Keim, Christopher

              ORAL HISTORY OF CHRISTOPHER KEIM
Interviewed by Dean Novelli and Steve Buxton
June 13, 2000 
[Tape 1, Side 1]
Mr. Novelli: I am Dean Novelli. Today is June 13, 2000 and we are speaking with, if you'll introduce yourself sir?
Dr. Keim: My name is Chris Keim. K-E-I-M.
Mr. Novelli: And Steve, introduce yourself.
Mr. Buxton: This is Steve Buxton.
Mr. Novelli: If you would Dr. Keim, if you'd just tell us a little bit about your family, your background before you came to Oak Ridge.
Dr. Keim: I was born in Nebraska, Tecumseh, Nebraska, a small town of less than two thousand. And I attended Nebraska Wesleyan University and University of Nebraska. I had a physics professor at Nebraska Wesleyan who was ahead of his time actually. I took a first course in atomic physics way back in 1926. And that was before the neutron had been discovered and before a lot was known about the structure of the atom. Among the students of Professor Jensen, was John Dunning. John Dunning became very important in the Manhattan Project. He has since died. He attended Columbia University, and I recall some of his experiences, particularly involving the gaseous diffusion process. He was a strong believer in the possibility of the diffusion process being used to separate uranium 235 from 238. There are others who were not so sure. And they had built K-25, actually, before they had developed the barriers for the process, and they were considering abandoning the process. Dunning convinced them to go ahead and complete it and that they would develop the barrier technique, which they did.
But in my own case, I had finished my work in graduate school. Professor Jensen was successful in getting most of us graduate assistantships so we could continue our graduate study in physics, and later I branched out into chemistry as well, and I have a strong background in physics, chemistry and math, although I find now that my math was elementary compared to the math that has been developed since. I had various experiences before I learned about Oak Ridge, but in 1944, early 1944, I was a research fellow at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research at Pittsburgh. I received a telephone call on Christmas Day inviting me to come to Oak Ridge for, well, the representative of Tennessee Eastman said, “We’d like for you to come to Oak Ridge and see what’s going on.” I came by train, and I was amazed at what was going on here. The construction and the many thousands of people who were already here in construction work as well as high level scientists, men I had heard about before but had never met. Ernest Orlando Lawrence was the inventor of the cyclotron. He was at University of California at Berkeley, and it was his idea which was the background for the Y-12 electromagnetic separation of uranium 235. Well, I came to Oak Ridge and hired in in early February 1944 and was assigned to the pilot plant in the so-called Process Improvement Division. We worked on trying to improve the process of separating uranium 235 from 238 by the so-called electromagnetic process. In my early experiences in Oak Ridge, I learned very early not to ask questions. And, in fact, I was told, “Don’t ask questions. We will tell you what you need to know.” So I didn’t ask many questions. Well, I was involved along with many, many others in the electromagnetic separation of uranium isotopes, and everything went along fairly smoothly but under high pressure for some time. But in the summer of 1945, we had a six weeks push in the production buildings to produce uranium 235. And shortly after the end of that production push, I commented to a representative of Westinghouse that “Well I suppose the material we’ve produced in the production facilities is on its way.” And he commented that “It’s already there.” That was just a few days after the completion of that production push. Then I asked him – I found that he was quite well-informed. He was not working directly for the Manhattan Project except as a representative of Westinghouse. He commented that the material would be used in the first atomic bomb after President Truman returned from the Potsdam Conference, and he was still at sea. The first bomb at Hiroshima was dropped before he arrived back in this country. He was still a day or two out at sea when the bomb was dropped. You may have attended last weekend [June 8-10, 2000] – the navigator [Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk] of the Enola Gay was at the museum [American Museum of Science and Energy]. Later I learned why it was dropped before his scheduled day, when he would arrive back in this country. I learned in certain information I gathered, that the Russians were planning to invade Japan. And President Truman knew of that through his intelligence and he didn’t want them to be in Japan at the time Japan would surrender. And he was quite sure that the use of the atomic bomb would force the Japanese to surrender. So he had the bomb dropped early, several days before he had originally planned to do it, in order to prevent the Russians from being in on the surrender. Then, of course, Japan didn’t surrender after the first bomb was dropped, and then at Nagasaki, about a week later, the plutonium bomb was dropped, and that forced them to surrender. Well, during my experiences with the uranium separation, being at the pilot plant and in the pilot plant, we had several, we had really four calutrons there in that building. Two alpha calutrons, which would be the first stage, and two beta calutrons, which were the second stage. The alpha calutrons in the uranium process, took uranium enrichment from 0.7% natural abundance up to about 25%. And then the beta process took the enriched uranium from 25% on up to over 90%, which was necessary for bomb purposes. Well, we had those calutrons, and rather quietly we separated the isotopes of copper, copper 63 