Rivas, Pearlie

              
ORAL HISTORY OF PEARLIE RIVAS
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
November 4, 2004 
Mr. Kolb: Pearlie, let’s start off by first asking you when and how you and your family came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Ms. Rivas: Okay, my dad was a construction worker. We were living in Missouri where we were all born. My brother, sister, Mom, and Dad, and I came here from Orange, Texas. He had heard about a construction job going on, something going on in Oak Ridge, so we came.
Mr. Kolb: Was it called Oak Ridge?
Ms. Rivas: Well, East Tennessee – something was going in East Tennessee. We were living in an eighteen-foot trailer and he told Mother to batten down the hatches because we were going to East Tennessee. So we came here to Clinton and he went over to the Plumbers Local in Knoxville, and they sent him out to Oak Ridge. He went to work for a mechanical contractor called Hopkins, Hicks, & Ingle, which now is Hicks & Ingle, and they sent him out as a plumber. We lived in that trailer in Clinton because construction workers couldn’t get housing.
Mr. Kolb: Trailer park like?
Ms. Rivas: Well, no, it was in the back of somebody’s yard, with big – Eddington’s Trailer Park. In fact we lived in a couple different trailer parks there, but this was in some farmer’s backyard.
Mr. Kolb: Which was probably typical of a lot of people.
Ms. Rivas: Right. There were other people working in Oak Ridge, and I remember Mother liked to can. It was in the summer, so she and some women there in the trailer park got a bushel of peaches, and they were sitting outside peeling the peaches, and when they got through they just threw the peach hulls and all this stuff over the thing for the cows cause they were coming right up you know to the – 
Mr. Kolb: Pasture was right there.
Ms. Rivas: It was. It was right there, because that’s what the thing was made of.
Mr. Kolb: What year was this?
Ms. Rivas: This was in 1943. August of ’43.
Mr. Kolb: How old were you then, roughly?
Ms. Rivas: I was about eight or nine.
Mr. Kolb: So you were in school.
Ms. Rivas: I was in school, yeah. We went to elementary school in Clinton. We lived in a couple of different trailer courts in Clinton for a couple of years and then a double trailer became available in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Rivas: Double trailer. When you looked at it on the road it looked like a long narrow trailer, but when they brought them into Oak Ridge they could let down the sides of the trailer and that would make a little bedroom on one side and a little bedroom on the other side, and in the middle was the kitchen and the living room, but there was no bathroom. And there was the wash house which sat in the middle of the block.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the old common bathroom.
Ms. Rivas: Common bathrooms: the men’s on one side the women’s on the other side. In the center was the laundry facilities and you would get up in the middle of the night and run down to the washhouse to use their facilities.
Mr. Kolb: You say it's a double. It was bigger than the normal?
Ms. Rivas: Bigger than the normal ones, yeah. If you look at some of the pictures of the aerial views around in Oak Ridge, you can see that some of the trailers are wider than the other ones and this was a double trailer.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and where was it located?
Ms. Rivas: 1029 Warbler Road.
Mr. Kolb: Warbler. Off West Outer?
Ms. Rivas: No, no, this was the trailers; it was in Midtown. In fact it’s where the First Methodist Church is now, along in that area. And you’ve seen pictures of the old Midtown Theaters and all this – well, it was across the road.
Mr. Kolb: On the north side of the Turnpike.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah. They were U-shaped. All those streets in there were named after birds.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Warbler, I see.
Ms. Rivas: And then we went up in the world. We moved up to what was called a double hut on Caribou Circle which is where ORAU is now.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Rivas: In fact their new building sits on where Caribou Circle was. The streets were all named after animals.
Mr. Kolb: And it was a double hut?
Ms. Rivas: It was a double hut.
Mr. Kolb: Double hutment?
Ms. Rivas: Double hutment.
Mr. Kolb: Two put together?
Ms. Rivas: Two of them put together.
Mr. Kolb: Still outside bathroom?
Ms. Rivas: No, we had an inside bathroom, but there was no shower. It was just a tub.
Mr. Kolb: And was that after the war ended or not? Or do you remember?
Ms. Rivas: This was, no I think the war was still on then.
Mr. Kolb: Because I thought I read that the hutments were sold – 
Ms. Rivas: Well, we lived there.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, soon after the war, but I don’t know when.
Ms. Rivas: And then we moved to a TDU down on Jefferson Avenue. Finally, we moved to Woodland. That was about the time I graduated in high school, when we moved to Woodland, class of ’52. One thing about the double, when we lived in the double trailers and the washroom – which the women would – of course, not many of the construction worker's wives were working outside the home. My mother was one of the few people that had a washing machine.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, electric washing.
Ms. Rivas: Electric washing machine, and it had an agitator in it and, of course, the old ringer things. But she’d go down to the wash house, you know, and do the laundry, and then Mrs. Smith or Jones or somebody would come by and say, can I use your washing machine? And Mother thought, well I’ll just make me a little money. So she would rent it for twenty-five cents an hour. She had a little tablet by the kitchen door, and Mrs. Smith would come get the agitator and we’d write down her name and what time it was, and then when she brought back the agitator, we’d figure up how much she owed. Well, Mother would get twenty-five cents or fifty cents or whatever, and that was her spending money.
