Whitman, Graydon

              ORAL HISTORY OF GRAYDON D. WHITMAN
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
November 12, 2001 
 [Tape 1, Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Grady, let’s hear you start telling us about how you got in the Army at first, and how you got to Oak Ridge, and got things started here.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I was in college at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio. I joined the Reserves – I don’t know if that’s the correct terminology – in October of 1942, with the idea that I’d go into active service about a year later. In April of 1943, everyone was called up and I went to Camp Perry, Ohio, and from there I went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for basic training in the combat engineers. Fort Leonard Wood is in the Ozarks. It’s not unlike Oak Ridge in many ways as far as the terrain is concerned. About three quarters of the way through that operation, I went to the field where we were building a pioneer bridge on the Big Piney River. A pioneer bridge is just that – you build it with hand tools, and it has to be substantial so that a tank could have gone over it. I was making square logs out of round trees with an adze.
Mr. Kolb: Pioneer style.
Mr. Whitman: It was a pioneer bridge. The whole thing was built that way. I hadn’t lost a leg, and I just got an order, another order, and they said, “We request that you go to a STAR [Student Training and Reclassification] unit at Grinnell College in Iowa and take some examinations.” Went up there for two days and took four-hour sessions in four subjects. After the finish, they said, “You have great proficiency in chemistry,” which I had no interest in, and they said “We’re going to send you to the University of Pennsylvania in the ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program] unit [to study chemical engineering].” So we went up there on the train, one thing or another.
Mr. Kolb: Is that in Philadelphia?
Mr. Whitman: Philadelphia. It’s an Ivy school. And they said, “Well, we’re not teaching chemical engineering this session, you’ll be in mechanical engineering.” Well that’s what I had been in, and there I was, almost a year later, not quite a year, back in college, and it’s a strange world. One day, I had actually gone down for an interview to go in the Air Corps at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Army Air Corps?
Mr. Whitman: Army Air Corps. And I came back – this was on a Saturday, as I recall. The next Monday, a Major Miller came around and said, “We’re looking for people to work in a special unit. Would you be interested?” [And I said] “I guess so. I’m interested.”
Mr. Kolb: When was this then?
Mr. Whitman: In March of 1944. And he left – we went back to the orderly room, and the next day, this first sergeant said, “Three of you are going to Tennessee. You’re going to my hometown.” And I said, “Where in the world do you live?” And he said, “Clinton, Tennessee.” He was from Clinton. His name was Daugherty. They have a furniture store, and you may have heard the name over there. So we ended up on a train to Knoxville overnight and chugged into Knoxville at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and got on one of these fifth-wheel buses, rode out through the countryside and came into Elza Gate. And my first reaction was “Oh boy, we’re back in Fort Leonard Wood of the Ozarks.” 
Mr. Kolb: Back in the Army camp.
Mr. Whitman: It was an Army camp. And all you could see from there was GI architecture, a lot of barrack-type buildings, and ended up right across from St. Mary’s in the SED Army barracks, Special Engineering Detachment. Had no idea what was going on. The next day I got on a bus and went to Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, there were buildings already there, of course.
Mr. Whitman: Yes, they had started – they had a lot of trouble, but they had started operations in ’44.
Mr. Kolb: So this was?
Mr. Whitman: March 13th, 1944. They had had a lot of trouble with their start-up, but be that as it may – I still remember this – we went into that Administration Building, the little building up at the north portal, the “Fish Bowl.” I went in there and this guy’s name was William Chalkley. I’ve never forgotten it. And I could see the buildings out his office, the Alpha Building. He was an assistant superintendent or something, and I was overwhelmed.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, and he was not Army, then?
Mr. Whitman: No, no, he was a civilian. And he said, “I want to welcome you here. We need your services badly. Don’t worry about what we’re doing, but it could end the war and it’s very important.” He said, “You have any questions?” I said, “Well, I don’t believe I do.” And he said, “Well, great.” And for the next two weeks, I went to school in the training facility behind the Administration Building. It’s still there.
Mr. Kolb: ORINS [Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, now ORAU, Oak Ridge Associated Universities].
Mr. Whitman: The yellow brick tile building, and learned all about calutrons.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you were in a class of how many?
Mr. Whitman: Four or five, six of us, just a few. When I came down here, there were three of us.
Mr. Kolb: Who taught the classes?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t remember. It was a man and a woman, they were husband and wife, and they – what we did was learn the nomenclature and the general structure of a calutron. I didn’t have any idea what we were going to be doing, but, anyhow, we learned everything had a code name.
Mr. Kolb: So they told you what a calutron did, of course?
Mr. Whitman: No.
Mr. Kolb: No, just the names?
Mr. Whitman: We had one, parts. And what it turned out to be, we were going to be concerned with working on these things, mechanics, really. 
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t know what it was handling or even how it worked?
Mr. Whitman: Nothing. It was just – as a matter of fact, to go from one room to another in that training building, you had to show your pass. And if you went in there five times a day or ten times, you had to get out your pass.
Mr. Kolb: There was a guard at every door?
Mr. Whitman: A guard at every door, from one room to another, and in one room there would be only the hardware associated with the calutron. And you learned all of the code names for things, like a filament was a K, a calutron was a D, and how it was put together and what it was made of. 
Mr. Kolb: So you never used the word calutron when you were on the job?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, we did, but they were just D’s and where they were in a racetrack. And so after about two weeks, as I recall, we went – and we were assigned – I was assigned to 9201-2, an Alpha Building, in Major Repair. And it turned out, back then, there was just a shortage of people who knew a screwdriver from a pair of pliers.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. I see.
Mr. Whitman: I mean, all the able-bodied young men, most of them, were in the Army, overseas or in training. They had a lot of ladies, a lot of women working and older men. And they were in desperate need of anybody who could just get these things to work.
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t really use your engineering training.
Mr. Whitman: Not yet. Anyhow, there were a lot of tough problems with this thing they were having. One of these, they had these great big ceramic bushings that went into the calutron face, and they were the electrical insulators for the 50,000-volt power supplies. They were soft soldered in and you had to have a wet woolen cloth around the bushing and a torch and get up there and solder that thing – and a big diameter – very quickly. If you overheated it, the bushing would crack, and if it wasn’t hot enough you’d get a cold joint.
Mr. Kolb: And you had to keep the whole joint hot?
Mr. Whitman: Well, you had to get it – it was a trick. You had to get around, do it fast, and not do it ��� if it was too time consuming, the bushing would crack. Well, this was a hell of a task.
Mr. Kolb: A real art.
Mr. Whitman: It was a real art. That’s what I did for a while, I got so I could – I did that and worked on this stuff.
Mr. Kolb: Was this repair or were you installing new?
Mr. Whitman: No, it was – a calutron at the end of thirty days, say in the normal operation, was taken down, the U-235 recovered from the pockets, the thing sent to a wash area where it was washed in dilute nitric acid, everything cleaned up, and all the parts brought back, and then it’s reassembled. And it’s kind of a complicated thing that has a lot of alignments and electrical features that require insulation. Accelerating geometries and receivers had to be assembled. They had all kinds of complicated parts. So, there was just a continuous line; it was like a production line. I did that for – I don’t know – a couple or three months, and then I went into the production end. I was a technical aide to the operations and control room. The control room consisted of one quarter of a racetrack; that would be four in a building.
Mr. Kolb: Four control rooms?
Mr. Whitman: As I recall, it would be a half a track – there were two tracks in some of the buildings and one track in others. In 9201-1 and 9201-2, there were two tracks. And so there would be four control rooms, each half of the track. And that became a much more complicated business. You had to learn about all of the faults, how to start up. If something happened to one, you had to diagnose the problem to decide whether it could be fixed or had to be terminated, which was a big deal because that was vital.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Stop a run basically?
Mr. Whitman: Stop a run. And if you made a mistake there and called it wrong, that was bad.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Well, how long did a shutdown last? Did you have to dismantle everything?
Mr. Whitman: They pulled it out hot, and got fumes powering up to the top of the building and out ventilators. Safety was not the number one reason. You know there were people in Oak Ridge who were in charge of Oak Ridge that had an obsession that the Germans were ahead of us in the separation of fissionable material for an atom bomb. And the drive to get this work done was – I’ve never seen anything like it. So production was a number one factor. I don’t mean that hell bent for election for every aspect, but it was still a major factor. So when these things were pulled, another one was put in very quickly. That one that had been reassembled, all its parts cleaned.
Mr. Kolb: And that soldering had to be done?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, that was done. They were stripped down to all the bolts and nuts and screws. And they were put back together, and a charge of uranium Tetrachloride put in, put in the tank, sealed up, vacuum drawn, and started up. And they ran for about thirty days in the normal course of events. I became a track foreman and I had –
Mr. Kolb: You went from control room operator type person?
Mr. Whitman: I was never an operator. Well, we learned to operate, but we were schooled in the intricacies of things so we could diagnose problems, know when to –
Mr. Kolb: You were like supervising people who did the actual work.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, and then when I became a foreman, I had twenty or thirty girls and five men.
Mr. Kolb: When was this about? How long did that take?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, I’d say about six months, or it was three to four months.
Mr. Kolb: Late ’44?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. To the best of my knowledge, and what I was told – I didn’t know it at the time – I was the only GI in the SED that had a line job in Y-12, line management job. Everyone else had a technical job, service.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, you were in production as opposed to service.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I got into production and had a – I was a foreman.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. So the other service people were not, were below?
Mr. Whitman: Draftsmen, engineers, technical assistants, aides, chemists, physicists, whatever. But I was in line management and I wasn’t an employee of Tennessee Eastman. I was Army. As a matter of fact, a couple of times I had ensigns and a Navy lieutenant reporting to me.
Mr. Kolb: So you interacted with non-Army personnel a lot.
Mr. Whitman: A lot. In fact, everyone in Y-12 wore a uniform consistent with the plant. I wore a blue uniform with yellow rings around the sleeves. The maintenance people wore khaki uniforms, chemical people – 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, it wasn’t an Army, it wasn’t a military uniform.
Mr. Whitman: No, I never wore my uniform. In fact, some people never knew I was in the Army. 
Mr. Kolb: Your job assigned you a certain kind of uniform.
Mr. Whitman: Each job had an assigned uniform, everybody, and so when you walked in that building, and if you had a white uniform and you walked into a production area, you were challenged immediately: “What do you want?” And if you had a blue uniform and you walked into a chemical area, “What do you want?” because you were like a sore thumb.
Mr. Kolb: Well, were the guards inside the plant to keep people out of the area?
Mr. Whitman: No, you were responsible for your own area.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. So you would have to challenge somebody else.
Mr. Whitman: You would challenge somebody else. Oh yeah, that happened all the time. See, everyone’s badge had, as I recall, there was a Roman numeral from I through V. If you had an I, you could get in the cafeteria and the dispensary. If you had a V, you knew everything that God had ever invented; you knew production. If you had a IV, and it decreased as you went down, IV, III, II, I. In addition to that, you’d have an Arabic numeral and a letter; and all of these things classified your need. I could look at your badge and immediately tell, well, you worked in so-and-so and did this, and you were entitled to know the following, which might be nothing.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have to turn your badge in at some point?
Mr. Whitman: Every day, you turned your badge in.
Mr. Kolb: No, I mean permanently? You don’t have your badge anymore?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, no.
Mr. Kolb: That had to be turned in, I understand.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, it was an exchange badge that you picked up at the plant.
Mr. Kolb: But I mean, at the end of the war.
Mr. Whitman: Oh, the end of the war. They hold everything. But all of the security was – it was just kind of wild. I’ve never seen anything quite like that.
Mr. Kolb: And people coming in – new people coming in – it was a lot, I imagine, too. Did you get to train other people?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. As a matter of fact, a lot of us got training from E. O. Lawrence’s people. I actually worked with MacMillan and Alvarez, and I didn’t know MacMillan – they were Nobel Prize winners. They were up in Y-12 in the early days in Process Improvement in the calutron and each of us that were involved in supervision spent some time in that to learn what new advances would be proposed. So it was kind of a – and you gradually –
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know who they were, I mean their credentials?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, yeah, I just knew they were scientists. They were the developers of the process.
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know they were Nobel Prize winners.
Mr. Whitman: Not then, they weren’t.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they weren’t then.
Mr. Whitman: No, they were just graduate students of Lawrence’s. You see, Lawrence developed the Y-12 process.
Mr. Kolb: Based on what he’d done in California.
Mr. Whitman: He took the cyclotron and modified it into a mass spectrometer of gigantic proportions.
Mr. Kolb: Scaled it up.
Mr. Whitman: Scaled it up and there was a worry that they really weren’t going to get enough production out of that; never had decided how much material they had to accumulate. However, when those things, when the Y-12 process got going, it was a couple of orders of magnitude greater than they had expected. And there were a couple of things that happened.
Mr. Kolb: It was more successful than they thought?
Mr. Whitman: It was far more successful than they ever expected. The ion currents were much higher, and there were a couple little details on it. There is a thing called space charge phenomenon. When you had a hard vacuum, if the vacuum is too hard, the ion beam will kind of repel itself.
Mr. Kolb: Wouldn’t focus.
Mr. Whitman: Wouldn’t focus. If you let enough air in, just the right amount, that thing would just harden up and the current would go way up and the focus would be sharp. And so every control panel out there had a little knob to let air into the –
Mr. Kolb: So you could monitor the beam.
