Alexander, James (Jim)

              
ORAL HISTORY OF JAMES (JIM) ALEXANDER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 9, 2011
 
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December the 9th, 2011, and I am at the home of James Alexander in Knoxville.  And you're known as -
MR. ALEXANDER: Jim. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Jim -
MR. ALEXANDER: To all Oak Ridgers -
MR. MCDANIEL: All Oak Ridgers know you as -
MR. ALEXANDER: I would be known as Jim.
MR. MCDANIEL: Jim Alexander, okay.  Well, Mr. Alexander, thanks for taking time to talk to us.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, I'm glad that you folks came.  I always like to talk about Oak Ridge to anyone who likes to listen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, good.  Well, let's get a little bit of your background.  Why don't you tell me something about where you were born and raised, and something about your family?
MR. ALEXANDER: Okay.  I was born in western Kentucky, a little town called Madisonville.  And I guess it was about 1947 that my father was transferred to Knoxville, and I'll have to tell you that that was not a pleasant time for my mother, who loved western Kentucky and a small-town environment because she told me later that one of the low points in her life was when she knew that she was going to have to take up roots and move away from her family and friends and go to Knoxville, Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: But anyway, we came to Knoxville, moved into north Knoxville, and I was a little boy, about seven years old, something like that.  We moved into a rental house that was a converted log cabin, and you talk about a lot of fun for a young boy seven years old.  Sort of out in the woods, isolated to a degree, beam ceilings and had me a BB gun and a dog, and in Fountain City I just had a great time growing up, until it was time then to move to west Knoxville.  And I did that I guess in the early 1950s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question.  Now what did your father do?
MR. ALEXANDER: He was involved in administrative work related to coal mining.  You know, western Kentucky was big in the mining of coal, and there was a company here in Knoxville that was involved in coal mining, and so he was transferred here.  That job did not last long, though, because unfortunately for him and my family, and me included obviously, is he contracted tuberculosis, and to have that in the '50s was not a good time to have that because there were not that many drug options to be able to treat it as you would have today.  So he was - I can remember my father more of the father who was very ill, basically isolated from family and isolated from the public.  He was in a sanitarium.  I remember driving out on Tazewell Pike with my mother and sitting in the car when she would go to visit my father.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, it was a bad time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were seven or so when you came to Knoxville.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes. 
MR. MCDANIEL: And then he contracted tuberculosis -
MR. ALEXANDER: Shortly thereafter.
MR. MCDANIEL: Shortly thereafter, yeah.
MR. ALEXANDER: Right.  And so it was a difficult childhood in the sense that he became ill and was ill for most of those formative years, and in fact died when I was a freshman in high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, he was 49 years old when he died.  So it was hard times for my mother particularly, having to go to work, having never worked before to keep up the - I have an older sister and she was already married, so that assisted in her maintenance of a household by not having so many mouths to feed.  But nonetheless it was a pretty difficult time there for a while, but I had a good -
MR. MCDANIEL: So I interrupted you.  You said you moved from north Knoxville, from Fountain City, to west Knoxville.
MR. ALEXANDER: To west Knoxville, moved into a rental house on Kingston Pike, and I'm telling you a little bit of detail because it's interesting how one's life is shaped by coincidence.  And in this case the family that was moving out of this particular house on Kingston Pike was the family of Guy Smith, who was the editor of the Knoxville Journal at that time.  He had a son exactly my age.  I got to meet him during that period of time of looking and transition between one house and another, and we became close friends all through the high school, and -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?  Now where was the house in west Knoxville?
MR. ALEXANDER: It was just in - let's see.  Let me think - just east of - what is the name of the shopping center where the fish market is?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.  That was out in the country -
MR. ALEXANDER: At that time, pretty much so.
MR. MCDANIEL: At that time.  I mean, that was out in the country at that time.
MR. ALEXANDER: We lived two houses up from that shopping center, so it was a rental house, sort of an older frame home, but pleasant memories.  And then we moved to Sequoia Village and Sequoia Hills, and when I was going to West High School, played basketball at West High School, met a young lady named Barbara Domenic who was to become my wife - little did I know when I met her at the time.  But we dated for about two years and married when she was barely 18 and I was 20.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ALEXANDER: And needless to say the families on both side thought, "You folks are just too young.  You shouldn't be thinking about getting married at that age."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: But here we are 53 years later with three married daughters, all of whom lives in Knoxville, which makes it a very convenient juxtaposition of family and - just like today.  As I told you, I was at graduation with all the family and them present -
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so that's a little bit of background.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you graduated West, and did you go right into college?
MR. ALEXANDER: Right into college.  In 1956 I graduated from West High School.  I wanted to go to UT, but my mother made it clear that there was not really the money to be able to finance a college education, so I knew that I'd have to work.  Well, it was through that association with Reuben Smith, whose father was at the Knoxville Journal, that he advised me of a job, which was called a copy boy back in those years.  And I jumped at anything, so I jumped at that job.  And I worked at the Knoxville Journal first as a copy boy, worked my way up through the organization ultimately to become a police reporter over that six year period while I was going to the University of Tennessee, and switched my major to journalism and graduated with a journalism degree.  And in addition to that, which was very valuable to me for getting a job at Oak Ridge is I'd had six years of newspaper experience to go with that degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: And the boss who hired me at the old Atomic Energy Commission made it clear to me that that was one of the attractive features of my resume, that I already had newspaper experience even though I was only 26 years old at that time.  But I came to Oak Ridge at 24.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. ALEXANDER: At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in public relations.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you stayed at the Journal for six years -
MR. ALEXANDER: Six years, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you finished up your degree at UT.
MR. ALEXANDER: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were married -
MR. ALEXANDER: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: And so I guess that was tough, being young and going to school and working and having a family and -
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, here's how tough it was.  I enjoyed the newspaper part of that period much more than I did the educational aspects.  And I had a city editor by the name of Dick Evans who one day took me home, and he said, "Alexander, how are you doing in school?"  I said, "Well, I'm doing pretty good, but I sure do like this newspaper work."  And he said, "Let me tell you something" - this was fatherly advice.  He said, "You've got one opportunity to get through college and get your degree.  You will have many opportunities to get a job at a newspaper, but only one opportunity to graduate, and so therefore you spend all of your concentration fully on your schooling, number one, and this job at the Knoxville Journal, number two."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And boy, did that ever sink in.  And from that point on I managed to deal with the job and school simultaneously pretty well.  It took me a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now did it take you six years to get through college, or did you finish college and then go work full time ______?
MR. ALEXANDER: Actually, that's a good question because it did take me six years to get through UT with a bachelor’s degree because I was working and I had to pull back the number of hours that I took in any given quarter.  We were on the quarter system back at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: I certainly don't look down my nose at that.  If you knew how long it took me to get my bachelor's you would understand that you were on the fast track compared to me.
MR. ALEXANDER: I was on the fast - right.  I'm glad to know that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so at 26 -
MR. ALEXANDER: 24 actually.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah, 24 you finished your degree, and you got an opportunity to go to Oak Ridge.  So tell me about what.  How did that happen?
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, it was my father-in-law who knew that I would be looking for a job soon, and he may in the back of his mind thought, "You know, those newspaper hours aren't that great for a young father with a young child," that maybe -
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, so - because you had a daughter by this time.
MR. ALEXANDER: I had a daughter at - yes, towards the end of that.  I had a young daughter at home, and you know, the earliest I would get home would be around 11:00 at night, and I began to think about that myself.  "Do I really want to stay in newspapering with a young child and perhaps others?"  And so he sensed I think my ambivalence over either staying with the journalism, which I loved, but also knowing that - trying to, you know, be a father at home during "normal hours," so to speak.  That might be a little difficult, so he brought home one day an application for a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what did he do?
MR. ALEXANDER: He was in first appliance sales in Knoxville, and then later he opened an antique store on Kingston Pike called Domenic's, and that was my girlfriend's name, Domenic.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: A family business on Kingston Pike called Domenic's Antiques.  And so he brought me that application and I filled it out, sent it in, and I was kind of shocked that a few days later I got a call to come out to Oak Ridge National Lab and be interviewed by a very distinguished gentleman by the name of Don Cowen, who was a biologist by profession, but he was in charge of the Public Relations Department at Oak Ridge National Lab.  And so I began as sort of an intern public relations guy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was this?
MR. ALEXANDER: That would've - 1962.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, '62.  Okay.
MR. ALEXANDER: 1962.  And I might mention that I didn't quite have my degree at that time.  I was taking Spanish 113 as my final course to graduate, and when I told Mr. Cowen this he said, "Well, now, we'll have to figure out a way for those Tuesdays and Thursdays that you have to go to your Spanish labs, and let's see if you might be interested in taking tours of the Graphite Reactor on Saturdays to make up for the time that you lost on Tuesdays and Thursdays."