Mr. Kolb: Couldn’t spend it on much.
Ms. Rivas: Well, [back] then, [with] twenty-five cents you could buy a loaf of bread, you know. So anyway, that was her little spending thing.
Mr. Kolb: How long did the washing machine last?
Ms. Rivas: Well it lasted a long time. But everybody would – I mean they would even come to the door and sign up and say, “When Mrs. Smith gets through with it, can I use it next?” There would be some days when that thing was busy all day long.
Mr. Kolb: So they would have – what did they have? Hand washing tubs? Wash boards?
Ms. Rivas: Well, some people used the washboard, but she had the washing machine. In the wash house they had these double tubs.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay.
Ms. Rivas: You know, for rinse water and then the rollers that you – the ringers, you know, that could move all the way around.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, those are hand crank?
Ms. Rivas: Yeah. So that’s kind of a long story about how we got to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but you got here pretty early, during the War.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And what elementary school did you go to in Oak Ridge?
Ms. Rivas: I went to Fairview. Fairview is up by – or was – where the museum is now, Museum of Science & Energy.
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t named after a tree like the rest of them.
Ms. Rivas: No, Fairview School wasn’t there very long but it went through the sixth grade.
Mr. Kolb: Where Robertsville is now?
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, where Robertsville – you know they changed that.
Mr. Kolb: Robertsville School at that time was called Jefferson.
Ms. Rivas: My high school years were at the old high school on the hill above Blankenship, except for the last year. My senior year, we were the first class to go one year to the new high school – what we call the new high school – and I still call it the new high school – but it’s fifty years old.
Mr. Kolb: You’re one of those that knows exactly how old it is.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, that’s true.
Mr. Kolb: It has aged over the years too.
Ms. Rivas: It has, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well, and your father worked construction all this time?
Ms. Rivas: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Various types.
Ms. Rivas: Well, he worked, he went to work for Hopkins, Hicks, & Ingle as a plumber and had been there for a while and they asked him to be a foreman and then he was the foreman for a while and then ended up being the division manager.
Mr. Kolb: Where was this?
Ms. Rivas: They’re out of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Mr. Kolb: But he’s living here?
Ms. Rivas: He was until – he retired when he was about sixty-three or sixty-four and got colon cancer.
Mr. Kolb: Living here in Oak Ridge?
Ms. Rivas: Yes, all the time he was in Oak Ridge. When the Plumber’s Local sent him out to Oak Ridge in 1943 as a construction worker, they said, “You may be there for two weeks or two months. Who knows?” Well, he lasted a long time.
Mr. Kolb: So did he work in all three plants?
Ms. Rivas: He worked in all three plants. Of course he couldn’t tell you or say anything about it. I remember the day he came home when the bomb was dropped. He came home – maybe it wasn’t that day or the next day – whatever, you know – and he said [that the bomb had been dropped].
Mr. Kolb: You don't know what plant he was at.
Ms. Rivas: I don't know what plant he was working at then.
Mr. Kolb: But he had heard about it at work.
Ms. Rivas: He heard about it at work.
Mr. Kolb: Before, I mean. It wasn't on the radio and newspaper – came out right away.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, and it was two years to the day when he started working, when they started in Oak Ridge. It was two years to the day later when they dropped the bomb, so it was August the 5th.
Mr. Kolb: Of ’43.
Ms. Rivas: Of ’43 when he came, and they dropped it August the 5th, ’45.
Mr. Kolb: Can you remember what you did that day? I mean, parade and –
Ms. Rivas: Well, I don’t remember. There were probably a lot of prayers for all the people that got killed.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I mean like when you went to school the next day or the day after?
Ms. Rivas: Well, I don’t remember.
Mr. Kolb: Was there school?
Ms. Rivas: I guess there was; I don’t remember. I do remember later on when the war was over we were – I just remember everybody, you know, the kids selling the newspapers and the one that said – 
Mr. Kolb: “War Ends”?
Ms. Rivas: “War Ends,” yeah. I remember the kids selling those and all the paperboys going around, “Extra!” standing on the corners.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. “Get your souvenir copy here,” basically.
Ms. Rivas: That’s right, that's right, should have kept it.
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s a few around but yeah, you’re right. Well I thought there was a big party type in Jackson Square that night. There’s a famous picture of a bunch of people.
Ms. Rivas: I keep looking to see if I recognize anybody there, but I haven’t.
Mr. Kolb: You were there during those very eventful times at the very fast changing times, right? What about when you went to school and there were so many new kids every week coming into town because the town was still growing, I assume, in ’43, ’44?
Ms. Rivas: Well, like I say, we were in Clinton, ’43 and ’44, but when we came to Oak Ridge, it was always interesting. Of course, things were so much different [back] then than they are now.
Mr. Kolb: Probably the schools in Clinton were even overtaxed too, weren’t they?
Ms. Rivas: Uh-hunh.
Mr. Kolb: Because there were some more of our people renting, living there, like you said, [in] trailers and everything else.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So the schools were bursting at their seams.
