Shacter, John

              
ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN SHACTER
Interviewed by Jim Overholt
September 25, 1990 
[Side A]
MR. OVERHOLT: I’d like to start with the early part of your life, before we get into Oak Ridge. Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and where you went to school.
MR. SHACTER: I was born in Vienna, Austria, and came to the United States, where I had close family, in 1938, after Hitler took over Austria. I was seventeen at the time, so my early education was all in German in Vienna, Austria, through most of the gymnasium, which is the equivalent of high school. So I entered – I was seventeen when I got in, in ’38. In Philadelphia, I finished high school. I had to take mostly English and American history, tutored other subjects. I was pretty much finished with math and all that stuff. And then went to the University of Pennsylvania for four years, well, really, three plus years, accelerated wartime courses, and got my Chemical Engineering degree, and went to New York for an interview and hired in with Union Carbide in New York.
MR. OVERHOLT: How did you hear about Union Carbide?
MR. SHACTER: They came to the school and recruited and said that – I had just before that interviewed with Tennessee Eastman, and they had given me an interview trip down to Oak Ridge.
MR. OVERHOLT: So, you went over to the Y-12 plant.
MR. SHACTER: So, I went over to – well, no, I didn’t really. I just went to Townsite, the residential area, and they had a big hall with the interviewers, and mine was Kleintop, was his name. He said, "Well, I can’t tell you anything about the work. It’s wartime stuff. But it’s got a lot of math and engineering, and it’s interesting, and it’s fast moving, and if you want the job, you’re going to have to stay right here and go to work.” I said, "Now wait a moment. I came down for an interview trip, and I’m not going to do that. I’ve got to finish my obligations in Philadelphia and then come back." He says, "Oh, no, you can’t do that." So I said, "Well, I guess I don’t want the job," and I went back to Philadelphia, came to New York for Union Carbide, and the guy in Union Carbide had a big hall of desks interviewing people, and he says, "There’s a place down south somewhere, we can’t tell you where, where they’re doing a lot of interesting stuff with math and engineering, and that’s all I can tell you. It’s a wartime job." And I say, "Are you talking about Oak Ridge, Tennessee?" And you could’ve heard a needle drop in the whole room, because everybody stared. All the interviewers turned around because they weren’t supposed to say that word. I just come back from there, so I knew the –
MR. OVERHOLT: Oh, that’s great. That’s a wonderful story.
MR. SHACTER: So, anyhow, I hired in with Union Carbide. They didn’t want me to stay in New York, immediately. They told me I could go back to Philadelphia and finish my affairs and hired in. I hired in the 27th of December in 1943, which gave me an extra year of seniority, those three days. My title was "Junior Cadet Engineer."
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, I’ve got that from others. That’s an interesting title, isn’t it.
MR. SHACTER: Engineer wasn’t enough. Cadet Engineer wasn’t enough. They had to make it a Junior – I wasn’t just a Cadet Engineer, I was a Junior Cadet Engineer. And the salary was a hundred-and-forty-some dollars a month, and since I worked forty-eight hours officially, a lot more unofficially, I got $195 a month.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, so you went back to Philadelphia, and then did they send you to Columbia from there?
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, I worked at Columbia at the Schermerhorn Building and the –
MR. OVERHOLT: And the Barrier Pilot Plant.
MR. SHACTER: Barrier Pilot Plant, and upstairs in the laboratory. I worked the upstairs and downstairs.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay. I’ll tell you what I want to do now.
MR. SHACTER: Very interesting.
MR. OVERHOLT: Let’s talk a little bit about your stay at Columbia, try to get that out of the way, and then I want to go back just a few minutes to some memories you have of Austria.
MR. SHACTER: Fine.
MR. OVERHOLT: That’s a unique thing that we have here. I didn’t know that this was – I didn’t expect this, so I’m really feeling something else coming here. Okay, tell me a little bit about your work in the Barrier Pilot Plant, what you remember about it.
MR. SHACTER: Well, I worked – I can’t tell you the technical details, and you wouldn’t be interested in them anyhow, but the purpose of the work was to find a membrane, a barrier, that could be passable to gas, but yet had pores small enough so that the faster isotope, uranium 235 molecules, it was really UF6, so that the faster zigzagging molecules would have a statistically greater chance to move into the hole, and through the hole than the heavier one, but only be a very, very tiny difference, fraction, so that you had to repeat the step over and over and over again, and half of the gas went through the barrier and half of the gas did not. You’d take the half that did go through and pass it through the next higher stage and then the one that didn’t, you’d pass it through the next lower stage, just like a distillation column.
MR. OVERHOLT: You got an out duct, and then one that keeps in the same channel.
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, that’s right. And tritium is, of course, UF6, uranium hexafluoride, is a gas, and it’s a highly corrosive fluoride gas, so there aren’t many materials that you can feed – certainly can’t put plastics or glass or something like that in there. There are not very many materials that will stand up to fluoride gas, and sit there for years and years and not be affected, or be affected very little. And so that limited the materials that we could make the membrane out of, of course. That’s about all I can tell you, except that the pilot plant was much of the same kind of stuff that chemical engineering students would learn in their training. So it wasn’t anything strange to me, and the people there were terrific. We had the best minds, best chemists from Ohio State University and other places, and great guys; used to have beer sessions and lots of fun. But hard work, very hard work.
MR. OVERHOLT: Now, what you’re saying is that some of this on the barrier is still classified and you can’t talk about the technical thing.
MR. SHACTER: That’s right.
MR. OVERHOLT: That’s okay.
MR. SHACTER: Well, the gory details, people wouldn’t be interested in.
MR. OVERHOLT: Right. What I want to understand a little better is how this pilot plant fit into the whole system of making the barrier. Because here they’ve got this Decatur plant in Illinois, and they’re producing them there. Now, how exactly did the interchange between that plant and the pilot plant in Columbia work? What are they doing? Are they getting the kind of barrier they think they want at Columbia and then this is the design they’re using at the Decatur plant, or are they making some at the Decatur plant, then testing that in the –
MR. SHACTER: Well, you have to remember, in the Manhattan Project, that many things were done in parallel that never really saw the light of the plant. In fact, most of the things that people worked on never were used in production. The whole Manhattan Project was based on the premise that if you followed half a dozen approaches that were equally promising at first –
MR. OVERHOLT: Some of them might work.
MR. SHACTER: Some of them might work. Maybe one of them might work and the others might – well, maybe one of them worked real well and two or three of them worked half well, you know, tolerably well, so it could have made the plant, and the others didn’t even work that well. And so really the work at Columbia that I was associated with in the pilot plant worked as if Decatur didn’t exist. And Decatur worked as if the pilot plant in Columbia didn’t exist. These were parallel approaches.
MR. OVERHOLT: How in the end, though, did they ever adjoin one another that you know of?
MR. SHACTER: No. As far as I know, the only place where all the barrier technology and the other technology converged into one site was in Oak Ridge, when all of the first buildings were built in Oak Ridge. At that point, by the way, the Y-12 plant was already operating. That was the electromagnetic method. And so was S-50. I don’t know whether you heard of S-50.
MR. OVERHOLT: Mark Fox was the soldier over that.
