found out there’s rights and wrongs and there’s some shady, gray shades in this world and there are some things that you just can’t come out and say is either black or white, and this type of thing. I think we have gotten very spoiled. I know our oldest son found this out. He was the one that went into restaurant management and being a chef. When he went to other towns to help open restaurants, he found some of the narrow-mindedness in some of the South Carolina towns absolutely appalling compared to what he was used to from here in Oak Ridge, the people here.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: In the restaurant business, how could he be exposed to narrow-mindedness?
Mrs. Osborne: The people that are your patrons.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: The things that they say?
Mrs. Osborne: The things that they say, their beliefs, you know, whether it’s the good old boys on football Saturday or whether it’s the fact that they’re going to fly the – I think South Carolina was having a real problem with the Confederate flag back about the time that he was there, so whether it had something to do with that, and the fact that he is a reader. He has just read more stuff than – I thought I was a reader, but he is really – he reads all of an author and then goes on to the next author and then, you know, this type of thing, and he is what I would consider an extremely well-read individual. So the fact that he had trouble finding people with the same interests that he had once he left Oak Ridge, that had something to do with it maybe.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Were people in Oak Ridge ever worried during the integration of the schools? I mean, you say you don’t remember many problems, but were they worried about violence? Because they had all that violence in Clinton.
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, yes, they really were. Everybody in the South was worried about violence. And I think as a result, a lot of Oak Ridgers stepped up to try to minimize any violence that might crop up or to try to stop it before it happened, this type of thing. What happened in Clinton was bad, and what happened in Mississippi was terrible, and it just is completely against everything you believe in. If you have a Christian faith, you can’t possibly approve of that sort of thing. And I cannot imagine any of the Jewish faith wanting that sort of thing either, that they would be just as appalled as – I said this badly by saying Christian faith, but my experience is coming from what I think is the Christian faith, but my Jewish friends would likewise be just as appalled by that sort of thing. So I think Oak Ridge definitely stepped up to try to avoid anything like that and to make sure that Clinton was safe going to school here, in the old Linden School, like they could do, and that that was one of the better things that came out of it.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: So the Clinton students actually came and went to school at Linden.
Mrs. Osborne: Right, at the old Linden. The new Linden had just opened, and so the old Linden School was not being used at that point. So they came and used that for a year.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: I just think that’s wonderful that Oak Ridge stepped up and let them do that.
Mrs. Osborne: Well, you know, bad times call for people to just step up to what they believe, and there probably were people in Oak Ridge that thought that was very appropriate, what happened in Clinton, but fortunately, they were in the minority, and they did not make themselves real loudly known.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: I have a few more questions about when you first came to Oak Ridge and just going back to the war years before you came to Oak Ridge. When you came to Oak Ridge, were you very much aware of the activity of security personnel, the guards? Did you see much military security around?
Mrs. Osborne: No, I did not, not as a teenager. Remember, I was not driving, of course, I was fifteen years old.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: The security personnel didn’t drive around through town?
Mrs. Osborne: I don’t remember ever noticing them. I mean, I was a high school kid, and I didn’t notice that. I had no reason to. I’d never been in any kind of trouble.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Did you ever hear of anybody getting in trouble with the security?
Mrs. Osborne: No.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Not even the high school students getting in trouble with the gate guards?
Mrs. Osborne: No. I knew that people every once in a while would lose their pass or their badge, whatever you wanted to call it, and I had been warned not to lose mine no matter what.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Did you carry it with you all the time?
Mrs. Osborne: I think I did, but I can’t honestly remember that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You may not have had to.
Mrs. Osborne: I probably didn’t because I never went near the gates except when I was with my parents going out of town.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: And you never forgot your badge when you went out of town? No, you would have remembered it.
Mrs. Osborne: Well, my parents would have reminded me. So maybe my parents kept it for me, who knows.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Maybe. During World War II, did your family participate in the war effort by having a victory garden or collecting aluminum foil, buying war bonds, those sorts of things?
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, my father always had a very large victory garden, and he was really good at growing all sorts of things, and my mother canned things and dried things. And that was before you had freezers, really, so you weren’t freezing things. Meat was rationed during the war, so I can remember – chicken was not, and I can remember they bought twenty-five slaughtered chickens and canned them one year, just in your big glass jars, so we used a lot of chicken that year. But Dad, yeah, Dad always had lots of tomatoes and corn and just your usual things. And it was out on the edge of town where he had the victory garden. Everybody was renting little spaces to have their gardens, and we would ride out there in the evening and pick and do different things.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s interesting. I didn’t realize people had them away from their homes. I always thought the victory garden would be at your house.
Mrs. Osborne: No, no, it was bigger than that, than your backyard, so I mean you really were growing food. And we also collected the tinfoil from everywhere. If anybody saw a piece of tinfoil, you know, if somebody chewed a piece of gum, you automatically stripped the tinfoil off of it, and you always had a ball of tinfoil in your pocket or somewhere, in your purse, if you were a girl, and you just added that to the ball. And the same was true with string. Every little string, you wound it around. If anybody threw down a cigarette package, you immediately grabbed it up and the inside had tinfoil between the two paper layers, and so you stripped that off. But you saved every little bit this way. And the used cooking oil, saved for something.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: I heard about that too, yeah.
