Westcott, Hoffman, and Freeny: Part 1

              
ORAL HISTORY OF JAMES (ED) WESTCOTT, LYNN FREENY, 
AND FRANK HOFFMAN

Interviewed by Denis Kiely
March 20, 1999
 
 
MR. KIELY:  It’s March 20, 1999, I’m Denis Kiely from Tennessee Technological University and I am here at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge and have the pleasure to be with, from left to right, Lynn Freeny, Frank Hoffman, and Ed Westcott, all of whom have been photographers here for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy.
Just to begin, Mr. Westcott would you talk about how you first came to Oak Ridge and your involvement with the early years here.
MR. WESTCOTT: I was a photographer for the Corps of Engineers, US Corps of Engineers in Nashville, Tennessee, in the Nashville district, and there was a recruiting officer came and talked to a number of people about coming to a job near Knoxville, Tennessee, and also one on the Alaskan Highway, and they needed a photographer in both places. I said I’d like to go to Knoxville because I’m familiar with East Tennessee because I’d been up here on assignments for the government before.  Within a few days I was given an automobile to transfer up here and I arrived with about 29, as I recall, other government employees in the office when I walked in.  I found the one I had to turn the car over to so I just kept the car - 
MR. HOFFMAN: That was over in Knoxville, wasn’t it Ed?
MR. WESTCOTT: They had an old garage showroom and a repair shop over there.   That’s where the first office was set up.  And we worked out of that, coming out to the site daily, and so that’s what brought me here. That was December of 1942.  They had just broken ground that October, started some railroad work into Oak Ridge and things of that nature, but other than that there was very little going on except preliminary grading and surveying.  
MR. HOFFMAN:  What started in December 1, 1942 groundbreaking, here, Y-12, when it took place.  
MR. KIELY:  As a photographer, what was your mission?
MR. WESTCOTT:  The mission was to, when the construction engineers or safety engineers or anyone wanted a photograph of their work to document their work, I’d go with them to do the photography and turn it over to them after it was done for their reports.
MR. KIELY:  Are there any particular projects that you were involved with that were memorable or stick out for you from that early period?
MR. WESTCOTT: Well, it was just when things really started moving in ‘43 they were building the town.  See they built the town of Oak Ridge in three sections of a thousand houses - first thousand, second thousand, third thousand - and as they needed more workers, they built more houses.  So one time first thousand houses as they were being built, the bathtubs had arrived and were off loaded on the Oak Ridge Turnpike in a field.  And if you can imagine seeing a thousand bathtubs in a field - it was quite a sight.  However photography was held back to a limit because of security reasons; everything was either official use only or confidential, or whatnot.  There was not a lot of it required right at the beginning and later on when the Atomic Energy came on board, Atomic Energy Commission, from the military to the civilian, part of their mandate was to have photography done on projects of a certain value, and it was necessary to do progress pictures on all buildings, facilities, once a month.

 MR. HOFFMAN:  Ed covered all the Manhattan Engineering District photographs from 1942 until AEC took over in January of ‘46, I think it was, wasn’t it Ed, and of course, all those photographs are now in the archives in Washington.  We shipped those up in 1991, so that’s where they’re located today.
MR. WESTCOTT:  Before the bomb was dropped, I worked on the photographs for the press release announcing that there was an Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that they were building the atomic bomb here.  And eighteen of my photographs were used in the press package.  We printed up hundreds and hundreds of copies of them.  They were sent out cross county by security couriers to stay in a metropolis area, and when they got the word to release them to a newspaper they went down and placed them in the hands of the editor.  That was before they had, what you call it, facsimile, fax, email.  So those pictures hit the press all over the United States and part of the world through the Armed Forces.  One fellow, Phil Tarber, he was in the Navy, he saw pictures of Oak Ridge, and he said - he was from Chattanooga - and I had my credit line on him of all things, and he said, “I’m going back to Oak Ridge and get me a job with that fellow.”  And sure enough, he came back and got a job with me and worked until they started building the wind tunnel down in Tullahoma and he went there as chief photographer.  Did a wonderful job and retired from there.