Mr. Whitman: But you could just monitor the beam, and when the pressure got too low, the beam would just blow up. If it got to high, it wouldn’t –
Mr. Kolb: There was an optimal between the –
Mr. Whitman: It turned out this optimum, they had never thought about. Also they used magnetic focusing by varying the gap between the pole faces, so the current was quite high, higher than they expected. And everything then was to get the calutron to run as long as you could, at as high a production, with as sharp a focus as practical. You could always get a lot more output by decreasing the focus a little bit, so instead of having ninety-seven percent, you might have ninety percent enrichment, for example.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s stop a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. Whitman: Those bushings came up again in Y-12, and they were breaking. 
Mr. Kolb: The ones you soldered in?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. They were breaking in operation for a variety of reasons and that was really a serious problem. That plant was in real trouble. Coors, of Golden Colorado, came up with a new bushing, and it was put in with a flange and a gasket.
Mr. Kolb: Not soldered like the original one?
Mr. Whitman: Not soldered. In addition to that, it had a lot more electrical stability and it could withstand whatever stresses were imposed on it from the operation. And then things just took off.
Mr. Kolb: When was that?
Mr. Whitman: I would say it happened in mid ’44, early ’44, or something. They were called Zircon. They were white. I’ve never forgotten that.
Mr. Kolb: That reduced the downtime, more reliable operation.
Mr. Whitman: We got more reliable operation. Well, there were all sorts of incidents in that operation that I have never forgotten that were just astounding. A calutron had a slit cleaner, and the charge material would kind of gum up on the ion source into the accelerating electrodes and short them out, and you were out of luck. So what they did mechanically, there was a graphite scraper that was pulled back and forth across the outlet of the ion source, and this would clean it.
Mr. Kolb: And this is the uranium material actually, it’s being cleaned?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, it would clean it off – just small amounts, so about once every, I don’t know, period of time – hours or so, a guy would come around in front of the calutron and buzz the operator. She’d turn it off and he would pull this slit cleaner back and forth. Well, we had a slit cleaner on my shift that was – he was strong. And sometimes those things would stick and it took a good effort. He pulled the rod right out of the front of the calutron, broke the vacuum, and he threw open the door and stuck his hand on the open hole, and it pulled an enormous blister. We had to get him out of there. It was a tragedy when that happened because there were five units on a single header, so you lost five units, and they would all go down with an enormous crash of electricity shorting out. But, anyhow, and there he was out there stuck to the front of the [calutron].
Mr. Kolb: He didn’t do that again.
Mr. Whitman: No, no. We also had a guy – we used soap solutions to look for leaks on the front of these things before they pulled the vacuum, and this guy got to the wrong unit and dropped the bottle of soap down the front of an operating unit. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen 50,000 volts shorted out with soap water, but it’s a sight.
Mr. Kolb: The plastic bottle vaporized.
Mr. Whitman: But it was a dangerous operation.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, all that electrical power. Were there any accidents ever?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, four electrocutions. When you opened the barrier door there was an interlock that shut off the power, but in addition to that you had to open a lock which shut off the power. Then when you physically opened the door, interlocks would also shut the unit down. And then when you got in, you had a grounding hook that you hooked onto the high voltage, and everything would shut down. And then that further established that it was shut down. On the inside of the track, everything was upside down. The key was at the top. Well, this guy had only been a new hire, and he went to the bottom. He was supposed to strip the unit. And when you do that, you buzz the operator and she turns the power off. Well, he got to the wrong one. He pulled the bottom door open, and it didn’t have the key in it, and the little latch up at the top had failed somehow or another, and the micro-switch failed. You know it always takes more than one [incident to produce failure]. He climbed up there and grabbed, didn’t use the grounding hook – there you are – grabbed the power supply.
Mr. Kolb: It was live.
Mr. Whitman: It was live, and he was hit and that was that. One of the guys in our unit, the SED, was electrocuted. In his case, he just fell against a fuse block in the power supply. That’s a story in itself. His brother came to the Visitor’s Center a couple of years ago.
Mr. Kolb: Oh. And you were there?
Mr. Whitman: I was there, yeah. “I’m so-and-so,” and he said, “My brother was in the Army here and I was in the South Pacific and I’ve never known what happened to him.” And I said, “Well, what were the circumstances?” He said, “Well, all we know is that his body was shipped home, and he was killed in the line of duty, and the undertaker couldn’t find any marks on him.” And back then, Oak Ridge didn’t exist.
Mr. Kolb: But, you knew this man?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. I knew him.
Mr. Kolb: You could tell his brother what happened?
Mr. Whitman: I told his brother, I said – after I found out who he was – I said, “Well, I know what happened.” And I took him over to the museum and showed him a power supply, and I knew exactly how it happened, he fell into a fuse block, and it was a relatively low voltage, but he was grounded. And anyhow, he said, “My mother never knew,” and he said, “I was in the South Pacific.” He said, “All we knew, he was killed in the line of duty, but we couldn’t find out how he died.” But he was electrocuted. The other accidents that occurred were these carpenters just getting in the wrong place. But those days were associated with production that had top priority and I remember just before they dropped the bomb, before the first test, which didn’t have anything to do with Y-12, but a guy came around from the Army, the Manhattan District, and got us together, some of the supervisors. And he said, “We’re about to see the fruition of your work. We want to increase the output.”
[break in recording]
Mr. Whitman: And so, for about six weeks, man, we ran everything flat out. Y-12 made about eighty-some kilograms with 235.
Mr. Kolb: And how many calutrons were there? Five?
Mr. Whitman: Twelve hundred. It’s eleven or twelve hundred, I don’t remember. There were five buildings. Four Betas and five Alphas. Alpha 1, 2, and 3 –
Mr. Kolb: Was that a sequential thing?
Mr. Whitman: Well, the Alphas were enriched to about twenty-some percent and the Betas – K-25 fed into Y-12 and furnished some of the partially enriched material to the Beta process and everything finished in Beta, which was a smaller diameter, so they could take it up to about ninety-seven percent. But it’s strange, you know, you talk about loose lips and all this and that. I found out about what we were doing kind of by accident. Walking back from the cafeteria one night – middle of the night – and the two guys ahead of me were going to the dispensary, and they were talking about heavy metal poisoning, uranium poisoning, how it affected the body. And I just knew, they were just jabbering away. And I thought, well, gosh, they’re working with uranium in this place, and uranium is associated with fission. When I went to college, atomic energy, atomic physics was the last two chapters in our physics book, and we’d never – the last two pages probably, I don’t think we ever covered. So this whole business was far out.
Mr. Kolb: You told me once about going to the library and seeing the book where the section on fission was heavily used.
Mr. Whitman: Well, the library in Oak Ridge – everybody that I knew could go to the Oak Ridge Public Library and pick up the physics book by Pollard, look at it, and see the darkened pages, open it to that section, and it described fission, the fission process, and how a weapon might be made with tremendous power.
Mr. Kolb: You guessed from that.
Mr. Whitman: I guessed from that.
Mr. Kolb: You and a lot of other people.
Mr. Whitman: Yes. But, of course, a lot of people knew.
Mr. Kolb: But then, it’s interesting with the two people, that was loose lips; they shouldn’t have been discussing that, but they were.
Mr. Whitman: No. They were.
Mr. Kolb: And you overheard it.
Mr. Whitman: I overheard it. They were just discussing it. I presume they were MDs, doctors. It sounded like they were. They were concerned with the physiology of heavy metal, particularly uranium, and how it might affect the human body. 
Mr. Kolb: They said the word ‘uranium’?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And they shouldn’t have.
Mr. Whitman: No. That was the word you never used. I’ve forgotten; I think it was tuballoy, but I’ve forgotten. It was uranium tetrachloride that was used as the charge material, but then finally the ion came out as the metal – uranium. And so the enrichment was uranium.
Mr. Kolb: So, you just stayed on the supervisor job through the end of the war?
Mr. Whitman: That’s right. After the war, just for – I don’t know, I guess April, ’46 – I went to a Beta building and was a foreman there. A Beta building was still production. And I was discharged from the Army, and all of the – I guess that was a lot – everyone was getting out of the Army at that time. I was discharged at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia, and I went back to Ohio to my home and I was going to –
Mr. Kolb: Did they give you any leave while you were in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, we got thirty days a year. During that time – the first time I got off, I went to the Smoky Mountains. Went up there on a bus and hitchhiked – this guy and I went up – he was a photographer, amateur type. His name was Jordan. He was from Virginia; he was a chemist. We just happened to know each other from work and one thing or another, and he knew about the Smoky Mountains. So went up there and we took a bus and we went to Gatlinburg, and then we hitchhiked up to Alum Cave Trail, and climbed to Mt. LeConte and stayed in those cabins. That was my first trip to the Smokies. We marched up there and, gosh, there were very few people there.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t need a reservation then?
Mr. Whitman: No, well, we got one at the Mountain View Hotel.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a place to stay?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, and I remember we hitchhiked up, and then we came back down the trail and hitchhiked back down, and an Indian took us back to Gatlinburg. That was my first trip to Gatlinburg. I’ve never forgotten that. You know, you could get, for a dollar, you could have dinner, which consisted of all of the meats.
Mr. Kolb: Even back in the wartime?
Mr. Whitman: This was during the war, back then we had meats and things. But it was very elegant.
Mr. Kolb: Were you at the Mountain View Hotel?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That was the top of the line then.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That was your first leave, you said.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, first time I left Oak Ridge. I may have gone to Knoxville, but I don’t remember. I don’t know why I would have gone. Oak Ridge had about as much to offer for me at that time. There were movies. Did you ever hear of the “Benchley”?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Mr. Whitman: The theater that was on the Turnpike about where the Civic Center is didn’t have seats; it had benches. And we used to call it the “Benchley.”
Mr. Kolb: An outdoor theater?
Mr. Whitman: No, it was an indoor theater that didn’t have seats; it had benches. And we just called it the “Benchley.”
Mr. Kolb: And it was where? Near the what?
Mr. Whitman: Civic Center. Right in along that section in Midtown. Everything on the north side of the Turnpike was residential. Pretty much everything on the south side was farming.
Mr. Kolb: Plus the colored people in Gamble Valley.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. Gamble Valley. Well, they couldn’t even be married. That was really segregation.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I’ve just heard recently about that. Bill Carden talked about the single colored women were in a fenced-in area, and I never knew about that, and there were single men.
Mr. Whitman: Well it was my first experience in segregated society.
Mr. Kolb: And this fence was very famous because it got climbed many times.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I had never seen anything like that, but when we got off the train at Knoxville, we saw this white and colored on there, on the drinking fountains and all that, and I’d never seen anything like that.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have colored people in your hometown?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, we did. But there wasn’t any segregation. I played football with colored people and went to school with them.
Mr. Kolb: There were so few of them.
Mr. Whitman: Very few. Maybe in a class of two hundred and fifty, there were like ten or something.
Mr. Kolb: And your town is �� where is it close to?
Mr. Whitman: Toledo. It’s about twenty miles south of Toledo [Fostoria, Ohio]. It’s a town like Clinton.
Mr. Kolb: I knew you went to Ohio State. Well, there was plenty to do in Oak Ridge like you said. There were lots of theaters.
Mr. Whitman: Dances.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, dances. The tennis court dances?
Mr. Whitman: Tennis court dances, and there were theaters. We had a PX, and we used to go – 
Mr. Kolb: Was that for military only?
Mr. Whitman: Right. We used to go – in the summertime – we went to Big Ridge a couple of times, just go swimming.
Mr. Kolb: And how’d you get there?
Mr. Whitman: A bus. Everything was a bus. No one had a car.
Mr. Kolb: Who supplied the bus? The Army?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t know. It was just buses. You know, Oak Ridge had a bus system that wouldn’t quit.
Mr. Kolb: This was available to anybody?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. I presumed it was part of Roane-Anderson’s bus system, because they had buses – I’ve forgotten the exact number. It was the sixth largest bus system in the United States. But anyhow they had buses coming out their ears, and all you had to do was stand out on the corner and you could get a bus to somewhere, either to the terminal –
Mr. Kolb: Free, all free?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, yeah. And if you wanted to go to Big Ridge or someplace like that, as I recall, there probably was a bus that periodically went to places like that, or maybe it was an excursion. But there were buses to Knoxville.
Mr. Kolb: Did the weekends mean anything?
Mr. Whitman: I didn’t have any weekends where I was.
Mr. Kolb: You worked seven days a week?
Mr. Whitman: Well, no most of the time, I worked shift work, and we worked seven consecutive days, and a day off and then we’d have three days off. I’ve forgotten how many.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, occasionally a three day weekend, or three day periods.
Mr. Whitman: After the end of a night shift you had three days off, and it usually occurred on a weekend for some reason.
Mr. Kolb: So you worked every shift – days, evenings –
Mr. Whitman: Rotating.
Mr. Kolb: Graveyard, yeah.
Mr. Whitman: Most of the time I was there I did that. So the whole business of work was – I lived in a hutment with three other guys for most of the time after I got assigned to one of these shifts, and one of them was a chemist, as I recall, and the other two were in the electrical end of things.
Mr. Kolb: Now, well, you said Army barracks here on your form.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I lived in the barracks for a while, I lived in a hutment for a while, and then finally we were going to –
Mr. Kolb: Where was the hutment?