Ms. Rivas: They were, yeah, they sure were. I think kids now when they move into a new school they feel kind of isolated for a while, but [back] then, there were so many kids coming from every place.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, everyone was new here.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well, not everyone, but a lot of people.
Ms. Rivas: It’s like being in the military, you know, you get used to doing it, to moving around and meeting different people.
Mr. Kolb: You'd done that before because your family had moved some, I guess.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, we had moved several different places before we came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, so it wasn’t that bad for you?
Ms. Rivas: No, that was no big deal to have to go into a new classroom.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but there were people from all over, anywhere, everywhere.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, right. We had a good time in the summer at the playgrounds because the recreation department would have [activities]. We would be over there when they opened up and run home for lunch and go back over there [and stay] all day and Mother would never have to worry about where we were and all this. We got into softball leagues and volleyball, and they were open in the wintertime, too, after school some evenings, in the early evenings. In the summer, there’d always be a big pageant. All the different playgrounds would get together at Blankenship Field and they’d pick out a theme and each school would do a different part, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, would they have a float or a –
Ms. Rivas: There’d be floats and little skits and we would dress up and all of this. It was a lot of fun and [would] just get everybody involved.
Mr. Kolb: Was it like a competition, almost, between schools?
Ms. Rivas: Well, yeah, it kind of became like that.
Mr. Kolb: Did they have prizes?
Ms. Rivas: I think they gave out ribbons. Blankenship Field was packed with people that would go up there and support the kids. There were, I guess, college kids that worked in the summer and it was great. Fairview got the adults involved in it at night on – I think it was Monday night. All the adults were invited over to play volleyball, and my folks loved to go over there. They just had a real good time.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get to go along?
Ms. Rivas: Oh yeah, there was something for us to do. The coach would be with the adults and his assistants or some of the others would be with the kids, and we’d be doing arts and crafts or whatever, you know.
Mr. Kolb: I almost forgot to ask, you have siblings or not?
Ms. Rivas: I have an older sister and a younger brother.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so, the three of you.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, we stayed out of Mother’s hair all summer long you know, every summer. My dad had a pickup, and it was the only vehicle we had. When we lived in Clinton, we would get up on Sunday morning, get on the bus, and ride the bus to Knoxville to church.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you went to church in Knoxville?
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, there was no Catholic church. We couldn’t get into Oak Ridge. There was a Catholic church in Oak Ridge, but we couldn’t get in and, of course, there wasn’t a Catholic church in Clinton at the time. So Mother would get the three of us ready and we’d get on the bus and ride the bus.
Mr. Kolb: This is from Clinton to Knoxville, and that was probably the Oak Ridge buses?
Ms. Rivas: No this was something separate. But then when we moved into Oak Ridge, well we rode the bus –
Mr. Kolb: Everywhere.
Ms. Rivas: Everywhere.
Mr. Kolb: Well I was told by somebody that their parents didn’t worry about it.
Ms. Rivas: You know, parents didn’t worry about the kids in Oak Ridge because they knew that we were locked in for one thing. We couldn’t get out and go anyplace.
Mr. Kolb: Pretty secure.
Ms. Rivas: It was. Well, we could walk to school at Fairview and at Jefferson we rode the bus. Still, we rode the bus. We walked to high school my senior year a lot because we lived in Woodland. There was a teacher that lived down the street and sometimes I’d get a ride with him and he’d give me a ride to school.
Mr. Kolb: That was a pretty good deal wasn’t it.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah it was. It was a good deal. He says as long as you’re here by a certain time, you can ride. But I wish we had buses now.
Mr. Kolb: Well, of course, yeah. How did you put up with the mud in Oak Ridge? I don’t know when they paved the streets.
Ms. Rivas: Walks. We walked the boardwalks to Fairview school when we were living on Warbler Road. We’d cross the Turnpike, go up the boardwalk to the school and then, of course, take the boardwalks in, when we lived on Caribou Circle in the double huts. [I remember them] more than I do boardwalks any place else and I don’t know why. How long did they last?
Mr. Kolb: The boardwalks, yeah, because I came in ’54. Of course, I lived down close to Jackson Square. I don’t know, I just don’t remember.
Ms. Rivas: Well, I remember the ones in the huts because we were on them, and of course the roads were gravel.
Mr. Kolb: But before that they were just mud.
Ms. Rivas: And then when we moved to Jefferson Avenue, I don’t remember there being boardwalks up there. So, yeah, there was mud. Of course, being a kid, you don’t worry about the mud and tracking the mud in the house and all that stuff, and Mother had to put up with that. That was her job. I know that there was a lot of mud.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you had work boots or something like that when it was messy? Do you remember, back in War days, rationing, not having enough sugar when you were a kid? Stockings?
Ms. Rivas: I remember Mother standing in line in Clinton at the store. They had had in the paper or somebody had said that they were going to have alarm clocks, many of them, and she said, “I’m going to go down and stand in line and get an alarm clock.” I don’t remember what time she got home, but it was later in the morning, maybe ten o’clock or something like that. My dad loved coffee and cigarettes, and she didn’t smoke but she’d go stand in line to buy him cigarettes and coffee. There's another drug store on down the corner of Market and Main too. They would get stockings or something like that, but I don’t remember her standing in line so much for those.
