Black, Colleen

              ORAL HISTORY OF COLLEEN BLACK
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
February 20, 2002 
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: I guess, Colleen, where we start is why and how you came to Oak Ridge from Nashville, right? Back in –
Mrs. Black: ’44. 
Mr. Kolb: ’44. Okay, go ahead.
Mrs. Black: I came with my parents. In those days when a girl was eighteen, nineteen, she lived with her parents and she lived with her parents till she got married, so my mother decided to come to Oak Ridge, and she told me to come and I said, “Okay,” I just did what – 
Mr. Kolb: She told you. 
Mrs. Black: She told me, “We’re going to Oak Ridge,” and so I really didn’t want to come and I didn’t want to stay but – 
Mr. Kolb: Did you come by yourself? 
Mrs. Black: No, I was one of ten children in the family. And my brother who’s older than I am was in the Army. Little, skinny, wore glasses, he was drafted into the Army; you know, this was wartime. And my next brother was a big, robust redhead so he decided to join the Navy. Well, they wouldn’t take him. They wouldn’t take him in the Army, they wouldn’t take him in the Navy; he had a ruptured eardrum. So he was ready to go work at a war plant. Mother wanted to come to Oak Ridge because her brothers were here. And they had come earlier; they had come in ’43. And they were making good money, but there was not much. I mean, they told her, you know, “It’s just an army camp; there’s not much housing.” So my father worked at the post office, and they told him at the post office his job was essential to the war effort, that he couldn’t quit, and if he did quit, he would have to be out of work for three months. And a man with ten children can’t be out of work for three months, but my mother said, “Okay, we’ll go to Oak Ridge. Colleen and Brian and I will go to Oak Ridge and we’ll save the money, and you stay here and be the house husband.” And that was very unusual in those days. So anyway, we came to Oak Ridge and, as a woman, my mother could not get a trailer because she was not considered head of the house. So I lived with an aunt and mother lived with another brother that she had. We had a lot of relatives that were living here, and so she kept applying and dogging them to see if she could get a trailer or some kind of a house. 
Mr. Kolb: So when did they actually come? 
Mrs. Black: This was, let’s see, in ’44; she came in July, early July, and I came too. That was early July, ’44. It was muddy, it was crowded, there were lines for everything, and being an old teenager, I didn’t like to give up stuff. And everything was scarce and you just couldn’t go in and buy anything.
Mr. Kolb: Well, did you get jobs right away?
Mrs. Black: So we went right away and got jobs, went to Ford, Bacon, and Davis and hired in, and I got a job as a leak detector. I didn’t know what that was, but – 
Mr. Kolb: At K-25? 
Mrs. Black: At K-25, in the old Conditioning Building. This was for Ford, Bacon, and Davis. But I couldn’t go to work right away; I had to go to Wheat School and be trained, and that was while they were, you know, doing their research on me. You had to have a Q clearance to work here. So anyway, I went to Wheat School. Well, I guess we both did, and mother was a leak detector too, but she was soon promoted to supervisor or something. She was older. So we worked and we sent our money home, and then in three months my father came and we could get a double trailer, because he was the head of the house.
Mr. Kolb: And all the other family came then? 
Mrs. Black: And then the other family came. And they went to school in the new Wheat School building; they’d built a new school building. We lived in the J. A. Jones Construction camp. Happy Valley, it was called. 
Mr. Kolb: Near K-25. 
Mrs. Black: Right. Right in the shadow of K-25, and we had our own post office, dry goods store, school – 
Mr. Kolb: Was there a church out there too? 
Mrs. Black: We went to church in the school; the priest came out and had service. Now I don’t know about the other –  
Mr. Kolb: The Chapel on the Hill didn’t have a chapel out there? 
Mrs. Black: Well it did, but you know that’s far away and we didn’t have cars, and gas was rationed. So it was great that – there were twelve thousand people out there; it was like a little village. So that’s where we went to church. But we had our own grocery store, bowling alley, movie –  
Mr. Kolb: Recreation center. 
Mrs. Black: In fact, some people who lived out there didn’t know about – that there really was an Oak Ridge. They really didn’t. 
Mr. Kolb: And I never knew about that. And, of course, it’s all gone. 
Mrs. Black: Yes, it’s all gone now.
Mr. Kolb: When I came in ’54, it was all gone, not a trace. 
Mrs. Black: Is that right? Not a trace? 
Mr. Kolb: No. Well, there is a little trace in the ground. 
Mrs. Black: Well, maybe if you get out and walk, you can see –
Mr. Kolb: But no buildings. 
Mrs. Black: No, no buildings. So it was, again, lines every morning. We had a double trailer.
Mr. Kolb: You had a cafeteria there.
Mrs. Black: Oh, we had a cafeteria. We had, you know, a grocery store, everything. If you were in the trailer, you were cooking. But I applied for a dormitory, so I got the dormitory room. But by that time, it was so crowded in the dorms, the single rooms had been turned into double rooms. So I got my cousin to come from Nashville and she lived with me in the dormitory, and one brother lived in the hutments over there. K-25 had a whole lot of huts for construction workers, and I know the blacks lived in the huts and the construction workers lived in the huts, and later the GIs lived in the huts. So the huts weren’t exclusively for the blacks.
Mr. Kolb: Like they were in Downtown here either, they were used both.
Mrs. Black: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: Which I didn’t know until recently. 
Mrs. Black: So anyway, it was good, and my mother kept the morale up. Oh, it was just like camping, you know, this is temporary, this is not permanent, and you know, if anybody complained that was –
Mr. Kolb: You were making good money. 
Mrs. Black: Making good money and couldn’t spend it because you couldn’t buy anything. [The clerks would say,] “Don’t you know there is war on?” if we’d go to the store and ask for something. And so, yeah, we knew there was a war on because –  
Mr. Kolb: You couldn’t buy furniture or any big-ticket items.
Mrs. Black: Oh you couldn’t buy any – you know, beauty things. You couldn’t get – lipsticks came in a cardboard tube. The curlers we used to put in our hair were metal curlers; you couldn’t get those anymore. You couldn’t get bobby pins, you couldn’t do pin curls, and hairspray wasn’t heard of then, and so we didn’t look very pretty. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you have doctors out there? 
Mrs. Black: Well, we didn’t have doctors there that I remember. They could have, but nobody was sick; we were young. We didn’t have a funeral home. But if there was an emergency, they sent them into Oak Ridge. But everything else, we had. Like I said, we couldn’t buy nylons; you know, they’d gone in the parachutes. Zippers were out of our dresses; they’d gone, so there were buttons. Elastic had gone out of the panties; they were gone to war, there were buttons, all these little inconveniences, you know. So I worked and they told me not to tell what it was I was doing. Well I didn’t know what I was doing, you know. We had this little machine and I didn’t even know what they called it later; they called it “a mass spectrometer, but don’t repeat that word” –
Mr. Kolb: Did they tell you that much?