Mr. Whitman: Right by the barracks, across from St. Mary’s. The hutments were adjacent to the barracks in the woods. We had a bathhouse and then hutments around it.
Mr. Kolb: Now, were they like the hutment village where Downtown Shopping Center is now? I have heard Hutment Village was there, that the colored people lived there.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. We had – it was square; it had a cot in each corner, a stove in the center, and you had your footlocker to put your clothes in.
Mr. Kolb: So two people to a hutment.
Mr. Whitman: Four. One in each corner.
Mr. Kolb: And no bath facilities?
Mr. Whitman: No.
Mr. Kolb: Or cooking facilities?
Mr. Whitman: No. The bath facilities were –
Mr. Kolb: Outdoors.
Mr. Whitman: Well, the bathhouse had little wooden walks. There were no concrete sidewalks in Oak Ridge – everything was wooden.
Mr. Kolb: So those facilities were like what the colored people lived in? I always got the impression that only the colored people lived in hutments.
Mr. Whitman: No, the GIs did. The others lived in barracks, and I lived in the barracks part of the time, and they were just long open areas with cots. They had about thirty people in the barracks.
Mr. Kolb: See, when I came to Oak Ridge I lived in one of the dormitories, which was Army.
Mr. Whitman: We never lived in the dorm until we were getting ready to leave.
Mr. Kolb: Those were better.
Mr. Whitman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Individual rooms.
Mr. Whitman: They had rooms, but I only lived in a dorm for like a few weeks. So I lived in barracks, hutment, dormitory, in that sequence.
Mr. Kolb: And you say [on your form] your “E” apartment.
Mr. Whitman: Well, that was after I returned.
Mr. Kolb: That was ’47.
Mr. Whitman: I got out of the Army in ’46. After I was discharged, I went back home and determined I couldn’t get in school. I could get in school, but I couldn’t get the courses I wanted.
Mr. Kolb: You hadn’t graduated yet?
Mr. Whitman: I hadn’t graduated. So I came back down here and went to work in the Stable Isotope Division.
Mr. Kolb: With the calutrons.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, and then I really learned about calutrons.
Mr. Kolb: Well tell me about the experience of the war ending. You know, that big emotional blow out.
Mr. Whitman: I was in Y-12 working when all this business occurred that the war ended, and I must tell you, I was working, don’t remember the exact time, but our boss – my boss’s boss ��� Waldo England was his name; he was from Rochester, New York. He was a physicist, as I recall. He was enthralled by the whole thing and he had to get – had to calculate how much uranium it took to make that bomb. I don’t know how he knew what he was doing.
Mr. Kolb: So he knew.
Mr. Whitman: Well, he was one of the guys that had a V on his badge.
Mr. Kolb: He was on the inside.
Mr. Whitman: He was on the inside, and I just remember him talking about it.
Mr. Kolb: You mean afterward when it was announced?
Mr. Whitman: After it was announced, that the bomb had been dropped.
Mr. Kolb: Did he announce to you? How did you physically hear the word?
Mr. Whitman: I heard it at work. 
Mr. Kolb: At work. It just came to you? It was announced?
Mr. Whitman: See, we had been told that we were close, and then in a few weeks – it just happened that I was at work when all that happened.
Mr. Kolb: Was it announced over a PA system?
Mr. Whitman: We had a PA system. Yeah, everybody was aghast, you know, and we spent that rest of the time –
Mr. Kolb: Did you believe it when you heard it? I mean what did you think?
Mr. Whitman: Well, yeah, I guess. One of the things that was in my mind, I couldn’t figure out how that could ever be delivered unless it were on a suicide mission, because of the tremendous potential. See, the bomb was very inefficient in terms of its [full potential], and theoretically, in the book it talked about the tremendous energy released. Well, I don’t know what percentage – what fraction – it’s small. Anyhow, I could never figure out how in the world they were gonna deliver this thing without blowing yourself up.
Mr. Kolb: Did you think of the bomb being dropped from an airplane?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. And it did rock ‘em.
Mr. Kolb: But then after you got off work that night or day or whatever, you got back to town.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, everybody was whooping around. 
Mr. Kolb: How long did that last?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, a couple of days, I guess. The Knoxville News Sentinel – or whoever the paper was then – put out this special edition which had all the pictures of – it was K-25 pictures that they had on the front of it, as I recall. I didn’t know anything about K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Whitman: Well, why would I?
Mr. Kolb: Well, I guess you’d never been there and no one talked about it.
Mr. Whitman: And I never worked with anybody.
Mr. Kolb: You never heard the word?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, I heard about X-10, I heard about K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you heard about it, but you never went there.
Mr. Whitman: But you see the people that I associated with for the most part were all Y-12. However, I talked with people who worked at the other plants, but we didn’t talk about it. I can assure you there was – people who talked too much, I think, just disappeared. I have to tell you one story. One of the things that happens in the calutrons is the electrical discharge, under certain conditions, will hit the tank wall, and it will arc in there and it will hit it and actually go through the wall. Well, when those things got so deep, they had to be repaired. And you had to get in there with a pneumatic drill, ’cause everything had to be non – you couldn’t put electrical conductors and things in there, so it was a pneumatic drill.
[Tape 1, Side B]
Mr. Whitman: Machinist group, they would dispatch someone to come in and do all the work. I called – it was raining. And this guy said, “Well, it’s raining awful hard, don’t know when I can get there.” Well, we had been told, if you ever had any problem like that, call Major So-and-so. So I called up and said, “Hey, I need a millwright down here, and this guy is reluctant to come.” I had hardly hung up the phone, I think, and this guy came charging in with all his tools!
Mr. Kolb: The first guy you called? He was told to get his ass over there?
Mr. Whitman: And I said, “Well, what happened?” He said, “Well this guy called me up and said if I didn’t get my ass down there, I’d find myself in the Aleutians.”
Mr. Kolb: So he dropped whatever he was doing.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. The rain never phased him. That brought up another interesting thing. I had a guy working for me that – we would get in the tank to do those things, and he got in terrible pain in his knee. Had to send him to the dispensary. Turned out he had shrapnel in his knee, and he was from the Italian campaign. He’d been discharged and got a job in Y-12 and no one ever thought about that. So here he was in the tank, in about a 3000 Gauss field with metal in his knee. And it tore – you know, it was a problem. And I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in a magnetic field; if you have nails in your shoes, your feet would just turn. It’s unreal. Many people who worked down there had the tips of their fingers gone. You had to use beryllium copper tools in there, and some fool would inadvertently – no magnetic materials were allowed, but somebody might come in and try it and, man!
Mr. Kolb: Try what?
Mr. Whitman: Bring a magnetic tool into the field and it would put your hand and just cut your finger off. That was not unusual.
Mr. Kolb: Now, this was one that the whole electricity beam, the residual field –
Mr. Whitman: The magnet ran continuously, electromagnet. Those great big 5000 Horse Power motor generator sets were the central – that thing was guarded night and day and had a fence around it, and was continuously monitored by an operator. There was a guy sat in that area.
Mr. Kolb: So that field was there continuously.
Mr. Whitman: That field was there continuously, and it was enormous. And you could go in there with things that were magnetic and you were in trouble. So there were lots of signs around there, this and that, but you know people. And you could come in from the outside with a magnetic tool and go in there, and it would just cut your appendage off, it was just like a guillotine, the magnetic field. There were all kinds of crazy things. I went in there one night, into the control room, a winter night, and looked down, and the first cubicle went pow! The second, pow, pow, pow, just down the row, and I thought, “My God, what’s happening?” I ran downstairs to the power supplies for the filaments, and suddenly realized somebody had left the outside door open, and this cold wind had come in and was blowing on the mercury arc diodes, rectifiers, and quenched them. And they were just going out, like water on a flame. And you know what we did after that? We wrapped all those things in flannel. Here’s this row of blue mercury tubes, they’re great big things, and we had them all wrapped in flannel.
Mr. Kolb: I’m surprised you didn’t overheat them.
Mr. Whitman: Well, that was not really a problem. Well, there was no heating system in any of those buildings, because the power supplies had to be cooled, and they just used that. You could hear Y-12 running from downtown, the hum, low hum, just humming along. Well, all of those buildings had these big ventilating fans that let outside air in through the cubicles and then up through the room and then out, and it cooled all of the rectifiers and whatnot. When you started a motor generator, if it shut down or failed, when you started up, you had to call Norris and tell them you’re gonna put a dead – gonna start a motor generator, and all the lights in the area [dimmed] until that thing got going. Motor generator set shutdown was very unusual. So that whole experience in Y-12 was something, all sorts of little things.
Mr. Kolb: And then you benefited from that experience in the stable isotopes.
Mr. Whitman: In the Stable Isotope Program, what we did there, I worked on that till we went through the periodic chart. I went back there after the war. And then after we got other cards.
Mr. Kolb: You worked for Eastman Kodak then?
Mr. Whitman: Union Carbide had taken over. We gotta get the sequence right. I worked for three months after the war, and then I terminated, went back to school, and got a job – 
Mr. Kolb: Then you got your MA degree from Ohio State?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, in 1947. Then I got an offer from the Stable Isotope – I was going to go to work for Marion Power Shovel.
Mr. Kolb: Up in Ohio somewhere?
Mr. Whitman: Marion, Ohio, and I also had an offer from General Electric in Schenectady. However, I couldn’t find a place to live. I just physically – 
Mr. Kolb: You were single, still, then?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. And I was gonna get married, and I couldn’t find a place to live. I had a car that sat on the street for a month, because I couldn’t find a battery.
Mr. Kolb: That was after the war?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, things were short. You just couldn’t find them. And I got a battery and I had four retreads, and transportation was – I bought the car after I got out of the Army and drove to Cincinnati with a friend of mine, his wife, and their baby. It took us ten hours to get from Oak Ridge to Cincinnati, and I actually drove through a creek bed in the late summer of 1946, where the road had been –
Mr. Kolb: Highway U.S. 25?
Mr. Whitman: 25 in southern Kentucky. The roads were in disrepair from during the war and they weren’t much to start with through that mountainous area. And I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience like driving ten hours. I don’t know how far it is to Cincinnati, but you can drive it in less than five now.
Mr. Kolb: Over 200 miles. Now it’s a four hour trip.
Mr. Whitman: Anyhow, I bought this car – this friend of mine and I were working in the Stable Isotope Group that summer after I was discharged from the Army. And he found a pair of 1939 Chevrolets, and we paid – I paid $950 for this thing, and it had been around the world, I think. And I had it for several years. Transportation before that, you know, there still was, there were lots of buses.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Were they still free? For a while, I guess.
Mr. Whitman: For a while. Oak Ridgers were very spoiled, because Roane-Anderson would come out and change your light bulb.
Mr. Kolb: I understood there was free lumber someplace in the middle of town, and you could go down and help yourself.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, there were all sorts of things that – 
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know what kind of lumber it was, whether it was scrap or whether it was good, or whatever.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I think most of those, you know, there were pretty good materials used in Oak Ridge, all things considered.
Mr. Kolb: No, I mean it was just available, so if you wanted to build something, could you get nails, you know, you gotta have nails.
Mr. Whitman: Well, you could, if you had a problem, you’d call Roane-Anderson, and they would send somebody out to work on it. Most of the time they didn’t know what to do.
Mr. Kolb: Well did you meet your wife during the war or after the war?
Mr. Whitman: After the war. We met –
Mr. Kolb: You came back here to work for Carbide.
Mr. Whitman: When I came back down to work and met her, she’d worked in Y-12 during the war, and I never knew her. Gosh, Y-12 had over twenty-two thousand employees. Enormous place.
Mr. Kolb: Did you eat at one of the cafeterias?
Mr. Whitman: Generally, yeah. At work, we were at the Y-12 cafeterias, and at the Central Cafeteria. You know, the place we used to go if we were going to eat, I think it was in Clinton. It was the Park Hotel.
Mr. Kolb: I bet they did a land office business.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, well, the food was pretty bad, really.
Mr. Kolb: In the Park Hotel?
Mr. Whitman: No, no, no, no, no. I mean in general it was. But it was as good as any place.
Mr. Kolb: It was free.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, worth every penny of it.
Mr. Kolb: You ate as much as you liked.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, there was always food.
Mr. Kolb: Now, you never, or did you ever smoke? I mean, back then, cigarettes were pushed on people. I mean everyone smoked.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, gosh we got cigarettes – I used to buy cigarettes for anybody who wanted cigarettes. I could get, at the PX, I could get a carton of cigarettes for, I don’t remember what it was, but it was a nominal amount.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you bought them for other people that needed them.
Mr. Whitman: And I smoked too. My boss, my intermediate boss, was named Ralph Brooks. He wrote Cas Walker’s column in the Knoxville Journal.
Mr. Kolb: During the war?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. Cas Walker had a column, a newspaper column, in addition to which ���
Mr. Kolb: You mean Cas dictated to him?
Mr. Whitman: No, he wrote it for Cas. In addition to that, Cas loaned him money to start a little business of making boxes for the Red Cross.
Mr. Kolb: Was this on the side?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, he did that on the side. And then after the war, he formed Plasti-line.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in Knoxville? Which is still going I guess.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, I don’t think he’s associated with it; it’s a big operation. He became a mogul in the industrial society.