Mr. Kolb: Well do you remember anything like wartime gathering of, I don't know, aluminum cans or milkweed pods that were replacing silk? So [for example] we'd go out in the fields and gather up these milkweed pods and they went on from there. Because we couldn't get silk from the orient during WWII, of course. That was one thing they were scavenging.
Ms. Rivas: One thing that you could find was copper and scrap metal. My brother had a little red wagon, and we used to take that little red wagon and go around – 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, collect things?
Ms. Rivas: Collect scrap metal and all that stuff, and then there was somebody that would buy it. And we had a victory garden. Coke bottles, we saved Coke bottles. You know, you had to pay a deposit for the bottle, so some people would throw them away. The rich people would throw them away and we’d collect them and go sell them in the red wagon, going around and collecting.
Mr. Kolb: Even paper was in short supply. People say they still can't throw anything away. They're using the back side [of a piece of paper] and writing all over it because they just have that habit of using it all up before they threw it away.
Ms. Rivas: Well that’s right. What’s the [old saying]? “Use it up, something, throw it out, do without”? I don’t know how it goes. Anyway, something like that. Well, I think that’s throwback to the Depression babies, and I do reuse stuff. I recycle and I use stuff and I pinch pennies, and if I could get back a quarter on a bottle, I’d take it back to the grocery store.
Mr. Kolb: Okay Pearlie, tell me a little bit more about – you told me about how you had nice recreation programs in the summertime. What else did you do for recreation, you and your family in Oak Ridge? What little time you had.
Ms. Rivas: Well my dad was working. I mean, he would go to work before we got up, and a lot of times, we’d be in bed when he got home. With just one vehicle, we couldn’t go a lot of places. 
Mr. Kolb: Well you had church activities, probably.
Ms. Rivas: Well, yeah, when we could get to them. But see, we couldn’t unless we got – well, we’d go on the bus as far as social gatherings and all of that, mostly picnics and family things. My folks weren’t big socializers or partygoers, and a lot of it was because they didn’t have the money to do that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, there was more neighborhood things.
Ms. Rivas: But it was more neighborhood and we had wonderful neighbors and one couple in particular that they were buddies with didn’t have any children, and they had always wanted children, so they kind of adopted us. So if we got tired at home and didn’t have anything to do, we’d go down and see Fern and Trout and they would pitch in and take care of us and put up with us while, you know, whatever. But we just had a good time with them and my brother and sister and I made our own fun. There was always neighborhood kids to play with.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. [inaudible] to belong to that.
Ms. Rivas: No, no, you didn’t. [Our generation would] go out and play, and we would go out and play and stay out until dark.
Mr. Kolb: Play with a ball and a bat and whatever and go play.
Ms. Rivas: We’d play ball, we’d get out under the street light and, you know, play kick-the-can and we were always – all these games and things for us to play. I don’t see how Mother stood it. The trailer that we lived in, in Clinton, was eight or ten feet wide, maybe eight feet.
Mr. Kolb: This was all one space?
Ms. Rivas: Just one big, long space.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t subdivided into sleeping areas?
Ms. Rivas: Well, when you walked into the door, on the right hand side was a couch that could open up into a bed, and that’s where Mother and Daddy slept and then directly ahead of the door was a counter top kind of an L shaped and that was the kitchen and there was a little gas stove, [inaudible], an icebox, not a refrigerator but an icebox [inaudible], and there was, on back, there was kind of a closet on both sides and you could open the closet doors and that would partition off the back. Well, and the back of it was like a booth in a restaurant, the table and the booths. Well, when we got ready to go to bed, you’d take the table down and turn it around and put it under the cushions, take the back cushions and put those on top of the table and that made a bed.
Mr. Kolb: Sort of like the camping trailers.
Ms. Rivas: Like the camping trailers. So my sister and I slept at the top of the bed and my brother slept across the bottom of the bed.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, all three of you are together.
Ms. Rivas: All three of us in the same bed. And we lived in that trailer probably three years.
Mr. Kolb: It's good that you were smaller children then.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, that’s true. But can you imagine children today putting up with that? And can you imagine – 
Mr. Kolb: Lack of privacy.
Ms. Rivas: Oh yeah, and of course there was no bathroom in the trailer. Everybody didn’t have a TV in their room and a stereo and their own room and all of that stuff, you know. How Mother lived through it, I will never, ever know. I had three children myself and I know what it is to raise three children but not in an eighteen foot long and seven foot wide – that’s how many square feet – not many.
Mr. Kolb: Not much over 100.
Ms. Rivas: No and this area right in here is probably eighteen feet from that wall to this one. But rainy days, you know, we stayed inside and played checkers or read books.
Mr. Kolb: Had one radio probably and that was it.
Ms. Rivas: Had one radio, yeah. In fact, one time, the only radio we had was the radio in my dad’s truck. I don’t know if you remember or not, a little girl – this was back in the ’40s, early ’40s – [who fell] in a well, nineteen years ago. This was way back. Dad was so concerned about her. About every fifteen or twenty minutes, he would come out and turn the radio and come back in and say, “They haven’t found her yet,” and then he came back in. That was only radio we had, was in the truck.