Mrs. Black: They told me that much, and then they had, you know, everything that went into it was with a code name. I don’t know why. The liquid nitrogen was L28. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever hear the word ‘uranium’? 
Mrs. Black: I never heard that word, never heard that word. It was just, liquid nitrogen was L28, and glyptal was something else, and helium was something else. Anyway, so we worked, and then one day, one of the GIs came in and was looking for a group of girls to help him in the Conditioning Building and he just picked me at random with several others, and so I later married the guy.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that was Blacky? 
Mrs. Black: That was Blacky. He was with the SED, the Special Engineer Detachment. And we worked shift; I worked from 4:00 to 12:00 and he worked from 4:00 to 12:00 then too, or he was called in to work, or he might stay over and work two shifts. I mean, they did that a lot back then. So anyway, that’s how I got here.
Mr. Kolb: Right. And then you worked as long – until you got married? 
Mrs. Black: I worked until I got married and then when –  
Mr. Kolb: That was when? 
Mrs. Black: Then we got married in ’45, and housing wasn’t available for servicemen then, so a friend gave us a trailer and we lived in the trailer for a little while.
Mr. Kolb: Gave you a trailer? You mean, gave you the right to live in it? 
Mrs. Black: Well, he had a private trailer over there, up on Badger Avenue, see, a lot of government trailers, but then there was a private trailer camp, and it was Don Jameson. You probably never heard of him. There were two brothers that worked K-25, Gill and Don, and I guess Don got a house, but he had come in a trailer, so he said why don’t y’all just take the trailer. So anyway, we took the trailer until we got a victory cottage and they made victory cottages available for the GIs. 
Mr. Kolb: Now where was that? 
Mrs. Black: That was up on Iris Circle.
Mr. Kolb: Here in Oak Ridge? 
Mrs. Black: Here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: So you moved into town, then?
Mrs. Black: Yeah, well, I was already in town in the dormitory. I didn’t live in the dormitory in K-25. They were for construction workers.
Mr. Kolb: Which dormitory was it? Do you remember? I don’t remember the one I moved into when I came to Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Black: You lived in a dorm?
Mr. Kolb: For the first year, yes. In ’54, yeah.
Mrs. Black: Okay, well, in the very beginning the dorms didn’t have names, you know, they had numbers, “WV so-and-so,” and then later they had names because somebody came in and they had wanted it to be like a little university and they just didn��t like all this –
Mr. Kolb: Army Stuff. 
Mrs. Black: Army stuff. So anyway, they named it. So I think I lived in Gastonia in the beginning. I’ve lived in several dorms, but Gastonia sticks in my mind. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, what street was it on? 
Mrs. Black: That was out by the YWCA. Oh, well, it’s over by the Boy’s Club. It was in that same area, and there was a cafeteria there and the drug store is still there. That’s a new drug store, but it was the old Hoskins Drug and it burned and now –
Mr. Kolb: Was that in Jefferson Circle? 
Mrs. Black: Jefferson Circle, and I don’t know the name of the drugstore; it’s called Jefferson Drug Store, I think. Well, I believe it used to be Hoskins and it burned, and they –
Mr. Kolb: That’s the company in Clinton, isn’t it? 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, and they rebuilt that, but then right across the street from there where the old museum was, that was the cafeteria, and that’s where we went to the cafeteria. And then across the street was the bus station, and that’s where we caught the bus to go to work, and I remember the buses as being free to work. I mean, somebody said – oh, I think we had to pay. I knew we had to pay in Townsite if we were going somewhere in Townsite or going to the swimming pool or somewhere.
Mr. Kolb: You did have to pay? 
Mrs. Black: For Townsite, but for the work buses, they were free; and in Townsite we had to buy tokens, and you could get five for thirty cents. 
Mr. Kolb: I understood that children could ride free. 
Mrs. Black: Probably. 
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause Joan Ellen Zucker told me about her favorite thing to do was to ride the bus on a Saturday; she would ride the whole route for free. 
Mrs. Black: Well probably. 
Mr. Kolb: But that was children.
Mrs. Black: Maybe that was true, and it could have been before or after. I don’t know, you know, and your memory gets hazy, but I remember one of the bus drivers telling me, he said, “I don’t like these tokens.” He said, “They have to pay, you know, you get five for thirty cents.” He said, “I get New York, Chicago….” He gets all kinds of tokens in the buses. You’re so crowded and you just hear a cling, clang, clung; you don’t care. But they did have buses that came in – oh, I forgot to tell you our little interlude in Harriman. While we were waiting for the trailer, the double trailer, my mother found a house in Harriman and we moved to Harriman for a couple of months. 
Mr. Kolb: Your whole family? 
Mrs. Black: Yeah. I don’t think I did; I was in the dorm. But I was back and forth so much; you know, if your mother’s there and fixing Sunday dinner, you’re gonna be there.
Mr. Kolb: Now you didn’t have a car did you? 
Mrs. Black: No, no, but buses, the buses went from Harriman; they went all around. We had the biggest bus service you wouldn’t believe. 
Mr. Kolb: It was fourth or fifth in the United States? 
Mrs. Black: Yes, it was. So you could just run out and get on the bus. I mean, just every fifteen minutes it seems like, so that was no ���
Mr. Kolb: And people that lived out of this area, too, came in? 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, they did, and that was no problem. And sometimes for recreation we’d go to Big Ridge, and there was always a bus on Sunday going to Big Ridge, buses all around town; that was no problem. 
Mr. Kolb: And your father, did he have a car during that time? 
Mrs. Black: He had a car but, you know, you couldn’t get as much gas as you wanted, so if we went back to Nashville, if we forgot some clothes or a costume or something that we had to have, we’d go on the bus, and it would take all day. There was no interstate and it would take –  
Mr. Kolb: No, it stopped every town. 
Mrs. Black: It stopped in every town and we stood the whole way. The buses were so crowded, and usually there were two of them. And a couple of times we went on the train, the old Southern, and that was longer. You’d think that would be quicker, but it took just as long or longer to go by train, so that was bad news. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, how about, before you got married, how about recreation? 
Mrs. Black: Oh there was so much to do. There were dances practically every night of the week.
Mr. Kolb: This was out there at Happy Valley? 