and copper 65, not telling anyone about what we were doing. We had suspected all along that with all the copper that was present in the source materials, or the source mechanism of the electromagnetic separation, that copper isotopes were being generated. So we put copper chloride into our charge bottles and adjusted our magnetic fields and our temperatures in order to vaporize the copper chloride and separate the isotopes of copper. Then that first enriched copper, I think it was copper 63 that was enriched, was irradiated and converted into a radioisotope of Nickel, I believe. And then Dr. Clarence Larson, George Boyd, John Swartout and several of us involved in the electromagnetic work, we all sent a letter into Physical Review announcing with enriched copper we had proved the existence of this particular Nickel isotope. That was the first paper that was ever written on the enrichment of stable isotopes. Well, on January 1, 1947, I think, the Atomic Energy [Commission] took over from the Army, and they visited the pilot plant, and I remember that Bob Bacher, B-A-C-H-E-R, was the physicist on the Atomic Energy Commission, and we explained to him that we could enrich the isotopes of all the elements of the periodic chart: copper, silver, zinc, lead, and so forth. And Bob Bacher told us to go ahead. He asked first what we were spending every year, and we told him about two million dollars. And he said, “Go ahead and do it, and if anybody ever tries to stop you, let me know wherever I am.” He later became president of California Institute of Technology. We never had to contact him because we were never stopped from separating those isotopes, and it took us about twelve years to go through the whole periodic chart. We could not separate the isotopes of those elements that were gaseous, and of course those elements like gold, which only had one atomic species. We didn’t bother with them, of course. It took us ten or twelve years to separate all those isotopes for the first time. Physicists, and particularly those within the Atomic Energy Commission, investigated those isotopes to see what they might be used for. They were interested particularly in bomb materials. But, some of those isotopes, thallium is probably one of the best examples, was converted to a radioisotope. Thallium, the radioactive thallium, is used by cardiologists for the analysis of heart ailments and problems. For instance, the FAA requires all pilots to undergo a stress test and a physical examination every six months or a year. I used to fly and I had to take a stress test and get my pilot’s certificate renewed once a year. The FAA required that the cardiologist, Dr. McLaughlin, use the thallium isotope when I underwent the stress test, and with that radioisotope, when my pulse rate would go up and so forth – if my heart were irregular for any reason, that thallium, radioactive thallium, would enable the cardiologist with a Geiger counter, to measure, and to identify the behavior of the heart muscles and the valves and so forth. I think several hundred thousand tests today are being done by cardiologists using that radioactive thallium. Well, the radioactive thallium decays over time, so new radioactive thallium has to be made to supply the cardiologist. And to supply that radioactive thallium, the thallium isotopes, stable, non-radioactive, they have to be separated electromagnetically and a reservoir available. I think probably in the stable isotope separation they have built a certain reserve of the stable isotope of thallium so that they can provide a continual supply of the radioactive isotope to cardiologists. Well, that whole experience was very fascinating, interesting to all of us. In 1957, I was asked to help at Oak Ridge National Laboratory develop a Technical Information Division. All information that they had accumulated from 1942 or ’43 to 1957 was in the vaults gathered with dust, was disorganized. And the people producing a lot of that information, the laboratory records, the libraries, the graphic arts people who were all service organizations to the research people, they were not organized in one information division. I attempted to organize them, put them together in an Information Division. And we succeeded in doing that. This was all before computers. In fact, one day I was visiting with a bunch of cadets from VMI and I commented, I said, “Do you men realize that the first nuclear reactor and the atomic bomb were all developed before computers?” And they looked rather surprised and one of them said, “Well, that wouldn’t be possible!” But knowing Enrico Fermi and some of those other men, we remembered Enrico Fermi always had a slide rule. And most of us had slide rules. And he always, when he would be giving a lecture, and I attended a number of his lectures, he would always be at the blackboard and he'd always have an eraser and a piece of chalk in his hand, and he would develop the material on the blackboard. And when he needed more space he'd erase it and start over again. A lot of what we did then was just done by plain arithmetic. In fact after I retired, I retired, had to retire at the end of April 1971, I did a little teaching. I was in a freshman chemistry class one day, and the students were doing a lousy job in their problems. And I had a little session and I tried to teach them in plain arithmetic how to do some of those problems. And they didn’t know how to do arithmetic. They said “which key do you punch on your calculator to do it?” This is what’s happening with our math classes and our science classes. They are now, of course, using computers and many of them do not know ordinary, plain arithmetic. I don’t know that that’s necessary, but it’s unfortunate, I think. Well, that’s some of my experiences.
Mr. Novelli: You mentioned you were contacted on Christmas Day by someone from Eastman Company. How long was your first visit here?