MR. MCDANIEL: Tuesdays and Thursdays.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so that was really one of my big first jobs, was to meet school groups at the gate of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and walk them up to the Graphite Reactor, explain to them the construction and function and the history of the Graphite Reactor.  And then we would go over to the isotope reduction area and look at things there, which was a big program back in the 1960s.
MR. MCDANIEL: So the only thing you had left to get was your Spanish, is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes, and –
MR. MCDANIEL: And the reason that I ask that is I'll tell you - I made a comment a while ago about how long it took me.  I had everything finished for college except Spanish for five years, then went back and took my Spanish and finally graduated.
MR. ALEXANDER: And finally made it.
MR. MCDANIEL: And my first job out of college was as a newspaper reporter for seven years, so yeah.
MR. ALEXANDER: For seven years.  Well, we both ended up with Spanish as the last hurdle.
MR. MCDANIEL: You're exactly right, and I wouldn't dare go to Spain or Mexico now because I wouldn't be able to speak any of it.
MR. ALEXANDER: I would probably slow down after “buenos dias”.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.  So you got this intern job at the lab, at Oak Ridge National Lab.
MR. ALEXANDER: I guess - yeah, I guess you'd call it an intern.  It wasn't technically described as that, but I was a member of the PR staff with specific duties to make up for those hours that I missed taking the lab, of tours.  I did - oh, I worked on brochures and other tours, and eventually I became editor of the ORNL News.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: Mm-hmm, I did that for a couple of years.  And then the head of the information office at the Atomic Energy Commission in downtown Oak Ridge - Ed Stokely was his name - and he called to see if I would be interested in joining them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how long were you at ORNL?
MR. ALEXANDER: Two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Two years, and so tell me about the ORNL News.  How often did it come out, and -
MR. ALEXANDER: As I remember once a month.  I think that it is correct.  And it was, you know, stories about employees, features, activities, technical meetings held in -
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet it wasn't as exciting as working at the Journal, was it?
MR. ALEXANDER: No, it was not, because at the Journal it was the excitement of the police beat and traveling all over town to fires, accidents, incidents and problems that the police and firemen dealt with, and that was very exciting for a young guy.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure it was.
MR. ALEXANDER: But I enjoyed because it was, as I said, better hours and certainly better pay.  And I can remember when I went to Oak Ridge - this was again 1962 - I was making $360.00 a month, and when I went to Oak Ridge my salary rose to $500.00  And I thought that I was a rich man at $500.00 a month back at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure.  My goodness.  So you stayed at ORNL for a couple years and then you got called to the AEC, and -
MR. ALEXANDER: Right, and that was - I had always admired that office from afar, meaning from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, because we dealt with that office on many issues.  And I had a lot of respect for those two gentlemen who worked there -
MR. MCDANIEL: Who were they?
MR. ALEXANDER: Ed Stokely and Wayne Range.  And I joined them to replace a gentleman who went to Washington with the AEC, and so I was the third man, and at that time it was a three man office.  So I was the low man on the totem pole and began a career that lasted 30 years with the federal government, first the Atomic Energy Commission, then the Energy Research and Development Administration, which I guess existed for only two years.  Then the Department of Energy was formed, and so -
MR. MCDANIEL: But it was all the same thing -
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, the functions and responsibilities were basically the same, and that was to be able to serve as a point of contact for the public, the media, elected officials, national, local to be able to get information on how their dollars - to put it crudely - how their dollars were being spent with the federal government in the name of the Department of Energy.  And so I took that as a very serious responsibility, realizing that, hey, we need to keep the public informed about how their dollars are being spent at Oak Ridge in research and production.  And so my whole career was involved in the receipt of questions and/or letters about certain issues and programs, or taking the initiative to put information together in the form of press releases, public appearances, briefings for visitors to make sure that, to the extent feasible, we could inform the public about DOE activities.
MR. MCDANIEL: How much - so how much of - this is kind of a general question throughout the time you were there, and it may have changed with different managers and different secretaries of the Department of Energy, things such as that.  But how much were you all kind of on your own, and how much of it was directed from Washington?
MR. ALEXANDER: There was certainly a necessity to keep Washington on board with the activities that we were involved in.  For example, if we were dealing with the local office of a U.S. congresswoman or man, it was very important to the Washington people that they know exactly what is transpiring.  What is the nature of the subject?  Is it a problem?  Is it a benefit?  So we - particularly in the realm of congressional relations we always kept our Washington counterparts informed.  And a number of press releases of significance we would submit to the Washington offices for review, not every press release -
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: Because we had latitude to make the determination as to whether or not they would be interested in certain classes of information that was flowing from the government to the public.  But we would use our judgment to make sure that - if we thought necessary, that yes, the Washington offices of the Department of Energy should definitely by kept - you know, people do not like surprises.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course now.
MR. ALEXANDER: So we liked to keep them - we used the term ahead of the curve, a heads up to make sure that they were aware before it went public.  And you never know how the media will treat a certain issue, and so you make sure that you touch bases -
MR. MCDANIEL: That everybody's on the same page, right?  Everybody knows -
MR. ALEXANDER: Everybody's on the same page, that's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I want you to do a couple things for me at this point.  I want you to - I want you to go through the 30 years that you were in that office, and I want you to talk about - because you had a number of different managers I would imagine.
MR. ALEXANDER: A number of different managers and styles.
MR. MCDANIEL: And talk a little bit about each one of those.  And then I want you to kind of go through and think of high points and low points and successes and challenges that you faced, and some of the - you know, hit some of the headlines through those 30 years of what were the big stories that you had, and how did you deal with them.
MR. ALEXANDER: Okay.  Boy, that's an open-ended question.  We could take hours -
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's do the managers first.
MR. ALEXANDER: If my mind is up to regurgitating and thinking and bringing alive that total history of 30 years.  But I guess I look back to the '60s - I think I look at it as the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and then I retired in the early '90s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, let's do that.
MR. ALEXANDER: And then I can look at some of the highlights and maybe low points and so forth.  But in the '60s certainly the emphasis at Oak Ridge - and I was at the Laboratory at that time - was the - was nuclear power and the great opportunities for the benefit of developing nuclear power for the benefit of the world.  And nuclear power was looked at as being the energy source of choice for the future, no question about it.  And in fact in the early years there was the belief that we could, at Oak Ridge and elsewhere, develop reactors that would be so inexpensive and to produce electricity so cheaply, because how plentiful uranium is and how cheap it is vis-a-vis other forms of energy - perhaps coal would be an example - that it might even be too cheap to even need to monitor, too cheap to monitor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so certainly the big emphasis then, in the '60s, was the development of nuclear power.  The Lab was involved in a variety of options to look at how you can built better reactors to be more efficient, more cheaply built, efficient, more safely operated.  And coupled very closely to that was the production and distribution of radioisotopes, and that began at Oak Ridge in 1946 with the shipment of the first radioisotope for medical use.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And in the '60s that certainly was still a very big program, to develop a myriad of radioisotopes that could be helpful in medicine, agriculture, industry, research.  And there was a huge emphasis on radioisotope production, and development of new radioisotopes.  With the advent of newer reactors with higher power you could produce transuranic elements, and the promise of californium and some of the transuranic elements that would be produced in some of the Oak Ridge reactors, such as the High Flux Isotope Reactor - went online in 1965 I believe.  I think I wrote the press release to announce its completion and operation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, there you go.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so -
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, it's interesting.  You're talking about that, talking about the isotope production.  I interviewed Alvin Weinberg shortly before he died, maybe about a year, and I asked him.  I said, you know, "What do you think are the big things that Oak Ridge did?"  He said, "Well, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the greatest thing that Oak Ridge ever did for humanity was radioisotope production" -
MR. ALEXANDER: I can remember his statement in that vein.  And when you look, if one could look, throughout the United States and the world on a daily basis and look at the sheer numbers of radioisotopes used in treatment - diagnosis and treatment of disease, it's a fantastically successful program which began at Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean, it revolutionized medicine - I mean, absolutely.
MR. ALEXANDER: CAT scans, whole body counters -
MR. MCDANIEL: Probably as much as anything has revolutionized medicine.
MR. ALEXANDER: Exactly, which brings me back to the hospital at Oak Ridge.  ORINS, as it was known - Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, later Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the hospital that we operated probably until the '70s, and the things that we did at that hospital - and it was known probably throughout the country as a place where various very seriously ill people could come to Oak Ridge with the understanding that we were at the forefront of development of radiation sources and radioisotopes to try to help people who were very, very, very ill, and at that special hospital -
MR. MCDANIEL: And it was almost a last hope for a lot of people, wasn't it?