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, and that was a thermal diffusion plant, and it was operating. But the whole plant of S-50, the whole thermal diffusion plant, was shut down when it was realized that one of the fifty-some buildings in K-25 was producing more than the whole S-50 plant, so it wasn’t really worth the – that was one of the parallel approaches that was abandoned.
MR. OVERHOLT: But let’s go back, now, to this – I think you were getting ready to say something – you got off on another idea – about exactly where all this technology for the barrier really ended up being worked out.
MR. SHACTER: Right here in Oak Ridge. The barrier work was transferred from all of the other sites to Oak Ridge, and eventually only Oak Ridge continued to work on gas diffusion technology.
MR. OVERHOLT: Now, of course, this is wartime we are talking about. The ones that they used during the war, are you saying that after they came down, after these barriers and converters came down and were assembled into the plant, that they were still making – the changes then that were made on the barrier were made here by – the technology was changing even then.
MR. SHACTER: It was transferred. The earliest, the very earliest stages and converters and stages in Oak Ridge were using barriers that were made elsewhere, of course. But once Oak Ridge got going, once the K-25 site got going, it wasn’t too long before the barrier work was initiated in Oak Ridge, too. Barrier research.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, but not producing. They were still producing it in the –
MR. SHACTER: Well, yeah, but there was – you know, the barrier types changed as the plant continued. And I can’t tell you – I don’t think it’s ever been declassified. Barrier technology is the most sensitive technology in gas diffusion, because, you know, a little country that wants to produce, say, some uranium 235 can make its own bomb or two.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well, we see what little countries, today, we see what little countries can do, can’t we.
MR. SHACTER: That’s right. So, I don’t think that we want to say anything about the barrier that gets down into the details where it might make it easier for someone who has no business passing that technology.
MR. OVERHOLT: But I will say that there has been quite a bit written about the Adler Barrier and the Johnson Barrier. You know, not in the kind of detail you’re talking about, but there have been distinctions made about those two.
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, and there were others. There were third and fourth barriers that you did not mention that were also in the competition later on, and as the plant went on, the barrier types kept improving.
MR. OVERHOLT: But without getting into technical explanation, I still want to understand, make sure I understand the assembly line of this, how the production and the development and technology worked with one another. 
MR. SHACTER: I came to Oak Ridge, and other than the interview stuff and so forth visit, permanently, to stay for years in, I think it was, July of 1944. So by that time, the earliest stages had been produced, and after the mock stages had been introduced, the ones that really had barrier and could separate were installed just about at that time. The barrier sequence of just precisely where each converter in these early days was produced, I really didn’t keep up with. I know we had the Conditioning Building in Oak Ridge, one of the tremendous sized buildings and they were starting to – who was down there? Bacon Davis was operating there and people like A. B. Hale and Calborn, those guys came from that side of the organization. But I had my hands full with operating the plant, and I didn’t really know and keep up with where each of the early converters was being provided with barrier and constructed. I only knew when they were installed, so I’m not the guy to ask. I’m not – Adler and Johnson barrier, precisely where they were produced and how they were put into the, you know, where each of those barriers was put into converters, I’m not the guy to ask.
MR. OVERHOLT: When you were at Schermerhorn, though, you did see, you did work on the Adler barrier, I assume. And you also worked on the Johnson barrier as well? 
MR. SHACTER: Well, I don’t know what, I can’t tell you what precise barriers I worked on. And I better not get into that because I’m not well versed on what has been published on that. I can give you names of people. I would know more about that.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, we’ll do that then; when we finish the interview, I’ll get some names. Tell me a little more about the atmosphere of Schermerhorn Hall and that basement you worked in down there. I know that’s been described.
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, as I said, I worked upstairs in the laboratories also, so in fact my desk and my place was upstairs. I came downstairs only to translate what we had learned on the beaker scale on the desktop into pilot plant. See, to me the pilot plant was a big scale-up, because I’d do research with beakers and test tubes and chemicals on the shelf, and then I had to take that stuff and apply it in the pilot plant. So I worked both in research and in the pilot plant thing, and that was more interesting, because I didn’t just – some of the guys just worked in the pilot plant per se, and they were carrying stuff from one place, from one vat to the other and so on.
MR. OVERHOLT: Had a crane down there they were using. 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, and that was fun too, but in my case, a lot of my work was on the bench, and my work downstairs in the pilot plant was just several visits a day, so I spent a good portion of my time down there, but not – my main work location was in the laboratory.
MR. OVERHOLT: Did you all have the whole building or were there classes or anything going on in there? 
MR. SHACTER: I don’t really, no, I don’t think there were any classes in the building, but I’m not quite sure. 
MR. OVERHOLT: Anything else? Tell me a little bit more about – 
MR. SHACTER: Well, the most interesting part other than that earliest period at Columbia University was coming to Oak Ridge and seeing the board sidewalks and the roads and the Central Cafeteria with the pork chops floating in hot water and the buses going, and the dormitories, and the buses going to K-25, and a lot of people in uniform, and a lot of people in civilian clothes, and the big plants, seeing them for the first time. No, before that, going to the Wheat School, you know, the Wheat Community and the Wheat School. And I was a student in the Wheat School for one week when I came, first came, learning about the gas diffusion process, not the barrier, now, but the way the plant worked, separating the – you had the stages, the controls, how the whole philosophy of design, of how – as I said, it was like a gigantic distillation column more or less, the concept, laid down and arranged in horseshoe fashion around the semi-circle there. It took – for about a week, I learned intensely what the process was about. The second week, I was the instructor.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, that’s the way things worked in Oak Ridge. 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, in fact Vanstrum, Paul Vanstrum, who later became Senior Vice President to Roger Hibbs eventually, Paul Vanstrum was a chemical engineer himself and he came from another part of Union Carbide (inaudible) he was about a year or two, I guess about a couple years ahead of me in experience, because I’d just come out of school. And so he had the first week class, and I was a student, and then after, he left and went to the plant to start help operating and I took the class over, and a new crop of people came the second week, and I acted like I knew all about the process. So that’s how fast things happened.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, things moved quickly here. 
MR. SHACTER: And then, of course, we moved to the plant, and at that point I knew pretty well how things were operating. The plant is not that complicated. Instrumentation is probably the most complicated part of operating that plant, and even it was not all that complicated for a chemical engineer. But the gigantic scale of everything, you know, we had bicycles riding up and down the plant.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah. What was your first reaction when you saw that enormous building? That’s the biggest building in the world. 
MR. SHACTER: Well, yeah, impressed as heck.
MR. OVERHOLT: You couldn’t believe, I mean, even after the work you’d done at Columbia. And you were there how long at Columbia? 
MR. SHACTER: I was at Columbia from late December ’43 to the middle of ’44.
MR. OVERHOLT: So even after all that work, you still didn’t have that – 
MR. SHACTER: Well, I knew pretty well. First of all, I knew what we were trying to do, you know, this business of – in my case, at least, I think I learned – I suspected what we were up to when I entered, especially after those two interviews both pointing the same way. So I suspected pretty much – I’d read the LIFE Magazine and the others, you know, the popularized versions of what Hamm and Straussman and Leitner and those guys had done in Germany, and I had a pretty good suspicion. And then they just told me, I’d say about two or three days of work, after we were told not to talk about it, co-workers at Columbia. Co-workers used to talk about it quite freely.