Mr. Kolb: No background music.
Ms. Rivas: No, no background music. But you know, even to buy groceries to feed the five of us, a trailer like that, you had to have some place to store the stuff.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you probably had to buy food every other day, because your icebox was not very big.
Ms. Rivas: No, the icebox was small. In fact, we would take that little red wagon – we lived on this side of Clinton – well, it’s where the major intersection, when you go into town, you know, and you can decide whether you’re going to [inaudible]. The trailer court was right there by that Kentucky Fried Chicken or whatever it is. Beyond this house, you’d have to go all the way through Clinton, under the underpass. It was beyond the underpass.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you had to go and get your ice; they didn’t bring it.
Ms. Rivas: They didn’t bring it, no, no. So here we’d take this little red wagon and go through town pulling that wagon and get ice and then come back through town. In the summer, we’d get a fifty pound block and by the time we got home it was twenty-five pound and it would go in the icebox. But then sometimes, some of the neighbors were going to get ice, and they’d bring us. It wasn’t an everyday project. But I remember I found four dollars all rolled up.
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness. Oh, I bet.
Ms. Rivas: [inaudible] the richest person in the world.
Mr. Kolb: I bet, big money back then.
Ms. Rivas: Oh, it sure was.
Mr. Kolb: Like fifty dollars now.
Ms. Rivas: Oh yeah, and I came home, and I told Mother and she says, “You need to go back to the store where you found it.” [I said,] “I don’t want to do that.” And she said, “Don’t tell them how much you found,” she says, “Just go in and tell them that you found some money,” and she said, “Tell them where you live, and if anybody lost the money, they can come.” So I go home and, you know, [I’m thinking,] “Please Dear God don’t let any” – 
Mr. Kolb: So how long did you hold your money?
Ms. Rivas: Well, nobody came, and so she said, “It’s yours. You can do what you want to with it.” I don’t remember what I did with it, but four dollars was, I’ll tell you, that was great.
Mr. Kolb: Was your, was your [inaudible] jealous of you?
Ms. Rivas: Oh sure, but of course I had to share with them too. I was fussing about having to go get the ice, and if I hadn’t gone to get the ice, I wouldn’t have found the money, so next time she said, “Who’s going to go get the ice?” [I said,] “I’ll go!”
Mr. Kolb: So you children went to get the ice?
Ms. Rivas: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I thought maybe your father went with you or something.
Ms. Rivas: No, he was working, and no, we would have to go, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: One of your jobs.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, that was one of our jobs, to go get the ice.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, would you have newspaper that you would wrap it in, I mean to keep it from thawing.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, and an old blanket or something we’d throw over it to keep it, but it would still – some of it would melt, you know, by the time we got home. If it wasn’t melted enough [to fit in the icebox], then that’s when you’d take the old ice pick and chip it off.
Mr. Kolb: You never threw it away, because – 
Ms. Rivas: Oh no, no, you kept it; either that or take it over to the neighbors and put it in their icebox.
Mr. Kolb: Yep, it went away real fast, regardless.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, yeah, that is true. 
Mr. Kolb: I guess they got the ice out of the Clinch River, you think? Was there an icehouse down on the Clinch River?
Ms. Rivas: No, it wasn’t on the river, the icehouse wasn’t, but I don’t know where it came from.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Rivas: But if you go under the underpass, its startup is on the right hand side.
Mr. Kolb: It was on the river, though, wasn't it?
Ms. Rivas: No, they didn’t get ice out of the river because it wasn’t that cold in the wintertime. I mean, it was cold, but it wasn’t – 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that's right, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I’m thinking about my hometown.
Ms. Rivas: Up north it would be, but no, I guess they made it some way.
Mr. Kolb: I forgot, yeah. Yep, that's right.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, if you grew up in the north – 
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, we get free ice. Go get it. Do you remember anything about ball teams and when you were in high school or junior high, football teams and basketball teams and that kind of thing? Did you attend those games when you were a kid?
Ms. Rivas: When I went to the high school, you know, football games and basketball games, but not before then.
Mr. Kolb: Did you go to the Wildcat Den, whatever it was?
Ms. Rivas: In high school, went to the Wildcat Den.
Mr. Kolb: Where was it located?
Ms. Rivas: It was at Midtown, where it is now.
Mr. Kolb: Because earlier, it was in Jackson Square area.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, what we did after the ball games, high school ball games was go down to the place where Big Ed’s is now; there used to be a drug store.
Mr. Kolb: There's the theater down there, Oak Ridge Theater.
Ms. Rivas: There was the Ridge Theater. But on the corner, there was a drug store down there, and after the football games they would have, you know, little parties and get togethers and all of that and we – 
Mr. Kolb: Sort of a fountain store.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, and after school – 
Mr. Kolb: Had a jukebox?
Ms. Rivas: Had a jukebox and you could dance and all of that, and then the one thing – of course, too young for the tennis court parties.
Mr. Kolb: But you knew about them.
Ms. Rivas: But I knew about them, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Bill Pollock's, yeah.