MR. ALEXANDER: In many cases, in many cases.  And I can remember vividly that unique facility that they had and operated for years which appeared to be constructed - a room within a room.  And the inner room looked like a motel room, and outside of that room were the walls of a concrete building.  And there were positioned radioisotopes - I believe cobalt 60 - at various positions so that a patient could come into that room and through - or radiation there was the hope that, in contrast with high doses of radiation, which can cause nausea and discomfort, that if radiation doses were administered at a lower, longer period of time, perhaps the results would be the same without the nausea and discomfort to the patient.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And I remember taking many people on tours of the ORINS hospital and showing them the early whole body counters that particular room and other tele-therapy units that we used in the treatment of illnesses -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: So that was a highlight I can remember of the '60s and being able to talk in a very positive light about the role that Oak Ridge had in developing this marvelous thing called a radioisotope.
MR. MCDANIEL: Who was the manager in the '60s?
MR. ALEXANDER: At that time that was Sam Sapiri.  He was my first boss.  And Sam Sapiri was a gentleman who I was totally scared of when I first saw him.  He had a mustache and he had sort of a stern visage, and I can remember that I would somewhat tremble when I had to go up to his office to deal with him on anything.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: He was definitely the boss.  Everyone knew it.  There was a lot of respect for him.  And his career, though, was mostly - he was approaching retirement when I went over to the Atomic Energy Commission  But he was probably most noted for leading Oak Ridge in the development of ancillary facilities in Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, and elsewhere in the major period of time when we were building additional gaseous diffusion capacity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ALEXANDER: The Portsmouth plant, the Paducah plant, in addition to expand the capacity from Oak Ridge to those other locations.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: We even had -
MR. MCDANIEL: That was like a $1.5 billion project, wasn't it?  
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, it was huge.  And one of the things I remember about Sam Sapiri is that in the heyday - in the early heydays of nuclear power where there was great promise and hope that there would be reactors throughout the United States - you should know it has not been that way.  There's been difficulties of getting reactors built for a number of reasons.  But in those early years there were predictions - and I don't know whether many people remember this, certainly in the Atomic Energy Commission.  But Sam Sapiri commissioned a study to analyze our lack of ability to provide uranium enrichment services based on the projected demand in the future.  And that study came out with the bottom line conclusion, as I recall, that there would be a need for a new gaseous diffusion plant the equivalent of the Oak Ridge plant to be built every year to keep up with the development of nuclear power in this country and abroad.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?  Wow.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, you know that never happened.  That was a very optimistic view at that time based on the euphoria really over that technology to generate electricity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: And the reality of it was that nuclear power never developed that extent - I mean on that rapid a pace.  But that was -
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's interesting.  I never heard that before.
MR. ALEXANDER: I know.  It was amazing.  Sometimes folks in the DOE, we'll get together and talk about, "You remember the study where we were going to have to build a" - and as you know, now we've shut down Paducah and Portsmouth and we're now looking to build a gas centrifuge facility at Portsmouth for uranium enrichment needs for the military.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.  And the K-25 building is all but gone.
MR. ALEXANDER: All but gone, which is so sad.  I haven't been there in recent months, but I know it's going to be very disappointing to drive by and look at the old building coming down.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's right, that's right.
MR. ALEXANDER: How many tours I have taken of Oak Ridge with people in buses and driving around the back side of K-25 - as old timers call it, the Oak Ridge Gas Diffusion Plant - stopping the bus and looking out and being able to explain to the wonderment of the people on board what was once the world's largest building under one roof, and the enriching of uranium first for the war effort, and then later building the additional K-31, 33, et cetera.
MR. MCDANIEL: I was up on Perimeter Road, up on the hill overlooking I guess the back side of K-33 several months ago, and there were acres and acres of just piles of steel.
MR. ALEXANDER: Of steel, from the dismantlement.
MR. MCDANIEL: They just - you know, the bulldozers, they'd take them out and lay them down, bulldozers pick them up and just put them in a pile.  There were domes - acres and acres of domes that they hadn't removed yet.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, that they had not removed yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, unfortunately, as you know, that there is some low-level contamination of that metal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And historically it's been very difficult for the government to be able to recycle that metal for use in the public domain.  I can remember a national magazine asking the question sort of rhetorically, "Would you really like to cook your scrambled eggs and bacon in radioactive skillets?" at a time when we were trying to hopefully be able to decontaminate metals from that facility out into the public domain.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: But there was - as you know, even today there's -
MR. MCDANIEL: Maybe it'd take less electricity, you know, so -
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah.  Yeah, exactly.  But as I have said in the past, a little bit of radiation goes a long way in the eyes of the public and the media, and a lot of the issues that I dealt with ______ accident - incident in a negative sense, in general, has been having to deal with the public in radiation accidents and incidents, and the lack of knowledge on the part of the public with respect to the effects or lack of effects of exposure to radiation.  So it's a difficult issue.
MR. MCDANIEL: Speaking of accidents, now were you there in '58 when they had what everybody refers to as the real accident?
MR. ALEXANDER: No, but I am very familiar with it because in talking to the public over the years about - there's a fascination of the public about radiation and radiation problems, and have you ever had anyone exposed or died at the Oak Ridge Facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And quite often I have referred to perhaps the most serious - I don't think it's a perhaps, I think it is - the most serious accident that we ever had at Oak Ridge was at Y-12 in the '50s when the uranium solution was inadvertently poured in an unsafe container, which resulted in a critical - criticality.
MR. MCDANIEL: Criticality accident.  It's interesting.  I interviewed Joe Lenhard - 
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, he was a -
MR. MCDANIEL: He was - I mean, and he - and I had heard of that accident.  I'd heard some stories.  But Joe was there, and Joe went into great detail about exactly what happened and how it was handled and who handled it.  And it was a wonderful, wonderful - you might want to read his transcript, because all these interviews are being transcribed -
MR. ALEXANDER: I can imagine.  Joe has a very good memory and a good memory of explaining things.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was - he was -
MR. ALEXANDER: Joe would be a guy that we would use quite often to explain to the public and the press technical issues -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: And he was very good at it.
MR. MCDANIEL: He's very good at explaining it where people could understand it.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, it was -
MR. MCDANIEL: All right, well, let's move on to the '70s.  Let's talk a little bit about the '70s.
MR. ALEXANDER: '70s - let's look at the '70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: You had a couple of major things happen in the '70s, I would imagine.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, one of the things that comes to mind is - and that also relates back to the issue of the development of nuclear power, and that is Oak Ridge National Laboratory was heavily involved in the '70s in a project in the state of Kansas to try to develop the country's first repository for high-level waste.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. ALEXANDER: There was a little city in the middle of Kansas called Lyons, Kansas, and there was a gentleman at Oak Ridge National Laboratory whose name was - I remember after all these years - Fleming Impson.  And Fleming was Oak Ridge National Laboratory's principle onsite representative for the development of an old, abandoned Carey salt mine in hopes to convert it into a repository for the nation's first repository for nuclear waste.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right, in Kansas?
MR. ALEXANDER: In Kansas.  And it was a very small city, and Fleming was excellent in developing and maintaining relationships within the community.  And the folks of Lyons, Kansas were really, really anxious for the Atomic Energy Commission to identify that site as the first repository, because they could see the benefit to this small city in terms of jobs, economic development.  And it was an extremely interesting project, and the reason we looked at salt, because it appeared to have the properties of being somewhat plastic in the sense that if you drop a hot fuel element into the salt, that it would be more or less malleable in the sense of further encasing the salt within the depths of the earth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: First and foremost, if you have salt the one thing that that tells you is that in that given site right there, there would not be water.  If there was water there would be no salt, because the water would erode the salt.  So the absence of water was of primary importance.  But underground, deep underground - I remember riding a rickety old industrial elevator which seemed to be at the bowels of the earth, and when it reached to the lower level you'd walk out into these mined corridors and salt.  And there we would - the plan was to be able to drill holes into the salt and to place the fuel elements.  And we had designed a special underground heavy-duty carrier that would receive the fuel element from above into a shielded container, and then drive it down the corridors, go over the whole, and deposit the fuel into the earth - into the salt formation.
MR. MCDANIEL: And so Oak Ridge was - they're developing this.
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, very much involved.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean, they were the ones that were developing this.