MR. OVERHOLT: What did they say? Can you remember any – 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, that we were working on the atom bomb, and that we were racing Germany, and that because of the earliest inventions that had been made at Germany by Hans Stienoble, the fact that when the atom is split, energy is released, neutrons are released, so you can get a chain reaction and find the reaction products to be in the middle of the atomic table instead of at the very top, that kind of thing was discovered in Germany. And since Hitler was so fast in getting the V-1 and V-2 missiles, and had all those German scientists working feverishly on wartime stuff, which we had not prior to that date. I mean, we were Johnny-come-latelys in everything, including Liberty Ships, and the planes, and we had to play catch-up. That may be the last world war where we’ll be able to play catch-up, too, because we had a little time, fortunately, the British, the French, and the others who were gaining time for us.
MR. OVERHOLT: Had a pretty good geographical location as well.
MR. SHACTER: If it were today, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to play catch-up like we did then. But we did play catch-up, and in the atomic area, we were convinced that Germany was way ahead of us, and we were reading the papers, expecting any day to hear that Hitler had given us an ultimatum or just bombed New York or something to get us out of the war.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, Ellison Taylor said he used to go up, when he was at Columbia, too, and he said he used to go up to the top of this building where he was staying, I think he was a fire warden or something, and he’d go up there. Occasionally a plane would fly over and he’d say, well, this could be it. Probably not, but it could be. 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah. So we worked day and night in those days. It was a lot of fun, but we made it fun. I mean, what the heck, there’s no sense in – well, you can’t go through life just being in a state of panic when you’re working. So it was a lot of fun. It was very feverishly done, but at the same time, it was dead serious, and we felt that we were racing Hitler from a second position, that we were, that we knew we had to play catch-up, that was the situation, and that, in a way, had he been first with the atom bomb, we had been second, we wouldn’t be having this interview today.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, yeah.
MR. SHACTER: So it would have changed the world. Younger generations really aren’t being told that, how serious the – we really came close to losing the war.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well, as it turns out, though, we weren’t quite as close as we had – 
MR. SHACTER: Well, I’m not just talking about atomic bombs. Had we not played the catch-up game quite as successfully as we did and people had not worked as hard, fellows and girls – there were many girls in the war plants – and had we not been successful, had we not had time, had the British and French and so forth not given us enough time, we would have lost that war.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, I look at that war. I think unquestionably the key was England. If he had taken England out, it really would have been a bleak prospect. 
MR. SHACTER: And he almost had the chance to do that.
MR. OVERHOLT: And it’s almost as if – you read what he had to say about the English – it’s almost as if a part of him, he didn’t quite want to do it, you know? You felt like he could have if he had just pressed a little more, but for some reason he always saw Germany and England as being allies. 
MR. SHACTER: Well, he had a choice of either turning east or west. He either had to attack Russia, or he had to attack England. And he felt at that time that England could wait, that really they had been clobbered, they had pulled out in Belgium, the big evacuation. They were limping home. And the small British air force of Spitfires and things weren’t really a match for the German Luftwaffe, and in those days he felt that Russia was the bigger threat, England could wait, you know, let the island sit there. And so he turned against Russia –
MR. OVERHOLT: Which was a mistake. 
MR. SHACTER: And you know, Napoleon, and I’ll give it to Napoleon, he couldn’t. It was just too – weather and everything combined.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well he was another Napoleon. The same thing happened to Napoleon. 
MR. SHACTER: That’s right.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well, listen, let’s go back to Austria in the ‘30s when you were a teenager there. Tell me a little bit about what kind of atmosphere, what you remember about the atmosphere in Austria when Hitler wanted Austria, when the troops – I guess you left, though, before he came in. When did you leave? 
MR. SHACTER: I left in ’38, a very few months after he marched in. You knew that Hitler himself was Austria’s gift to Germany. He was born in Austria.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, and by the way, he made sure – my memory of this is not real vivid right now, but one of the first things he did when his troops went into Austria was to raid one of the libraries there, which he feared might prove that he was of some, had some sort of Jewish descent. Have you ever read that? 
MR. SHACTER: I’ve heard the stories about that, but I don’t know if they are true or not.
MR. OVERHOLT: So, whether or not that’s why, but they think that’s what he was afraid of.  
MR. SHACTER: Could be.
MR. OVERHOLT: I want to know two things. First, what you remember about the atmosphere of Austria, and what happened to your family. I mean, did your whole family come to America? 
MR. SHACTER: No, most of them died. Austria before Hitler, just before Hitler, was sort of an autocratic regime. It wasn’t really an open democracy; it was something in between a fascist state and an ordinary republic, so we didn’t really have, in the last few years, what you might call individual liberties like you would in a real democracy. Now, Czechoslovakia on the other hand, right next door, was an outstanding, about the same size as Austria, they were an outstanding democracy, every bit as liberal and free as England or France. In fact, they had Mazurik and Benesch in Czechoslovakia, and they really were an outstanding example, even by today’s standards, of a well-functioning democracy and were doing fine. Austria was, as I said, sort of an in-between situation and did not have much freedom. However, the youngsters in Austria had a lot of fun. There was the mountains; the country’s beautiful. The alps, we were skiing in the winter and all kinds of sports in the summer, well, lots of things to do, and academically very, all those countries, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, produced good students and excellent scientists. Most of the scientists that worked for the United States later came from – even doctors. Vienna was famous for producing the world’s best doctors in those days. So academically, the schooling and the education system in those little countries and Germany too. Switzerland was excellent.
MR. OVERHOLT: What do you remember about people you knew, about whether they wanted to be amalgamated into the German state or not? Can you remember what their sentiments – 
MR. SHACTER: It varied from enthusiastic supporters, guys that even worked illegally for the takeover of the Nazis, all the way to people who felt destroyed when Hitler took over, were vehemently opposed. So, the whole spectrum, you can’t generalize it.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, tell me about your decision to come to America and what your parents – 
MR. SHACTER: Well, my decision was, our decision was prompt. My father had died when I was five years old, so there was only my mother, my sister and I, and there was just no question in our mind, that we weren’t gonna wait to see what would happen. We immediately started contacting the embassy and family and got on the lists. It was most important that I left, because being seventeen years old and a boy, I was in greater danger than my sister or my mother.
MR. OVERHOLT: In what way? 
MR. SHACTER: In the sense of being picked up and either put into a camp or work or attacked or anything else. So there was the Hitler Youth, a very aggressive group, and they could do whatever they wanted to do. Police wouldn’t dare to oppose them, and these were kids, so they didn’t have any sense of responsibilities or restrictions. So I got a plane ticket. At that time, you could get out by plane and only by plane.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, before you get into that, what’s this list that you had to get on? Can you explain that to me? You said you had to put your name on the list to leave.
MR. SHACTER: A waiting list for the visa to be admitted to the United States.
MR. OVERHOLT: You’re just talking about a visa. 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah.
MR. OVERHOLT: How much difficulty was there at that time in getting that? 