Dr. Keim: Just one day. I came in on a Sunday evening, checked in at the Guest House. The next morning a car picked me up to take me to Y-12. And I spent that day in Y-12.  And I met E. O. Lawrence. I met some of the officials of Tennessee Eastman. I heard the names of Arthur Holly Compton mentioned; he was chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. I heard the name K. T. Compton mentioned; he was president of MIT. And then as – I was in a car, and I drove around in that car in Y-12 – I was not permitted to get out of the car, but I could see the big packing cases with the name Westinghouse on the outside and the name General Electric on the outside. Then I saw those big metal containers and I concluded, “Gee, those are magnetic coils.” And then I realized what they were doing in Y-12. They must have been using what is an enlargement of the cyclotron, which is an expansion of the mass spectrograph. And I decided that they must be separating the isotopes of uranium. At one time during that day we went to lunch in the Y-12 cafeteria. And a uniformed guard looked over our shoulder all the time we were eating lunch. And we talked about the weather and general things. We didn’t talk any science. But this guard had a heavy cold, and he would cough and he would sneeze. And when I returned to Pittsburgh the next day, in several days I had a bad cold, which I had gotten from that guard. That's how close they watched us. I did not return to Pittsburgh by train. I returned by plane, and Tennessee Eastman said we want you to go back to Pittsburgh and then come back as soon as you can. So the chaufferette driving the Army vehicle said, “I will pick you up at eight o’clock.” My plane left at nine o’clock. And she had to drive to Clinton and in the old Clinton Highway through Knoxville and out to the airport. And this was, you see, in January, so it was winter time. She had a heavy fur coat on. She took off her fur coat and tossed it in the back seat and she said, “Now I’ll get you to your plane on time but I’m going to have to drive pretty fast. If you’ll look out the back window and watch to be sure there are no police following us, we’ll get there.” And we got there and I was able to catch my plane. Well, when I got back to Pittsburgh, I reported to the director of Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, Dr. Weidlein, W-E-I-D-L-E-I-N. And he said “Did they at Oak Ridge assign you to a dormitory in West Village?” I said, “No.�� He said, “Did they tell you about Site X or Site W?” I said, “No.” “Well,” he said “what do you think we’re doing down there?” I said, “Dr. Weidlein, it looks like atomic energy to me.” He said, “Don’t you ever say that to anybody else.” Then I learned later, he was the chief chemical consultant on the War Production Board which assigned the priorities for the military, of personnel and materials, and he knew what was going on in Oak Ridge. So that's the reason of those leading questions that he asked me. And then he warned me not to talk about it to anybody else, and so I didn’t.
Mr. Novelli: Was he the first person to warn you about not talking about anything? When you first came here did they give you any type of security briefing for that one day visit?
Dr. Keim: On that one day visit, they did not. When I returned a month later, I was able to terminate my contract at Mellon Institute and return just about a month later, early in February. Then new employees, we went into what we called the “bullpen.” That was down there in those tile buildings, up the road here on Laboratory Road. We had security sessions there – no we didn���t have security sessions. We had sessions conducted by Tennessee Eastman, and they were based on the sessions which Eastman Kodak used for new employees, on supervision and employee behavior and so forth, just general, not involving security, not involving any technology of the process here in Oak Ridge. Because there were many people in those conferences, in those classes down there in the tile buildings, who were, well we were there during the time that the Army investigated us to get our security clearance. We were in those classes for about ten days. And several people in those classes were removed before the classes were over. Because, for instance, I remember one man who was a locksmith. We were a whole mixture. He was a locksmith and he said there was no padlocks, no locks in Oak Ridge that he couldn’t open. Well, they removed him and he was never employed. And then there was another young man who was in those classes, and he was there because he was hired by Tennessee Eastman, but he was kind of a draft dodger. He talked too much and they removed him, and probably turned him over to his draft board. So we went through those classes; then later we were taken to Y-12 and we went into classes at Y-12. And those classes dealt more with physics and math and electrical engineering, and more nearly related to the process and to the project.
Mr. Buxton: Tell me about some of the equipment, what it was like to run the equipment, the alpha and beta control panels, some of your experiences with them, what it looked like and felt like, the voltages and currents and stuff like that involved.
Dr. Keim: The alpha equipment, let’s see. Well, first of all, the process took place in strong magnetic fields. By the way, those magnet coils, we later found, were wound with silver, which was borrowed from the Department of Treasury at West Point. I remember the story is told that when General Groves or his representatives went to West Point, said we need to borrow some silver to produce these magnet coils, and they couldn’t use copper, because copper was needed for projectiles, for shells, and they didn’t want to tie up ten thousand tons of copper, and so when they told the people at West Point how much silver they needed, the people at West Point commented, well they weighed their silver in Troy ounces and the Manhattan Project was talking about ten thousand tons of silver, which was available. So these coils were then wound at Allis-Chalmers, I think, in Milwaukee. And the coils then shipped to Oak Ridge under heavy guard, of course. Well, I’m digressing there talking about the coils. Now the alpha process from the source to the collector, the ion beam traveled – 
Mr. Buxton: Was the beam visible to the eye?