MR. ALEXANDER: They were heavily involved in developing that concept.  And even to this day the salt formations are still considered to be ideal for repository, i.e. the Nevada test site.  Yucca Mountain is the name of where there's hope - still hope to develop an underground repository.  But even there there's still difficulties in doing that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: But again, we had to tell the folks of Lyons that that was not to be because of two things.  There was as I recall two issues, and this is not necessarily in order of importance.  But there was perhaps, I think, some problems distant from this specific site of earth depression and/or the suggestion of water which was kind of uncomfortably close.  But the other big issue was that in the public arena and the political arena there was a very negative attitude towards this project progressing, because basically they said, "Kansas does not want to be the nation's dumping ground for the country's nuclear waste."
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so there was public opposition coupled with some technical issues that developed.  And so here we are, 30, 40 years later and we still do not have a repository for spent fuel.
MR. MCDANIEL: because every state would say the same thing.  "We don't want to be the dumping ground."
MR. ALEXANDER: Not in my backyard, the NIMB kind of problem.  So that was one thing that stands out in the '70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that was one of the things in the '70s.
MR. ALEXANDER: And oh, I can remember also the concept of the agro-industrial complexes, an idea developed by ORNL, I believe, in their offices at the Y-12 site and some of their buildings there, of being able to build these super-reactors that would not only produce electricity, but seawater could be converted to drinking water.  And if these were strategically placed within the regions of the world near a coastline, they would be these extremely beneficial facilities for the development of these regions by providing fresh water as well as electricity, and then to have agricultural developments in association with that fresh water that has being pumped from the sea.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was a big project.  Desalination - well, anyway, converting salt water to clean water, drinking water was a huge project in Oak Ridge, wasn't it?
MR. ALEXANDER: Huge - it was a huge project, and we had many concepts.  I can remember artists' illustrations and photographs that I would distribute widely, national magazines about what Oak Ridge was working on, that perhaps this would be a solution developing third world countries and underdeveloped regions of the world.  The other thing that I wanted to jump to that I can remember in the '70s that was very, very important at Oak Ridge, and that was fusion energy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ALEXANDER: And there were many research facilities at the Y-12 site.  It was an Oak Ridge National Laboratory program.  But we had many programs related to - hopefully to develop the fusion process, the joining of atoms rather than splitting them as in fission, and that we would be able to develop reactors that would be safer and to produce energy similar to the processes going on the surface of the sun through the fusion of materials.  And Oak Ridge had a very large program in fusion energy and research.  We're still involved in it, to my knowledge, in fusion energy.  It's not to the degree it was then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: We also had a big magnet program to develop these super magnets that would be necessary for future fusion energy devices that would require intense magnetic fields.  And we were the lead site in the United States for a number of years in developing magnets.  But I can remember when I first came to Oak Ridge, the '60s and the '70s, that there was a prediction that, oh, it will be at least 20 years because there's many technical and complex issues associated with the development of that technology.  So it will be at last 20 years.  Well, here we are 2011, and I'm not sure that we're much closer to an operating fusion reactor as we were back then, again because of the technical issues and technical difficulties of being able to -
MR. MCDANIEL: I think Oak Ridgers are spoiled because, you know, they did the Manhattan Project in 18 months, you know, and -
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes - yes.  Exactly.
MR. MCDANIEL: So they - you know.  So I think we were all a little spoiled by that.
MR. ALEXANDER: A little spoiled by the ease with which we were able to come to success so quickly.
MR. MCDANIEL: One thing I want you to talk about in the '70s is talk about the hijacked airplane.
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, yes, the hijacked airplane.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about the hijacked airplane a little bit.
MR. ALEXANDER: The hijacked airplane -
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second.  I'm going to adjust the camera, so - set back up, so.” All right.
MR. ALEXANDER: This was in 1972, and I can remember well the time because my boss - there was only two of us in the office at that time, and Wayne Range, my boss, had to go on a trip to Washington, DC.  And so I was left alone in the office.  I was the number two guy, and little did I know what would befall me during his absence.  In fact, I can remember that he decided to stay in Washington an extra day or two, and it was on - I think - a Saturday morning when I got a telephone call from a gentleman you know, Harvey Cobert. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. ALEXANDER: Harvey Cobert was the director of public relations for Union Carbide, and he and I worked on a number of issues, but I was the number two guy.  He was the number one guy there.  So Harvey called me at home early on that Saturday morning and he said, "Jim!  Jim, we've got a problem."  And I said - and I was still asleep.  And he said, "There's a plane that's been hijacked and the hijackers are threatening to force the pilot to crash his plane into the High Flux Isotope Reactor."  And I kind of, you know, wiped my eyes, and I said, "Harvey, it's too early to be joking.  You can't be serious."  He says, "I am serious."  And so with that began a saga in the realm of public relations, in my case, for a number of hours.  And I immediately jumped up, got dressed, and went to the - then it was the - I guess that was ERDA, our ERDA office building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.  Now was that the federal building, where it is now?
MR. ALEXANDER: That was the federal building, I'll just use that - yeah, the federal office building downtown.  And Harvey and I discussed where is the best place for us to go together.  It was he and I together.  So Harvey came over from Y-12 where his offices was and we sat in the public area of that building.  You didn't have to have a badge to get into this section where we decided to set up quarters.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And the very first thing that we did is we got sort of up to date from the technical people as to what was happening.  But the most vivid thing - memory of that whole episode was the ability to walk out of the federal office building, into the parking lot, look up into the sky and see that airplane circling Oak Ridge.  Talk about bringing home a threat.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because at that time the air space over Oak Ridge was I guess a no-fly zone.  I mean, it was closed, wasn't it?
MR. ALEXANDER: No, actually, not at that point in time.  It was known as an area that you had to have -
MR. MCDANIEL: Special -
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, you'd better be careful because you wouldn't want to fly over Y-12 particularly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: But we got together, and the first thing that we did after the logistics of setting up an office - and the phones had not started ringing intently at that point.  So we hastily got together - Joe Lenhard was one of the guys that I sat down with - and we said, "Okay, what are we gonna be asked?  The question is going to be what would happen if the hijackers force the pilot to crash the airplane into the High Flux Isotope Reactor."  And that was the question.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And over and over again, the phones would ring and we would pick up the phones.  Harvey would use the same answer that I used, and Joe Lenhard with the DOI, working with his counterparts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory basically came up with the answer that we considered best we could do at that time, with that short notice, because phones are ringing.  We had to give an answer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And that was - there was the belief that if the plane crashed it would not be crashing straight down.  The High Flux Isotope Reactor core was underground surrounded by thick concrete walls.  Yes, the superstructure was steel and aluminum, a classic industrial building, and that would certainly be severely damaged if not wiped off of its foundation.  But if the airplane's coming in at angle, which you would presume - coming in at an angle - there was a belief that it would demolish essentially the top of the facility, but the reactor being, what, 16, 18 feet below the surface of this big pool, concrete pool, that it is highly unlikely that that reactor itself would be damaged to the extent that radioactive materials would be blown outside of the perimeters of the Oak Ridge federal reservation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: It would be a limited kind of dispersal of radioactive material, and we expected it would be contained within the government reservation.  And that was sort of the bottom line to the answer that we had at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so -
MR. MCDANIEL: Now that you look back on it, though -
MR. ALEXANDER: You know, I have never talked with anyone else that said that you guys were crazy to have said that, or that you were wrong.  It's just that hey, you know, that was the best answer that we had -
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the best answer at the time.
MR. ALEXANDER: Based on the design and construction.  Of course the reactor was shut down, and whether or not the plane could even be aimed directly at the building, even hit it, but even a direct hit, it was our best belief that the superstructure would've been raked down, torn down, but that the reactor, being far beneath the surface and surrounded by concrete -
MR. MCDANIEL: It'd just be a big mess.  It'd be a big mess.
MR. ALEXANDER: It would be a horrible, horrible mess.
MR. MCDANIEL: Horrible mess, because you know the plane, even if it did that, it would keep on going and probably hit some other things, and -
MR. ALEXANDER: And hit some other things.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, so -
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, so we would certainly expect to have radioactive materials to have to deal with.  We did not consider it to be a catastrophe.
MR. MCDANIEL: It wouldn't be like a Three Mile Island type of - China Syndrome type - which we're going to talk about in a minute.  But it wouldn't be like a disaster, I mean, a radioactive disaster.
MR. ALEXANDER: Right.  And another thing that was so fortunate for Harvey and I, because we were the only ones working this at that time - and I might add that at one point in time a reporter for the Oak Ridger came over and sat in our office and just sat there and watched us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: Kind of interesting to have a reporter listening to you talking to other media, but that's what we did.  