MR. SHACTER: Well, since we had close family in the United States and they vouched for me and vouched for the others in the family, the other two, we didn’t have so much trouble getting granted the immigration status, but it was a matter of timing, not immediately. You had to go through the procedures and it was gonna take several months. So I got out by plane to Italy and lived in Italy by myself.
MR. OVERHOLT: So your mother and sister stayed. 
MR. SHACTER: My mother and sister left later, but they also left by plane. They went to England.
MR. OVERHOLT: Were you in Vienna, or where were you? 
MR. SHACTER: Vienna.
MR. OVERHOLT: Vienna, okay. 
MR. SHACTER: So then I lived in Trieste, Italy, for three months.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, who did you stay with? 
MR. SHACTER: Just friendly strangers.
MR. OVERHOLT: Just anybody who’d help you. 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah. There were people in Italy at that time that could – see, Italy was under Mussolini. Eventually, of course, it became just as bad as Germany, but the Italians were very friendly, very helpful, and I learned Italian on the street. Having dates, you know.
MR. OVERHOLT: So, you just went from house to house or wherever. 
MR. SHACTER: No, no, I had a little one-room.
MR. OVERHOLT: You got a room. 
MR. SHACTER: Got a room.
MR. OVERHOLT: So how much money did you have when you left? 
MR. SHACTER: Very little. I lived mostly on spaghetti. I had an accordion with me.
MR. OVERHOLT: Were you scared at that time? 
MR. SHACTER: No, no, it was a big adventure. There was nothing to be scared of once I got out of Austria, and the same thing with my sister and mother, once we got out. But the rest of the family did not take as quick action as we did. They decided to see whether the situation would be tolerable.
MR. OVERHOLT: How in the world did you – I mean, if you had no money and you were living like this in Italy, explain to me how you had enough money and who made the arrangements. 
MR. SHACTER: We had enough money in Vienna to live, of course. We just simply translated part of that money into airplane and travel tickets. So, I had a steamboat ticket to travel around the Mediterranean, which I eventually used, and traveled, I think, fourth class on a French boat with a bunch of French Foreign Legionnaires, fourth class, and we had a lot of fun. We made a bon fire and danced and I played the accordion and we sang all kinds of songs. I was young. I was ready to have fun, had every opportunity and it wouldn’t have helped any to just sit there and worry. I had plenty of things to worry about, but I just wouldn’t let myself worry.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, give me a few more details, though about your leaving Italy. Can you give me anymore about – 
MR. SHACTER: I eventually wanted to wind up in France to take the boat at the right time to the United States when the waiting period was up and my family was going to expect me in New York, but I had to spend some additional weeks between the time that – I had a three month visa in Italy. Rather than renewing it, I used part of the steam ticket then to make a round trip, like a tourist, around the Mediterranean. Went to Greece and Israel and Egypt and all kinds of islands and North Africa and eventually to Marseilles in France, and then traveled by train through Paris to Boulogne, and took the ship, I think it was a Dutch ship, which later was sunk –
MR. OVERHOLT: So this trip from Marseilles to Boulogne, how long did that take? 
MR. SHACTER: Just a few days. Spent a couple of days in Paris, went to the Folies-Bergère.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, beat Hitler there anyway.
MR. SHACTER: Oh, yeah, yeah, beat him by quite a bit. And I was better received too. And then took the boat over to the United States. My family expected me in New York, and we went immediately to Philadelphia, and I stayed in their home. They were first cousins.
MR. OVERHOLT: So these relatives were from Philadelphia. 
MR. SHACTER: Yes. That’s why I went to the University of Pennsylvania.
MR. OVERHOLT:  Right, and they’re the ones that met you in New York, these people who were living there.
MR. SHACTER: That’s right.
MR. OVERHOLT: How were they relatives? Tell me – 
MR. SHACTER: First cousins.
MR. OVERHOLT: First cousins, so it was what, your father or mother’s people? 
MR. SHACTER: My father’s sister’s daughter.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, and how long had they been in America? 
MR. SHACTER: Oh, they had been there from just about the time they were born. It was the mother, her husband that immigrated to the United States.
MR. OVERHOLT: Did you speak English at that time? 
MR. SHACTER: No, not a word. I had French and Latin, six years of Latin, two years of French. I could speak French, but I bought myself two lilliputian dictionaries that fit in the palm of your hand, and I kept the German/English in one pocket and the English/German in the other pocket, and that’s how I entered 10 A, 10 B English and American History, and American History came the next term. Just English, 10 A, 10 B English, and I learned the hard – you know, the two-by-four treatment, actually learned pretty fast.
MR. OVERHOLT:  I would never have guessed you were European.
MR. SHACTER: I have a pretty good ear. I’m musically inclined and I could hear my accent. I could hear that I was speaking differently from other people. I still have an accent today.
MR. OVERHOLT: I barely detect any of it. 
MR. SHACTER: Not very much. I’ve spent as much time in the United States as Kissinger, except Henry Kissinger –
MR. OVERHOLT: He doesn’t have as good an ear as you do. 
MR. SHACTER: No, that’s probably part of it, and he also, I think, lived with family that continued to speak German, whereas my family didn’t speak a word of German. So it was sink or swim. If I wanted a date with a girl, I couldn’t ask her in German.
MR. OVERHOLT: How long did it take you to get to where you could sort of get around and do what you wanted to do with the language? 
MR. SHACTER: Oh, right from the beginning.
MR. OVERHOLT: Just a few weeks. 
MR. SHACTER: You use your hands more.
MR. OVERHOLT: No, I meant using the language though. 
MR. SHACTER: Well, how do you define that? I mean you go to the bathroom, you learn how to ask where the bathroom is and food and stuff the first day. You know, they make these little phrase books where you learn the essentials, and then after that, yes, no, please, thank you, excuse me, girl, boy, you know. And then you keep going. You add a few words, initially, every hour. And you need the words too. The early words are ones that you need most, and you use them all the time. Then later you start reading and grammar and stuff and marvel at the difficulty of the English language.
MR. OVERHOLT: Oh, really?
MR. SHACTER: Oh, sure, so many exceptions. You’ve heard the joke about "How do you spell fish?" G-H-O-T[-I]. Who would guess that GH, like in ‘enough’ is pronounced like an F. Or O in ‘women,’ or T[I] in ‘nation.’ Or how many meaning of the word, take a simple word like ‘get.’ G-E-T, how many ways it is used: ‘get it?’
MR. OVERHOLT: Well, like ‘faire’ in French. 
MR. SHACTER: Not quite as bad. I don’t know of any language that uses, any of the usual languages, that uses words and exceptions as much and in as many different ways as English does.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well, it has such a large vocabulary to start with too. English has the greatest vocabulary of any language on earth, what I’ve been told. 
MR. SHACTER: I wouldn’t be surprised, and it comes from different languages. It comes from French and from German, so the roots of the words come from different origins. It’s not an easy language to learn. But on the other hand, it’s become the international language today. Chances are, if you go anywhere in the world and you’re looking for someone to understand a language that you might understand too, it’s likely to be English.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well it’s interesting that you mention that, because I had to take a German reading class when I was in graduate school, and oh, I thought that was so much more difficult than French, just measurably more difficult, the way the verbs were split, and you know, you’d see the first of it at the beginning and have to go to the end to pick it up and I always thought – 
MR. SHACTER: The Germans are bad about long sentences and long words. They don’t make periods, and their words become enormous, because they take nouns and string them together and make all one word out of them, and so that’s where German is bad.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well, that’s been a fascinating story. I’d like to spend more time on it, but I think probably what we need to do now is to move on to Oak Ridge. I’d like for you to tell me a little bit about the first day, and, of course, I know you came down for an interview first, but then when you came back, and you were hired by Union Carbide right off and sent to Columbia. 