Mr. Kolb: How in the world did he ever get – he must have bought it in Knoxville.
Mr. Whitman: Well, he knew Knoxville and he knew Cas. He was a very nice guy and a very sharp man, and he did these tests for Cas.
Mr. Kolb: Well, did he go to Knoxville a lot too?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t remember.
Mr. Kolb: Now, telephones, they were few and far between, right? I mean, in the barracks, there were public phones available?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t remember. I can’t remember ever using a phone. We had a lot of phones in the plant, but they were just PAXs. The whole communications business back then was far different, letters. You know, Oak Ridge wasn’t on some maps.
Mr. Kolb: No, I meant talking with people in town. If you wanted to call somebody in another barracks, for example, could you do that?
Mr. Whitman: Well, we didn’t have a phone. I supposed they had a phone in the orderly room. The only thing I can remember, in the PX, the ceiling was covered with Fall City beer labels.
Mr. Kolb: The whole ceiling?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. What you’d do is, when the beer bottle was cold, then you could slide the label off, and stick it on your wallet, throw it up and it would stick on the ceiling and the wallet would come down.
Mr. Kolb: People did that for enjoyment.
Mr. Whitman: Amusement. And so the ceiling was covered with Fall City beer labels. That’s the only kind of beer they had, Fall City. But, you know, the people that were in that SED were from all over the United States.
Mr. Kolb: This is the Army that you were in.
Mr. Whitman: Army. Twelve hundred of us. It was a Special Services unit. It had a separate designation. We’ve had a couple of reunions. We had our last one two years ago. And it’s hard to find out anything about it. For some reason, it kind of doesn’t exist.
Mr. Kolb: You mean after the war?
Mr. Whitman: After the war, went out of business, but it was so damn secret during the war that, and they still don’t, you know it’s one of these things that existed but didn’t exist, in a way, and so when we tried to get everybody’s address and whatnot, we didn’t really get much help from the government. We got it largely from a yearbook that had everybody’s picture and name, and most of them misspelled.
Mr. Kolb: Any pictures ever taken of you as a unit?
Mr. Whitman: No. There was a football team, a baseball team, SED, they played a regular football schedule with teams around. We had some very good athletes. And we had a drum and bugle corps and a marching society, Major Miller’s Marauders. But I never was in on any of that because I worked shift work. Those of us who were assigned to that kind of activity, and I didn’t know I was in the Army, really. You know, it wasn’t until after the war –
Mr. Kolb: But the other guys, did they have to wear uniforms?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, a lot of them wore uniforms. When I went to work, I changed out of my uniform and got into another uniform which was blue, bright blue, it had a yellow ring around my left arm, which meant I was a supervisor, had to be treated with deference, and a badge.
Mr. Kolb: Are those blue uniforms around at all? I’ve never seen one.
Mr. Whitman: No, not to my knowledge. Most people don’t know that, that everybody in Y-12 wore a uniform. Even our building superintendent wore a uniform. And the color you wore identified where you worked. There was always a lot of competition about the management of Y-12. The electricians, the electrical group, wanted to run it, the chemists wanted to run it, but the process people ran it. And I was in the process. The electricians reported to us, the chemists reported to us, the maintenance people. We ran a building, and all those services were under our direction. You couldn’t terminate one, you couldn’t start up one, you couldn’t fix one. We had to write the orders or give the orders, so we were a corps.
Mr. Kolb: So you were in production in mid-’44. Were all the calutrons operating then when you got there?
Mr. Whitman: No, they were adding more. The last Beta building was being built, Beta 3 was starting up. I don’t think Alpha 4 and 5 were operating yet. Alpha 3 was being built, and they were modified to increase the production. When I got there, they had had trouble in the Alpha units. There was dirt in the magnet oil. They had to shut down and clean out all of the units. And somebody had welded a packing gland to a valve stem, and I think it was just an R-extract, and they concluded that that was sabotage, and there was a big hullabaloo about that. And then there was the bushing problem, and so it wasn’t until ’44 when things really got rolling, and they were doing better all the time. The reason I know a little bit about the isotope separation with calutrons, I worked in the Stable Isotope Program, and we designed units to go through the periodic chart. You can just vary the voltage in the magnetic field and you can separate mercury or lead or uranium or plutonium or whatever you fancy. In the Stable Isotope Program, when we went through the periodic chart, I left and went to work for the ANP Program [Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Project]. That’s the only program that, as I look back, I don’t see how anybody in his right mind could have imagined putting a reactor in an airplane.
Mr. Kolb: Well, Art Fraas was a piece of cake.
Mr. Whitman: I understand that. I worked for Art.
Mr. Kolb: I worked in the Fishbowl. Art Fraas and I were in that same building, and I was working in a different program, but they were in that building.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I worked on the ARE [Aircraft Reactor Experiment]. I was the operating supervisor. Bill Cottrell and Bob Affel and I were the three superintendents, and Ed Bettis and Larry Meades were the hootches.
Mr. Kolb: Larry Meades, University of Virginia.
Mr. Whitman: He was the chief physicist.
Mr. Kolb: Bettis was a character too, of course.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, he was an inventor. He and Ray Mayne. Ed was really a wiz.
Mr. Kolb: I worked with Bill Cottrell for quite a while too. He was in the army here too, right?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t know whether he was in the Army or not, could’ve been. You know, some people were in the Army and were married and lived off the area. Some of them lived in Cove Lake.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause there was not enough housing here.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. That’s right. And there were other people in the service that were in the secret service I didn’t even know. In Y-12 in all of the key areas, there were people who were working there that were in the service, and I didn’t know.
Mr. Kolb: So they wore uniforms that were not –
Mr. Whitman: They never wore uniforms, never. 
Mr. Kolb: They wore these Y-12 uniforms.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, and then they wore civilian clothes after that. They were in places where something would happen to shut the building down, like the magnet oil or the electrical supplies, and they worked just as laborers or – I remember this one guy after the war, he had a Master’s in Mathematics and he was looking after oil filters.
Mr. Kolb: What a misapplication of talent.
Mr. Whitman: Well, it turned out that he was one of the guys that was in the secret service.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he was a snooper?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, he was snooper. And they were just keeping tracking of things and making sure that nobody put coffee grounds in the magnet oil. He was in a key spot, but his work was mundane, manual.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but he was really working in his head. And you didn’t know that until after the war.
Mr. Whitman: I never knew it until after the war.
Mr. Kolb: Did you talk to these people after the war?
Mr. Whitman: Yes, I did. I happened to because he was in the building. I knew everybody in the building. I knew him, but I never knew he was – he wore a uniform. A bunch of Navy guys came in and they were officers. Don’t ask me why. And they were learning about the calutron. And they worked for me. Here I was a lowly sergeant and here these guys were lieutenants.
Mr. Kolb: Were they just getting trained for something else?
Mr. Whitman: I have no idea. During the war, people would have tours of duty. General Groves used to march through periodically with his entourage. I didn’t know – I saw him. They’d come through the control room. They would walk in, in a group, and march down, and look at everything sternly and walk out, to be seen.
Mr. Kolb: How big a group are you talking about?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, he would have four or five people with him. Well, you know, he was the chief honcho of the whole damn – I didn’t know that.
Mr. Kolb: Nichols was with him probably.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, Kenneth Nichols was his right hand man. He actually did work for the others. He managed work at Hanford and Los Alamos.
Mr. Kolb: Nichols did?
Mr. Whitman: Yes he did.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I thought he was just Oak Ridge.
Mr. Whitman: He was based in Oak Ridge, but he was concerned with logistics and coordination of the other places too. He was Groves’ right hand man. He was a colonel, and he was from the University of Iowa, and I believe his training was in hydraulics or civil engineering. And he came here with Groves, and his office was in Oak Ridge. He came back here a couple years ago for the anniversary celebration. I don’t know what year it was; I’ve forgotten. It was the 50th Anniversary, so it would be ’96. He had his wife with him. He’d never been in Oak Ridge, and he remarked, I heard him say it, that Oak Ridge was so beautiful, it was unbelievable how it could have changed to be like it is, because back then it was a mud hole. Dust, you know, when it didn’t rain, it was dusty, and just clouds of dust. And when it rained, it was muddy. It’s no hyperbole; it was muddy.
Mr. Kolb: Did they put gravel down?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. Well, the roads were gravel, but there was still, if you got off of them, and those boardwalks were over mud holes. So Oak Ridge was not beautiful. It was a military reservation. That’s what I said, when I first came here, I thought, ‘What in the world were they, why are we back in a military base? We just left one a few months ago.’ And there were other Army people here, though, the MPs and all of them were in the Army here. The SED wasn’t really in the Army. It was in the Army, but I can’t ever remember hup-huppin’ around except for those guys who were in that special unit that paraded. We never had any inspection. I didn’t do anything. I was on my own.
Mr. Kolb: Well, were all the SED people in Oak Ridge, or did they have other people in other locations? Were some others, like, at Hanford?
Mr. Whitman: Yes, a friend of mine went to Los Alamos. I don’t know of anybody at Hanford. They may have been. But at Los Alamos, there were several people up there. George Mace, who I came down here with, eventually went to Los Alamos, and he left here and went back to school and he became a professor of engineering mechanics at Michigan State. His son, one of his sons, was a golfer, pretty good. And he went down to Texas. He wrote Texas a letter. He said, ���I’m interested in playing golf for the University of Texas.” So they invited him down there. Tom Kite met him at the airport. They went and they played nine holes, and they had lunch, and Ben Crenshaw played the back nine with him and he made the team. He went through four years of college on a full scholarship on a twenty man golf team and never played a match except in practice. That was back when Texas had oil wells. Can you imagine that?
Mr. Kolb: Never played a match. You mean the golf team never competed?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, the golf team did, but he was never good enough to beat Tom Kite. The golf match only consisted of about – 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I thought you meant Tom Kite was a coach or something.
Mr. Whitman: No, he was on the team. Tom Kite and –
Mr. Kolb: Crenshaw too?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, they were captains. And they met these guys to interview and they played and they made the recommendation to the coach.
Mr. Kolb: He was a backup player, in other words.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, a twenty-man golf team from Texas, had an oil well pumping away, so it was one of these things where they could afford anything. Well, anyhow, George came down with his son. They stopped by to see us. In about two weeks, I got a dozen Titleist golf balls in the mail. That’s how I learned about the golf business. And George has been down here a couple of times. I kept track of most of the people I worked with for a long time and then it was just, I haven’t seen anyone.
Mr. Kolb: Haven’t had a reunion in a while?
Mr. Whitman: No, I was involved in the last one, and I’m not going to be involved in another one. We had about five hundred people here, and golly, the work is –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, to do it, you mean.
Mr. Whitman: To do it.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you were involved with doing this.
Mr. Whitman: Yes. Three day affair and mailing letters.
Mr. Kolb: When was that?
Mr. Whitman: It would have been in ’96. I don’t know whether it was ’94 or ’96. We’ve had four of them, and that was the last one. We had one up at Gatlinburg and a couple up here. The big one, though, was quite big. That’s when Nichols came. I guess he ended up as a general. And as you say, he visited his old home. The thing that always struck me when I was here in those early days, everybody was from someplace else. And if there was any kind of a holiday, everybody went home.
Mr. Kolb: Including you? Did you get to go home much?
Mr. Whitman: No, I didn’t. When you’re on this shift business, you kind of had your nose to the grindstone, and I got a thirty day furlough once a year. So I had one, while I was here, I think, or two.
Mr. Kolb: Thirty day continuous?
Mr. Whitman: Mhm. Strange.
Mr. Kolb: Well did you write letters to your parents?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, yeah. They didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. Never learned about it until one of my guys I knew in high school worked down here, not as a GI but as a civilian, and after the war was over, there was a little article in the paper about him and me working, and that’s the first time my folks knew what I was doing. My dad had been in World War I, and when I left the University of Pennsylvania, he decided that I was headed for Europe. And of the thirty-five people that I was with, they did go – just the three of us, I believe, came down here, and the rest of them did go to Europe, and they were in the Battle of the Bulge, and several of them were killed. So the flip of the coin is hard to figure out. And things happened over and over that were hard to imagine. The thing that struck me about Oak Ridge in the early days, when we first came in, we went to the barracks; we were on our own. That was kind of unusual. But we checked in at the order room, and they said, “Well, report tomorrow morning. You’re on your own.”
Mr. Kolb: Get on the bus and go to Y-12.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, whatever. I didn’t know where I was going. So we got on some buses and went up around the town, and it was unbelievable. You know, we went up the hill, and all of these houses, houses everywhere. And just, what in the world is this place?
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t expect so many houses.
Mr. Whitman: No, well, didn’t know, just thought they’d all be barracks.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t look like a military base when you got up to the houses.
Mr. Whitman: No, it looked just like it does today, more or less.
Mr. Kolb: With mud streets of course.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, and here are all of these houses. It was baffling. I remember talking to George and Bill Whitley, and said, “What in the world are we into? What are they gonna do with us?”
Mr. Kolb: Big question. And you didn’t find out for a long time.
Mr. Whitman: Not really. Well, you sort of knew right off, as soon as I went to Y-12, that this was a factory, and quite an impressive one. And it’s sort of mysterious in the sense that, when you got into it, and when you were right in the main works, you couldn’t figure out what it was. Here’s this big racetrack humming away, sparks flying. Do you know that people – it’s no exaggeration – everything was coming into Oak Ridge, into Y-12 in particular. All kinds of material, but nothing ever went out. Nothing. Trucks, flat cars, chemicals, wire, plate, and nothing ever came out.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have much interaction with the operators in your group? You said they were mostly women. Were they local women, most of them?