Mrs. Black: No, no. You know, I was in Happy [Valley] very, very short time, because I got my dorm room. Now, they did have a recreation department out there and they did have dances, and Helen Jernigan was the recreation director and she was out there for a summer. She was a very young girl, and she came this summer and came in through Gallaher or Blair, never knew about Oak Ridge, and she was the recreation director, and she’ll probably have some stories for you. So I don’t know where she lived; she may have lived in a dorm out there, I’m not sure. But when I found out how much activity was going on in Oak Ridge, they had about four or five movie theatres and they had bowling alleys and recreation halls, and when I met Blacky, we could go the PX and dance and get chocolate ice cream. Most of the places just had vanilla ice cream and you had to stand in line for ages to get that. 
Mr. Kolb: Where was the PX? 
Mrs. Black: The PX was over kind of where Downtown is, somewhere in that area, and that is where the GI hutments were, in that area. 
Mr. Kolb: And that’s where Blacky lived?
Mrs. Black: He lived in the hutments with four other guys that worked on the same shift and on the same area that he worked. And I don’t know whether the government planned all this, this way. You know, we had neighborhoods around and each one had its own grocery store and school and playground, and I guess they tried to keep people separate so they wouldn’t tell.
Mr. Kolb: Well, neighborhood based town. That’s the way it was planned, so there was school, shopping –
Mrs. Black: It was convenient and it was also –
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t have to drive very far. Transportation was limited. 
Mrs. Black: That’s true. 
Mr. Kolb: So you had plenty to do? 
Mrs. Black: There was plenty to do and everybody was young. I mean, we didn’t have any old people, because in order to live here, you had to work here. 
Mr. Kolb: You were about twenty then? 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, I was nineteen, twenty. So it was great for the single person. Now for the married women that had come here with children, that was very difficult. They had to stand in line with the children and juggle the ration stamps and the money and the stuff, and it was very difficult.
Mr. Kolb: In the mud.
Mrs. Black: In the mud. But they did have a Woman’s Club. Somebody formed a Woman’s Club. So you could dress up once in a while and put on your hat and your shoes and go out and have lunch.
Mr. Kolb: Where would you go to have lunch? 
Mrs. Black: They had cafeterias, they had the Guest House. You couldn’t go, I mean they didn’t really have any restaurants, no, but the Woman’s Club, they had it catered, I guess. In fact there was a woman here by the name of Cater, her name was Caterer, and she catered. She catered my wedding. So that’s what the Woman’s Club did. I mean, it wasn’t a very fancy lunch, but you’d dress up and go have lunch, play bridge, do a fashion show, and they had different sections. They had the book section where you could discuss books.
Mr. Kolb: Just like they do now. Now you said the Guest House, the Alexander Inn, they had a restaurant there? Or not? 
Mrs. Black: Yes. 
Mr. Kolb: So they had a regular sit down restaurant? 
Mrs. Black: Well, it was, but it was just for the people in the hotel, I think. I don’t know. 
Mr. Kolb: Were there meeting rooms where you could have meetings? 
Mrs. Black: We usually met in the Recreation Hall for most things.
Mr. Kolb: Would you have food catered in?
Mrs. Black: Mhm. I was trying to remember – seems like maybe we did potlucks. A lot of times we made stuff; I remember making things for the Woman’s Club. Maybe that’s what we did. 
Mr. Kolb: Now this was when you got married or before? 
Mrs. Black: This was when I got married. Before, I didn��t go to the Woman’s Club. No, we went bowling and dancing and movies and things like that, ping pong and the Recreation –  
Mr. Kolb: And you said Big Ridge; you’d go out to Big Ridge or –
Mrs. Black: Go to Big Ridge and go canoeing. 
Mr. Kolb: How about Norris, was that a park then? 
Mrs. Black: Yes, there was Norris and there was the Tea Room, but we went there for the dam. But, I don’t know, you had to have a car. I don’t remember the bus going to Norris.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, but Big Ridge was real popular.
Mrs. Black: Big Ridge was very popular. 
Mr. Kolb: And the swimming pool was in town, of course. 
Mrs. Black: Yes, that was popular. We went swimming, and when we first started going, I remember the mud bottom at the swimming pool, and we didn’t have any fancy bath houses like they have now. We had some trailers, some double trailers over on the other side. 
Mr. Kolb: So it wasn’t concreted in, initially? 
Mrs. Black: No. 
Mr. Kolb: And it was spring fed and cold as kraut. 
Mrs. Black: It was cold, it was. 
Mr. Kolb: Then you started having children. 
Mrs. Black: And then I started having children. 
Mr. Kolb: The youngest one was born in ’46, as I recall. 
Mrs. Black: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: And that was one year after you got married. 
Mrs. Black: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: And they came pretty often. 
Mrs. Black: Pretty often. Every two years, sometimes every year. Okay so that –
Mr. Kolb: But that was after the war then, ’46 was right after the war, so the first children were –
Mrs. Black: Were after the war, and then my parents went back to Nashville and we had to settle down. You know, we thought that soon as the war was over that the place would close down. 
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know.
Mrs. Black: But, you know, we kept getting notices, stay on the job, do this and do that. 
Mr. Kolb: But you quit work. 
Mrs. Black: I quit work.
Mr. Kolb: As soon as you got married? 
Mrs. Black: No, after I got pregnant. 
Mr. Kolb: The first time.
Mrs. Black: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But Blacky, of course, stayed on. 
Mrs. Black: He stayed on and went to work for AEC. AEC was just newly formed, I guess.
Mr. Kolb: About ’47 or so?
Mrs. Black: Yeah. And he went to work for them and then I think it was called ERDA or DOE after that. It went on. Anyway, he stayed with them for the whole time, and we just stayed on because, you know, they had good schools here and the hospital was close and we had our friends here by that time and –
Mr. Kolb: Now what about the rest of your family, did they all leave? 
Mrs. Black: Yes and No. My brother went back to Nashville, my brother Brian, the one that lived in a hutment, and then he came back and worked in Oak Ridge and then he went to Knoxville and formed his own company. 
Mr. Kolb: And he’s still there. 
Mrs. Black: He’s still there; he’s retired and his sons have taken over the company. And then Sheila, my sister Sheila, she was just a little kid in Oak Ridge, but after she was bigger, she came back and she lived with us, graduated from Oak Ridge High. And she still lives here; she lives in Garden Apartments. 
Mr. Kolb: What is her name? 
Mrs. Black: Sheila Rowan. And then Jo Iacovino, you know her, and she would have a different perspective because she went to school at Wheat. 
Mr. Kolb: Okay, right, they were in school.
Mrs. Black: She was in school, and then she was in Harriman and went to Harriman School too, because I told you there was that move in there. I’m not too sure on the dates, but she did go to Harriman School. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, so your children got all through Oak Ridge schools. 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, my children went through Oak Ridge schools. They went to St. Mary’s for first grade and then they went through Oak Ridge schools. 