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And the interesting thing and the fortunate thing for Harvey and I was that, as you know the history of that particular incident, the plane circled a few times, and then they decided that, hey, they're not interested in forcing the plane to the ground.  They wanted more money, different - so they left the Oak Ridge area and didn't come back to the Oak Ridge area.  So we did not have to - well, there was at one point the fear that it might come back, but we didn't have to get together again for a public relations kind of information flow issues, but -
MR. MCDANIEL: But that lasted a while.
MR. ALEXANDER: Most of the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Most of the morning.
MR. ALEXANDER: Most of the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: And a lot of things were going on in the plants.  You know, all but emergency personnel were being discharged to go home, and a lot of the facilities were being shut down and buttoned up.  So a lot of measures were being taken to minimize any damage and problem for the public by taking certain steps, but we were focused on answering the multitude of telephone calls that were coming in.  But the fortunate thing was that the plane left.  Now if the plane had stayed there much longer I am confident that the media from certainly the United States and perhaps international media would start flooding into Oak Ridge to set up camp, to observe and to watch this thing.  But it never played out long enough for that influx of news media to develop.
MR. MCDANIEL: But you did have phone calls from -
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, the phones, the phone calls -
MR. MCDANIEL: Major, major news outlets.
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, absolutely.  It's just that they didn't get on airplanes and fly in or drive in and just inundate us with very little preparation for handling anything like that at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: In more recent years and after that and Three Mile Island - I should get this in I think right now.  Oak Ridge recognized, particularly after Three Mile Island and to a degree about that airline incident - of course Three Mile Island was seven years later in 1979.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: But we realized the importance of putting together an emergency response program in great formality, because there were shortcomings at Three Mile Island as far as how you deal with the media and the public.  And we all in government, particularly DOE, we decided that it was time to really get together and come up with formalized plans, exercises, working with state and federal officials, and how would you handle such a massive influx of media, emergency personnel, and what kind of order - how could you maintain order.  So that goes on today, as I understand it, continual exercises to be able to prepare one’s self for dealing with big issues like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.  One of the things, and I think it was in the '70s, was President Carter visited.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember, were you involved in that?
MR. ALEXANDER: I was involved in a number of major visits, but that was a little early in my tenure to be able to be of major involvement.  But high official visits really stand out in my mind as - I remember President Ford going to Knoxville and I was heavily involved in that visit.  In fact I got arrested for speeding in a government car on Pellissippi Parkway.  
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: This is kind of funny -
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, tell me.
MR. ALEXANDER: Because I was racing from Oak Ridge to go to work at the old Hyatt motel.  That's where the visit - major part of the visit transpired.  And I had to get there.  I probably was running a little late.  And so I looked up ahead and I saw a police - Tennessee Highway Patrol, I believe it was, pulling cars over.  And so I thought to myself - he was walking down and talking to everybody in the cars that had been pulled over in front of me, so I thought, "Hey, I've got a perfect excuse.  I'm with the Department of Energy and we're hosting a visit by the President.  And so, you know, I have to get there, and I'm sorry for speeding, sir.  That's why I was in such a hurry."   So he comes to the window, and this guy was really cool.  He said, "I wonder what kind of story you're going to have."  He says, "The person in front of you had a sick aunt, and the person in front of that was some other kind of problem that he thought was very important.  Now what kind of problem do you think that you had that entitled you to break the speed limit on Pellissippi Parkway?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And I thought, "Well, sir, I guess I just won't explain that since I don't think you're too amenable to listening to the answer that I had." 
MR. MCDANIEL: That's funny.  That is funny.
MR. ALEXANDER: But yeah, presidential visits, visits by secretaries of Energy.  I would always be involved, not so much at the beginning of the career because I was so young and my bosses would take over - the Carter visit was one example.  But - and a little footnote to my career: I'll never forget the pleasant experience I had at - in 1994, my last big responsibility was hosting a visit by the Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary at that time.  And she was visiting Y-12, and there was just a scurry of activity on the periphery.  Of course I was on the periphery; she and others were dealing with other big issues and the programmatic kinds of things.  But I was scurrying around trying to get a press release approved to announce something, and I had my brick cell phone, the old Motorola first phones that had an antenna about that high above the two or three pound telephone, and I had my briefcase, and I was running around doing this, that, and the other.  And someone came into the area where we were all associated, you know, giving room, and this guy come in and he says, "Alexander!  Alexander!  They need you in the dining room," where Hazel O'Leary and all the bigwigs of Oak Ridge were seated and having lunch.  And so I rushed through the door to figure out, "Uh-oh, my boss, Joe Lagrone, he's got some new problem or question of me."  So, I rush through the door into this auditorium.  Everybody got up, and Hazel O'Leary led the group in the singing of, "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."
MR. MCDANIEL: Are you serious?
MR. ALEXANDER: She had been told that it was my final day of work at the DOE, and you talk about a memorable exit.  And speaking of exit, there was a photographer in on this little secret, knowing that I was going to be serenaded.  And he positioned him outside of that door that I plunged out of.  So above that door was an exit sign, and here I was with my cell phone, briefcase, and exit on the day I exited from DOE.
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny!  That's great.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, that's one of my favorite photos.
MR. MCDANIEL: We - now let's - so let's talk about the '80s a little bit.  One of the things that I want you to talk about, and I can't remember what year this was, but when they had the congressional hearings.  I believe it was during Joe Lagrone's tenure.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes, that was -
MR. MCDANIEL: That was in the '80s.
MR. ALEXANDER: That was in the '80s.  That would've been in about '84, '85, somewhere in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, with Marilyn Lloyd and Al Gore.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.  Let's talk about the '80s, but that's one of the things I want you to talk about as well.
MR. ALEXANDER: And I think that is the meeting that you were referring to that was associated with the announcement of the release of mercury from the Y-12 plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, it was held at the - yes.
MR. ALEXANDER: It was held at the old -
MR. MCDANIEL: At the museum.
MR. ALEXANDER: At the museum, yes.  Now I was manning the fort at that time.  I was not at those hearings.  My boss was there every day.  But -
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure that was a big deal -
MR. ALEXANDER: That was a huge - a huge situation of the release of mercury.  I happen to have written the press release which announced to the public and the world that we could not account for, what was it, 1.4 million pounds worth -
MR. MCDANIEL: Something like that, yeah.
MR. ALEXANDER: And that figure was revised upward later.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And that was a huge, huge issue that I was heavily involved in, and not so much the hearings themselves, but of course I was kept abreast of the content of those hearings, and there were some very difficult times for people who had to explain to the congressmen answering to the questions of - well, some of the questions related to, "Well, why didn't you speak about this before?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And this is - I'm getting a little rusty on the details, but as I recall that situation was that we were under severe classification restrictions with respect to dealing with specific numbers of mercury possession at Y-12, because mercury was used in a process to separate lithium isotopes for the nuclear weapons program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so therefore that was a very classified program, and there was the problem of being able to deal with precise numbers and how -
MR. MCDANIEL: because people knew how much mercury you had, then they could kind of figure out - exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes, yes.  And then they would wonder, "Well, why hasn't this been discussed before?"  Well, as a matter of fact there were environmental monitoring reports which did discuss the presence in East Fork Poplar Creek and elsewhere within the public domain, so there were documents that did confirm earlier the presence of mercury.  The detail as to how it was released, associated with which program - that came later.  But I know the government attempted to do the right thing, to certainly acknowledge in environmental monitoring reports the presence of mercury in the environment.  Now - but obviously later we found out huge problems within the community of Oak Ridge and that it had migrated through East Fork Poplar Creek all the way to Poplar Creek on the other end of the reservation.  We had a massive cleanup program to clean up East Fork Poplar Creek.  We had to go into -
MR. MCDANIEL: And East Fork Poplar Creek had been dredged and -
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes, had to been dredged.
MR. MCDANIEL: Had been dredged early, before all this, and it got -
MR. ALEXANDER: Exactly, with the sand.
MR. MCDANIEL: It got moved to new buildings in Oak Ridge, so -
MR. ALEXANDER: Yes, part of the upgrades of the water or sewer lines within Oak Ridge.  They had used some of the sediments from East Fork Poplar Creek as part of that construction activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: So we had major, major cleanup programs throughout the community.  You know, just flashing into my mind, though, one of the things that I recall, not only the difficulties of having to deal with that very negative issue of this contamination, but in working with the city of Oak Ridge I can remember that I always thought how well that the city and the government and the contractors worked together to solve this problem.  Yes, the city was not happy at all.  Would any city be happy with the presence of mercury within the neighborhoods and so forth?
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course not.