Mrs. Osborne: And I remember I got, one time, I managed to get a five pound bag of sugar for my mother for her birthday, without using – I didn’t have any rationing stamps, because my mother had all the ration books, and it was her birthday, and I was trying to get something that she would like, and I decided that a bag of sugar would be just perfect. I went to this little store where they knew me and knew my mother, and I asked them if I could possibly buy a bag of sugar, and somehow, I don’t know how, they let me have a bag of sugar, and I took it home and wrapped it up for mother’s birthday. She was tickled to death to get a five pound bag of sugar.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s neat. How did you hear about the bombing of Hiroshima? Do you remember much about that?
Mrs. Osborne: No, whether I heard it in school or whether I heard it from my parents, I can’t tell you. I really have no memory of when I first heard that the war was over.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You don’t remember how – do you remember how people acted? Were they excited in Michigan?
Mrs. Osborne: Oh, I’m sure. My parents would have been extremely happy. I was what, about twelve? Or less than that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: You were probably thinking about other things at that age.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, okay, so this would have been what, ’45?
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Mhm.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, I would have been about twelve, and I’m sorry, I just don’t have any memory of that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: That’s okay. Oh, I wanted to ask you briefly about your dad going to work to survey the possibility of a second Panama Canal, which I thought was interesting.
Mrs. Osborne: Well, Dad worked for the Atomic Energy Commission here in Oak Ridge, and came in ’49 and went to work for them as the assistant head of the Budget Division, and stayed until about ’63. In ’63, he was transferred to Las Vegas, to the Las Vegas office – which, I never knew AEC had a Las Vegas office until then. They were there for a couple of years and then he was transferred to the Panama Canal Zone to work on the feasibility of building a second Panama Canal. This was before the first Panama Canal had been turned over to Panama. They knew – the United States knew that we had to turn it over to Panama, and they were wondering, they were afraid about what was going to happen. So they got to thinking about, what about the feasibility of building a second one, so that we would always have one. So Dad and several men from Engineering in the Army were the group picked to study this, and so he and Mother moved to Panama. And everybody else that worked on this project was military, so they lived on the military base there, except my mother and father were not military, so they had to live off the base, and the other ladies would let Mother know about how much she was missing by not being able to use the clubs there and the groceries there and all this sort of thing, and [they would remark], “What a shame your house has cracks in it so the bugs come through,” and all this. So, anyway, Mother didn’t like it at all, but Dad loved it. He loved being out in the jungle, and they were trying to find where they would build one. And so they were just back in the jungle a lot of the time, hiking and trying to decide where would be a place that they could do this and how much would it cost, what would be – and they came up with the fact that it would not be a feasible thing to do, so that was their recommendation, was to not do it.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Do you happen to know what Panama thought about their – or did they even know that they were doing this?
Mrs. Osborne: I don’t know if Panama even knew. I really don’t know.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: It was such a small group, they may not have been aware of it anyway. That’s interesting.
Mrs. Osborne: It was a small group. But that was something different from what Dad did most of his life, and he thoroughly enjoyed that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: It was an adventure.
Mrs. Osborne: Yeah, it was.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Are there any other unique experiences you remember from living in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Osborne: I know when I went back to school as an adult, I heard a young guys talking about – over at the college – I heard a young guy talking about how the cancer rate in Oak Ridge was so high. His aunt had cancer now, and that she said it was due to all the radiation and everything in Oak Ridge, that everybody was getting cancer. And I said I didn’t think they were. And so then you realize that if you try arguing with him, you’re not going to get anywhere, that, just be quiet and let him say whatever he wants to say, and that’s the only way to go, that he had already made up his mind and was very busy sharing this with the other people in the class, that Oak Ridgers just had more chance of getting cancer than people anywhere else.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Based on his anecdotal evidence.
Mrs. Osborne: Based on the fact that either his aunt or his uncle had had cancer of some sort and been cured. So, I don’t know any more than that.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, it’s interesting to learn how people think about Oak Ridge. I’m sure whenever you go somewhere, people ask you, “Is it safe to drink the water?”
Mrs. Osborne: They used to do that when I worked at the museum here. They used to ask if I lived in Oak Ridge, and then if I had any children, and they they’d try to phrase it as nicely as possible, “Were the children all right?” “Did they have two heads?” or something like this, so I assured them they were all fine.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What else has made Oak Ridge an unusual community in which to live?
Mrs. Osborne: Well, it has very good health care. I guess the fact that Oak Ridge has more to offer in the way of entertainment. They have an excellent Playhouse, they have an excellent Symphony Orchestra, they have ballet, a couple of pretty good ballet companies. They can perform with the opera company in Knoxville.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: What do you think has contributed to that level of arts? This is such a small town to have such a rich artistic community.
Mrs. Osborne: Well, I think that maybe a lot of people that are very arty are also scientific, that that just sort of goes hand-in-hand.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well, Barbara, it’s been a wonderful interview. Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Mrs. Osborne: I can’t think of anything right off-hand. It’s been fun.
Dr. Hamilton-Brehm: Well thank you for interviewing.
Mrs. Osborne: You’re very welcome.
[end of recording]