Mr. Kolb: So, you saw the school system grow and change and settle down. 
Mrs. Black: But there’s some wonderful stories about the people who went to school here in Oak Ridge and about how every day somebody new would come in and from all over the country. And Pearle Rives is another name that went to school here and lived in a, maybe in a private trailer. I think she said she lived in a hutment, and I didn’t know they had family huts, but she can tell you about that. 
Mr. Kolb: Is she still in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Black: Yes, she’s still in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you know, there’s so much change that you went through in the years. I mean, it’s just amazing. And eventually Oak Ridge did settle down, kind of; the streets got paved and everything and the hospital was replaced later on. But those early years were – of course you didn’t know what was going to happen to Oak Ridge, like you said, was it going to stay here or blow away. But as soon as the government decided to keep work here, they sort of settled down. But then when you – did you see the removal of Happy Valley? You know, it went away real fast. 
Mrs. Black: Yes it did and I don’t remember because I got busy with my family and I didn’t go back out to K-25. Now when I go to Nashville, I go right by K-25 and I’m amazed. Like you say, there’s no trace. 
Mr. Kolb: In ’54, I didn’t even know about it until recently. I mean, I’d heard the word Happy Valley and I didn’t know what it meant. I thought it meant something prior to Oak Ridge, prior to K-25, you know, like Wheat Community. 
Mrs. Black: Well, it was in the old Wheat Community. 
Mr. Kolb: But did the name Happy Valley, did they make that up? 
Mrs. Black: I don’t know where they got that. It just happened. Like, we don’t know where they got Oak Ridge; somebody said they had a contest. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh is that right? 
Mrs. Black: Well it was Black Oak Ridge, anyway, but then I think the construction worker – see, when we lived in Harriman, they called this Kingston Demolition Area, they called it the Manhattan Project. All the things came with CEW, Clinton Engineer Works on it. We didn’t know where we were and some people just called it the Project and some called it the ERA and some called it ‘the reservation.’ I mean, it really – you didn’t know what they were talking about, but you really did. I mean, you couldn’t say. 
Mr. Kolb: Of course in places like Knoxville they probably just called it –  
Mrs. Black: That place.
Mr. Kolb: That place, those people over there. Those crazy people with all that money. 
Mrs. Black: With all that mud and all that money. 
Mr. Kolb: Wish they had some of the money but not the mud. 
Mrs. Black: Well, when we would go into Knoxville to buy something –
Mr. Kolb: Where would you go shop? 
Mrs. Black: Well, we went into – they had Miller’s and George’s and we had a Miller’s here in Oak Ridge too. But we had Miller’s and George’s in Knoxville and there were other stores along Gay Street and we would ask for things, “Do you have…?” “We’re saving them for civilians.” We weren’t considered civilians because we worked at Oak Ridge. And we stopped and we washed the mud off our shoes and we tried to look like Knoxvillians, but it didn’t work. They could always spot us. 
Mr. Kolb: They wouldn’t sell to you? 
Mrs. Black: Sometimes. And we don’t know whether they didn’t have them or they were just looking down their nose or I don’t know. 
Mr. Kolb: This was during the war? 
Mrs. Black: This was, yeah, during the war. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you go to do any entertainment or not? 
Mrs. Black: Some people did. I guess we didn’t. You know, if you didn’t have a car, we didn’t have a car till later, maybe forty –
Mr. Kolb: There was a bus service to Knoxville? 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, there was a bus service going to Knoxville, but it was always crowded and you had to stand up and it just wasn’t worth it for us. We had children right away, and it just wasn’t worth it. There was a lot of entertainment here. Friends became your family. It was strange, and we entertained with potlucks. That seems so strange, for other people in other cities, but anyway that’s –
Mr. Kolb: Well, it was church based. 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, church based, you’re right, and so we did that. We had a sewing club and a bridge club and all these clubs and now I’m still in that sewing club and we don’t sew and I’m in the bridge club and we don’t play bridge. 
Mr. Kolb: Really? You just talk.
Mrs. Black: Well, we just eat. We go out to eat; we meet and eat. Meet and eat is what we do. We’ve done the bridge, we’ve done the sewing, and I don’t know if you’ve read that little cookbook that the ’43 Club put out, but it’s got a lot of little tales in it, and one little tale was talking about, they didn’t know that they were being watched, the women in the neighborhood. And so every week –
Mr. Kolb: Now what do you mean ‘watched’? 
Mrs. Black: Well, I mean, it was war time, and every week these women would get together to sew and to talk, you know, maybe put the kid to bed for the nap or take them with them and they’d go and sew and maybe bring a sandwich and have lunch. And so one day an FBI man appeared and said, “I see you all meeting.” You know, “What is it you’re talking about?” And they said, ���Formula, diapers!” So, I mean, we were watching for anything. I mean, they were watching what went on. There are some little stories like that in that book that, how the women reacted to living in a fenced-in city in a secret town. You know, you got together, you wanted to meet and talk about the babies and the diapers, and, you know, it was before Pampers, and we always had to wash the diapers and hang them out on the line or hang them inside sometimes. You know, they were strung along in the bathroom. It was not an easy time. 
Mr. Kolb: You had electric washing machines, though, or did you? 
Mrs. Black: Well, not during the war we didn’t. See, the washing machines had gone to war. We had scrub boards, and when we went to the dormitory, we had the scrub board and they had a laundry here and you could take –
Mr. Kolb: Is that the one down near Jackson Square, where the Chinese place is? 
Mrs. Black: Yeah and we called it ‘The Shredder.’ They could shred your clothes in about a week because I think they sent them out of town. Think of all the laundry and then –
Mr. Kolb: But you wouldn’t send diapers there? 
Mrs. Black: Oh we wouldn’t send diapers ’cause we needed those, and you had a hard time buying diapers. No, but I meant other clothes. And then some people would come in, and you’d just be muddy if you came in, the husbands come in from work and take your boots off or you’d get in the shower and do your laundry and your body at the same time. That’s what Bill Linnahan said he did and he lived in the dorm. They’d just come in and wash it off. You can’t imagine the mud if you don’t – but see, because none of the streets were paved. They just came in and scrapped off everything off the top and there we had the mud and soap was scarce and you couldn’t buy soap, so that was our biggest thing. Everybody usually, if you had a bathtub, it was full of muddy boots, I mean, ’cause you’d come in and have to wash them or you’d put them in the utility room. They had built-in things for the washing machine. 
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure newspapers got used, put down for all the mud.
Mrs. Black: Right, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but I’m sure the time went by so fast.
Mrs. Black: It did. I can’t believe how old I am. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, once you have children, but I mean the wartime period. 