MR. ALEXANDER: But they were sympathetic with the government and its contractors knowing that we were working and working hard to correct a problem.  And there was a compatibility of a working relationship between the government and its contractors and the city of Oak Ridge which was so beneficial.  It was not a real negative environment with the city expressing its anger and frustration and anger with us.  It was more of, "Let's work together.  Let's work as hard as we can to correct this problem."
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you think probably in a rare sense of clarity among - pardon my bias - among government officials that they realized that - as I've been told and have been explained by a lot of people that, you know, we were doing things for our national security, we could have - and we could have been more careful.  But we thought we were doing what needed to be done.  And do you think that the city took that into consideration, as well as the fact that if it wasn't for the Department of Energy, the AEC there wouldn't be an Oak Ridge, and that even today or even then the financial stability of the city of Oak Ridge depended on the federal government?
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So they tried to be as understanding as possible because they knew they were so closely tied to the work that was done there.
MR. ALEXANDER: I think that's a part of it.  I think in part there was an element of trust, and part of that is built on the fact that so many Oak Ridgers worked at the facility.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: These are highly-educated people, and they could come home and the headlines and the news would say one thing, and they would say, "Well, let me - behind that, let me explain this because I am a scientist or a biologist," or whatever, and to be able to impart a level of communications within the community so that they really understand and understood the technicalities of the issue, and therefore I think there was a lot of trust on the part of the community that, "Hey, a lot of our people work there.  They're working diligently.  This is their source of income.  This is the source of their livelihood.  They are trying their best, because we know them.  They are our next-door neighbors.  They are our friends at church, in the community."  And so I think there was this camaraderie and the element of trust, and the things that you said I think also come into play.
MR. MCDANIEL: While everybody outside of Oak Ridge was saying the sky was falling, they were explaining, "No, it's just a few leaves off the tree that we need to take care of, sweep up," and you know -
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, so to speak.  Let me give you a good story related to people - talking about people outside of Oak Ridge.  There was a point in time that - it was very disturbing to me because I knew that the situation was not in Oak Ridge - even though we had serious problems that were being corrected, they were not nearly as dangerous as some reports suggested.  And I had a tour bus that came out of Nashville with about 40 people on this bus, and I was with that group, and we toured the Oak Ridge facilities.  Their plan in advance, I had been told at the museum, that they were going to eat lunch in Oak Ridge after the tour, and then they were going on back home to Nashville.  And I'm standing there at the end of the bus after I'd said my goodbyes and thanks for coming to Oak Ridge, and I hope this gives you a greater understanding of all the things that we're proud of here in Oak Ridge.  And the woman that was in charge of the tour, she got on the microphone and said something like this.  She said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I've had several of you express to me your worry over our plans of having lunch in Oak Ridge today because of all the information that we have on the environmental and health and safety issues in Oak Ridge.  So there has been so much concern expressed that we think that we will cancel our plans to eat in Oak Ridge and we'll just take the bus from here and eat somewhere en route back to Nashville."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: That was one of the low points that I can remember that I had - this would've been in the '80s - of coming home how serious people outside of Oak Ridge were taking this and believing that there were so many serious problems at Oak Ridge that it could be even a hazard to eat in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Even a hazard to eat in Oak Ridge.
MR. ALEXANDER: So going back to the element of trust that goes back to one of the things that I wanted to mention.  At the beginning of the '80s, 1983 to be specific, we had a new manager that came in, and about the time that the mercury issue was coming forth to the public.  And that manager, Joe LaGrone, whom you have interviewed, made it clear to us in public affairs that he had a whole new agenda coming into Oak Ridge with respect to dealing with environmental issues, skeletons in the closet, making our facilities better, more efficient, safer, less impact to the environment.  And we are going to do that in full cooperation with the public, in general; more specifically, our workers, the employees of this city, the employees of cities wherever we have facilities.  We are going to be open and in total candor with respect to our problems and our issues.  And it was - that was sort of - with the mercury coming out and this new mandate, we jumped on that within our office and knew that we had a whole new world before us in terms of communication with the public.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: We had no more staff, but Mr. Range and I had a lot of work to do, not the least of which was to deal with our contractor public relations people and say, "Folks, in the future we're gonna be operating in a goldfish bowl.  We're going to be reporting accidents, incidents, and issues that develop with much more frequency.  And when you use a standard of whether you should get it out or not get it out, use your - your judgment behind might've been, 'Hey, that's not a big deal; let's don't worry about that.'  Always err on the side of putting it out.  If there's any doubt whatsoever issue it to the public.  We've got to regain credibility and to establish good relationships with our communities."  And I think with that mandate and all of the activities that he was behind in initiating that major environmental restoration program in Oak Ridge, and he is due a huge amount of credit for initiating that program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.  I'm sure that wasn't easy for him, and it probably wasn't easy for everybody else, was it?
MR. ALEXANDER: It was not.  It was not for the staff -
MR. MCDANIEL: Because it was so different.
MR. ALEXANDER: It was different.  It was not that we were hiding things in the past, it was just that we were using a judgment that perhaps was not up to his standards.  And whether or not you should - okay, let's say hypothetically that a laboratory worker - this is a hypothetical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: If a laboratory worker, say at Y-12, was pushing a cart and on that cart was a beaker of a solution of low-level uranium, and that cart collided with another structure within a laboratory, and that beaker of uranium fell on the floor of that workplace, and there was a decision to, "Okay, this is not much of a hazard, but let's get everybody out of here.  Let's evacuate this area so we can get in here to clean that mess up properly."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, you ask yourself, one small beaker of low-level uranium in the liquid form on a concrete form, is that really worthy of putting a press release out?  Well, if you analyze it one way you'd say, "Are we gonna start announcing every spill of an ounce or two of uranium on a floor?  Then we'll never stop issuing press releases on anything!"  But we knew if there was, number one, an evacuation, people are concerned.  People will talk to other people.  This can work its way out to the news media.  The news media can call me.  "I want to know about those things."  And if I know about it -
MR. MCDANIEL: And why didn't you tell us about it?
MR. ALEXANDER: And then, "Why didn't you tell us about it earlier?"  So we got early on into a situation of, "Hey, put it out."  Okay, we had some depleted uranium - smoke from depleted uranium oxidizing within the burial grounds west of Y-12.  You know, should we put something out there?  We have those kinds of problems all the time.  Yes, we are.  We're going to start reporting on any -
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet the contractors didn't like that, did they?
MR. ALEXANDER: I am sure - in fact, we had a visit by a contractor in a facility in Ohio - I won't mention any specifics.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: But they brought an entourage to Oak Ridge specifically to discuss in a roundtable discussion what are these new guidelines for issuing press releases.  And they were not happy at all, it was clear.  And they were basically suggesting that we're being way overboard.  This is ridiculous!  We should not be issuing press releases on this, that, and the other.  And if you're telling us that we do have to start putting out press releases on these minor incidents you're going to have to give us some guidelines.  And we said, "We're not gonna give you guidelines.  We want you to use the judgment that we expect of you in making decisions to get information out to the public, because that's the new expectation.  Now if you want some guidance and clarification give us a call and we'll tell you whether you should or shouldn't.  But we really would prefer that you folks do what we are telling you is the right thing to do, and that is to get it out."  
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: "And if you can't make that decision, we'll be happy to make that decision for you."  And that happened many times.  And they would call me.  The PR director would call and say, "Jim, do you really think this is - I mean, the guy, this or that," and I said, "No, that's easy for me.  Go ahead and get it out."
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: Now at first the media couldn't figure out what was going on -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And a lot of these things would end up on the front page, a number one story in the news -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah.  Yeah.
MR. ALEXANDER: But after they realized this was a new wave of information flowing from DOE, the stories that used to be at the top of the fold started -
MR. MCDANIEL: Getting smaller.
MR. ALEXANDER: Diminishing more and more into the lower, because they realized that, hey, there's going to be a lot of flow of information from the Department of Energy.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that's probably good for the department, because they started using - the media started using their judgment on what was important and what they thought was important and what was not, and the Department of Energy could say, "We released this information. It was released," you know, so -
MR. ALEXANDER: That's right.  As you touched on before, I would much rather call a reporter and say, "I want to tell you about the following.  We're putting out a press release," rather than picking up a phone and say, "Jim, were you aware that you had a spill uranium hexafluoride at K-25?"  And if I have to say no, that's rather embarrassing -
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: Because they think that perhaps I don't really know what's going on in my facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.  And I would imagine that that kind of new way of doing things probably led to - I don't know how to say it - led to probably a little bit more consideration in how the actual event was handled probably.  Here's an example - and you may disagree with this, and I may be wrong.  But I've had several people tell me that here when - just a few years ago there was a leak off of a truck on Bethel Valley Road, I believe, of some -
MR. ALEXANDER: I think that was Highway 95 -
MR. MCDANIEL: Highway 95.