Dr. Keim: The beam, you could look into the end of the vacuum chamber through a window, and you could see the beam coming out of the source and bending upward on a, I think a forty-eight inch radius. I think the collector was forty-eight inches from the source. You could see that beam going up there. And then the beta process, where you used the enriched material that was produced in the alpha process, the beta process, I think, was on a twenty-four inch radius, and it was smaller equipment. But I remember that Niels Bohr, the great physicist from Denmark, visited us, I think in 1944, and we let him look into the window showing the beam and, of course, he was fascinated with that. Later I visited with Professor Bohr in Copenhagen and we reminisced about his visit to Oak Ridge. By the way, the story of Niels Bohr escaping from Denmark to England during the war, and I confirmed this with him, and the story I’d heard was correct, that when the British learned that the Germans were going to invade Denmark, they wanted Niels Bohr out of there. They wanted to rescue him. So they sent in a two-seater fighter plane to a certain location, and they put Niels Bohr in it and started back to England in that two-seater fighter plane. Well the German anti-aircraft cannons started firing at this plane, and they had to go up in altitudes to avoid the flak which they were encountering. And the pilot put on his oxygen mask and Niels Bohr tried to put his on, but Niels Bohr had an unusually large head. And the oxygen mask – he couldn’t put it on. And when he got back to England he was unconscious. They almost lost him, in rescuing him. And he confirmed that, yes, he didn’t remember much about the flight because he passed out completely.
Mr. Buxton: We need to change the tape.
[Tape 1, Side 2]
Mr. Buxton: Go ahead.
Dr. Keim: Those runs in production, in the electromagnetic process had to run several days and not twenty-four hours. And he [General Groves] said, “Well, we have to know tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. We're going to make the decision on the equipment in the next beta production building. We want to know if we should use the same equipment that we’ve been using or whether this new equipment is ready.” And he said, “What would you do?” We all agreed we’d use the equipment that was in the old building, not the new equipment, because it wasn’t ready. And that’s what they decided the next morning. He was real good about going to people like we were and getting our opinions and making his decisions on that basis. And then E. O. Lawrence would come in often. I remember one night he came in. Usually they would come in during the night because they were busy elsewhere during the day. And we were running some new equipment and we were kind of babying it. He said, “Oh we’ve got to step up the voltage, we’ve got to step up the production.” And he would fire it up and they'd get a lot of sparking and settle down. And then when he left the building, we were getting a lot more production than we were when he sat down at the controls. But, he hadn’t been out of the building more than four or five minutes, everything blew up. What had happened was that he had increased the voltages and everything, that the equipment just failed. But that’s what he wanted to find out. And when it failed, we would take it out of the tanks, out of the chambers and we would decide where it failed and we would try to strengthen it the next time. That was the purpose of our work. But E. O. Lawrence would come in real often, and we had a mixture of people from Berkeley. I remember Bob Thornton was E. O. Lawrence’s number one assistant. He was there a good deal. And we had a lot of people from Berkeley who were working with us. We had a lot of GIs too. And they were not in uniform, but usually coveralls, and they were working along with us also.
Mr. Buxton: Was that the Special Engineer Detachment?
Dr. Keim: Yeah. And then they brought in a bunch of Navy ensigns and they mixed them in with the Army GIs, but that didn’t work. Most of the Army people were not commissioned officers. The ensigns from the Navy were commissioned and they were not working for the Army and the Army didn’t want to work for the Navy. So they pulled out the ensigns after a while. It just didn’t work at all.
One of the most remarkable things, in the production buildings when they first started, they had these control cubicles connected with the calutrons and they would train girls to operate these control cubicles and all they would be told or taught to do, was to look at meters and adjust their equipment to maximize those meters for the collection. It was just, to me, remarkable how well those girls could operate those cubicles or those calutrons just from the training that they had received. I stopped one day, I was just going by, and I said to one of the girls “You’re doing a good job there. Tell me how do you do it?” And she said, “I don’t know. They just told us to maximize those meters.” She said, “I can’t even operate the radio at home.” But they could operate this equipment.
Mr. Buxton: Was it hot and dry and dirty in the buildings? What was it like to be in the room with the equipment?
Dr. Keim: When we took the units out of the vacuum chambers, they were pretty dirty. They were filled with deposits which went on during that production. We called the contamination that the units had “crud.” We said “they were full of crud.” All those units would then go to the chemistry area and they would be washed. And all that crud and all that material would be collected by the chemists. And then any uranium was recovered. Nothing was wasted. The buildings were just very clean, except, well, in the chemistry area, but it was still clean; it was all contained. And in the pilot plant, in the beta process, they had curbs around all the floors, so that if we ever were going to have an accident and spill material, it couldn’t run outside the building. It could be recovered. I’m sorry that Building 9731, Pilot Plant in Y-12 was not preserved as a historical monument on the electromagnetic process. Y-12 decided they needed more office space, so they took out the equipment. We tried to talk them into preserving it for a museum, but we were not successful. But at the [American] Museum of Science and Industry [Energy], in one area you will see at least some of these beta source and collectors, and then you will see the cubicles, the faces of the cubicles for operating them. But it would have been nice to have preserved 9731 as a historical monument.