MR. KIELY:   So your term as photographer here lasted from 1942 until -
MR. WESTCOTT:   From ‘42 to ‘66.  I must have done something wrong because they transferred me to headquarters in Washington.  I was there for the next 10 years. And  I did all the photography for the commissioners and visits, from the President, trips of the President, related to the Atomic Energy programs, so that kept me on the move for another ten years.
MR. KIELY:  And so Frank you came here - 
MR. HOFFMAN:  Yes, I took Ed’s place here.  I came from Cincinnati.  I was in another AEC facility in Cincinnati.  When I arrived here it still looked like pretty much like an Army base.  There was a lot of the old quonsets and the barracks buildings and the AEC was still headquartered in the Castle on the Hill, which was, I think there was seven barracks buildings put together, and they called it the “Castle,” and we had our photo lab in one of the buildings in the back, one of the original lab buildings, they called them.  So I took over, that was in 1966, and I retired in ‘92.  I went through first AEC, and then ERDA, (Energy Research and Development Administration), and then the Department of Energy.  One of the big projects I did, I was trying to take care of those negatives that Ed produced during the Manhattan Project because they were so classified at the time and they didn’t put any captions on them, so we had to caption most of the photographs.  We identified them, put them in new envelopes, archival envelopes, and then shipped them on to the archives in Washington.  That was quite a project; that took years because I would only do it one week at a time.
MR. KIELY:   How many photographs did you have to provide?
MR. HOFFMAN:  Oh gosh, Ed, I don’t know; I think we maybe had 25 boxes.
MR. WESTCOTT: 10,000 negatives, is that ‘42-‘46.
MR. HOFFMAN:  There was a good 10,000. We sent the negatives from ‘42-‘46.  Actually we started back in ’39.   We had some old photographs that we got hold of, and different people would bring in and so we’d copy them, and we included those into the archives.  I was real pleased that we put them there because they are safe now and they wanted the photographs.  They didn’t have anything on the Manhattan Project, but just a few photographs, so we kind of overloaded them.
MR. WESTCOTT:   People are getting those photographs and using them in books.  Enrico Fermi’s granddaughter came out with a book, right, in ’94.   I believe, all the history…
MR. HOFFMAN:  She sat in the office there, when we were on the Hill. They would research the books there and pick out their history from it.  And I guess the other thing, when I got here to the Museum; it was down on the Turnpike in an old cafeteria.  We finally were lucky and got the money and moved up here which was, of course, all the progress photographs we took of this building and of the first exhibits and which was quite a set up at the time.
MR. WESTCOTT:    Frank and I knew each other before he came down; I would have to go up to National Lead on photo assignments and he was photographer there.  We met - and we weren’t total strangers.
MR. HOFFMAN:  Yeah, I used to send photographs down to Ed and that’s how we kept in touch for quite a few years. And back in those days we were doing motion picture photography too, and we used to do this story of Oak Ridge Operations and they would show it every day here at the Museum.  And that was always a big project; took in all the facilities of the Oak Ridge Operations which were all the Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and Y-12, K-25 and New Brunswick, St. Louis, and Puerto Rico and Niagara Falls, Portsmouth, Paducah.

MR. WESTCOTT: Yeah, this was the office here.  We had to serve a large area.  Did they still have the airplanes when you were here?
MR. HOFFMAN:  No, those were gone at the time.
MR. WESTCOTT:  Well, that was when they were building Paducah and Portsmouth: we had the C-47 and some other kind of plane and a helicopter that went from Oak Ridge to Knoxville to take the workers who had to go up for a day or two to those places so that was a big operation in itself.  The Air Force… 
MR. KIELY:  So you, Frank, you were there until 1992 when you retired?