MR. SHACTER: That’s right.
MR. OVERHOLT: Tell me about, you maybe don’t remember it, but if you can remember that first day that you came to Oak Ridge, when you came to stay, tell me a little bit about that.
[Side B]
MR. OVERHOLT: Tell me about the first day you came down from Columbia and how you came into Oak Ridge.
MR. SHACTER: Well, I came into Oak Ridge by bus, of course, having taken the plane or the train. I don’t remember how I got to Knoxville, but the last part of it was by bus, of course, and I came in through the gate. I’d already been in Oak Ridge once, so the procedure of coming in through the gate wasn’t strange to me. And I’d been in the residential area in Oak Ridge overnight, so that part wasn’t strange to me. The first strange – the dormitory was the first, well, even that, I had been in a dormitory before, seen it. So I guess the first really new thing was the Wheat School, taking the bus out to work and checking into the Wheat School.
MR. OVERHOLT: Now, this bus you came in to Oak Ridge, was this purely for K-25 workers, or did this bring to you to the Townsite, then you got on another? 
MR. SHACTER: No, no, that was a residential bus that brought me to the residential area, only.
MR. OVERHOLT: Actually, it was probably an off-area bus. 
MR. SHACTER: Yes, I believe it was. It may have been a Greyhound or Trailways or whatever. And then the bus that took me to the Wheat School was definitely a K-25 type bus, ’cause you had to go through the – well, you know where the gate was in those days, the block house is still there, although it’s a new block house. They didn’t have that fancy a block house in the early days, but that’s basically where the gate was. So you had to go through that gate to go to the Wheat School, Wheat Community, and learn about the process.
MR. OVERHOLT: So you went in that day to the Wheat School. Did they put you in class that day?
MR. SHACTER: Immediately.
MR. OVERHOLT: Immediately, you went straight to work. 
MR. SHACTER: Oh yeah, they didn’t horse around. They didn’t have time. The plant was being built and the first buildings were going up and they needed people there ready to receive the – see, they didn’t wait till the whole plant was built. They operated it in sections; you could do that. And of course the advantage was also that the plant was getting the benefit of the people and the people were getting the benefit of the plant. They had to get acquainted with each other. The construction workers really didn’t know much about what they were building; they were following the drawings.
MR. OVERHOLT: That’s really the most unbelievable part of this whole project, is the fact that you’re building a building that doesn’t have the technology really ready for it yet.
MR. SHACTER: That’s right.
MR. OVERHOLT: And you’re just sort of doing both at the same time. 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, we truly did not know the final characteristics of what was going to go down in the structures until the stuff arrived and there was still competition for the technical features. And also, the earlier stages were different from the later stages and in several ways, but it was amazing that it worked as well as it did. And, of course, it didn’t take very long for us to put S-50 out of business, because, as I said earlier, the whole plant was just equivalent to a few stages of K-25 and we had thousands.
MR. OVERHOLT: Well, you put Y-12 out of business. 
MR. SHACTER: And we put Y-12 out of business, and I remember Clarence Larson, who later became President of the Nuclear Division, he worked at Y-12, and he’d say, "John, come on over." By that time, I was analyzing production, and improving production and so forth, and he’d say, "John, come over here. I made a big improvement in the Y-12 process," and he was right. They made big improvements in the Y-12 process, but while they made those steps, we made big steps, and we were working with factors, and they were working with percentages. 
MR. OVERHOLT: Now, isn’t he the one who was working on the nickel plating of the pipes at K-25, Clarence Larson? 
MR. SHACTER: Clarence Larson, no, it’s unlikely. Clarence Larson worked, he was a Californian, and he worked with E. O. Lawrence on (inaudible). He was a researcher, chemist, I believe, by former background. Really worked in there as a physicist, and he was one of the top technical people on the electromagnetic method.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay. There’s still a possibility that this is the same person I’m talking about, but I need to look that up. 
MR. SHACTER: I don’t know. I’m sure of what I’m saying, but it’s conceivable, people worked in so many different areas, it’s conceivable that there was a point at which he was consulting on something else. Just like I was consulting at Y-12 while I was working at K-25. And of course Y-12 got into isotope separation too, later on, so we knew something about isotope separation.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, there are two things I want to cover now. I’d like first for you to tell me a little bit about the first job you had once you got out in the plant, and then secondly, I’d like to know how the work was going. If you got there in June of ’44, you got there, oh, six months before they started sending the gas through the first stages there. It didn’t go very well, from what I’ve been told. I’d like for you to tell me what you remember. 
MR. SHACTER: There were several little emergencies.
MR. OVERHOLT: But first, tell me what your first job was, then go into the second question. 
MR. SHACTER: The first job that I had, and I had it for several months, was a supervisor. Anyone who had a college degree there became a supervisor pretty quick. I didn’t know anything about it, but I learned about – part of the control was measuring the gas stream. And from what you would measure, you would determine whether things were okay or not, and if they were not, you would have to take action, either turn valves or do something, maybe isolate certain equipment and so forth.
MR. OVERHOLT: Which was called cold tracking? 
MR. SHACTER: No.
MR. OVERHOLT: That’s a different thing. 
MR. SHACTER: The unit that you could isolate was called the cell, and it consisted of several stages. Because you couldn’t just connect all the stages and have one plant of thousands of stages and not have any way of cementing it. If there were local trouble, you’d be much better off isolating it and working on it in an isolated state rather than have the whole plant connected and every time some little problem appeared somewhere you have to shut the whole plant down.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah. 
MR. SHACTER: So there were units that were called cells, and this is not classified, and they were isolated, and it was the job of that group of people that worked with the analyzers, mass spectrometers, things of that type, to analyze the gas stream underneath and determine whether the impurities in the main constituent were what they were supposed to be.
MR. OVERHOLT: What instruments were you using to detect that? 
MR. SHACTER: Well, basically, the mass spectrometer was the analyzing instrument, and what it measured was not the main gas stream, but the impurities. For example, when you have uranium hexafluoride, you obviously don’t want any moisture, and therefore you don’t want any air. And so the plant had to be, what’s the expression, surgically clean, sterile, and if you had any foreign objects, or if you had any leaks or breaks in the pipes, you would get air into the system, and you would get moisture into the system, and you couldn’t tolerate that, because uranium hexafluoride and moisture, well, even air, just wouldn’t get along. So there were, throughout the plant, stations located in the operating area where people used to, usually girls, women, used to watch those instruments, the charts, and when there was trouble, they were supposed to use the phone devices, and eventually they had a control room where slave recorders were used. But before that, they were supposed to use, while the plant was still under construction, they were supposed to use the phones and yell for attention. And we used to hop on the bicycle and go there. Even if there was no emergency, and everything was working fine, we still, I still had to be on the bicycle quite a bit of the time to just visit the stations and make sure everything was operating smoothly.