Ms. Rivas: But my parents didn't [go], no, they didn’t. Like I say, they didn’t socialize a whole lot. It’s not that they were anti-social, it’s just that they were brought up in a different culture than a lot of the other people who worked here. They were farmers, you know, raised on a farm, and just didn’t – 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, weren't used to having little plays and-
Ms. Rivas: No, they weren’t raised that way, and everything was more family oriented than it was social, socializing, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, organizational kinds of things.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, things that were organized. They just kind of did their own thing. We would go down on G Road [Key Spring Road] on Sunday afternoon and have picnics. There was a stream down in there.
Mr. Kolb: At the bottom there?
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: At the end of G Road?
Ms. Rivas: Yeah and that was before across the road was all built up. That was all farmland and forest.
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s sort of like a park down there, right?
Ms. Rivas: Well, there’s Marlow Park, but I’m talking about on G Road, and there was a place that we had all to ourselves. On Sunday afternoon, Mother would fry up some chicken and make potato salad. Mother had a sister, and her husband and their two children, her brother-in-law who lived here, we’d all get together, you know, and load the kids in the back of the truck, and we’d head down to G Road and have our picnic, and at six o’clock, we’d listen to The Lone Ranger.
Mr. Kolb: At night?
Ms. Rivas: On Sunday, yeah, and then as soon as he said “High Ho Silver,” it was time to get in the truck [to come home]. But we had a lot of picnics down there.
Mr. Kolb: Were other people using that area too, for that, for picnics?
Ms. Rivas: Well there weren’t a whole lot, because we thought we had us a little secret place down there, and it was by a stream.
Mr. Kolb: Early on, it had to have a gate on it. I mean, you couldn’t get out of Oak Ridge without going through a security [gate]. Was that after ’49 when the town opened up, when the gates came down?
Ms. Rivas: No, I don’t think it was after ’49, because I was younger then. I don’t know where the gate was. Was the gate down?
Mr. Kolb: I never saw it. Like I say, I came in ’54, so I don’t know. I’m just asking if you remember.
Ms. Rivas: I don’t think that road went all the way through. I think it was just inside Oak Ridge and the fence was on the – 
Mr. Kolb: Inside Oak Ridge, okay, so you didn’t go beyond the gate wherever the gate was.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, right, I don’t think it went all the way through.
Mr. Kolb: Because I remember somebody talking about – Grady Whitman, I think it was.
Ms. Rivas: I just think there was a – I remember it just being an old gravel road that went down there, and as far as I know we were still in Oak Ridge, you know, and not have to go – you’re talking about badges and all that. We had gone out of Oak Ridge someplace and started back in, and I must have just gotten my badge to get back into Oak Ridge. My sister already had hers and of course my brother didn’t need it because you had to be, I think, twelve years old or something like that in order to have one. Well, I had mine, and here we were coming back in, and everybody was looking for their badge and I couldn’t find mine. Well, you didn’t have to have it to get out; you had to have it to get back in. I couldn’t find mine. They wouldn’t let me in, and my Dad was so mad: “Twelve-year-old girl, and you’re not going to let her – what do you think she’s going to do?” So Mother and I stayed and he went to the house.
Mr. Kolb: Looking for your badge.
Ms. Rivas: We were supposed to put it in a certain place. I mean, that’s where the badges were. Sure enough, there’s my badge. So he brought it out and they let me in. I never forgot my badge again because I didn’t want to hear him go through that.
Mr. Kolb: Well did you ever have problems with the fact there was a guarded community other than that?
Ms. Rivas: No. In fact, it was kind of neat because we never locked our doors. We were going out west – this was probably just after the gates opened, and maybe going to Missouri to visit relatives or whatever, and we were way down the road, maybe around Nashville someplace and [Dad asked,] “Did you lock the door?” She said, “I don’t even know where the key is,” because the policeman patrolled, and of course everybody was locked in.
Mr. Kolb: Oh the police did patrol around?
Ms. Rivas: Oh yeah, police would just kind of drive around and make sure everything was okay, but we never had any problems. I mean, we were gone for a couple of weeks, I guess; it seemed that way.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t tell your neighbors you were leaving?
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, we probably told them we were going but – somebody knew that we were gone, but we worried about locking the house. I don’t think our house was ever locked.
Mr. Kolb: And nobody else's was either, probably.
Ms. Rivas: No, no, we could just come. When they opened the gates, you know, the big ceremony, they had Rod Cameron and Marie McDonald and all of that stuff. We were there watching the parade and taking pictures of them.
Mr. Kolb: Where did you watch? Where did you go to go to see the parade? Do you remember?
Ms. Rivas: On the Turnpike, up close to Jackson Square. Another thing they had was a movie called The Beginning or the End with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they showed it at that time?
Ms. Rivas: They showed it.
Mr. Kolb: Was that the grand opening of it?
Ms. Rivas: No it wasn’t. It wasn't when the gates were opened, but they did show it later on. This was another [time when] they had movie stars come into Oak Ridge. Anyway, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was there, and I don’t know how I got selected, but they asked me to be one of the ushers at the grand opening.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, was at the Ridge Theater?
Ms. Rivas: Was at the Ridge Theater, yeah. And I remember I was all decked out, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, like you were going to a dance.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, but we got to see him when he came in and usher him down the aisle.