MR. ALEXANDER: A truck going from the lab over to K-25 or in that direction, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: They leaked something, some chemical or something that needed to be cleaned up.  And, you know, they went in and I mean they scraped the road up and -
MR. ALEXANDER: And repaved it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Repaved it and did some fairly - a large amount of work on it to fix it.  And - but I've had several people say, "You know, had that happened 30 years ago we'd have probably just took a water hose out there and washed it off, you know, and maybe scrubbed it a little bit, and that would've been it."  So -
MR. ALEXANDER: And I guess the point of the old timers who worked there, they certainly would've considered that making a mountain out of a molehill perhaps based on how they worked in the "good old days."
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: But at the time that it happened I don't think there was any question in anybody's mind that what they did was necessary, and that's exactly right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: But again, you know, talking about old practices, sometimes folks look at the practices at Oak Ridge and think that this was, you know, sloppy work and deliberate kinds of practices that were bad and wrong, and that they should've known better.  Well, actually they were performing tasks and jobs exactly consistent with the standards of the time.  Standards have greatly changed over how you deal with burying waste in the earth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: Oak Ridge National Lab - you're familiar.  Open trenches would be dug.  Things would be dumped in direct contact with the earth.  Well, certainly you would never do anything like that again.  And so if you did that in the past, this is not symptomatic of a bad culture.  It is simply evidence of people following the practices at the time and believing that they were doing -
MR. MCDANIEL: And of the evolution of technology, so.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, exactly.  That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So -
MR. ALEXANDER: Let's see if there was anything -
MR. MCDANIEL: Was there anything else you wanted to -
MR. ALEXANDER: Anything about the environmental issues and dealing with the mercury and –
MR. MCDANIEL: What would be the biggest - in your 30 years, what was the biggest challenge that you had?  And you might've talked about it already.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, I had many accidents and incidents that were very challenging.  A train wreck in Rockingham, North Carolina, and I approached it and there was rail cars - it was like a TV set.  We had cars falling off of a track, and there was a report that it was an Oak Ridge shipment there.  And when I arrived the media had already come to this small, little airport at Rockingham and I was being inundated by questions even before I could get to the site.  When I got to the site and I looked at helicopters flying, respondents from two states, two or three federal agencies, this looked like a television -
MR. MCDANIEL: Disaster movie.
MR. ALEXANDER: Series disaster movie.  I could not believe my eyes, and -
MR. MCDANIEL: What was on the train from Oak Ridge?
MR. ALEXANDER: Depleted uranium from one of the gaseous diffusion plants.  I can't remember whether it was Oak Ridge.  And just what we call heels, the residue of depleted uranium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, we didn't - once - we had pretty much confidence when we flew up there that there would be no problems.  But again, when you hear a radioactive shipment on a train and this time tumbled down into a ravine - but as soon as our health physics people walked down to the area and checked it we knew that we had no problem.  The cylinder was dented but there was no release of material.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: But even at that time there was discussion on the part of the EPA to evacuate all of those homes on that hillside because there was a radioactive shipment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: On board, on this train.  But now back to your question, the most significant –
MR. MCDANIEL: And when did that happen?
MR. ALEXANDER: That happened - that was in the '70s, I believe, or early '80s, late '70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'd never heard that story before.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, that -
MR. MCDANIEL: But it wasn't that much of a story - I mean, you know.
MR. ALEXANDER: I flew with two technicians from Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant who - one was a specialist in packaging and the other was a specialist in radiation monitoring.  And the three of us - and I was the information guy, knowing that there would be media crawling everywhere, which there was -
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember who those guys were?  Do you remember their names?
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, no.  I don't.  
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MR. ALEXANDER: Maybe if I can remember those two names -
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.  That's all right.
MR. ALEXANDER: I'll tell you another interesting thing.  A shipment of a spent fuel element was coming into Oak Ridge and the truck driver lost control, and this spent fuel - highly radioactive, I might add.  This truck crashed in a ravine side of the road of the road coming from the interstate towards Clinton, and it was a secondary road, two lanes.  And we got word in my office.  I and a health physicist got in a government car and we drove up to Clinton, and there was this highway patrolman.  "Stop," he said, "you can't go any further."  We showed him our badges and our Geiger counter and he said, "Okay, you folks can go down there."  You talk about being kind of scared.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I bet.
MR. ALEXANDER: I mean, until we got there we didn't know whether we had high levels of radiation or not.  But the guy - the health physicist as I drove was hanging his probe out the side of the car, and we - you know, there was nothing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where was it exactly?  Was it past Clinton, was it -
MR. ALEXANDER: Past Clinton going towards -
MR. MCDANIEL: Towards I-75.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, in that direction.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And the next day the story focused on the shipment of radioactive material being involved in a serious accident, and you had to read about the third or fourth paragraph before you read that the driver was killed.  Again, the inordinate amount of interest in things radioactive rather than the loss of life in a traffic accident.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?  Wow.  My goodness.
MR. ALEXANDER: Anyway, going back to that question, I think, what did you ask me about the most significant -
MR. MCDANIEL: What's the most significant challenge that you had?
MR. ALEXANDER: I think what I have touched on with the turning of the page with respect to the policies and operating in a goldfish bowl and the tremendous amount of work that we had in working with the contractors, the public, and the media to convince them that this is a new DOE.  You are going to hopefully find that we are going to be very open and candid, and that we will be inviting you into our facilities.  Let me give you one example of that time, a rather dramatic decision by Joe LaGrone.  And that was we were in a meeting with regulators, and one of the things that he made sure, that there was gonna be absolute top-notch relationships with the regulators, state and federal, with respect to environmental issues.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And I remember him in this meeting asking, "Do you folks have any difficulties in getting into your facility - into our facilities?  Because your job is to monitor us, look over our shoulders."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: And one or two of them kind of nodded their heads, yes, that at times they did have some difficulties getting in here.  And LaGrone almost immediately said, "I think I know how I can take care of that.  We'll get you security clearances so you can come and go whenever you want to without an advance notice."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: He said it, and he meant it, and he did it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. ALEXANDER: And so - now you talk about sending a message to the regulators and to the public.  "Look, you can come anytime you want to, because we're gonna clear you to make sure that you can do your job."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: But again, I guess that - looking back that's when long hours began.  My most difficult years at DOE were the last ten years, from '83 to '93, and that was long hours of working almost every night, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00 at night.
MR. MCDANIEL: Back to the newspaper days, huh?
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah -
MR. MCDANIEL: And you weren't nearly as young as you were back then, were you?
MR. ALEXANDER: Not nearly, but it just an overwhelming amount of work in comparison with previous years, and it was difficult times in the sense that a lot of it was negatively oriented: accidents, incidents, spills, problems, issues, allegations, rumors, and to try to ferret all that out and to deal, you know, with the public on, you know, usually negative-type issues was difficult.  Now in contrast - now let's shift gears to a very positive part of my career -
MR. MCDANIEL: Good, let's - that's -
MR. ALEXANDER: It was after the 30 years that I spent with the Department of Energy, and that was as a contractor to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in conducting tours and visitation to Oak Ridge facilities for about 12 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So after you retired from DOE -
MR. ALEXANDER: After I retired I - do you remember Marilyn McLaughlin?
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm, oh, yeah.
MR. ALEXANDER: Marilyn called me and said, "Would you be interested - since you in communications know a little bit about a lot of things in Oak Ridge, would you be interested?"  I said, "That's sounds great."  So I participated in that public tours and took - made talks and briefings and tours of Oak Ridge facilities.  And the reason I really liked that, because it was a shift away from dealing with accidents, incidents, and problems to satisfying the interest of the visiting public on the wonders and activities of Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you could talk about the great part - the great part of it.
MR. ALEXANDER: Exactly, the wonderful history of Oak Ridge, which everybody's fascinated with, and then to shift gears to the contemporary work and the future that will be enhanced by the activities at Oak Ridge.  And so that was a real, real pleasure for me after the last ten years of dealing with the other kinds of issues.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.  Well, a couple other things I want to ask you about real quick is - one is, you know, obviously we talked about your first daughter being born, and you had through the years - you had two more daughters, is that -
MR. ALEXANDER: Two more daughters, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Two more daughters, and you've always lived - you've never lived in Oak Ridge.  You've always lived in the Knoxville area.
MR. ALEXANDER: I was a commuter, yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, so -
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, the reason I made that decision is that all of our families - my family's side, my wife's family's side - all lived in Knoxville.  And I thought about that, commuting back and forth, and I thought, "It's probably best that one person of the family do the commuting rather than all of them."