Mr. Buxton: That would have been. I’ve seen some of the alpha calutron controls. They used to have one sitting down at the old Museum for years, and I used to stop and look at that. Let me ask you a couple of things here. I want to talk a little bit about what it was like to live in Oak Ridge itself. What was the city like, what was your impression of day-to-day life here? After it got going good, not necessarily just the first few days, but just ordinary life here, what was your impression?
Dr. Keim: Well, initially, I lived in a dormitory for about four months because my house – I was able to pick out a house, but it was not completed. And I kept going to housing in Tennessee Eastman and asking when I could get to my house, because my wife and little girl, two years old, were anxious to get from Pittsburgh down here. And they didn’t know where I was, what I was doing. I just wasn’t able to get my house. Stone and Webster built a lot of the houses at that time, and finally by putting the pressure on Tennessee Eastman, we found out why Stone and Webster had not released their house to Tennessee Eastman. They were using it as a field office. And they didn’t want to give up that house because it was convenient as a field office. Finally, Tennessee Eastman did get the house and I was able to move my wife and little girl from Pittsburgh here. But we were under gasoline rationing and I did not drive my car. I think we had permits which enabled us to drive to Clinton at least once a week and drive to Knoxville once a week for shopping purposes. But generally I did not drive my car, and to get to work and back, I rode the Army buses. The Army buses would come in from, say, Y-12. And then we had the bus terminal, and then we would, from the bus terminal, transfer to local buses which would be assigned here to town. I remember I came in one night after swing shift in the evening and got on a bus. After a while I asked the bus driver, I said, “Well, where are we going?” He said, “I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve been on this route.” And we were a couple of miles from where I wanted to go and I showed him the route that we needed to follow. We had a lot of experiences like that. Roane-Anderson was the operator of the community, the houses. I was in Fox Motor the other day, visiting with Lester Fox. They have rebuilt Fox Buick Pontiac Motor Company very nicely, but there used to be a heating plant there – supplied steam for all the dormitories and buildings in Jackson Square and that general area. There was a railroad spur that backed down to about where Fox Motor now is. And every morning a lot of janitors and maids would get off those trains, because there were trains coming from Knoxville out to Oak Ridge. And then in the evenings, they'd get on the train and go back to Knoxville. They had to have hundreds of maids and janitors in these government-owned buildings and dormitories and commercial buildings around Jackson Square and the hospital. The hospital was an interesting operation; of course, it was all military. My little girl had to have an emergency surgery along about the first Christmas that we were here. And I took her down to the hospital. Dr. Preston is still here. I saw Dr. Preston just yesterday in the café, in the restaurant. He’s in Rotary Club with me. And Dr. Dwight Clark was the Chief Surgeon. Later, Dwight Clark returned to the University of Chicago and became head of surgery there. Unfortunately, a few years later, he contracted hepatitis and died. It was a tragedy, because he was a brilliant medical doctor. In fact, my brother, an older brother, lived in Nebraska. And his doctor called me once and said, “Your brother has thyroid cancer, and I understand through my medical readings that there is a radioactive Iodine that might be used in the treatment of thyroid cancer. Do you know anybody who is an expert on that?” And I said, “Well, Dr. Dwight Clark has returned to University of Chicago and he would be the most expert I would know.” And the family physician in Nebraska contacted Dr. Clark in Chicago. My brother went to University of Chicago and had thyroid cancer surgery. He lived to be ninety-five. He never had any recurrence of that thyroid cancer.
Mr. Novelli: What year did your brother become ill?
Dr. Keim: Oh it was along the late 1940s, not any later than 1950. He lived another almost fifty years after he had that thyroid cancer. Then Dr. Clark told me of various experiences he'd had in Oak Ridge that he was anxious to follow up on. For instance, he commented that he had treated a man, a laborer, who had a compound fracture of his leg. Brought him into the Oak Ridge Hospital and those Army doctors treated him. They didn’t know how to clean from radioactivity and they were quite sure that that compound fracture had been contaminated with some radioactive material; they weren’t sure. But Dr. Clark told me, he said, “That man recovered from that compound fracture in about half the time that a normal compound fracture would be expected to heal.” They decided that all that contamination of radioactivity had prevented certain infections because of that radioactivity. He wanted to investigate that further but he never had the opportunity. Of course, that’s what the old Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies did, they did a lot of investigations on, and your father did a lot of investigations on radiation treatment. Then, I remember in 1944, I think it was, there was a troop train coming on the L&N, and between Jellico and La Follette, it went off the tracks and ended up in the river. About, I think, forty or forty-five GIs were killed and they brought all the injured and the GIs that were killed, into the Oak Ridge Hospital and kept them here a few days until they were able to, Army, move them out again. But the military staff, the doctors, the medical staff we had at the hospital, they were unusually able. Well, the head of the hospital the Army had picked, I think he was from Minnesota, and he was head of the medical staff at the hospital. Then when he built up his staff, he built it up from high level men, medical doctors he had known in his various experiences. So we did have a high level of medical staff here. When I closed out my house, I ran across some old records. They made house calls for about three dollars and we could make office calls for a dollar or two, and we were really taken care of.