Mr. Kolb: Douglas Fairbanks?
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I didn’t know he was here.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness. So it was the grand opening.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, it was the premier; I guess it was.
Mr. Kolb: So did you see the movie?
Ms. Rivas: We saw the movie, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay Pearlie, I guess, really, the secrecy part of Oak Ridge didn’t ever bother you. You were not working, so you didn’t have to keep a secret. You didn’t know what was going on and your father didn’t talk about it, right?
Ms. Rivas: Right.
Mr. Kolb: But there was an aspect that was kind of interesting about Oak Ridge being a dry community and a dry community in Harriman, right? Rockwood? Rockwood area?
Ms. Rivas: From what I understand. Of course, I was too young to drink then.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but did your parents?
Ms. Rivas: And my parents didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t either?
Ms. Rivas: Well – 
Mr. Kolb: Did they have any problems with it being dry?
Ms. Rivas: Well, they didn’t have any problems with it being dry. Both of them would drink socially, you know, Christmas and maybe a holiday they’d have a drink, but other than that, I don’t remember them going to the liquor store. But from what I understand, all you had to do was call the cab and the bootlegger would bring it out to you. So they never seemed to have any problem.
Mr. Kolb: But the Army guards were searching people for liquor?
Ms. Rivas: Oh yeah, and I don’t know what they did with what they confiscated.
Mr. Kolb: Probably drank it! They probably had better parties than – 
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s see, you said your family made a lot of friends, have a lot of good friends. What happened after the war when – did a lot of those people leave [after the] big layoff occurred at Y-12 and construction was pretty much over at the plants and that sort of thing?
Ms. Rivas: Well, seems like the friends that Mother and Daddy made stayed around. 
Mr. Kolb: So they kept their jobs.
Ms. Rivas: They kept their jobs and they stayed around. They were doing different [jobs]. Some of them were construction workers that worked with my dad. I know one of their real close friends, she worked for the cafeterias, Oak Ridge Schools, and she stayed around until she died. Of course, all of them are gone now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, that generation.
Ms. Rivas: Not one of them is still alive. My dad would have been ninety-three.
Mr. Kolb: Did the children stay around?
Ms. Rivas: Some of the children do. In fact, sometimes I see some of them around town that we used to play kick the can with under the street lights. I’m not close with them, but yeah, some of them are still around.
Mr. Kolb: You had your school classroom reunion too?
Ms. Rivas: That was good to see, and it was just our – 
[break in recording]
Ms. Rivas: – we had two years ago, was just our class. In previous years, we had combined them with like the Class of ’50, ’51, ’52, and ’53 or ’52, ’53, ’54, and ’55, and there were two hundred-forty-one in my graduating class. Two or three hundred in each class and you have a reunion of three or four classes, you’ve got seven or eight hundred people.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, big group.
Ms. Rivas: It’s a big group, and you didn’t know who was in your class and who wasn’t, so we decided to have just our class, and it really turned out well. The sad thing about that, out of two hundred-forty-one, fifty-nine were missing. Big percentage.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, some made it back.
Ms. Rivas: There were probably eighty-some and then their spouses came, which was good. We had a good turnout, had a Friday night get together down at Midtown Community Center, and then Saturday we had a get together and Sunday we had a little get together, so it was really nice, you know, to see everybody. There are several people who graduated, probably thirty-five, forty, maybe a little more than that, that are still living in this area. Now, not all of them came to the reunion, but they're still living around Oak Ridge. And some others, you know, have taken off and gone out and had their careers and are coming back to Oak Ridge to live, and moving into their parents’ house. We’ve had a couple whose parents have died since the reunion and they said we’re moving back home, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, well I can’t blame them.
Ms. Rivas: We inherited the house and we’re going to fix it up and move back to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Get that old cemesto.
Ms. Rivas: Get that old cemesto and no problem whatsoever. It’s good to see them. Some of them can afford to fix up the cemesto and have this a little winter place or summer place and another home someplace else, which is great because they said they always loved Oak Ridge and it’s a nice place.
Mr. Kolb: I can understand, yeah.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, it is; Oak Ridge is a nice place.
Mr. Kolb: I’m never going to leave. They'd have to carry me out in a box.
Ms. Rivas: Well that’s what I told my kids when I bought this house, that this is the one where I will stay in until I can’t – you know, take me from here to the cemetery.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, yeah, Oak Ridge sort of grows on you that way.
Ms. Rivas: It does. It really does.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s see, one area that people maybe don’t like to talk about a lot, but did you and your family have any contact with the Afro-Americans that were here?
Ms. Rivas: When I was talking about our graduating class, there were three blacks who graduated from Scarboro the year we did.
Mr. Kolb: High School graduates?
Ms. Rivas: High school graduation, yeah, and their names were listed in the paper, only they were listed, you know, separately. So the class of ’52 really had two hundred-forty-four graduates.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t go to Oak Ridge High School.
Ms. Rivas: But they didn’t go to Oak Ridge High School.
Mr. Kolb: They had to go to Knoxville.
Ms. Rivas: They went to Scarboro.
Mr. Kolb: Did you interact with them?