Mrs. Black: Oh it did. 
Mr. Kolb: Two years and it was over. 
Mrs. Black: It was over, and then you could –
Mr. Kolb: How did you feel when the war ended and then the bomb was exploded? 
Mrs. Black: Well, we were excited. Now, I’ve heard –  
Mr. Kolb: Where were you when it happened? Were you working? 
Mrs. Black: I was working and we came out of work that day – the newspapers, you know, had it, but you had to pay a dollar for a newspaper. They were usually five cents each, but it was the special issue. And everybody was so excited, and I think they went downtown and I remember just yelling and screaming, and some say they shouted “Uranium, uranium!” The scientists that had had it bottled up all these years, they just shouted, but I didn’t know what uranium was. And we thought, hey we’ll be going back home, we’re going to get back to normal, but we never got back to normal, whatever that is. 
Mr. Kolb: You became an Oak Ridger. 
Mrs. Black: Became an Oak Ridger, and in the beginning we didn’t have a funeral home. We were so young, we didn’t need a funeral home. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, I understood that Martin’s Funeral Home, that was a World War II building down on the turnpike. 
Mrs. Black: Well, it wasn’t. Well, that –  
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t used as a funeral home. 
Mrs. Black: I don’t believe it was built until after, but I’m not sure, ’cause the first funeral home came in and it was over close to the hospital and it went out of business because there was no, you know, we didn’t have any wrecks because we couldn’t have the gas, we didn’t have the cars, and people weren’t old, and if you died, well I guess they went back to their home. And it was bad because usually at meetings and things in the olden days we used to borrow folding chairs from funeral homes, and here we didn’t have the funeral home to borrow the chairs from. It was just a different era. 
Mr. Kolb: The rec hall you went to when you lived here, was it the one up on Jackson Square? Or, there were a bunch of rec halls. 
Mrs. Black: There was Ridge Rec Hall, and there was one, Grove Center –
Mr. Kolb: There was Midtown. 
Mrs. Black: I didn’t go to Midtown, but I went to Grove Center, and –
Mr. Kolb: And then there was one at –
Mrs. Black: And Jefferson, yeah I went to all of them. 
Mr. Kolb: Now Grove Center was that where the –
Mrs. Black: The Oak Terrace.
Mr. Kolb: The Oak Terrace was down below and they had a bowling alley down below and then a big rec hall up above. 
Mrs. Black: Right. And sometimes they’d get smart and they’d say “no bobby socks” because women couldn’t buy hose, you know, and they didn’t want young people coming in, the bobby socks, you had to be over a certain age. I don’t know why, but anyway, no bobby socks allowed. 
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have bobby socks, you didn’t have hose, what did you wear? 
Mrs. Black: We went bare legged. We put on leg makeup, and that’s what we wore. It was messy. It was horrible. 
Mr. Kolb: When I came here I ate every meal at Roscoe Stevens’ Oak Terrace during the week, and on weekends, on Sunday, we always went over to Park Hotel, every Sunday noon, the guys we were with. That was a wonderful meal, I mean –
Mrs. Black: That was. 
Mr. Kolb: You’d stand in line there and wait for an hour if we had to ’cause it was such good food. We’d starve on Saturday just so you could pig out on Sunday and we did. I’m sure you went over there too once in a while.
Mrs. Black: We went over there once in a while. 
Mr. Kolb: Because it was special. Yeah, that was a big loss. Well, you know, there is so much to talk about that, you just don’t know where to start or stop. Like you said, just the bus system was unique and I never realized how big it was, but when you think about it, it did everything, it went everywhere. 
Mrs. Black: It was, and when I rode the bus from Harriman, you know, when I’d go and spend the night with my parents and ride the bus back, the drivers were so nice, they really were. And sometimes we were late coming out and I’d get on the bus and [say], “Forgot my badge,” and, you know, we’d have to go back and get the badge and get back on the bus, and he’d drive around and he’d start honking at some places because he knew the people would have a long way to come out to get on the bus, but that was really nice and you really got to know the people on the bus and they told the same jokes every day, same old thing. Fun time. 
Mr. Kolb: And the hospital here was very busy with maternity. 
Mrs. Black: Yes. You know they were always asking, “What are you making in Oak Ridge? What are you doing there, what are you making?” You could never tell them. 
Mr. Kolb: You mean in the hospital they’d ask you that? 
Mrs. Black: No, I mean, just around, and people who worked at the hospital would tell you, “We’re making babies.” And if you asked a laborer, if you asked somebody just sitting on a bench, “What are making out there?” he’d say, “Oh, eighty cents an hour.” You know you’d never give a right answer. 
Mr. Kolb: “What do you do out there?” “As little as possible.” 
Mrs. Black: And you weren’t supposed to tell how many people were working here either. So if they asked you that, “Well how many people do you think are working out there in Oak Ridge?” you’d say, “Oh, I guess about half of ’em.” You never, never tell an estimate, you know. It was –  
Mr. Kolb: Well you probably didn’t know. 
Mrs. Black: Oh, we didn’t know, and we should have turned them in. And that was another thing, you never knew if somebody was a spy. Ann Boker is a member of our group now, and she tells about [how] her father was told to turn in anybody who asked, “What are we making? What are we doing? How many?” They gave him a little kit, and it had envelopes that were addressed, and he was supposed to write the names down and mail them to Knoxville. So he hid the little envelopes, and hid them in the closet, and one day he came home and his wife was cleaning, and she had cleaned out the bottom of the closet and found all these envelopes, and she thought he was having an affair.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. Which did happen, occasionally.
Mrs. Black: So yeah, which has happened, but not to them. So he had to tell her that this was, you know, he was a spy. “You mean you’d tell on your people?” So Ann enjoys telling that story. 
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, because her father was a security person. 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, security, and I guess, you know, that happened a lot, just to make you aware and not to talk. Well, see, I’m so dumb, I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t care. I mean, once in a while I wondered, well, what are they doing with all these pipes, what’s going through these pipes, where are they going? They were big, they were little, there were pipes, pipes, they never ran out of pipes, they’d bring the pipe in, the millwrights would hook them up to your machine and you would climb all over them, test them, mark them, send them back and if the weld wasn’t welded well, you’d mark it and send it back but you never knew what it was going to be in that pipe. And I guess Blacky probably knew; he didn’t tell me. I’ve heard a lot of women say, “Oh, my husband told me, oh yeah, I knew what it was all the time.��� I didn’t know, and I heard Dr. Preston say, “I didn’t know.” A lot of people say, “Oh yeah, it was well-known.” 
Mr. Kolb: It depends on people’s curiosity and whether they have scientific kinds of interest, you know. 