Mr. Whitman: To some extent. Yeah, some of them lived in Clinton and some of them lived in dorms, but not really. The organization was kind of interesting. We had a foreman, a general foreman, who had the building, and then a foreman like I was, and I had a forelady who interacted with the girls between me and the girls. A forelady. She didn’t know anything about the calutrons, but she knew about the girls. And any beef I had with the women, I went through her. Our chain of command was through her.
Mr. Kolb: Because they were women, they figured they’d put a woman in your place.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, and she was a very good person, and I don’t even remember her name, but she was about ten years older than most of the girls. And then we had five startup people who were men. When the calutron was put into the tank by the maintenance people, it had to be hooked up, checked out, and the knobs swiveled and the voltage turned on and the thing heated up, and a man did that, the guy that was trained, he did all that. When it got tuned up, it was turned over to a girl. One girl had one unit, to get it going. That was one of the worries about Y-12, they couldn’t get enough of technically trained people to operate the calutrons. So at the end of the war, each girl was running four.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, busy.
Mr. Whitman: Well, it got so once you learned how to do these things, and it turns out, once you get the thing going, the less you fool with it the better it gets. Let it go, let it run, and it would do better in the long run than just twiddling with the knobs. The best production came at midnight in the nights. Less distraction, you know, people got tired, and it just ran. So, during the day, everything was screwed up, with all the experts. And that’s when a lot of the maintenance was done in terms of special people that might or might not work at night, or they wanted to check this or that or the other, but the things would run beautifully if left alone and everything was functioning. I had a guy come in – we also were responsible for the vacuum systems. In the basement was this enormous room that had roughing pumps, Kinney pumps, mechanical pumps, the two diffusion pumps that were on each tank, and all its appurtenances, and some additional diffusion pumps; all this was plumbed in, five units on one working pump. So here’s this maze of pipes and red lights, green lights, chains, this and that. We brought this guy in, new hire, I may have told you this, he came in and he looked all around, you know, and we said, “Well, we’re gonna put you in training and in about two or three weeks, we’d like to have you be in charge of this operation.” That one man, pretty much, ran it. He looked around, and he said, “Like hell,” and walked out and we never saw him after that. I guess he just went through the gate, turned his [badge in], he just left Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: He could do that?
Mr. Whitman: Well he had a badge, and he left. He turned his badge in. Went out the gate and was gone. It overwhelmed him, and it was an impressive thing, the complexity, and it was the wrong thing to tell him.
Mr. Kolb: He didn’t want the responsibility, in other words.
Mr. Whitman: No, but see, those things, they required a lot of servicing, and they were, you know, critical to the whole operation. So here’s this room, and it was, the first time you walked in, it was noisy, lights flashing.
Mr. Kolb: After a while you got used to that of course.
Mr. Whitman: Oh, yeah. And right beside it, in the next room, were all of the controls for the filaments, rectifiers and power supply. We actually operated units while the buildings were being constructed, and the magnets were all running, and units were running as they were still assembling powers supplies. Now, listen to this, you know what a fish tape is? It’s a steel thing that an electrician can shove up a conduit and pull wire with. Here’s this guy down there, pushing his fish tape up, and the operator keeps shorting the unit out. He’s down there with a hot unit. He was supposed to be working on the one adjacent. I tell you, when you could start a unit, you started it, and the fact that another one was still being built down the row, that’s all right. You wouldn’t think of doing anything like that today. And so here’s an electrician down there in the wrong place pushing a fish tape up a hot conduit.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’m sure he found out pretty fast it was hot.
Mr. Whitman: Well, it kept disappearing. It melted it all. Well, someone finally got down ��� 
Mr. Kolb: I would think he would quit after.
Mr. Whitman: Well, see, it’s a long way. He wouldn’t be aware of it.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he didn’t feel it?
Mr. Whitman: No, it was grounded in the conduit. God, if it hadn’t been, he would have only done it once, he’d have been anchored to the floor. I saw guys that would hit one of those condensers, and the nails in his shoes would be burnt in the concrete. That was my first experience with high voltages. I didn’t know how a light bulb worked, but when we got through with that, I knew a lot about high voltage and rectifiers. All the rectifiers were great big water cooled cathodes, anodes, and we were working with, I think the ratings were like 50,000 Volts and 5 Amps or something like that. We’d take several hundred of those things, and you’ve got lots of electricity. The racetrack in the summer night was an unusual thing. 
Mr. Kolb: Was there a lot of arcing going on because of the humidity?
Mr. Whitman: Ground to ground. Just blue globes, and it would arc ground to ground. All the insides of that thing were wire mesh. In a hot, humid night, those things would be glowing away and shorting out, and it wouldn’t hurt them. That was my first experience with that kind of stuff.
Mr. Kolb: Eerie.
Mr. Whitman: Eerie, it’s eerie. 
Mr. Kolb: And that got to be routine.
Mr. Whitman: Routine. The filaments in those things, they only lasted a short time, and they were changed remotely.
Mr. Kolb: How fast, I mean, how often?
Mr. Whitman: About every two weeks I think. They were one-eighth inch diameter cantle, and the ion bombardment on those things would wear them out. They ran at 2000 Fahrenheit, and when they burned out, you had to pull this great big tube out through an airlock, close it off, then put a new filament in, stick it back in. It was the most labor intensive thing you can imagine. That whole calutron business was just a constant. Then you had dozens of these things that were always in a various phase of startup, shutdown.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I���m sure after the war, when they got into non-military production, they probably optimized things better.
Mr. Whitman: Well they shut them down pretty much except the Stable Isotope and Beta 3. Can you imagine, though, when you took one of those things out of a bin that had been operating at these high temperatures, these fumes coming out? And you didn’t sit around waiting for it to cool down. When you took that thing down, it was pulled out with this crud.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t wear masks or anything, or you didn’t have any protection?
Mr. Whitman: Well, not that I know of. It went up in the air. But it was a different time, and as I said before, there was an urgency to do this thing that pervaded and everything was like that, and some people, if you just didn’t get with it, well...
Mr. Kolb: Was this communicated just by the atmosphere of the people or was there anyone telling you, preaching to you, that we gotta produce, we were competing with the Germans?
Mr. Whitman: No, no. The only thing that was ever told to me, I was told several times, what you’re doing here can end the war. And that was it. And there wasn��t any elaboration, but as I learned since then, talking with, well, hearing Alvin Weinberg and others talk, [Eugene] Wigner, particularly, they said he was just obsessed.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Of course, he came out of Nazi Germany.
Mr. Whitman: Exactly. That’s why. You know, all the key people came out of Nazi Germany, most of them.
Mr. Kolb: Well not all, I mean, Oppenheimer.
Mr. Whitman: Fermi.
Mr. Kolb: Fermi did, of course.
Mr. Whitman: Wigner and Schacts.
Mr. Kolb: Compton didn’t. He was American. A lot of Americans were here, of course, already. But there were enough Jewish scientists in the top echelon that they really communicated that.
Mr. Whitman: They feared that the Nazis would get the bomb and defeat us, which would have been tough if they did have it.
Mr. Kolb: And in actually, the Japanese were closer than – the Nazi program was way behind, as I understand it.
Mr. Whitman: I never have understood what happened. I’ve heard these stories –
[Tape 2, Side A]
Mr. Whitman: Kind of the reaction I had when I came here, I was a little bit let down in that I couldn’t quite see what we were doing and for all I knew it was a kind of a boondoggle.
Mr. Kolb: For all you knew.
Mr. Whitman: For all I knew.
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know.
Mr. Whitman: I didn’t know, and it was a huge operation. And I thought, golly we’re just going to get muddled down, and we’re going to end up being on guard duty or something. You know, we were in the Army.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. And you could always be shuffled off to something else.
Mr. Whitman: But Major Miller, when he had interviewed us, said, “Well, you’re going to be working in a factory.” That’s the way he put it. So Oak Ridge, as I said, looked like an Army camp, and I just felt like, golly, got left behind. That was my first reaction.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, even though they told you it was important. How could this be important?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, how could this be important?
Mr. Kolb: But you were obviously in a production mode, not a scientific mode of inventing something like Los Alamos. It was different, I’m sure.
Mr. Whitman: Right. But a lot of inventing went on, but it was peripheral to keeping this thing going. But you know what I mean. But Oak Ridge itself was different in terms of – it was kind of temporary. One of the side issues, we had a big dental building, and we all went to have our teeth looked at at regular intervals, and there was a dental technician and dentist, and the building is where the hospital is now, I guess.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. Was it part of the original hospital?
Mr. Whitman: No, it was separate, but in the same area. It was parallel to a street perpendicular to the Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: You know where the American Red Cross building is now?
Mr. Whitman: No, it was west of there.
Mr. Kolb: Further west of there, closer to the hospital.
Mr. Whitman: Closer to the hospital. And so we had that sort of thing. The other thing that happened shortly after we came here, there was a big train wreck near La Follette, as I recall, a disastrous train wreck. They brought the people into the Oak Ridge Hospital. They needed blood and I’ve forgotten the details, but it happened shortly after we came here. Oak Ridge had quite a medical facility. They had a cadre of doctors, most of whom delivered babies. That was their big operation, but still it was a hospital. It had all of the facilities. One of the guys I knew climbed on top of the water tower out on East Drive to look over Oak Ridge when he first got here. Just to see it. And while he was up there someone [saw him]. They got down to the base of it when he came down and arrested him and took him into the [guard headquarters]. He said he was just out [trying to get a better view of Oak Ridge].
Mr. Kolb: Did he have to climb a fence that he was not supposed to?
Mr. Whitman:  No, no, he was a resident here.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, was it fenced off?
Mr. Whitman:  He got in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be so he could get a better picture of – he wanted to see Oak Ridge. There was always that kind of thing. I had a guy working for me who was a very good startup man. One night I got a call from the police station. They said, “We’ve got so and so down here, and he says he works for you. Can you come down and verify this?” I got down there, and it turned out that he had come in in his car from Clinton or wherever and you had to have your car searched – trunk, everything. Well, he had a bunch of whiskey in the trunk for his friends, so they said, “Well, we’ve got to take you down and,” I don’t know, “we take it” and give it away, I guess. So the policeman got in the car and said, “Now that’s all you have?” He said, “Yeah, that’s all I have.” Whizzing down the Turnpike, I suppose at thirty miles an hour, whatever, he had to stop suddenly for some reason and a couple of bottles rolled out from under the seat, hits the policeman’s feet. It wasn’t a policeman; it was an MP [military police]. So he had lied to them. So I had to go down and get him released. There was always somebody in trouble with the constabulary or whatever. But you can imagine having a bunch of roustabouts and guys like that, that there was always a problem. But by and large there was another factor. Everyone here was working, and most of them were above average intelligence. I mean, they had abilities or they wouldn’t be working here, and so it was a rather unusual place from that standpoint. I’d never been in a setting like that. I know we had several guys who were pretty good musicians. So, you know, there was a Symphony. Waldo [Cohn] started the Symphony and the Playhouse and all that, so it was quite an unusual place from the standpoint of being in the middle of nowhere.
Mr. Kolb: Well, besides that, were there dance bands, or jazz combos or that kind of stuff?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, but the principal guy was Bill Pollock. He had music all over town on the tennis courts, and they had them at night, nearly every night. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, nearly every night? I thought it was only on weekends.
Mr. Whitman: Weekends a lot, and then during the week.
Mr. Kolb: Now, was he paid to do that? You know, we’ve got to get his biography too.
Mr. Whitman: I would assume he was somehow or another because he was involved too much to do it on his own.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I know he gave an ORICL interview with a bunch of other people, and I heard him say that he and another guy tried to start up a business and they put two dances on, and they charged, they took in money. And that was it. After that, the Army said, no, they weren’t gonna let them make money on it. And they took it over and I guess then he was paid to do it or whatever.
Mr. Whitman: Well, when you were in the Army here, you had special privileges. I could go in and out of the gate and never be searched. And we were in constant demand to bring whiskey through the gates.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, of course. You were never searched? They trusted you?
Mr. Whitman: I was in the Army. I was never searched. So we were a source of whiskey. In the wintertime, we had these big wool coats, and you could stick a couple, three bottles in. 
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t search your car even?
Mr. Whitman: Well, I didn’t have a car. Anybody who wanted booze, you could get a GI to bring it in.
Mr. Kolb: Where did you go, to Clinton?
Mr. Whitman: No, a little town west of here. Clinton was dry.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t everything dry?