Mr. Buxton: What type of money did you make when you came here early? How did they pay you, comparatively speaking, to other places?
Dr. Keim: At Tennessee Eastman, they did not have initially a wage scale. They would ask each one of us, “What were you making back in your job?�� What was I making at Mellon Institute of Industrial Research? I was making $350 a month. They said, “That’s what we’ll pay you.” If I’d have told them $500 a month, that’s what they would have paid me. But there were others who came in and they were getting less than $350 a month. And when they told Tennessee Eastman that they were maybe earning $200 a month, that’s what Tennessee Eastman paid them, because they had no wage scale set. Later they established a wage scale and they adjusted all of our rates of pay then according to our technical ability. But initially, they just didn’t have any wage scales at all.
Mr. Buxton: I’m going to ask you one more question. Then I think we’ll wrap it up for today. You’ve done such an excellent job. What do you remember about Colonel Nichols? Do you remember meeting him? What was he like as a person? Tell me some about Colonel Nichols.
Dr. Keim: I have here someplace, [gets up to look for a photograph] I think – there he is. I lived at the corner of Florida Avenue and Outer Drive initially. And Colonel Nichols just lived around the corner on Olney Lane, I think. I used to see him every morning out jogging. And then his brother-in-law lived right next to me, Colonel Peterson, A. V. Peterson I believe. My wife used to play bridge with Mrs. Nichols and others. Our wives had no idea what we were doing, what we were involved in. I can tell you an interesting story. When Stone and Webster pulled out in the early ’50’s or middle ’50’s from Y-12, they were leaving Oak Ridge, I called their superintendent at Y-12, and we had had in the basement of 9731 some old files. As I browsed through those files from time to time, I knew they were Stone and Webster files. And they were full of dynamite. If some columnist had gotten a hold of those files, he could have had a field day with them. But I realized how sensitive they were and I called the superintendent of Stone and Webster and asked him if he wanted to come and look at those files. And he did and he thanked me many, many times. He said, “We had lost these files, did not know where they were, and we appreciate you protecting them.” They had all of the information; for instance, in those files was a letter, a memorandum from Stone and Webster to Colonel Nichols. It said, “We are finishing the high school,” and that's on Kentucky Avenue then, “We are finishing the high school, but we observe there is no gymnasium. What are your wishes?” And Colonel Nichols just sent back the original memorandum, he scribbled on the bottom, “Build one.” And that’s the way it was built. In those files, there was just all kinds of information of that kind. In some ways, I wish I had been more nosy and spent more time looking at those files because it had a lot of interesting information. But I realized also it was very sensitive and I didn’t. I had learned not to know too much. I didn’t have access to Top Secret information. I had access to Secret information, but not Top Secret. I didn’t want to know too much. So when I found out about those boxes, well, Colonel Nichols you see was – now, he has since died, hasn’t he?
Mr. Buxton: Yes, he died about six months ago.
Dr. Keim: He was here, he and his wife were here. Oak Ridge celebrated their 25th anniversary and Colonel Nichols and his wife came back for that. And they've come back since. Did that have a date on it? [refers to photograph]
Mr. Buxton: This was a couple of years ago in 1998, when they were here. And I found out about it the day that they left. I found out that he was here or I would have gone.
Dr. Keim: In that picture, they were just wandering around and they had looked at their house, 111 Olney Lane. The people who lived at Olney Lane saw them and went out to see if they could help them. And they were just interested in looking at their old house in which they had lived while they were here.
Mr. Buxton: What kind of a person was he? What kind of a personality did Colonel Nichols have?
Dr. Keim: I didn’t have direct contact with him that much. He was a typical military man in authority. I don’t think we ever did any socializing. Now he had a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Iowa State, I think. Well, he knew what he was doing. Now General Groves, of course, everybody knows about him. Now, he had been in charge of building the Pentagon before he was picked for the Manhattan Project. But he was, General Groves was upset when FDR picked him to head the Manhattan Project because a military person knows he’s got to be in conflict, on a field of action in order to be promoted, to make advancement. That’s what he’s trained to do. And General Groves, he just didn’t want to come down here, but FDR said, “That’s where you’re going,” and that’s where he came. He wanted to go to the European Theater of course.
Mr. Novelli: What was your impression of General Groves? Did you have much contact with him?
Dr. Keim: Oh yes, he came in often. Well, he was a good administrator. Attended to detail. He again, he was in charge, he was the big boss. And we never questioned him. Same way with E. O. Lawrence. We never questioned E. O. Lawrence. I went to Berkeley a number of times because they were developing new equipment out there. And E. O. Lawrence would entertain us all at Trader Vic’s. We’d go to Trader Vic’s for a big meal and just get together.