MR. OVERHOLT: In the end, I’m sure you were all over that plant, from one end to the other.
MR. SHACTER: Yes, I was. And it was kind of a unique group in a way, because organizationally, the management had decided to break the organization down by buildings and sections of the plant. And they had given strong-willed people the power to operate each section. Well, that’s like operating a distilling column and giving somebody the job to operate plate one and plate two and do things to it. And you can’t do that because the plant is all connected. We were the only group that was not segmented like that and had the whole – later on the control room did too, of course. They called them the shift supervisors, the shift foremen, general foremen, eventually. But there was quite a turf war going on between the people that were in charge of the different sections of the plant and didn’t want anybody to touch them. 
MR. OVERHOLT: I haven’t heard this before. This was when you first got there. 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, it was like Russia today, you know, the central government and the republics, and we had a lot of republics and big, little dictators, each one wanting to run his own show, and it took quite a bit of – of course we knew where our allegiance was, to the whole darn plant. We wanted it to operate as a unit. We didn’t want people to shove problems from one place to another, and that was a very strong struggle of management, organization, different concepts. It was technical and human.
MR. OVERHOLT: Can you give me more detail on that? Can you remember a story that might stand out in your mind about these conflicts? 
MR. SHACTER: Well, I remember Johnny Murray, who later on became a number one Vice President, a number one production chief over all of the plants, Y-12, K-25 and so forth in Oak Ridge. At that time, he had come down from South Charleston. He was a very interesting person, by the way. He had no college education of any kind. I’m not even sure he finished high school, but a sharp guy and very personable, quick grasp, and for some reason the two of us hit it off quite well. I was a technical guy, and I kept him informed on the technical side, and he over the years got to trust me as somebody who never mislead him consciously. And so we became pretty – he was on a bicycle too, and he was the shift foreman. They made him shift foreman, and he operated out of the control room. And he shot – bypassed one of the units or shot something down, I forgot exactly what he did, and the guy that was in charge of that unit simply said, "Johnny, in this area, the only thing that you can touch is non-operating equipment, not operating equipment." And they had big arguments. They were eventually settled the only way that they could be settled.
MR. OVERHOLT: Where did that rule come from? 
MR. SHACTER: He had made it up.
MR. OVERHOLT: That was his rule. 
MR. SHACTER: That was his rule. By golly, he had responsibility over that part of the plant, you weren’t going to touch it.
MR. OVERHOLT: I see, I see. So it sounds as if those people in your capacity who were sort of roving around the plant, if you infringed on these little provinces that you’ve described, that’s where the conflict came in.
MR. SHACTER: You’d be in trouble, yeah, that’s right.
MR. OVERHOLT: Where do people like Dunning come into play on stuff like this?
MR. SHACTER: We weren’t quite in as bad a situation as the control room people, because they could operate, they had ways of taking action. Whereas, we were more the analysts and the interpreters and I was not called upon to turn any valves or anything like that. That wasn’t my job. My job was to identify the problem and indicate what action had to be taken. But the action to be taken had to be done either by the person operating that building or section or the person in the control room. Either one of them could take action, ’cause in an emergency, the first guy around that can take action has the onus on him. And sometimes they didn’t take action fast enough. That was some of those little emergencies you’re talking about. And if you let the thing go out of control, then you have a bigger, then the little emergency becomes the big emergency. That happened sometimes.
MR. OVERHOLT: Do you remember some of those people getting in a lot of deep trouble because they tried to be their own boss, and didn’t take action soon enough from the situations handed to them? 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, in the big situations, in the emergencies, it was rarely that a person was willing to screw up the plant just to win a point in an argument. That was more in the non-emergency situations. In the emergency situations, people started being adults, don’t act like kids, and they rise to the occasion. But there were some honest mistakes. After all, people were still learning how to plan work, including myself. But I think we learned pretty fast, and novices of one day would be experienced people of the next day, and each time you had a different emergency, you’d learn from that. And fortunately, the plant was small. You know, only a small portion, in the early days, only a small portion of the plant operated, so we grew up learning on small scale, and screwing up equipment on small scale that later on became the whole plant. If we had screwed up the whole plant, you know, it might have taken months to put it back in operation again and that never happened. All our emergencies were hours at most. A couple of days maybe. Well, hell, we weren’t producing that much in the early days anyhow, so it wasn’t a catastrophe to put them out of action for a few hours or a day. So things worked in spite of everything. These side stories that I’m telling you are just interesting side stories that explains human nature and character and stuff. But these were strong people, they were action minded people, they’d been operating, they were a little bit older than I was, they had been out in industry for a few years, they had learned that there is competition within the organization as well as outside of the organization. They were bringing some of their good habits and some of their bad habits with them to work. So it was natural, the incidents, the kind of frictions that I’m telling you about happened. And these were good people; I’m not in any way saying that that proves that K-25 was operated by bad people. It wasn’t. They were ambitious people and they were reaching for more authority and more interesting and maybe a more important job.
MR. OVERHOLT: I wonder about – you probably didn’t come in contact with him much, but I wonder about those people at the top like [John] Dunning and Dobey Keith, where they came into play in this.
MR. SHACTER: I met Dunning and Dobey Keith maybe a couple of times each, and so I didn’t have much contact. The people that I had more contact with were the people under them at Columbia University. The top guy I had everyday contact with was Ed Mack, who was the Chairman of the Chemistry Department at Ohio State before he came to Columbia, excellent person. People like Ed Harris, Lassiter, these were professors at Ohio State. Damon, he came from Colorado, was my direct supervisor. The Colorado School of Mining is where he came from. And a very imaginative guy. And then here in Oak Ridge, the top people that I met were, oh, Clark Center and Socks Kinsey and under them Rucker and, oh, Paul Huber was an early section head. He was one of the guys that, by golly, had his section in the plant and he was very strong.
MR. OVERHOLT: He had his turf and he was going to protect it.
MR. SHACTER: Oh, sure, they all did. And there were others. There was a guy, Ferrara; can’t think of his first name.
MR. OVERHOLT: How many of these people would you say there were. There were sections that they were responsible for. In the total of the plant, what are we talking about here, ten people, or less than that?
MR. SHACTER: Maybe less than ten people. More than a half a dozen.
MR. OVERHOLT: And under those people, they have how many people? 
MR. SHACTER: Well then they had building supervisors and they had an awful lot of girls, mostly, just watching instruments that eventually weren’t needed. We had too many dials and things to watch. Eventually it just turned out that the plant was a lot easier to operate if you just left it alone. One reason we beat Y-12 is the step was so simple, and once the plant ran, really the main jobs was small emergency staff and maintenance. You did need maintenance crews, but not operating.
MR. OVERHOLT: Ted Shapiro tells a wonderful story about it. He says, you know, being at K-25, particularly in those later years, and then after the war, said it was really like being around a kind of sleeping giant. All you would hear is that hum and buzz and there wasn’t too much activity at all. 
MR. SHACTER: That’s right, you couldn’t see any person.
MR. OVERHOLT: But when you didn’t hear that buzz, suddenly people would just appear everywhere trying to figure out what was wrong. 