Mr. Whitman: No, there was a wet county over here; I can’t think of the name of it, a little town. It’s on the Southern Railroad [Oakdale]. That was the primary source to buy legally. When I got off of the train in the Knoxville L&N Station, a man gave me a card. He said if you need anything to drink, call this number. That was my first introduction to a bootlegger. I’d never heard of a bootlegger. I didn’t know what a bootlegger was. So this guy gave me a card. And that was another thing. When I came here, I came here on March the 13th, the day after my birthday, and it was a beautiful day. The flowers were blooming, and we were dressed in winter uniforms, wool shirts, wool jacket, wool overcoat, the whole bit. Hot. And I came in here and I thought we had gone to heaven. You know, I came out of a snowstorm, and went down here, and the next day we were sitting out – before we got picked up for Y-12 – in the beautiful sunshine. It was an early spring. I’d never been south of Cincinnati or St. Louis and the weather here – that has always made an impression on me, the temperate climate here. It was one of the reasons I stayed. It is nice. And it was so pretty then. I’d never seen the dogwoods, redbuds. In Oak Ridge I don’t remember so much of it there because everything was dug up and newly built. But it was so pretty and the sun was shining, and the birds were chirping, and here we were in the middle of a war, and we’re sitting out there in the sunshine. The contrast from – you know, we were imminent to go to Europe, and here we’re suddenly sitting out in the middle of nowhere not knowing what we were going to do. It was a strange time. It’s hard to explain.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet it was. It’s the opposite of what you expected. You didn’t know what to expect.
Mr. Whitman: You didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t have any idea.
Mr. Kolb: Well, it was easy to take, I guess. You wondered how long could this last.
Mr. Whitman: Can you imagine having maid service? And we did. The people came in your hutments and they’d make the beds, clean up the place. We didn’t have to do that. Here we are, lowly GI’s.
Mr. Kolb: But you had to do your laundry didn’t you?
Mr. Whitman: No, we had to take it to the laundry. We had a laundry in Oak Ridge we took our clothes to. We didn’t have to do anything except work. It was just an incredible kind of situation. If I wanted to go to Knoxville, you just go in the orderly room and say, “I want a pass.”
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have to report to your military unit ever?
Mr. Whitman: Ever. Never.
Mr. Kolb: Just like you were on a job.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I shouldn’t say that, we reported, I’ve forgotten, but it was –
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have any meetings every so often?
Mr. Whitman: All my meetings were associated with work. Captain Barger [our commanding officer], he understood the situation, and we were issued clothing or, periodically, we got our mail, and so I’d drop by the orderly room every day.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay. And that was close to where you lived?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, within just a short walk. The barracks were right on the bend on the Oak Ridge Turnpike across from St. Mary’s, just a stone’s throw in. 
Mr. Kolb: Weren’t there other Army units here too?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, but they were the MP’s. We didn’t have anything to do with them. And then there was the Manhattan Engineers, who were in the Castle, and we didn’t have anything to do with them either. They were responsible for the management of Oak Ridge. And we were a special –
Mr. Kolb: And where did they live?
Mr. Whitman: In houses.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. They didn’t live in barracks – even though they were single men?
Mr. Whitman: They had housing. Most of them were officers. They were – to the best of my knowledge, had been in the Corps [of Engineers], civil engineers, prior to the war, West Point graduates or R.O.T.C.
Mr. Kolb: Your unit was all non-coms?
Mr. Whitman: There were no officers except Captain Barger and he had a lieutenant, and to the best of my knowledge, Major Miller, who organized this thing, who got us, recruited us. And he was still here.
Mr. Kolb: He was the one from Clinton?
Mr. Whitman: No, no, I don’t know where he was from.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you talked to a guy from Clinton.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, he was a First Sergeant. Far as I know, he went to Europe. His name was Daugherty. He happened to be a First Sergeant where I was stationed in Philadelphia, and Major Miller was a regular Army officer who recruited the people for the Manhattan District. They came up short of technical people to pursue the Manhattan Project. So one of the sources – they said, “Okay, we’ll get whatever we can out of the Army.” If you happened to have had a reasonable academic record or whatever, you got brought down here.
Mr. Kolb: Or Hanford or someplace else?
Mr. Whitman: Or Hanford or Los Alamos. Major Miller was the person who recruited these people, and he stayed here for the whole time. That was Major Miller’s Marauders who was the Fife and Drum Corps and did whatever ceremonial work, and when they had special events that needed somebody to march. I was never involved in that. They were all day workers that wanted some mixtures. If you were interested, you could play an instrument. And they had, as I said, a baseball team, a football team, a basketball team and all that.
Mr. Kolb: Bowling?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t remember bowling.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you didn’t bowl then? They had bowling alleys.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, I didn’t bowl until 1948. It was the first time I ever bowled in my life.
Mr. Kolb: Up in Jackson Square there was a recreation –
Mr. Whitman: Grove Center.
Mr. Kolb: – and they put a bowling alley down below there.
Mr. Whitman: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And then, of course, Grove Center, where Roscoe Stephens had the Oak Terrace.
Mr. Whitman: That’s right. That was the big thing. And then there was one in Jefferson. That’s where I first bowled. Wes Savage organized a bowling league.
Mr. Kolb: ANP?
Mr. Whitman: No, it was in the Stable Isotopes Program back then. I worked for Chris Keim for about five years. He was the head of it; he started it.
Mr. Kolb: Now was he involved in Y-12 in World War II time?
Mr. Whitman: Yes, he came here from Shell Oil and was involved in – 9731 was a pilot plant for the calutron, Alpha Beta, and they did all the development work and they first started it there, and that’s where they trained people when they came in to get some quick knowledge about what they were doing before they went into the production facilities. He stayed there and after the war, he started the Stable Isotope Program and went through the periodic chart, which is literally true. And after that was done – that was my first experience – and then we got a thing called 26 Project. We had a small vial that contained uranyl nitrate that was largely 236, and they wanted it enhanced to some high percentage of 238 or 235 or whatever. And we built a special unit that brought that up to about ninety-some percent in one pass. That was my first experience with a project, and I decided from right then and there that’s what I wanted to do. Working on a project. I give you a problem – go solve it. You know work on a – whatever, with a goal, a start and a finish, and then do something else. And that was the first time I’d ever done anything like that, and it just fascinated me, and we worked on that for several months. It was a high priority thing, and we had a big meeting about it. In fact, it was during that time that Rickover first came down here. He came down here with his captains and whomever, and they had a meeting in the cafeteria of the Y-12 plant. Weinberg was there, and I had to give a talk about what we had done on U-236. It was just a little issue; it was one of the technical programs, and I’ve never forgotten.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you don’t know what they were looking at using U-236 for?
Mr. Whitman: No, they were interested in its cross section. It was a minor thing in a whole sequence of things. It was just something. But they couldn’t figure out how to enhance it quickly. The mass spectrograph could do it in large quantities. You know, one pass. But be that as it may, that’s when I first learned a little bit about nuclear reactors. And Weinberg asked – we were talking about breeders, and Rickover said we’re going to do – the Navy will do its breeding ashore. [laughter] And I didn’t know anything – the terminology was Greek to me. But it was “Ah-ha-ha,” for everyone in the room. As you know, he was a very salty guy. On a couple of occasions, Joel Witt and I were up in Washington, and he and I sat in Rickover’s chair at his desk. He had an office up there where Milton Shaw was concerned with the enterprise, the Reactors Program. Just a side issue – we wanted to sit in Rickover’s chair, so we could wheel around, wheel and deal. That’s when they were talking about [coolants] – he said, “If the seas were filled with sodium, some damn fool would want to cool a reactor with water.” 
Mr. Kolb: Who said that?
Mr. Whitman: Rickover. Well, you know they were talking about sodium coolant. As you remember, back in those days, everyone was [talking about] every combination of coolant and fuel and moderator, all these combinations – bismuth and sodium, NaK and water, helium, carbon dioxide, whatever. So someone said, “Well, sodium would make a very efficient coolant for the submarine.” Rickover was aghast at having all that sodium, back then, on board.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, but they actually did that.
Mr. Whitman: I know, but I’m just telling you. Anyhow that was just one of those things.
Mr. Kolb: So you got to meet Rickover in this meeting – or see him at least?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. Well, I didn’t know him from Adam.
Mr. Kolb: And that was when? Nineteen-forty –
Mr. Whitman: No, it was in the fifties as I recall, early fifties. ’54. When we got on the ANP program [Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Project], Algor and Dell and I squired Jimmy Doolittle around, had to show him our work.
Mr. Kolb: Wow!
Mr. Whitman: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: A famous hero.
Mr. Whitman: We were pumping NaK [an alloy of sodium and potassium, liquid at room temperature and used for cooling fast breeder reactors used in naval propulsion units] in a big loop, and Jimmy Doolittle came in. Also showed [Edward] Teller [a tour of our reactor assembly area]. Teller asked me – we had these big beryllium pieces for Art Fraas’ experiment. He touched one. He said, “Now do I have to wash my hands?” These people that were famous, they were like everyone else, I guess. Doolittle, he was a very intense man.
Mr. Kolb: He was still in the service then.
Mr. Whitman: I suppose so.
Mr. Kolb: Did he have a uniform on when he came?
Mr. Whitman: No. He was in civilian clothes. I had seen him fly a GB [Granville Brothers Sportster] in the Cleveland Air Races in 1933.
Mr. Kolb: What’s a GB?
Mr. Whitman: That was a sport plane that they first used in the Cleveland Air Races and it broke two hundred-and-thirty or forty miles an hour way back in the thirties. I saw him flying at Cleveland. Saw Amelia Earhart. My uncle took me up there to the air races back in the days when all this glamour – and so then Doolittle became an advisor somewhere. And I saw him again in California just by accident. He was out there at an Explorer’s Club meeting, staying at the hotel I was staying in. I don’t know why I was out there – I’ve forgotten. He must have been ninety. And he was still very active. Just happened to see him. He was just in this group.
Mr. Kolb: Well, since we’re talking about important people, who else did – you saw Groves and Nichols all the time.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I didn’t see Groves all the time. He wandered through. He wouldn’t know me.
Mr. Kolb: Did you see Compton or anyone else?
Mr. Whitman: Not that I can remember. Groves had a presence. He was a stout fellow, and I can still see him marching down that cubicle room with his group in tow. You know, just striding along. I guess he just wanted to see it. And he wanted to be seen. He was the man in charge. You know, he didn’t want that job.
Mr. Kolb: Oh.
Mr. Whitman: He built the Pentagon, and he wanted to go to the South Pacific. He heard about this project and he didn’t want anything to do with it. He took it on the basis that he would be promoted to a General. And they did that.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he wasn’t a General when he had the Manhattan job?
Mr. Whitman: Not when it first started. Not when he built the Pentagon. He was a Colonel, a full Colonel, and he was in the Corps.
Mr. Kolb: What did he finally make?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: He was a Major General.
Mr. Whitman: I think so.
Mr. Kolb: I suspect he wanted to go into combat because that’s where you really got elevated. You got a chance for being elevated.
Mr. Whitman: There was a certain [attitude], when the war was going on, it sounds kind of crazy, but everybody was ready to go once you got in combat. It was one of the things that everyone expected, but three months out of Fort Leonard Wood, I can honestly say that was an experience that I’ll never forget. I mean, if you didn’t get shot, you’d sure blow yourself up because we learned demolition, all sorts of nasty things. Building pioneer bridges. And it was a hard life. It was truly different.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Enough to where you knew you didn’t want to do that if you didn’t have to.
Mr. Whitman: That’s right. It was hup-hup. In coming here to Oak Ridge, it was almost like heaven. I mean, here we are – suddenly in this place doing things that we were kind of trained to do at one time in our lives – working in an environment that had nothing to do with the Army.
Mr. Kolb: Right. At some point did you find – just know that you were going to spend the rest of your wartime days here?
Mr. Whitman: I didn’t know that I was going to. No, once you got here, you did not leave.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, so you could relax about that, in your mind.
Mr. Whitman: I didn’t know that. None of us knew that. Never even thought about it.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you never thought about it.
Mr. Whitman: Never even occurred to us.
Mr. Kolb: The war only lasted another year and a half. So that went by so fast, probably.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. But to the best of my knowledge, if you knew about Oak Ridge and were involved in it in any way, you were never going to leave the continental United States, I don’t believe, unless you were on a mission associated with the Manhattan Project, because you were a security risk. And people who were a problem, I believe, went to the Aleutians. But I don’t know that for a fact. All I know is I heard stories about people who just kind of disappeared, but I don’t know of anyone in the Army.
Mr. Kolb: Was that just a term? The Aleutians, like that’s like going to hell? You were shanghaied basically, sent off to never-never land. In Russia you go to Siberia, in the U.S. you go to the Aleutians.
Mr. Whitman: Back then if you misbehaved, you could end up in the Aleutians.
Mr. Kolb: Whether you went there or not.
Mr. Whitman: But Oak Ridge had so many advantages, people used to complain about Oak Ridge and its mud and dust. But I always thought it was just a little bit of heaven compared to some of the things.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you get used to everything after a while and took it for granted. Some things you can’t do anything about, so why bitch about it.
Mr. Whitman: Well, the other thing is that there really were some tremendous opportunities. If you wanted to open your mind and get with it.
Mr. Kolb: That’s why you stuck around.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, there just seemed one thing after another happened. It never got dull.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. And you had a very interesting career even getting into the scientific area or engineering later, I mean, the lab was a wonderful place to work where you could do something different every so many years. One project or another project.
Mr. Whitman: Or if you wanted to specialize in something and had the training and ability, but if you wanted to specialize in something back then, say you wanted to work in heat transfer or fluid flow or metals or materials development, there was something you could do that would be useful. I think that the city back then as such, we got kind of spoiled because we were kept.
Mr. Kolb: Free medical service for example. Every time you wanted to go to a doctor, it was free, so you’d just go. After the war, I guess that happened for a while, but what about the transition?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, there was lots of hollering and screaming.