Mrs. Black: Right and what they knew, what they studied. I think Blacky, he knew about heavy work I didn’t even know what, I still don’t know. You’re sure you don’t want some coffee?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, we can stop a minute.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, we are going to talk a little about the Afro-Americans, so-called blacks in early Oak Ridge and how they lived in the hutments and, just go ahead and tell what you were going to say. 
Mrs. Black: Well, I didn’t know many blacks; I didn’t know any blacks. The black people lived here and they had come from all over and were glad to get the jobs because they paid good money, but the housing was so terrible. They couldn’t bring their families, but it was like the white people, if they didn’t have the right kind of job, they couldn’t have the right kind of house for a family so they lived in the black hutments and –
Mr. Kolb: Now, of course, they were all single. 
Mrs. Black: Well, no, they weren’t all single, some of them were married, but if they couldn’t bring their family here – just the same, my brother lived in a hutment. He lived with four other guys; some were married, some were single, because you couldn’t bring the wives in, but they just lived – I lived in the dormitory. Whether they were married or single, we lived in the dormitory, and we couldn’t have husbands or boyfriends to come in. It was not that time. If you wanted a house, first of all you had to be married, and you had to have the right kind of job, and you had to have a certain number of children. That’s just the way it was during the war, and it wasn’t putting the blacks down necessarily, there was not enough housing. It was very crowded. And I know they lived in Gamble Valley, and I know they also lived in Scarboro.
Mr. Kolb: And also earlier, I think it’s true that they lived in Woodland area. Dick Smyser wrote an article saying that was one of the original black housing areas, was Woodland.
Mrs. Black: Across from Holiday Inn, there were some huts. Now, I don’t know who lived there. There were probably blacks and that is kind of in Woodland, but still, it was the transportation, it was the housing, but the money was good. It was better money than, well, better money than I made. I had graduated from High School and worked one year at Life and Casualty Insurance Company and I made eighty dollars a month and I thought it was good. I came to Oak Ridge and made forty dollars a week. So to me that was big money, but Blacky was making $50 a month as a private in the Service. But he had his room and board. It was just a different time. 
Mr. Kolb: Now did the blacks mostly do construction work, or did they do other jobs? 
Mrs. Black: They were maid service and janitorial service. When you understand that some of the blacks – I don’t know any black scientists, or if there were black scientists or teachers, I don’t think they came here. I’m not sure, now, I don’t know. But it was the same with the women. The women who were college graduates, and there was a lot of college graduate women here, they came here, usually they had a degree in nursing, teaching, home ec[onomics]. 
Mr. Kolb: No engineers.
Mrs. Black: There were no – I mean, women didn’t want to be engineers and scientists. I can’t remember. There was one woman who was a scientist that I knew, Eleanor Seahorn, but other than that there weren’t. And they trained the ones that came here as home ec[onomics] majors, they trained them to be analysts and things in the lab. They trained me just because I had a high school education, and maybe if I’d had a couple years of college, I would have been trained for something else. So about the blacks, I don’t know if they offered them training or not, I’m not sure. They weren’t a problem, as far as I know, I mean, we just didn’t –  
Mr. Kolb: But did they have their own separate recreation facilities? 
Mrs. Black: Yes, they had their own separate recreation. 
Mr. Kolb: And cafeteria? 
Mrs. Black: Mhm, that and all.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Colleen, let’s talk a little bit about what happened when the city opened up and it changed from being a secret, closed, fenced-in town/city to not being a secret closed-in town and how, maybe, things changed with the outside people, Knoxville, if they ever did. 
Mrs. Black: Well, it was a wonderful celebration we had when the city opened. 
Mr. Kolb: Who were the movie stars that came in?
Mrs. Black: Oh, you probably wouldn’t remember the duo Adolphe Menjou and Rod Sterling. He was a cowboy; he came down the turnpike on a horse. And Marie McDonald; they called her ‘The Body’ Marie. They really weren’t the top notch, but they were maybe B-stars. So they did come, and we had, oh, schools from around that had bands coming down the turnpike, and they had a black school, I think it was called Pearl, from Knoxville. Lots of celebrations. 
Mr. Kolb: What did they do, send some students over here? 
Mrs. Black: Well the bands, they sent the bands to march down the turnpike. 
Mr. Kolb: Bunch of bands from a bunch of schools?
Mrs. Black: Yeah, from around. 
Mr. Kolb: And they had never been to Oak Ridge, obviously, because they couldn’t get in.
Mrs. Black: No, couldn’t get in before. You know, just big celebrations and –
Mr. Kolb: Speakers. Wasn’t Barkley, Senator Barkley?
Mrs. Black: Oh yeah, Barkley, yeah, Alben Barkley, right. He was here, and there was a radio show that was popular then called ‘Queen for a Day,’ Jack Bailey, and he came and I think he picked a Queen for the Day. I don’t know who it was. And then the Atomic Energy Museum was out in Jefferson, and I believe that’s when that opened, that was really big, and you got the irradiated dime. But things didn’t change too much, right at first I guess we got a lot of salesmen knocking on doors.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, cause they could come in –
Mrs. Black: They could come in selling magazines, selling stuff –
Mr. Kolb: And all the security people, now, until that time, it was Army people during World War II. What happened after the end of War? Did the security people change to being AEC Employees or –
Mrs. Black: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause the Army kind of went away. 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, they did, right. But, you know, when the gates opened to the city –
Mr. Kolb: In ’49, right? 
Mrs. Black: They moved the gates for the plants out on the Oak Ridge Turnpike by Mason Lane, you know, those guard things, and the ones where we used to meet. That’s when they put those gates up. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, those were not there during the war? 
Mrs. Black: They were not there during the war. The whole city was fenced in. I mean, the whole area was fenced in during the war. Then when the gates came down in 1949, they had moved more gates to fence off the plant area. 
Mr. Kolb: What did you do when you went out to the plant, like K-25, did you have to go through a checkpoint? 
Mrs. Black: Right, you had to go through the checkpoint. 
Mr. Kolb: But could the public not go out that far?
Mrs. Black: No, no, it wasn’t – 
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: Could you tell me about how the security was after the war, then? 
Mrs. Black: Security was still tight for the plant area. 
Mr. Kolb: So, that was not a Tennessee State Highway going out by K-25? You couldn’t drive right through town and go out to Kingston? 
Mrs. Black: I don’t believe so. I mean, we better check on that.
Mr. Kolb: Until later?
Mrs. Black: Until later, because I think when those gates of the city went down, the gates of the other came up, and you had to be working to go out there. 
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, ’cause one thing about the gates going to Y-12 on Scarboro Road there, it’s got five bathrooms in it: white and black men, white and black women, and the guards. Five bathrooms in that little building. 