MR. HOFFMAN:  Yes, I retired in 1992.  We had all these projects going; we would hope the centrifuge project and Portsmouth would have been finished about that time and the Clinch River Breeder Reactor was supposed to be finished, and all of them stopped, so things kind of slowed up, so I thought I would get out and let Lynn take care of..
MR. KIELY:  (to Freeney) So, you came in 1992?
 MR. FREENY:  April of 1992. I remember Frank called me on the phone and he goes – “I am going to retire; are you interested in my job?”  And I said, “Ever since I came to Oak Ridge I’ve been interested in your job.”  And he says “OK, let’s talk.”  So it went from there. The first time I met Frank, he won’t remember this, but I remember I was just starting out, I was over at ORNL taking pictures of the HTML opening, and I felt this nudge, and I looked and somebody said – “Who’s this guy?”, and he said, “That’s Frank Hoffman, the DOE photographer, get out of his way.”
MR. HOFFMAN:  Now that’s when I put on some weight – 
MR. FREENY:  So that’s when I was a skinny guy.
MR. HOFFMAN:  We tried to work with everybody.  We had a lot of photographers coming in and out of there.  
MR. WESTCOTT:  Lynn’s got a big background in photography, even before he came to DOE.  Tell us about your experience there in commercial realm.
MR. FREENY: Well, I started out at North American Phillips being studio photographer, and that’s probably the most boring thing in the world.  Take the shots for owner’s manuals, technical manuals, taking parts and shooting with a Dierdorf Rosewood camera, 8 x 10 camera.  That taught me I wanted to do something else, and I was continually looking at resumes going, and landed a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory doing industrial photography which I really wanted to do.  That was more my dream and in the past I had been a nature photographer, too, I did that, did a lot of covers for the Tennessee Conservation magazine and some other book covers, calendars, and things like that, but to find a job in East Tennessee as an industrial photographer was really my dream.  It landed in my lap after I got the interview with ORNL and got the job, and then Frank calling me on the phone.   I was just so happy and surprised, and said “Yes, I’m interested, very interested.”  And I’ve been here seven years and plan on staying here, longer as long as they keep letting me take pictures of decommissioning of the things - they’ll run out eventually.
MR. HOFFMAN:  There won’t be anything left after they get a key and close the door.
MR. FREENY: Yeah, that’s what someone said, “You can get a picture of them locking the door.”
MR. KIELY:   Anything other than decommissioning that’s been memorable?
MR. FREENY: Well, the CEBAF (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility) thing is something Frank gave over to me.  He was covering it as they were digging holes and stuff in Newport News, VA.  And now, that’s finally on line and I get to take - I remember going down into the halls, and I’d seen some of Frank’s pictures and there was nothing down in there.  And suddenly it started building and I slowly, but surely, twice a year go down there, and do some updated pictures, so now that project is going.  It didn’t go the way of the other projects you were talking about. And another thing we got - we got negatives from the Super Collider project in Dallas, and we got a lot of their digital equipment, so it suddenly modernizes to be a digital place, less staff, but we were servicing people all over the world now because we are sending photographs to London, to Australia, New York to wherever magazines would want photographs.  It’s kind of changed a lot in that hard copy photographs are not nearly as valuable as having digital images for people.  So it is - and with Frank and Ed’s photographs, I have been inundated with this 50th anniversary and for the 50th anniversary of the City of Oak Ridge.  And I did a lot, digitized a lot of their work for that purpose, so it’s gone full circle, I guess, as far as photography.
MR. KIELY:  Since we are having the 50th anniversary, I was wondering if Ed, if you had any particular memories about the opening gate ceremonies or all of the activities associated with it.