MR. MCDANIEL: Than everybody else, of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so - I loved Oak Ridge, though.  I mean, I could easily have lived in Oak Ridge and been extremely happy to do so.  But - and I'm so proud of Oak Ridge, and I enjoy so much visiting, going and talking with people and looking at the history.  And in a sort of vicarious sense I can almost wish that I could transfer myself back into the time of the '40s with the excitement of all the young people coming and working together behind the fence, and working for a common good of the country.  And just talking to people like Bill Wilcox and others who were there at that time, to me it would be such an exciting and wonderful time to have worked in Oak Ridge, and particularly with the success and knowing that what you did ended World War II.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly.  What a thing to look back and say, "I was a part of that."
MR. ALEXANDER: I was a part of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: "Wasn't that a wonderful opportunity for me?" you know, especially as a young person when you're full of life and full of energy, and something new and exciting and emotional - you know, emotion-filled, you know? 
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, and the romances that developed - people who came from various parts of the country, and believing that they would go "back home" after the war was over, and then think, "Hey, Oak Ridge is a really nice place to stay.  I think I'll stay."
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let me - I won't - I have one more question for you, and as a trained newspaper man and a person who worked in public relations and public information for 30-something years for the government, what is your take on today's media?  What is your take on the new media, the social media?  I mean, you know, tell me what you think is good and what is bad, and how can young people today who are doing perhaps the same type of job that you had when you first started - you know, what opportunities are there for them to utilize the new media?
MR. ALEXANDER: I am a very poor person to ask about that because I am not current on all of the new means of communication, and e-mailing and texting and Facebook -
MR. MCDANIEL: Tweeting and -
MR. ALEXANDER: And Tweeting.  I am a relic of the past when it turns to communications.  Computers don't like me, and the feeling is mutual.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: I have more problems than successes with computers.  But getting back to the way that I think I would answer that question and looking at the media and those in school today, I think basically journalism is the search for the truth no matter what; to get it out rapidly and accurately to the public, make sure that - of course accuracy is number one important -
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And to get that information you have to - one has to deal with multiple sources and try to balance that story with perhaps extremes that you might get on either end striving for a position always of giving anyone who has an opinion or stake in that particular story an opportunity - to a point of reasonableness -
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: Of expressing their opinion and having the balance, along with the accuracy, so that the public is informed in a very professional fashion.  And I have great respect for journalists because I was one at one time, and I recognize the difficulties.  It is not an easy profession, but it is a very, very rewarding and exciting profession.  And I would do it again in a heartbeat if I had to start it over again and take the same career path.  I could've also been happy in the newspaper for all those years.  I mean, it's just - it's a feeling of being on top of things.  You're a journalist and you're at the forefront of activities.  You have this beneficial position of being able to gather information and have the pleasure of the success of communicating this information from that vantage point to a very interested public, which should be educated in all kinds of realms, whether government or science, industry, whatever.  That's a way to answer it I think.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, and as a filmmaker myself, you know, I kind of feel the same way, is that there's a fundamental, basic understanding of what it means to tell a story.  Now the tools that you use to tell it -
MR. ALEXANDER: Can vary.
MR. MCDANIEL: Are going to change and continue to change, but the basic element of having the fundamentals of knowing how to tell a story and tell it properly remains the same, whatever tools.  And I guess that that's - if I put my two cents' worth in about that, that's the way that I would think about that, so.
MR. ALEXANDER: Yeah, and you think that perhaps - here it's been 17 years since I have retired, and I think about press releases and things.  Could I really still write a press release?  Well, I think it's like a bicycle.  I bet it would take me five minutes behind, preferably, a typewriter rather than a computer - and I want to tell you a funny story about that -
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ALEXANDER: But you would never forget it, and you would take great pleasure, because there's the mechanics of putting information together -
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.  Exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: In the proper order to be able to start with the important and end with the mundane and tell the full story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.  Well, tell me your last story.  Tell me your typewriter-computer story.
MR. ALEXANDER: Oh, yeah.  I was the last and I - hang on just a second.  Could you go somewhere where you're out of the corner of my eye?  
MR. MCDANIEL: We're almost through.
MR. ALEXANDER: We're almost through, we're winding down.
MR. MCDANIEL: A few minute and we'll be through.
MR. ALEXANDER: Okay.  I was the last one in the office to - and I was, in fact, drug kicking and screaming into the world of computers, because I had my Royal typewriter, my manual Royal typewriter.  At the newspaper it was the old, standard black, but mine when I went to DOE, to the Atomic Energy Commission, in a few years it was a brand new beige one, and boy, that looked modern to me.  But it still was the Royal typewriter.  And so I kept - you know, very reluctantly, and I can remember typing press releases, and particularly - I would do some speech writing for some of the managers, and I could end up - you know, I'm going stand just slowly -
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, here, let me kind of go back here just a little - 
MR. ALEXANDER: Okay.  I can remember at the typewriter editing, pasting, Scotch taping, white out, and then having to figure out where is -
MR. MCDANIEL: Go ahead; stand up if you need to.
MR. ALEXANDER: Where is the end of this thing that I have just typed?  And I can remember lifting up into the air a speech that - you know, with all these pages stuck together, and in fact it'd be some rolled up, and then I would hand it to the secretary, you know, to put together in final form.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: And getting to this - it's a kind of interesting story, though.  And finally I agreed to be taught how to use a computer, more specifically, the Word Perfect.
MR. MCDANIEL: Word processor, yes, yes.
MR. ALEXANDER: And they taught me just enough with my hunt and pecking technique - I never was taught typing but I could go pretty fast as long as I could hear and type, but not have to transpose from one to the other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MR. ALEXANDER: But I could push a button and magically this - what I had done would to go the secretaries, and they would polish it up and edit it and paragraph it.  I didn't - you know, I knew very little about how to do any of those things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: So there was one - I think it was - yes, it was a Friday afternoon.  We had to have a very important report into Washington every Friday afternoon.  A thunderstorm came through the valley, wiped out electricity to the building, including all of the computers.  I had insisted on keeping my manual typewriter almost like a teddy bear close to me, and it was on the shelf of my window in my office.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. ALEXANDER: And so everybody's standing around twiddling their thumbs trying to figure out, '"How in the world are we going to get this report to Washington?  The computers are down.  We can't do it."  I said, "Just wait a minute," reached up, picked up my manual, put it in front of me, got my paper in there, and typed out my input to this report, which was about four, five items.  I walked in as they're still standing there.  I said, "Here, you smart computer people.  Here is my contribution to your report.  Now what are you going to do with it?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my.  My, my.
MR. ALEXANDER: But the problem with typewriters, as you know, is you finally get to a point where you can't buy ribbons.
MR. MCDANIEL: You can't buy ribbons.  They don't make them anymore.
MR. ALEXANDER: They don't make them anymore, so I -
MR. MCDANIEL: It's almost to the point about film now, you know?  You can't buy - you certainly can't buy Kodak Chrome film anymore, I think.
MR. ALEXANDER: That's true.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, because everything's gone digital.  So -
MR. ALEXANDER: I used to - speaking of film -
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you still have that typewriter?
MR. ALEXANDER: No, I don't.  That was Government Issue.  I couldn't take it home.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, government issue.
MR. ALEXANDER: I couldn't do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ALEXANDER: But early in my career - you might - want to tell you one little story.  This is just about one of my jobs in the photography lab at the old Knoxville Journal.  I ran the telephoto machine, and you would load a rotating drum with four by five paper and snap it down, and then you would listen to the gruff-talking Yankee in New York - I'm joking about the term Yankee - but this guy was mean and he was tough.  And you'd have to phase your machine to his signal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ALEXANDER: And if you missed pushing that button to start that thing - you know, you'd hear it making a peeping noise, you know, and finally when it got through you'd take it off there, take it and process it through the developer, the fixer - you know, the short stop and the fixer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ALEXANDER: And - but if you failed to get that picture and the managing editor looked through the pictures that you had developed and he had a chart of what was to be sent that day, and he said, "Where is this out of Minnesota, the earthquake in Minnesota?"  I said, "Oh, Mr. Humphries, I'll have to go back and ask for a resend."  You talk about a mad man in New York.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I bet.
MR. ALEXANDER: "Bill, this is J. Alexander at the Knoxville Journal.  Could you please during your break send me" - "Arr, arr, arr" - he let me know what he thought about having to resend that thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my.
MR. ALEXANDER: Those were the fun days, like you say, the humble days of photography.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.  Well, thank you so much, Mr. Alexander.  I appreciate it.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, glad to do it.  I'm glad to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: I appreciate it.
MR. ALEXANDER: All right, all right.

[End of Interview]