Mrs. Black: That’s exactly right. 
Mr. Kolb: Segregated, in other words. But that was monitoring the traffic to Y-12, and that would have been closed off to the public. 
Mrs. Black: To the public, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So where did the public come in, from Elza Gate? 
Mrs. Black: Elza Gate and –
Mr. Kolb: What about from Knoxville, from old Oak Ridge Highway, Solway Road? 
Mrs. Black: Solway. 
Mr. Kolb: Those two places only? 
Mrs. Black: I think so. Now, I’m not sure, you better check with that, but those gates were not, I mean, they were more modern and were put up later, I believe, and I don’t know when they were abandoned. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, they haven’t been abandoned yet; they’re still there.
Mrs. Black: Well, I mean, they’re not used as gates.
Mr. Kolb: We remodeled two of them.
Mrs. Black: Well, I mean, you’re not stopped. They’re not used as security check points. 
Mr. Kolb: So, you don’t know when those were really opened up to the plant areas? Was it much later? 
Mrs. Black: I think it was much later. 
Mr. Kolb: But the city was opened just to Elza Gate and the one from Old Solway Road, I guess.
Mrs. Black: As far as I know. 
Mr. Kolb: But when you went into Knoxville to shop you still got the same cold shoulder? 
Mrs. Black: I guess. Well, after that, I guess they started paving the streets, and, see, so many of the Knoxville people worked down here. So many of our people moved in there to West Knoxville. 
Mr. Kolb: That’s true. If they were going to buy a home, if they wanted to buy a home, they could buy it over there, they couldn’t buy in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Black: And you couldn’t buy it in Oak Ridge. 
Mr. Kolb: For a while, yeah, until ’57. 
Mrs. Black: Yeah, housing was tight for a long, long time. 
Mr. Kolb: But you moved out here in your “D” house when? 
Mrs. Black: 1950. 
Mr. Kolb: And you had ten children here? 
Mrs. Black: Eight. 
Mr. Kolb: I’m sorry, eight; you were one of ten. Where did you put them all? 
Mrs. Black: Well, every time we had a child, we knocked out a wall and raised the closet rod, and we had single beds back there, and we had bunk beds for the boys, and we have a basement. 
Mr. Kolb: Was that part of the original building? 
Mrs. Black: No, there were no basements in the original. As time went on and babies came, we just made room for them. 
Mr. Kolb: I know you have been active in a lot of different community affairs and we can go on and on forever, talking about those things. One thing about Oak Ridge is that is has such an active community life or always did. Like you said, you played bridge and you sewed and language clubs and on and on and on, you could just join a club for any little thing you could think of almost, and that’s still the case. 
Mrs. Black: That’s the case, and Oak Ridge has had such a spirit back then. I hate to hear people say, you know, how horrible it was. I mean, it was bad, it was bad all over, I’m sure, all over the country, but it wasn’t as bad as being in a fox hole. But the spirit of Oak Ridge, we were all doing something to win the war, for the war effort and I think that –
Mr. Kolb: You think that carried over?
Mrs. Black: I think it carried over and we’re still helping each other and like I was saying, that, if you weren’t near your family you just kind of adopted neighbors and friends and church, and they were your family and you got real close to all these people. And if you lived here that long, well, you’re just like family. 
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have traditional relations like uncles and aunts and cousins. It was, like you said, you made other – friends were your family because that’s what was there. 
Mrs. Black: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: And I think that’s unique about Oak Ridge’s churches too, because I know a lot of people in my church that are from other denominations because they just don’t feel obligated maybe to belong to the Presbyterian Church if they were raised Presbyterian, or you name it. 
Mrs. Black: Whatever. 
Mr. Kolb: They join what they like or what they agree with and they are not obligated to do what Mom and Dad told me to do twenty years ago. 
Mrs. Black: That’s right. 
Mr. Kolb: Not that it applies to me, but it happens in a lot of cases. And the Oak Ridge Spirit is true in sports, too, isn’t it? 
Mrs. Black: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: Did your children participate in sports much? 
Mrs. Black: Not much, some. Girls did some basketball and boys, not too much. They were in scouts. They were involved in different things. But the sports way back, say for the Army, that was really something. They had the SED guys and some of them had been on college teams before they came here. 
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know about that till I talked with Grady Whitman, and that was a good team back then. 
Mrs. Black: Oh yeah, it was great. And I know Jane Sherman’s husband, Bob Sherman, I don’t know if you remember him or not, he’s gone now, but he was right there, he was such an athlete with basketball, football, baseball, all of it. And that helped with him around.
Mr. Kolb: Did they play on Blankenship Field or where? 
Mrs. Black: I can’t remember the name of the fields. I don’t think Blankenship, but you know we had several areas that they played, and we would go off and watch the teams. 
Mr. Kolb: That was during the war? 
Mrs. Black: That was during the war. It was great. 
Mr. Kolb: Then after the high school got started, they had teams right away, I guess ’44 or ’43, but they had teams right away as I understand it. 
Mrs. Black: They did and sometimes they had shifts, the night shift, the day shift. I think they had A, B, C, D shift. Each shift would play against the other. It was –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you mean the workers? 
Mrs. Black: The workers, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Besides the school kids. 
Mrs. Black: Oh yeah, I’m not talking about the school; I’m talking about the workers here. That was a big morale booster. 
Mr. Kolb: Did they have gymnasiums to play basketball in? 
Mrs. Black: I don’t know where they did it. I just remember the softball and stuff, but they were basketball players, these tall guys. 
Mr. Kolb: Well the high school had a basketball, had a gym. 
Mrs. Black: They must have gotten to use the basketball thing from the high school. ’Cause, you know, right away when you got all these many people from all over the country, they were interested in, like you said, the music, the Little Theater. They didn’t call it Playhouse then; they called it ‘Little Theater.’ And they had all these different things; you could join any club, the Camera Club, the whole bit, and they were very active. And we started taking courses, you know, at the high school, and they were teaching Music Appreciation.
Mr. Kolb: Really? 
Mrs. Black: Oh yeah, in 1944. 
Mr. Kolb: A busy mom like you? 
Mrs. Black: Well, in 1944 I guess when I wasn’t, before I got married, and then after I got married. 
Mr. Kolb: You took classes before you got married? 
Mrs. Black: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: In the high school, in the adult education kind of night school? 
Mrs. Black: Kind of. 
Mr. Kolb: I never heard about that. 
Mrs. Black: T. F. X. McCarthy, I guess, was the Music Appreciation [teacher]. You know, we didn’t have tapes that you could play music and stuff. He had records and it was wonderful. He was also a writer for the paper, what did they call it? The Oak Ridge Journal and so, oh yeah, people were very involved. 