MR. SHACTER: That’s right. Then there was Clark Center, who later became the president.
MR. OVERHOLT: Did you know him pretty well? 
MR. SHACTER: Oh, yes.
MR. OVERHOLT: Tell me a little about him, like his personality. 
MR. SHACTER: He’d know everybody’s name. That was one of his fortes. You met him once and you’d remember his name, of course, but next time you saw him, he remembered you and people liked that.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, he called them by their first name? 
MR. SHACTER: He called them by their first name, and very people conscious. The story goes, well, I know that this is a true story. In later years, he was driving a Texas millionaire around who was politically well-connected, and so the politicians asked Clark to show him what he could that was not classified. And so he got him in his car and he drove him around the outside of the horseshoe plant. Clark was very proud of what we had accomplished in the plant, and he says, "Have you ever seen a building that size in your life?" And the Texas oil man, being, I guess, a heckler, said, "Heck, in Texas, we’ve got outhouses that are bigger than that." And Clark looked at him and said, "You guys need it!"
MR. OVERHOLT: That’s wonderful! 
MR. SHACTER: After Clark died, I put that in a letter to the editor in the local papers, ’cause it characterizes his style.
MR. OVERHOLT: So he was kind of a humorous fellow, then, to be around. 
MR. SHACTER: Humorous, a very dry humor. He would grin from ear to ear. He’d have a very dry sense of humor, very conscious of people, good selector of people. Rucker was more the jovial guy. And then there was Sam Barnett, he was from South Charleston.
MR. OVERHOLT: What was this guy’s name, Socks? 
MR. SHACTER: Socks Kinsey.
MR. OVERHOLT: He was a little more aloof, wasn’t he? 
MR. SHACTER: Yeah, and not my kind of a guy. I mean, he’d get interested in how much glassware the laboratory was using and why they were using so much glassware. And I always felt that if they quit doing research, they wouldn’t use any glassware. So he got interested in details and I didn’t have an awful lot of respect for him. But the people who were down here were basically very capable people. Management styles varied. Then there was a guy by the name of Bill Humes who was a section head like Paul Huber, and he eventually became top, before Johnny Murray, Bill Humes was the production manager. Later on he was transferred to Canada, where he became a Vice-President. And then to New York where he became a Union Carbide Vice-President. He was the one that called me up to New York to work there for the corporation. He had a nervous breakdown later on.
MR. OVERHOLT: Is that right? He worked for AEC, though, for a while, didn’t he?
MR. SHACTER: No.
MR. OVERHOLT: This must be a different Humes. 
MR. SHACTER: No. This Bill Humes worked strictly for Union Carbide and went up to Canada Union Carbide, then to New York Union Carbide, became a group Vice-President, which is about as high as you can get under the president of all of Union Carbide, and then left Union Carbide.
MR. OVERHOLT: So he’s dead now? 
MR. SHACTER: No, I don’t think he’s dead. He lives in California, but he became sort of a – he lives a very simple life. He’s a hippy type, very interesting guy. But he had something akin to a nervous breakdown, I don’t know the terminology precisely. But when Bill Humes operated in Oak Ridge, he was probably the best manager all around, the most capable, the most respected, technically equipped that existed in those days. These statements are subjective. In my book he was. And what he did, that very few people even today have learned to do well, is he learned that you can bypass whole layers of management if you want to as long as you don’t make your decisions that way. But as far as information and informality is concerned, if you were five levels below him, he’d be likely to show up in your office or at your work station and sit down and throw his big feet up. He was a tremendous sized guy. He’d throw his big feet on your desk and there wasn’t any room for anything else on your desk, and he’d start talking to you about "How are things going? What’s your job? Do you like it? What do you like about what’s going on? Are we doing the right thing or aren’t we doing the right thing?" He’d get all kinds of information, and he’d bring that with him, and when he got together with his staff, the people directly reporting to him, he knew more about what was going on than they did. Now, he never bypassed layers of management and made decisions that way, because then those guys would have been left out. But he sure kept them on their toes because he had tremendous grasp and he knew how to get people to open up to him. He’d never get them into trouble. He’d never say, well, I talked to a guy, Joe, five levels below me, and he told me that you sons of guns are screwing up over there and his name is Joe Blow, you know, that would have gotten the guy immediately into hot water. But he talked to so many people and he did so much traveling around. Johnny Murray did some of the same thing. He did so much of it that people didn’t know where he got his information.
MR. OVERHOLT: Now, Bill Humes, did he have the same title as Paul Huber?
MR. SHACTER: In the early days he did. But then later on, Bill Humes was second only to Clark Center.
MR. OVERHOLT:  What about Felbeck? Did you see him?
MR. SHACTER: George Felbeck was another guy like Socks Kinsey. George Felbeck was a corporate vice-president; he came from the chemicals company, and a very astute technical guy. And he was responsible for my, I guess, third or fourth job, in a way, because he looked at us when he came down here and we were bragging about how we had taken this tremendous sized plant and put it in operation, how smooth it was operating, and how we could do with less people and save money all over the place, and got better barrier, and better this and better that. He says, "Okay," he says, "If you weren’t stuck with this plant and you had to do it all over again," you know, Kellex, "If you were Kellex and you know what you know today, and you had to do the whole job over again, how would you do it?" And we said, "Well, gee, I don’t know." And he says, "Well, find out. Form a little group. You don’t need quantity, you need quality. Form a little group and ask yourself that question." And a lot of people were saying, "The guy’s crazy. I mean, we’re never going to build a plant like this again." And as it turned out, he was very foresighted, because we did build more plants. In fact, it wasn’t too long that K-25 was a shut-down plant, and only the other plants operated. So once the nuclear power business started up, it was the new plants, not the old plants, that continued. Had he not made that statement or raised that question, we would not have gotten into the idea, you know, sort of a dream group. We formed a dream group. And for no good reason at all, we paid half a dozen or a dozen people, maybe more, to just – and out of it came not only new plant concepts and new designs, some of the patents that I showed you earlier have to do with what makes the new plants different from the old plants.
MR. OVERHOLT: When did he ask you that question, before or after the war? 
MR. SHACTER: I think it was just near the end of the war or right after. But it was on a visit, and he said, "Wherever I have worked, I’ve asked people that question. And it generally turns out that they not only learn how to build the next plant much better, and there’s always a next plant, it’s been my experience, but secondly, out of this work come improvements, even to the present plant.
MR. OVERHOLT: Did Kellex stay in the nuclear energy business after the war? Were they a part of making other things, gaseous diffusion?
MR. SHACTER: Among other things. But Kellex didn’t – Kellogg, Kellex diversified and now a lot of the guys are part of other architect engineering firms. I know one guy at Kellex was Jim Finneran. He was a high official in the Flora Corporation, which is an architect engineering organization working out of Texas. I forgot to tell you that among the top people that I met under Dobey Keith of Kellex was Manson Benedict. Now him I have known over the years, and he’s a jewel of a person, both technically and human, enormously respected and became later the head of the Nuclear Engineering Department at Massachusetts, at M.I.T., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MR. OVERHOLT: Tell me a little bit more about him here, though, during the war. 