Mr. Kolb: The gates didn’t open until ’49.
Mr. Whitman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: And those four or five years between there were a kind of transition.
Mr. Whitman: Jim, we didn’t lock the doors on anything.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, ’cause it was all guarded.
Mr. Whitman: Well, yeah, not only that, but everyone that was here had been somehow or another evaluated relative to security and character and one thing or another.
Mr. Kolb: If you were a thief, you’d be found out and probably got rid of.
Mr. Whitman: Right. That doesn’t mean everybody was a saint, but at the same time, the chance of – there were no door-to-door salesmen back then.
Mr. Kolb: Were there ever any knifings?
Mr. Whitman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Or shootings?
Mr. Whitman: I think there were.
Mr. Kolb: Or people who get in arguments, get drunk just like everywhere else every Saturday night?
Mr. Whitman: I think there were. I was never privy to any of that, but I’m sure there were lots of things like that. There had to be. There were a lot of guys here in the construction business and one thing or another. My goodness, I saw little incidents that you wouldn’t believe. In the cafeteria line one day, this guy came through ahead of me, and he was obviously a construction type, and he had among other things a great big piece of coconut pie on his tray, and the cashier said well this is so much.
Mr. Kolb: Oh this is when you started paying for it.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I didn’t pay for it, but they did.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they did. Okay. Oh, you in the military got free food and they didn’t.
Mr. Whitman: Right, for a while. But anyhow, she told him how much it was, and he said, “That’s terrible,�� or something, and took his tray and dumped it upside down in the cash box. There was gravy and potatoes. They had to shut the cafeteria line down and wash the money.
Mr. Kolb: What did they do to him?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t know. Nothing likely.
Mr. Kolb: He just stormed out?
Mr. Whitman: He just left.
Mr. Kolb: He got away with it? He made a big scene. Well, I’m sure there were a lot of crazy incidents happening all the time.
Mr. Whitman: All the time. We had a guy – in those dormitory rooms – I don’t know this for a fact, but I was told and I believe it – this guy had a bow and arrow, and he was fiddling around with it, and he shot it into the wall, and there was a man lying in his bunk, and the arrow went partway through the wall, right over his head. They had to come in and apprehend him.
Mr. Kolb: He started a fight?
Mr. Whitman: I don’t know what happened, but that’s the way it started. Another guy took a motorcycle apart, brought the parts up in his room and assembled it, and then took it out in the hall and ran it out – just all sorts of little odds and ends of people doing crazy things. Just people. It was also my first experience with segregation. We got on this bus and there was an American Indian sitting in the front. And the bus driver thought he was a Negro, black, and he wouldn��t run the bus until the guy moved and the Indian wouldn’t move. And so we had an incident. And as far as I know, the bus is still sitting there.
Mr. Kolb: Because the Indian didn’t want to move.
Mr. Whitman: He didn’t want to move. 
Mr. Kolb: He was stubborn as the bus driver.
Mr. Whitman: Just little things like that.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever go to any of the high school football games or that sort of thing?
Mr. Whitman: Not back then, but we had a football team, but I didn’t see all the games.
Mr. Kolb: Where did you play at? Blankenship Field?
Mr. Whitman: Blankenship. Any big affair, I’ve never forgotten. At the end of the war, we had a big ceremony down there at Blankenship Field, and the PA system didn’t work. Here we are in the center of high technology.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my Lord, power zapping everywhere around you. Was that Bill Pollock’s PA system?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, I don’t know about the circumstances, but it didn’t work. Groves was there. But any ceremony that I recall was taking place there. 
Mr. Kolb: I saw one of Ed Wescott’s pictures about the E ceremony, where everyone got their patch. Manhattan Project patch.
Mr. Whitman: Excellence.
Mr. Kolb: Is that what it was called – the E ceremony?
Mr. Whitman: No. All people that worked in defense plants got an E for excellence. The Manhattan Project, we had a special award. Have you ever seen it?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I’ve seen pictures of it.
Mr. Whitman: I’ve got mine. I’ve got a pin.
Mr. Kolb: There’s a picture up in the Jackson Square kiosk, there’s a picture of that there.
Mr. Whitman: My uniform’s still hanging out here in this closet.
Mr. Kolb: Your Army uniform? Okay, but not your work uniform.
Mr. Whitman: No, no. I never owned that. They treated that like – it was specially laundered and sifted and –
Mr. Kolb: It could be contaminated.
Mr. Whitman: Right. We never wore badges that were film badges to the best of my knowledge back then.
Mr. Kolb: Everything was Alpha range, and you really couldn��t monitor it.
Mr. Whitman: I would think that the most, well, I shouldn’t say this – I don’t know. I would think airborne contamination would have been the big problem where I worked, from fumes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and then, like you said, there’s that tantalum from those diodes or filaments.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, all that sort of thing could be contaminated, and I’m sure that’s the case. Uniforms, we went regular Army. When summer came, we wore summer uniforms, and in winter we wore winter uniforms. It just so happens, my uniform was a winter uniform because I got out in April. I still have it – parts of it.
Mr. Kolb: Can’t get into it though, I’m sure.
Mr. Whitman: Well, kind of. Did you ever see a GI winter overcoat?
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’ve seen pictures of them. I think they’re heavy as lead.
Mr. Whitman: They are heavy as lead, wool, hot. They’re very good. Those are the ones they wore in combat. Heavy. The uniform was issued when we first went in.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have heavy combat boots too?
Mr. Whitman: Mhm. We didn’t have to wear them here, but in some places you had to wear safety shoes.
Mr. Kolb: Now, they wouldn’t be metal toes, would they?
Mr. Whitman: No, because you learned that around the tracks there was a whole special kind of culture and equipment – beryllium copper tools, no metals. If you wanted to ruin your watch – if you had a watch – the gap in the magnets was around 3,000 gauss in the Alphas, and double that in the Beta units, so it was potent. Not that that’s great, but it’s big. It’s enough to orient –
Mr. Kolb: Curl your toenails. So after the war, then, you were in Stable Isotopes, you saw the town transition to non-military more and more, of course.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, the first –
Mr. Kolb: And, you know, the big down-sizing in Y-12 occurred, what, in ’46, ’45?
Mr. Whitman: It was down to just a few thousand.
Mr. Kolb: The population went up like that and then came down.
Mr. Whitman: You know, a lot of that was – about 40,000 of that population was construction. That all stopped, and Y-12 had 22,000 employees. Y-12 became almost a ghost place. They just shut those big production buildings down.
Mr. Kolb: Was that right? Shut them down totally for a while?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: There was no need any more.
Mr. Whitman: There was only one building. And Jack Case got involved in building some – well, Y-12 had a history of working with enriched uranium, and they had some machine shops, and Jack Case got some work that involved machining a form of uranium for Los Alamos, and then Y-12 got involved in that, and so their history of working with uranium gave them a leg up on the material, and then his background and his people with machining and foremen, brought on –
Mr. Kolb: Were they doing that during the war too?
Mr. Whitman: No, but they had a culture that involved – the biggest building, one of the biggest buildings in Y-12 – that big chemical building where Biology is – was never used for its intended purpose. It was built to process charged material – uranium tetrachloride – for the calutrons. The war ended before that building was finished, so it was never used. It had stainless steel floors and all sorts of things. When Biology took it over, it was the first use. Then, so when the place was – to me it was a strange time. When Oak Ridge was opened up and they started to sell the houses, everyone seemed to be all upset about the price they had to pay for these houses, and it was kind of a giveaway.
Mr. Kolb: And that was ’57.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well, they had been so used to handouts.
Mr. Whitman: Exactly. Everything.
Mr. Kolb: In fact there was a vote that they didn’t want to even become normal for a while.
Mr. Whitman: That’s right. There was a certain sort of satisfaction, I guess, or way of living – you’re kept, you’re safe; everything’s done for you in a way, and suddenly you’re going to have to own something and take care of it.
Mr. Kolb: Start paying taxes.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, it’s a whole new thing. And some people resisted that. And I think there was a general culture to resist it. Prices were too high. And so Oak Ridge changed slowly, and it wasn’t easy from what I could see. One thing that I didn’t do at first when I was here, but after I got out of the Army, I got involved with a guy by the name of Forrest Gunther, and we did a lot of fishing in these lakes, and we also got involved with the Anderson County Sportsmen’s Association. Built a lot of fish beds and worked with kids, had fishponds and tournaments, and all this kind of stuff. And I got to know a lot of the people in the surrounding area. It was very interesting. Before that time, Oak Ridge was an isolated area. You talked with people that had worked and lived here, and found out later, you know, well, the people in Clinton were human beings too, you know, and we interacted with them. Back then, Magnet Knitting Mills was one of the big things. It’s closed now. But many people there worked at Magnet. We worked with a lot of them in setting up these tournaments and organizing events and getting prizes. I worked with a lot of the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] ichthyologists [constructing] fish beds. Learned a lot about TVA. During the war and living here, we knew about TVA, but not really.
Mr. Kolb: You knew it was TVA power you were using.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, but didn’t know a lot about TVA. I learned that, a lot of that after the war in some of my first dealings with the Sportsmen’s Club, and learned about water level control and flood control.
[Tape 2, Side B]
Mr. Whitman:  Then got interested in Norris, and one of the guys I had worked with, his father was involved in the design and construction of Norris. Had a lot of pictures of it, you know, the timber cutting and all that. Norris was built ahead of schedule and under the bid, under budget.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever meet any of the people that were moved because of Norris and Oak Ridge?
Mr. Whitman: Yep. Gallaher.
Mr. Kolb: Like John Rice Irwin?
Mr. Whitman: No, I met him, I know him, but I met a guy whose name was Gallaher. I played golf with him a little bit; found out that his father owned that land out there, used to own the steamboat, and they would – when the river was high enough, Clinch River – drive down to the Tennessee and go to Knoxville. Steamboat. And the other thing they did, I learned from other people in Clinton, they used to cut timber up in the Powell and Clinch and in the spring floods take it down to Chattanooga. Ride it down.
Mr. Kolb: Had to go through the dam?
Mr. Whitman: There were no dams, not to Chattanooga, back then; I’m talking about before any of TVA in the early days.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they came downstream to the Fort Loudoun Dam.
Mr. Whitman: There was no Fort Loudoun.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, there was no Fort Loudoun?
Mr. Whitman: Back, I’m talking about before any of TVA, in the early days.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, oh, I see. Before Norris even.
Mr. Whitman: Before Oak Ridge. When Oak Ridge came – you asked me if I knew anyone that had been relocated, and Gallaher owned a farm, and that’s where the slave cemetery is now. It was his farm.
Mr. Kolb: Near Wheat.
Mr. Whitman: Near Wheat. And Christenberry owned the land where the golf course is. That was a dairy farm. It was about 1,200 acres.
Mr. Kolb: Which golf course?
Mr. Whitman: Oak Ridge Country Club. That was a farm, and Grove Center was – where Grove Center is – was a community and little business place. Robertsville. That’s where Reba Holmberg lived.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I know Reba. Her parents are buried in that cemetery right behind the school there, Cedar, the one on Robertsville Road. I went there and saw that.
Mr. Whitman: Cedar Hill?
Mr. Kolb: Cedar Hill, yeah. There’s an interesting grave in that cemetery. It’s big, plenty of room, still being used. There’s a big fenced off grave with a big marker on it – Colonel John Hannah – Confederate Army Colonel [Editor’s note: John Hannah’s grave is located at Robertsville Baptist Church Cemetery, AEC #30]. It says, “Son John by his consort.” It didn’t say anything about a wife.
Mr. Whitman: By his consort.
Mr. Kolb: By his consort. And I’ve met a John Hannah, and I think I’ve been told that he’s a descendant of that Colonel John Hannah. And they’re very prominent. It’s worthwhile seeing. It’s in a gated, fenced area – very prominent. That guy was somebody. It was about late 1800s that he died.
Mr. Whitman: Well, several of the people who worked for me in Y-12 lived here – grew up here. Luther Waller lived out somewhere near Bull Run. He had a farm there, and he worked in Y-12 during the war. And I always remember –
Mr. Kolb: But he didn’t lose his farm, though.
Mr. Whitman: No, no, no. He was just outside the area. And he went to work here and I know he took every paycheck and bought savings bonds.
Mr. Kolb: Put everything in savings?
Mr. Whitman: Well, he had a farm and he was living off that, and I’ve just never forgotten that. He was a very nice man. Another guy that used to – he knew Norris very well, and he was there when it was impounded and had fished in that area. So I got to know a lot of locals indirectly and then some directly through different activities. It seemed like most of the people in Oak Ridge were from someplace else, but then as time went on, we learned about others that were around here or lived here like the Holmbergs. Bob is from Iowa, and Reba grew up here. Her mother worked in Y-12. She was a chauffeur and delivered the mail.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any contact much with people in Knoxville? Because I understand that Knoxvillians looked down on [Oak Ridgers].
Mr. Whitman: There was a lot of animosity. I don’t know why, but it seemed so.
Mr. Kolb: Because people were going over there and spending money, you know.
Mr. Whitman: I never understood it completely, but we were not really – I never felt welcome.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the outsiders kind of mentality, I guess.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, and Oak Ridgers were just a bunch of [outsiders] living out there in the mud hole, and doing something that nobody knew what it was about, and they were above us or below us, and there was never any real [understanding between the two communities].