Mr. Novelli: This was during the war?
Dr. Keim: Yeah.
Mr. Novelli: How would you travel when you went out there?
Dr. Keim: Streamliners.
Mr. Novelli: By train?
Dr. Keim: Yeah. The train, if you called Knoxville, the train would stop at Edgemoor Road, the old bridge, the old road up where the Steam Plant is. They’d stop and you could get on. I remember once I got on and I was going to Berkeley for several days or a couple of weeks and I had heavy suitcases, but I had to get on wherever that train stopped. I remember going through that long train to get to my Pullman seat carrying those heavy suitcases. Then, we could, if we notified the conductor when we left Cincinnati that we wanted to get off at Edgemoor Road, they’d stop and let us off. And then, in advance, we would have made arrangements that an Army car would meet us there and bring us on to Oak Ridge. But I did go at one time, I flew to California. It was an old DC-3. We landed at Memphis, and we landed at Little Rock, and we landed at Albuquerque, and up and down we went. And I had a bad cold. I didn’t realize when I got on that plane, but by the time I got to San Francisco, my ears were hemorrhaging because I wasn’t able to adjust to the air pressure. When I got back to Y-12 and went to medical they said, “Don’t you know better than to fly when you have a bad cold?” And I explained I didn’t know I had a bad cold until I got on that airplane, and up and down, up and down, and I realized then that I had a cold.
But I went out by Streamliner several times. When we’d get on the Streamliner in Chicago, whether it was a Burlington or whether it was Union Pacific, we would always be assigned to a double bedroom. The Pullman Conductor would come to us, “Do you want your meals in your compartment or do you want to go to the diner?” And we didn’t know why we were being given such high level treatment, but we found out later, that compartment, the last compartment on the train, was always reserved for the Manhattan Project. And anybody traveling in for the Manhattan Project would be assigned to that compartment. Generally and often, General Groves or some high level people would be using it, but we got to use it when it was empty, when it was available.
Mr. Novelli: You've said “we.” Would you be traveling with someone else?
Dr. Keim: Yes. Generally there would be several of us in a group going. We’d be part of the Process Improvement Division at Y-12 and we’d be going out to Berkeley, to the cyclotron building out there at the University of California. I remember once, I was traveling alone, and I got on the Interurban Car, it’d go over to Oakland. And then we would transfer to a little streetcar called the K Car that would take us up to the Berkeley campus. I got on that K Car one morning, and the conductor looked at me and he said, “Well, good morning, Dr. Keim. How’s everything in Oak Ridge?” And I was so shocked, I couldn’t answer him and I just went back and sat down. It turned out that was the best thing I could have done. Had I even acknowledged I was from Oak Ridge – he was military intelligence and he was trying to get me to talk. And I was so shocked, I couldn’t talk. It was fortunate, fortunate that way. I happened to be on a Streamliner, went to San Francisco, Oakland, prior to the United Nations. Yeah, the formation of the United Nations. It was formed in San Francisco. When was that? 1945? That was right after the bomb had been dropped. And on that Streamliner were a lot of interesting columnists including Walter Winchell. Now Walter Winchell was kind of, he was a radio commentator, and every Sunday evening at 6 o’clock, “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North America. This is Walter Winchell,” and so forth. He was on that train, but he did not associate with the columnists, the newspapermen. He would go to the diner with his guard and eat all by himself with his guard. And those newspaper columnists decided that they would cook up a rumor, and they cooked up a rumor that had no basis of fact. They made certain that Walter Winchell learned about it. So when he went on the radio the next Sunday evening, he told about this rumor that he had picked up, and he broadcast it as the gospel truth. And then they all came out in their newspaper columns the next day and told about how they had planted that for Walter Winchell. They had no respect for him at all, and they were out to get him. And they got him.
Mr. Novelli: You had mentioned that when you first came here, your first visit, you stayed at the Guest House. Do you have any memory or impression of what the Guest House was like?