MR. SHACTER: Well, he ran the conceptual design group, process design group. He ran the group that I later joined, initially. He and Arthur Squires, who is another outstanding Kellex guy. He was a physical chemist.
MR. OVERHOLT: But Benedict, how old is he?  
MR. SHACTER: I’d say Benedict must be now about eighty.
MR. OVERHOLT: Is he still alive? 
MR. SHACTER: Oh, yeah, last thing I heard he was alive. He has a home in the outskirts of Boston and another home in – he still has an office at M.I.T. and he’s retired of course, and he plays golf in Florida, in Naples, Florida. 
MR. OVERHOLT: In Naples? 
MR. SHACTER: His wife is a physical chemist also, and my wife, Kathleen and I, have been together with them on occasions, socially. Both are tremendous people. So is Arthur Squires. Arthur Squires was a bachelor. I think he still is and he’s in Virginia at B.D.I., retired from there. Very imaginative guy, and those two guys formed the group that I later worked with and eventually took charge of. I was at one point in charge of process design, just before going up to New York, and George Garrick was a mathematician, came in from outside and took Arthur Squire’s place later, and I worked for George when I was in charge of processing, process design, ’cause George was not an engineer. He was a very astute mathematician.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay, let’s shift for just a moment. I don’t want to get too involved, we’re about to run out of tape here. 
MR. SHACTER: We get some very, very top notch people.
MR. OVERHOLT: These personalities, I would love to get as much a profile on all of these people as I can, and if people like Manson Benedict are still alive, it’s possible we could maybe work out some way of getting an interview with some of these people. I’m trying to do one – I’d like to get in touch with those.
MR. SHACTER: I’d be glad to put you in touch with Manson. I’ve got phone numbers and stuff.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, I’d like to get all the – ’cause my wife’s parents go to Florida, and they’re very close to Naples when they go down there in the winter. There might be a possibility there of getting to know him. 
MR. SHACTER: By the way, he does come to Oak Ridge periodically, not very often, usually once or twice a year.
MR. OVERHOLT: Okay. What I might do is write him a letter and see if we can cross paths somewhere.
 MR. SHACTER: He is a real topnotch person. Actually, an internationally recognized person.
MR. OVERHOLT: You know, in that Stephane Groueff book called The Manhattan Project, he’s mentioned quite often in there. He goes into quite a bit of detail about Benedict.
MR. SHACTER: Then I met other people. I met Eugene Wigner, who was a Nobel Prize winner later on, and another jewel of a person. He’s at Princeton now. And he and I and Alvin Weinberg co-authored a book.
MR. OVERHOLT: I don’t think he’s doing very well, though. 
MR. SHACTER: Well his short-term memory is starting to slip. But he must be in his nineties or so. But an outstanding, a very unassuming person and a close friend and fellow Hungarian. I told you earlier that the Hungarians made some very good scientists, and of Teller. Edward Teller and Wigner were buddies.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, Wigner and Teller and Szilard were all Hungarian.
MR. SHACTER: Szilard. Fermi was Italian. That crowd ran Chicago and the first reactor and were tremendous people.
MR. OVERHOLT: Tell me a little bit about when you opened up your first cascades and started sending the gas through in those first buildings over there, tell me about that and what the problems were in those first months, which would have been probably the first months of ’40. 
MR. SHACTER: Well, a lot of them were just a lack of tightness. When you first – we must have had more welds. I don’t know how many times around the earth you could have taken the welds that make up all the various connections and things, so when you put something like that together, you count the places where things didn’t match right. So the biggest factor was finding all the imperfections, and I would imagine that, people being people, that there were a few sandwiches left in the pipes too, you know, that had to be absorbed and stuff. There are always little things.
MR. OVERHOLT: That didn’t happen with the refinement of uranium 235? 
MR. SHACTER: No, so there were always, you know, when you first take brand new equipment and assemble it and fill it up with whatever, you’ll run into first time situations.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, I hear you had a lot of power failures in those days. 
MR. SHACTER: Well, the power, the original power, came from the K-25 Power House and that was kind of slapped together with robbing on a priority, wartime priority basis: a generator here, another generator there. And then it was made variable frequency, which, as it turned out was not needed because we got our power from the steam plant.
MR. OVERHOLT: You know the story behind that, though, don’t you? Why they had to vary the frequency?
MR. SHACTER: Because they were worried that they didn’t know what speed the – 
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, they didn’t know what pump, they didn’t have the pump fixed. 
MR. SHACTER: They didn’t have the pump fixed and they didn’t – and even after they had the pumps, they didn’t quite know at what speed they would have to run it. It was an insurance policy of sorts.
MR. OVERHOLT: Yeah, I thought that was an interesting story. I’d read the story about the meeting, and they said, "Well, we need to start this steam plant now." And the guy who was going to build it said, "Well, what frequency?" He said, "Well, I don’t know. We don’t have the pumps yet." "Well, how can I build it if we don’t have the pumps?" He said, "Well, can you do it on more than one frequency?” And he did. It was the first one ever done that way. 
MR. SHACTER: It was, at the time it was built, the largest power plant in the world. Now, by today’s standards, of course, it’s small, but in those days it was big. And, of course, the instrumentation had not been perfected yet in those days, so you could have electrical mishaps at one corner that would put, you know, go like a bunch of dominoes, and put the whole system out of action. Later on they had all kinds of protective devices that made that less likely. But in the early days there were various emergencies of one type once and never again, because when people encountered those emergencies, they learned something that would make it less likely or completely impossible for that kind of emergency to occur again.
MR. OVERHOLT: Let’s make a little list, then, of some of these things that you can remember. Power failures were – you do confirm, then, that there were some power failures. 
MR. SHACTER: Oh, yeah, there were leaks, there were power failures, there were unexpected occurrences in the process gas itself, you know, behavior that was not anticipated, and I can’t tell you any more about that, because that would get into classified matters.
MR. OVERHOLT: My understanding is the only thing that is classified over there now is the barrier. Is there something else classified about the K-25 plant? 
MR. SHACTER: Well, some of the – you have rotating equipment and you have to have tight plants. You cannot have wet air in contact with UF6, so you have to have all kinds of sealing devices that prevent that. So there are some tricks of the trade there also that are classified.
MR. OVERHOLT: I went over to Hoffman’s office a few weeks ago and got a photograph of one of the compressors, and I noticed on the back of it that that had been classified, or I should say it had been declassified in 1981, so it had been classified up till that time, which makes you wonder how much they keep up on all these things.
MR. SHACTER: Well, I’m going to stay safely away from those areas that I knew to be classified. I haven’t kept up with what has been declassified in the eighties or not. I imagine I’m probably leaning on backwards a little bit too much, but I’d rather err in that direction than in the other direction. And I think, you know, there’s reasonable classification and there’s unreasonable classification. I feel when you start talking about how to separate in terms of precisely what barrier, you know, how to make barrier, how to make other tricks of the trade, there I think the dangers of having that kind of information going to the Saddam Husseins and so forth, is real enough. I’m all in favor of not making it easier for those kinds of guys. Course, the Russians and the big timers, England, Germany and so forth, they have learned a lot of their – they’ve developed their own type technologies and today have –

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Formatted and Edited by JHR, April 2013