Mr. Kolb: Even after the war this continued.
Mr. Whitman: Oh yeah.
Mr. Kolb: You said that you never would wear your shoes over there or you would take another pair of shoes along, because your Oak Ridge shoes would be muddy, and you were identified as being an Oak Ridger by that.
Mr. Whitman: But you know the thing that’s so strange is that all of the influx of payroll and money and work that has come in from Oak Ridge is a major asset; but at the time, we weren’t really welcome as far as I could tell – and not too welcome any place else. I kind of felt – and I think part of it’s true – we were sort of isolated from the surrounding area, and you know there was a lot of poverty, particularly north of here.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well all of Tennessee was a lot worse.
Mr. Whitman: And so it was strange, and here you had a group of people – some of whom were really world-class scientists.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I can understand maybe a little jealousy there.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: We think we’re better, and we were better, had a symphony, had our own playhouse. You know, they’ve got a symphony and playhouse over there. Why don’t they come to ours? Got to have their own.
Mr. Whitman: Well, I think that it’s interesting; by design Oak Ridgers were working on something that we needed to be isolated, back then, from the surrounding area, so people didn’t know anything about what was going on.
Mr. Kolb: And you weren’t allowed to talk about it.
Mr. Whitman: Weren’t allowed to talk about it, and so there was – by design, a lot of animosity probably grew up between regions. I can remember back then people – you know how girls and women were interested in nylons, stockings.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, ’cause they were so scarce.
Mr. Whitman: They were scarce. They were invented by DuPont in 1939 or thereabouts. During the war they were unavailable. Nylons were big things, and rubber gloves. You know, tires were rationed. Food was rationed, sugar, gasoline. But Oak Ridge had a lot more of things, I believe, than some of the surrounding areas.
Mr. Kolb: That’s another reason for jealousy.
Mr. Whitman: That’s why it came up in my mind, because we had a source of goods and services that others didn’t have. I ran into a man at the Visitor’s Center several years ago that had been a Captain in the United States Navy, stationed at the Pentagon. And he said, “I’ve always wanted to come to this place and see.” And I said, “Well, we’re certainly glad you’re here.” He said, “I was in the Pentagon, and I had a responsibility for acquiring heavy equipment for the Pacific theater. And I had acquired a great deal. It was about to be shipped out, and it was a big coup the way I got it.
[break in recording]
Mr. Whitman: [Just before it was to be shipped it disappeared.] I went to my commanding officer, and I said, “I’ve lost all of this equipment. It’s gone.” Paper transfer. And he said, “It’s gone to someplace called Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” And he said, my commander said, “Forget it. Just go on about your business and forget it.” He said, “I always wanted to come down here and see this damn place.” He was a very nice man and just a gentleman in every sense of the word.
Mr. Kolb: Did he feel better after he came?
Mr. Whitman: Well you know, he learned later, but he said, “I just had to come down.”
Mr. Kolb: It was something higher priority than what he was supposed to be doing.
Mr. Whitman: Well, it involved bulldozers and trucks and, just, material, and so he was out-prioritized. He was in the Pentagon where Groves had built.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I’m sure a lot of that happened.
Mr. Whitman: And I must tell you another story. This is hilarious. Y-12 needed some pumps, hydraulic pumps. So this guy found out that they had some pumps somewhere up in Ohio. He went up there, and he commandeered the things. He got them by hook or by crook. He got transportation, and through great effort got them to Oak Ridge and got them in the plant and forgot about it. About five years later, he was walking through the warehouse, and here were these pumps still in their crates. They’d never been used.
Mr. Kolb: After the war?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. He had risked life and limb and all kinds of shenanigans to get those things. Well, it was just one of those things that probably something changed. But it was a life and death situation. He said, “You know, I went to Cincinnati, and I located these things and I got these damn trucks, and I got them loaded, and I got them transported down here for life and limb and cheated and lied. Broke all the rules, and five years later, I found them in the warehouse when I was wandering around one day.” And I’m sure that happened a lot. Just tons of things that everybody needed.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Well, I saw the movie Lorenzo’s Oil. It was about a family who had a son who had a very rare medical problem, and the father was trying to get research doctors to devote some research into this particular malady which was very rare. And that’s why they weren’t researching it. So this father was telling this very important scientist and at one point he says, “Do you realize that in World War II, the Manhattan Project designed, built, and tested the Atomic Bomb in twenty-eight months? Why? Because they all focused on one objective and they succeeded. You could do that too if you really collaborated.” But I heard that number, twenty-eight months, and I’ve been here in Oak Ridge since ’54. I’ve been here twenty, thirty years. It never hit me till that time.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: 28 months and that’s an impossible feat. It’ll never be done again – thank goodness.
Mr. Whitman: You know the Engineering News accounts of this said it was like building a Panama Canal every year for three years in terms of material and construction.
Mr. Kolb: Successfully.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s three Panama Canals.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah. It’s just the volume of material, the scope of the job.
Mr. Kolb: Even more, it was the scientific precision.
Mr. Whitman: It was esoteric in many ways.
Mr. Kolb: The graphite reactor was built with slide rule accuracy. You know, that’s all we had basically. And everything you were involved with, slide rules.
Mr. Whitman: You know, I bought a four-function calculator, and I think it cost eighty bucks. That was a big deal. Back during the war, you had slide rules, that’s it. You know they employed people during the Depression making up log tables. This guy and I were trying to plot ion paths for the job in the Stable Isotope Program. Back then, did most of it manually, God, spent hours and days putting an ion through each one of these gradients and it turned out to be a waste anyhow. I just remember doing this with a Marchant [calculator]. I can’t remember the details, except it had a velocity and a vector and it was moving in an electric field. We tried to recover energy from these receivers, regenerating receivers. But what an ordeal. You could do that now some afternoon between lunch breaks. But the whole idea of the scope of these things was –
Mr. Kolb: Well this was replicated at K-25 too. You know, I’m sure people there had similar experiences, I mean, feeling about the scope of it. I mean, there the buildings were even bigger. I guess they saw the equipment to a certain extent. I’ve never been out there to see it, but the operators, you know, they had mechanical operators.
Mr. Whitman: Well, they had single control rooms.
Mr. Kolb: For the whole process? One control room?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, to the best of my knowledge, but they had a lot of sub-places for mechanical work and the like.
Mr. Kolb: I understood they had people on bicycles.
Mr. Whitman: They did.
Mr. Kolb: Going down these tracks inside the building.
Mr. Whitman: The converters were big tanks and then the compressors and the valves, and it was just repetition.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever see that?
Mr. Whitman: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, during the war?
Mr. Whitman: No, no, no, no. It was after the war. I went out there several times for one reason or another and got a tour. We had that test facility out there and we were under K-25’s aegis in terms of safety, and we used their electricity and water and mechanics. Roger Hibbs heard we were gonna blow something up and he wasn’t happy, so we had a review by K-25. So I got a tour of the control room, and it was quite interesting.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever see the Roosevelt cell?
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, but he was never there.
Mr. Kolb: No, I know, but I mean, that’s what we’re trying to save.
Mr. Whitman: I think that would be vital. But the converter, you know, it’s just big pipes, big pumps, and big pots, and it just goes on and on and on.
Mr. Kolb: A lot of sequential repetition. But, as I say, there’s a huge magnitude of that thing too, even bigger volume.
Mr. Whitman: Well, if you take K-25, Paducah, Portsmouth, and Oak Ridge used ten percent of the electricity generated in the United States.
Mr. Kolb: Did that all come from Kingston Steamplant?
Mr. Whitman: Primarily, but after the War, it was American Electric Power, Kentucky and Ohio, Portsmouth. During the Cold War. During the War, Kingston, well, you know, Oak Ridge, the steam plant out there was the world’s largest steam plant ever built at that time, at K-25. It was the world��s largest steam plant, built in 1943, ’44.
Mr. Kolb: Did that precede Kingston?
Mr. Whitman: Yes. That has some very special features.
Mr. Kolb: So that all went into K-25.
Mr. Whitman: It had umpteen motor generators that ran at different speeds, and they coupled that to get different RPMs at K-25. And that steam plant was built – at that time, it was the world’s largest steam plant.
Mr. Kolb: How big was it?
Mr. Whitman: I’ve forgotten. Kingston was built afterwards. It was during the expansion. It was four boilers, I think, but it had many motor generators. The biggest one, I would guess it was around 50 Megawatts, perhaps, or 25, but they had several, and they ran at different speeds to get different frequencies to get different RPMs out in the plant. And they had a switch yard right beside that plant, and it was the world’s largest. Most people don’t know that. It also supplied energy for the thermal diffusion process, S-50, was right at the end, they used steam from the steam plant.
Mr. Kolb: So Y-12 got its power from what? Just from the grid?
Mr. Whitman: From TVA. That power out there was exclusively K-25, the power plant, coal fired.
Mr. Kolb: But I also heard that Kingston Steam Plant was all diverted totally into the gaseous diffusion enrichment.
Mr. Whitman: Right, and it came along as the gaseous diffusion plant expanded. So Kingston supplied all of that.
Mr. Kolb: And nothing but.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, it was essentially from TVA, but they had nine units. Then Bull Run was built as further expansion.
Mr. Kolb: I thought that was just for the local grid.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, but it was also going to be used for Department of Energy. The Department of Energy was going to the moon. It was started up in about ’61, and it’s still functioning quite well. It’s one of the more efficient ones in the world. It’s supercritical. When they started that thing up, they had trouble with the feed pumps, and they had trouble with the super heaters. They were down for about a year. Then they finally got going. I was out there a couple of times because we were involved in the EGCR [Experimental Gas Cooled Reactor] with TVA, and we had to do all this hup-hupping with TVA, so I got to go out there and listen. But I also went over to Kingston for another reason, I can’t remember now, when it was running, and that’s when I first learned how you detect steam leaks back then, with a broom. Stick a broom up to the flange; if there’s a steam leak, it’ll catch on fire. It’s superheated, and the broom would burn. There were nine units, they’ve got nine stacks, and then they had all kinds of trouble, and then they built those two twelve hundred foot stacks.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that was pollution.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, I don’t know, then they had to put in a lot of petrol precipitate.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s because of EPA [Environmental Protection Agency].
Mr. Whitman: Oh, I know, I know. And then they put special venturies on some of the smaller stacks to try to enhance the draw. I was out there when they were starting up a couple and I learned a lot about steam power plants. Kingston was built for, as you say, was tied to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: But I didn’t know that the K-25 plant was that big.
Mr. Whitman: I didn’t either. Miller Myers worked for me, and that’s where he worked.
Mr. Kolb: Is he still alive?
Mr. Whitman: No. But he worked out there full-time for a long time, and he was kind of second in command. So he knew a lot about the steam plant business. They had a double-ended pipe failure in that plant, in the main header coming out of the boiler. A rare occurrence. Double-end, chrome moly steel, and no one was hurt but a couple of guys had to hang their heads out the windows up there in the top to keep from being asphyxiated, because it filled that building with steam.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t scald them?
Mr. Whitman: No, they were far enough away from it. It wasn’t a temperature problem; it was displacing the air. And it blew the boilers down, and it was a double-ended pipe failure of a chrome moly weld. It severed. When someone said you couldn’t have a double-ended, I just happened to remember, when you’re hassled about double-ended pipe failures, that was a maximum credible accident, and it offset, and, I’ve forgotten, it was in a huge line, and it blew that boiler down like it was [nothing]. So they didn’t lose anyone. But there was a man killed out there when that plant was built, and at night it’s an eerie place. In the old days, when all the stuff was cleared out, we had our test facility there. We had this great big crane and the pigeons were in there, and the lighting was very poor, and Roger Derby always used to say, “I think that ghost of that man was out here tonight.” He was killed in an accident when they were assembling the plant. Roger Derby was one of our designers. He did one of the safety studies for us. That’s why we located out there.
Mr. Kolb: Well, so you can almost say that fate was good to you over the long haul.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s the way I feel about getting to Oak Ridge. Of course, I was not in the military atmosphere. It was all very civilian.
Mr. Whitman: Well, if you think about it, going from the things that were concerned here during the war, say in Y-12 and other places, and then moving on, you know, half a dozen different activities, each of which was interesting in its own right. And got to meet a lot of people, interact with a lot of people. As I say, the only real thing as I look back on it that was kind of wild is the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion. But it had a lot of good information, and advancements came out of it.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll tell you a story, yeah, the spin-off, well, of course, molten salt came from that. It never has been commercialized. I don’t know that anybody’s still pursuing that.
Mr. Whitman: Well, molten salts have a lot of utilization in heat treatment, but not as a fuel. A lot of the material developments.
Mr. Kolb: The pebble bed reactor is now still viable.
Mr. Whitman: Yeah, I’ve heard a lot about it.
Mr. Kolb: Germany, I think.
Mr. Whitman: Have they got the problem solved with the fission product retention?
Mr. Kolb: Well, I don’t know. They say that’s what the Germans are really thinking about.
Mr. Whitman: I know, they must have.
Mr. Kolb: They must have gotten the coatings – 
Mr. Whitman: Impervious. 
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, thank you, Grady. This is the end of our first oral history session. It’s about 12:40 [p.m.] on the 12th of November [2001]. 
[end of recording]