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know you had time for that. 
Mrs. Black: Well they did, and down at the end of Orange Lane was a barn, and that’s where they had the Little Theater. I think it started in the barn down there. 
Mr. Kolb: So what did you take classes in? Music Appreciation and –  
Mrs. Black: Music Appreciation and Art. 
Mr. Kolb: And then after you got married?
Mrs. Black: I kept on and then I went to UT and took courses and stuff. 
Mr. Kolb: Blacky had to stay home and baby-sit the kids. 
Mrs. Black: He was glad to; he was an only child. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, really? Oh, what a change. He must have loved children. 
Mrs. Black: He did. He was real good with them. 
Mr. Kolb: That’s something when I came here in ’54, that was the period of Jackie Pope, and Jack Armstrong was the coach and there was really a heyday for high school football and I went to all the games, but that was after the World War II era. But there was a lot of feeling about Oak Ridge. 
Mrs. Black: And Clinton. 
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, from day one, I guess, there’s always a natural rivalry, and still goes on. Kids don’t know why probably now, except they’re just close by. 
Mrs. Black: Right, well I think that anyway. I know the Clinton people used to accuse us of stealing the chickens because food was scarce. You know, I’m talking about the early days, and we didn’t have many grocery stores, and sometimes we would go to Harriman to buy stuff or – they called it a black market down here at some crossroads. I don’t even remember the name of it, but they’d say that Oak Ridgers were out stealing their gardens and stealing their chickens. Now, I don’t think that happened, but the Clinton people would rent out, say if there was a garage or a smokehouse, or any building they had, they would rent out to these people that were working here that didn’t have a place. They’d say bring your own sheets, and you were there for one shift, and that was in the very beginning when it was really hard, and I got that from some of my uncles who had come here in ’43 and it was just really rough. 
Mr. Kolb: There probably were some chickens stolen. 
Mrs. Black: Oh, I’m sure. 
Mr. Kolb: It was embellished and blown out of proportion. 
Mrs. Black: Ridgers had to eat. 
Mr. Kolb: There were probably some chicken thieves out in Clinton, too. It wasn’t invented by Oak Ridgers. But I’ve always heard about the, partly jealously, because of the big money being made here. Of course, after the war, well, it still stayed on. The jobs here paid better than most, the government jobs did, and my wife taught in Norwood till 1992, and she was considered an outsider in 1992, by the local people. 
Mrs. Black: And probably a lot of those children’s fathers were working in Oak Ridge, some of them.
Mr. Kolb: They knew all about Oak Ridge. It just was a different culture, that they thought we thought we were better and maybe we thought we were better, to a point. 
Mrs. Black: Were you here when Margaret Mead came here? 
Mr. Kolb: No, well, I don’t know, I didn’t hear about her till later, I came in ’54, so I don’t know when she came. 
Mrs. Black: I don’t know when she came either. 
Mr. Kolb: I think she came earlier.
[Editor’s note: Margaret Mead visited Oak Ridge in the 1960s.]
Mrs. Black: But, you know, she criticized us for being shut off and not opening ourselves to –  
Mr. Kolb: Well you didn’t have a choice about it. 
Mrs. Black: No, and another thing she criticized, she said Oak Ridge was a town without a grandmother. That wasn’t quite true, but it was young and she said something terrible’s going to happen to that town, you know, children can’t grow up without grandmothers. So I laugh now and I’d say, yeah, now we’re all grandmothers and great-grandmothers. 
Mr. Kolb: Now we’ve got too many grandmothers. 
Mrs. Black: That’s right. 
Mr. Kolb: Well you know, it was different, and we didn’t have a choice in the matter, that was just the way it was. We made out the best we could, like your mother, she was in Nashville having all of these grandchildren here, while you were having all these children, like your other siblings too.
Mrs. Black: That’s right. 
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure she came back and forth to see you as often as she could, and back and forth.
Mrs. Black: Took all day.
Mr. Kolb: It just was such a unique experience. That’s why we want to document everyone’s history ’cause everyone’s got their own story to tell, basically, and it��s your stories. 
Mrs. Black: It’s my story. I wish it were exciting but it isn’t, it’s just plain old –
Mr. Kolb: Well it’s not whether it’s exciting or not. I’m sure there are plenty of things that were exciting and plenty that weren’t; some were just plain down, just had to get through it, you know. But just going to work every day, now, did you work eight hour shifts? 
Mrs. Black: Eight hour shifts; the women usually worked eight hour shifts. 
Mr. Kolb: You never had to double-shift, ever, did you? 
Mrs. Black: No. 
Mr. Kolb: Some of the men did. 
Mrs. Black: Oh, they did. 
Mr. Kolb: They had to stay over to do whatever they have to do but –
Mrs. Black: And the telephones, you know, we didn’t have telephones back then. You couldn’t get a telephone in your house unless it was approved by your boss, and so I know one woman we knew had a telephone, but she didn’t want anyone else to have it. Her husband said it’s not for you all to use and don’t tell them. So we were over there for coffee one day, and she had put it under a cardboard box and the phone rang. Somebody said, “Your box is ringing.” The jig was up. And you know people would want to come over and call. 
Mr. Kolb: Because she had an early phone?
Mrs. Black: She had an early phone because her husband – if your husband required it, and sometimes, you know, if something was going on in the plant, they’d call you back. And then it was hard to get phones. When we finally got phones, we had to be on a four-party line so you hardly ever got to use it, and I was on a phone with a woman next door, and she was the head of some club and it was always busy. 
Mr. Kolb: So how long did it take to get phones? 
Mrs. Black: Oh, a long time. I don’t know. It took a long time. I think we were in here in 1950; probably took till 1950. But we had mail service two times a day.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, that was typical. Earlier.
Mrs. Black: Do you remember that? Typical. Three cent stamps, mail service two times a day. 
Mr. Kolb: Gas was about twenty cents a gallon, maybe even cheaper. 
Mrs. Black: That’s exactly right. And saving, we had to save everything. You know I look at the paper that we waste.
Mr. Kolb: What do you mean? 
Mrs. Black: Well, like paper, you know the kids in school had to write on both sides, margins, write through the margins, everything, and you know how we waste paper today. I thought the computer was going to save paper.
Mr. Kolb: It generates more.
Mrs. Black: More, more paper. The soap, we would take the soap and use it and then down to the last, and then we would glue it, mesh it with the other soap, because my mother had that expression from the ’30s, the Depression, ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.’ And so when the war came along we were still making do, and making do, and that’s what we had to make do with, with everything. 
Mr. Kolb: Came in handy then. 
Mrs. Black: It did; I was used to it.
Mr. Kolb: That’s for sure. My goodness.
[end of recording]