Dr. Keim: Yes. The next morning – they didn’t serve meals there, it was only a rooming house. The next morning, when I was going to go to Y-12, I had arranged with a Tennessee Eastman representative, I would meet my car at the post office, Jackson Square Post Office. Right near the Jackson Square Post Office there was a place you could get a donut and a cup of coffee. Down the street on Central Avenue was the Central Avenue Cafeteria. I first was going to get my breakfast at that Central Avenue Cafeteria, but when I saw the hundreds of people going in and coming out, I knew that I could never get in and out in time to catch my car. An interesting experience I had, when I got off the train Sunday afternoon, at the L&N, I saw a man with a Tennessee Eastman badge and I went up to him and introduced myself. He was there to get about four of us who were coming in for interviews. And as we came out from L&N to the Guest House, we came out via Clinton and over to Oak Ridge, there was one fellow who just talked incessantly and probably coming on off that train, he may have had too much to drink. He was just overly talkative. The next day, he and I had agreed that in the evening, we would compare notes on our interviews. He was going to be interviewed in the Townsite and I was going to go to Y-12. And when I got back that evening, there was a note in my box at the Guest House from this fellow and he said, “10:00 a.m.,” and that was when he was to be interviewed, he said, “There’s nothing here for me, I’m on my way back to Michigan.” He had come from someplace up in Michigan. But the Tennessee Eastman representative had canceled his interview as being a bad security risk because he talked too much. So he wasn’t even interviewed. Out he went. And after I was here, I had recommended a certain individual I knew at University of Pittsburgh in electrical engineering. I thought he would be a good employee, and so we arranged that he’d come down from Pittsburgh, and he flew down. And an Army vehicle, chaufferette, picked him up – 
[Tape 2, Side 1]
Mr. Novelli: Beginning of Side One of Tape Two.
Dr. Keim: Well the next day I called up Tennessee Eastman personnel and asked if Mr. So-and-So from Pittsburgh was there to be interviewed. And they said he won’t be interviewed. He’s on his way back to Pittsburgh. And I said “What happened?” They said, “We don’t have any idea.” But something happened from the airport to the Guest House. The chaufferette turned him in. And he wasn’t even interviewed. So what happened between him and the chauffeurette, I have no idea. [laughter] He didn’t know she was military intelligence. But this was the surprising thing after the bomb was dropped. Now I was at the Pilot Plant and over the PA system we heard all this information, and I called my boss and said, “We’ve got to turn off this PA system. It’s telling a lot of stuff that we’re not supposed to be told.” And he says, “Forget it. The secret’s out. The bomb’s been dropped. It’s all on public radio.” And that surprised me and another fellow at the pilot plant. We said, well, we better go home for lunch, because our wives will hear this over the radio and they will just be so shocked and scared to death, and we’d better go home and tell them what we’ve been doing the last couple of years. So we went home. They had no idea where we were going every morning or what we were doing.
Mr. Buxton: So you didn’t even tell your wife what plant you worked at?
Dr. Keim: Oh she knew I was going to Y-12, yeah. But I didn’t know much about X-10 and I didn’t know anything about K-25. Actually I think by the time the first enriched uranium was produced for the first bomb, I believe material was coming over from K-25 and the gaseous diffusion process and going into the beta process at Y-12 and being enriched on up to 90% or so, for bomb purposes. Then it was shortly after that the bomb was dropped, shortly after that K-25 decided they could start with natural uranium 0.7% and they could go clear on up to bomb purposes. And electromagnetic process wasn’t needed. I remember when the order came through at Y-12 that they were going to shut down the production buildings, and they were going to lay off about ten thousand people. I knew that Colonel Forney, who was head of the, was the Army, Manhattan Project Superintendent of Y-12 – I said, “Colonel Forney, is this necessary, to lay off all these people?” He says, “The war is over and they have done their job. They can all go back to their farms or whatever they were doing. They’ve done their job.” Not needed anymore. And Clark Center at K-25, the gaseous diffusion plant, when they were having to reduce their forces by the hundreds and thousands there, he had a nervous breakdown, because he was so concerned about those employees he was laying off. He had no choice. And I think that he recovered from his breakdown, but I don’t think he ever regained his health completely. Then after Clark Center had headed K-25, retired, he went on a little acreage down near Kingston and later died. And let’s see, the original head of K-25, the gaseous diffusion process, was from Union Carbide. Thelbeck, I believe it was Thelbeck. When he – and then Clark Center succeeded him – and when Thelbeck, I think that’s the name, retired from Union Carbide, he and his wife started an around the world trip, and the plane crashed. The plane crashed taking off from New York City or someplace. They were killed. They never, never, never got to enjoy his retirement.
Mr. Novelli:  Obviously at the end of war you stayed on in Oak Ridge. Why did you choose to stay here?
Dr. Keim: Stable isotope program. I had an interesting program and I considered leaving. My wife and I talked about it. And I was interested in going back into academic work, but I had the interesting program of separating stable isotopes, heading up that program. Had a good gang and I just decided that this was what I wanted to do. So I stayed here. I knew several people who left but came back, because they found life outside Oak Ridge was too slow, just too slow. That’s one thing about Oak Ridge, there's something new going on all the time. The SNS [Spallation Neutron Source Accelerator] project, I’d like to be around when that’s completed. I won’t be, but that’s going to be an interesting development and I hope it is finished. I hope Congress continues to support it with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos, Berkeley, Argonne, Brookhaven all involved, I think they’re going to have the political clout necessary to get Congress to approve it. And I hope so.
 Mr. Buxton: Well thank you very much Dr. Keim for talking with us. It’s almost two hours now. So we’ve enjoyed it very, very much. We’re going to stop now.
[end of recording]