MR. WESTCOTT: Well, we, the Public Information Department, had planned on it for some time and the City also, and we knew just about what was going to happen at every hour.  Vice President Barkley was to appear so I was told to go the airport and fly over Oak Ridge the morning of the gate opening - they expected traffic to be backed up all the way to Clinton waiting to come in - Clinton’s eight miles to the east of us - and so there was a plane standing by for me and a broadcast station from Knoxville had a reporter on board, and he was going to broadcast what he saw from flying over.  I remember we got out here in the real early morning.  I believe it was a Saturday, must have been a holiday, and it was a rather cool morning.  You could see the people, you could tell when they were getting up, getting their fires started in their houses.  We had coal burning furnaces at that time. You could see an area, we’d fly over and a puff of smoke would come up from the houses, and I thought, boy, we’re waking those people up with this airplane.  So when we flew over the gate opening site, there weren’t many cars at all on the outside of the gate, but there were an awful lot of cars on the inside of the gate for people from Oak Ridge that were coming on the inside to watch the gate open.  So I flew back to Knoxville and we got in a car and zoomed back out here in time to photograph the rest of the ceremonies, and the parade and the speaking of the Vice President on the football field. I think David Lillienthal was first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; he was one of the speakers and some radio and film personalities 
MR. FREENY:  Who was Vice President then? 
MR. WESTCOTT:  Barkley, Alvin Barkley was Vice President from Kentucky.  So that was a pretty busy day.
MR. KIELY:  Just as a final topic of discussion - this is on technology.  What kinds of equipment were you using in the beginning in regard to changes in that.  When you started, film and processing.

MR. WESTCOTT:   When I got here in ‘42 one of the engineers had an Argus C-3 was the only camera.  In fact we didn’t have any office furniture or anything.  We used the Argus C-3 until later; I believe we got a view camera a Speedgraphic, so my main camera was the Dierdorf, a handmade camera made in Chicago out of Central American mahogany.  They sell now for about $3,000 and I think back then they sold for a couple of hundred, maybe, I don’t know.  Then the Speedgraphic Press Camera with flash on the side was what I used mostly.
MR. HOFFMAN:  When I took over we had Hasselblad Cameras at the time, and they’re still in use today, I mean, there is not a lot of change, really when you look back.  It’s been several years, but 30 years or more.
MR. KIELY:  Processing?
 MR. HOFFMAN:  We did all of our black and white processing and the color we shipped out because we didn’t have the staff to do that and everything, and if there was anything classified Y-12 would process it or ORNL.   But unclassified material we would ship to the contractor in color and all the black and white we did.
MR. KIELY:  What kind of film, black and white, would you use?
MR. WESTCOTT:  Back in the, I guess it was a tri-x at that time, and plus x, but back it was superpan press when you were, Kodak.
MR. HOFFMAN:  We still use the Speedgraphic now and then, and, of course, I use the Dierdorf.  I still use that, I used that until I retired just for little portraits and things like that.  But the Dierdorf,  I had it repaired a few years before I retired and sent it back to Dierdorf in Chicago, and he had a listing of “Camera 142” or something like that .  Said, “You bought it in 1943?” Or ‘44 whenever it was?  He had the exact date down when it was purchased and everything.  That was a very good camera.  The lenses were all good lenses at that time.  And of course, we used Aeroflex as far as our motion picture camera.  But now that’s a thing of the past.
 MR. KIELY:  Was that a 16 millimeter?
MR. HOFFMAN:  That was a 16 millimeter.
MR. KIELY:  Again, processing, was that done?
MR. HOFFMAN:  That was done by Calvin Productions in Kansas City.  They were a motion picture lab and they could do both classified and unclassified material.
MR. WESTCOTT:  Well, I set up the first color lab which was a dye transfer color lab in the Atomic Energy Commission.  That was under the AEC. We had some material to be photographed and we couldn’t get it to come out quite right, the only way we could do it - we couldn’t get good whites and the dye-transfer process was a very expensive process.  With two people we were able to make 18 prints just working as hard as we could from morning to night and then later we got into Type C which is a process we have now in the one hour photo.  And we set up a lab doing that and got a lot of help from Eastman Kodak to get us started when that was first introduced.
 MR. FREENY:   Well, now it’s more digital; probably 95% of the stuff I shoot is digital.  I still shoot a little with the Hasselblad and the 35 mm Nikons, but most of the stuff is digital, the reason being everybody is in a hurry, they want it NOW. A lot of the stuff, I’ll shoot it in the morning and 15-20 minutes later, I’m back on my computer, sending it out of different newspapers, or different publications.
MR. KIELY:   Digital camera?
MR. FREENY: Yes, a Nikon digital.
MR. KIELY:  Your traditional; how do you digitize that?
MR. FREENY: With a Leaf Scanner; it’s a glorified enlarger; which is like an enlarger, it has the even the same old negative folders like on the best enlargers.  It fits in there; it’s no problem; it’s the same.
MR. KIELY:  You’re using the negatives in the scanner?
MR. FREENY:  Yes, I scan a lot of Ed’s and Frank’s negatives to digitize them because we got--
MR. HOFFMAN:  Because it’s the easy way.
MR. FREENY:  One of Frank’s famous pictures ended up in Time Magazine it was the burial yard at K-25. I don’t think Lockheed Martin was too proud of that picture but it showed, it was a great aerial shot of the burials, and it was sent to Time Magazine. And a lot of Ed’s stuff has showed up in places I didn’t know it would show up like the First Tennessee Bank had an advertisement that a “War Ends” picture was in it and I don’t know where that came from and I don’t take responsibility.  It’s changed a great deal, from money wise to it’s cheaper to do it that way.
 MR. KIELY:  I guess I only have one question left.  What’s it like having to take so many photographs but having security as an issue where you have photographs and no one can see them.  You’ve taken them and clearly have an interest in them and proud of them.  Is that an issue for you?
MR. HOFFMAN:   Well, I think basically that everything that Ed photographed, and they were all at that time all of the facilities like K-25, Y-12, and X10 - they were all classified and I got those all declassified and before they went, so now that entire issue is not an issue because most of the material has been declassified.  There’s not, I think some of the plants now they have, we usually, we did more public relations work and we stayed away from the classified material because Y-12 would take care of that, and K-25 would take care of that.
MR. WESTCOTT:   Two incidents I’d like to tell you about which I didn’t particularly like, it was classified.  I went to K-25 while they were building it.  Two ex-servicemen came back from Germany that had been injured; lost an arm or leg or something, and they were at an outdoor program speaking to the workers at K-25 – “stay on the job, get the job done” - so from over their shoulder I had this picture of this big crowd of workers listening to them and it had the end of the K-25 building on one side of the picture.  
MR. HOFFMAN:  With the sign in the background, I remember it. - 
MR. WESTCOTT: They wanted to publish this and intelligence says, “OK you can have this part of it but the rest of it will have to be classified.”  So they cut my negative in two.  And they kept the part with the building on it and saved the part of the people in it for publication and the soldiers.  Well, later on we did get the other part of the negative, declassified, got put together and prints were made of that. Another one that was classified that I was disappointed in for a while was when Dr. Logan Emlet hooked up a little toy steam generator to the Oak Ridge Graphite Reactor and used the steam from the reactor to drive the generator which lit up a little light bulb like an automobile headlight bulb.  That was the first electric power produced by atomic energy - ever - in the world.  So that went under classification for a number of years before we ever got that -
MR. HOFFMAN:  Well, I think that was classified because they weren’t supposed to do that there.  There was another project in that assignment.
MR. FREENY:   I was just going to tell you about this one incident.  SeaWolf, you were probably over there doing some pictures before.  We had Jim Sasser who was going to visit and they wanted to make sure I didn’t take any classified stuff because it was going to go to the public.  Most of my job was that. And everything was fine; I made sure I didn’t get anything in it.  But I didn’t notice the guy that was touring everybody. Had this clipboard holding it up on his chest, and it said “Top Secret” across it; had all these words; and every picture I had to clip them and destroy them a bunch of those things.  I never saw those again.  Just an incident.
MR. KIELY:  Gentlemen, I know you have to go back.  Thank you very much.  The only thing, I have some release forms that need to be signed.

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