Ms. Rivas: No.
 Mr. Kolb: So were your – 
Ms. Rivas: Well, my dad did at work, because a lot of the – I would say the majority of laborers were black, you know, that dug the ditches and all of that. Of course, he had no problem with blacks and he wasn’t prejudiced, and so we were raised the same way, you know. 
Mr. Kolb: Right. They lived in different areas.
Ms. Rivas: They lived in different areas.
Mr. Kolb: Scarboro area, and so you didn’t have much contact with them.
Ms. Rivas: In fact we really didn’t see them that much because of living in different parts of the town.
Mr. Kolb: Had their own shopping areas, I guess.
Ms. Rivas: Well, that used to be a question to me, you know. Where did they go buy their groceries, and where did they get their hair cut, and where are they, you know?
Mr. Kolb: They must have had their own retail over there in the Scarboro area, I assume.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, and of course that was when they called it Gamble Valley over there.
Mr. Kolb: Out of sight, out of mind.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, well, we just, we knew they were around someplace but didn’t know where. But I questioned why they had to live over there and why they didn’t live [in our area]. As a child, you wonder about things like that.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you knew segregation.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, that was living separately, and that’s what it boiled down to.
Ms. Rivas: But where we lived in Missouri, there were no black families, and even with moving around like we did on the construction chain, didn’t really run into a lot of them, so [it was just] one of those things.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, when your children went to school, they were integrated.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So there was mixing then. Yeah, normal by then.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, I remember that.
Mr. Kolb: [inaudible] got, [inaudible] charged to integrate the Oak Ridge schools, as I understand.
Ms. Rivas: I don’t remember so much about the integration of the Oak Ridge schools but we were – that was right after I was married and we were living in Clinton in an apartment up over the Clinton Courier office which is across the street from the school.
Mr. Kolb: The high school?
Ms. Rivas: The grade school, yeah, that one that got bombed. We just had gotten married in this little apartment. This was when Casper was the one, and you talk about being scared, I mean that really bothered me because I was pregnant, and here we were living in this little place and I thought, we got to move. What bothered me was Horace Wells, who was the editor, would write his opinions in the paper, and I thought if anybody’s going to throw a bomb on something – 
Mr. Kolb: You'd be a target for something.
Ms. Rivas: – they're going to bomb the press, and we were living right upstairs, so we didn’t stay there too long, like you said. We left, yeah, and of course they did [bomb] the school instead of the newspaper. I was working and my husband was in the Air Force at the radar site that was up at Briceville. So here he was going in one direction and I was going in the other, coming to Oak Ridge to work and living right there in the middle and I thought, you know, we can’t have this child and live – you know, somebody come in and take care of this child up over the newspaper. So we moved to Oak Ridge. But then they bombed the school.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t they do something near the church over there too? 
Ms. Rivas: You know there were several things around town that – some of it made the paper and some of it didn’t – but the way Horace Wells was writing it up, I thought, oh, that’s pretty bad.
Mr. Kolb: So you came to work in Oak Ridge, then, after you were married and worked here quite a while I guess, right? Where did you live when you moved back to Oak Ridge? With your husband?
Ms. Rivas: Well, after I got out of high school, I went to UT for a couple of years and then I went to work for Carbide for the Purchasing Department. And the Purchasing Department was in the old dormitory that they just tore down and made Cheyenne Ambulatory thing. I worked in the Purchasing Department for a couple of years and got pregnant, and he was in the military, so we went around the country a couple of places. Anyway, ten years or so later, I came back to Oak Ridge with the children.
Mr. Kolb: Your parents still alive?
Ms. Rivas: My parents were. After we divorced, I moved back here with the kids and got an apartment on Placer Lane which is where Manhattan Place is now in Woodland – they were the brick apartments – and rented an apartment there until I bought a duplex in Woodland and converted it to a one-family and that’s where I raised my family, and then went to work. When I came back to Oak Ridge with the children, I went to work for General Electric.
Mr. Kolb: [inaudible]
Ms. Rivas: No, they went to St. Mary’s. They all went through eight years at St. Mary’s and then to Jefferson and the Oak Ridge High School. My oldest son is living now in Charleston, South Carolina, and he’s working with restoration and reconstruction of some of the older homes and older buildings and all of that in Charleston.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe we could use him back here.
Ms. Rivas: Oh yeah, yeah. And my daughter lives south of Kingston, not too far away. She has two children. And my youngest son died three years ago at thirty-nine. So I’ve got my daughter around, and her two children are – one of them is in Nashville and the other one, the girl, is in the Army in Fort Lewis, Washington, so married to a man in the Army.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, what goes around comes around, right?
Ms. Rivas: They’re spread out. Yeah, just hope she stays stateside.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you never know when you're in the service, that’s for sure.
Ms. Rivas: As I told you, my dad died in ’77 and my mom died and was buried out at Anderson Memorial.
Mr. Kolb: Are there any other unique experiences you remember about Oak Ridge you want to share? Unique things that happened to you, that you want to talk about? Oak Ridge is an interesting place to hang your hat.
Ms. Rivas: Oh, yes. Like I say, when I was divorced, I knew I was coming back to Oak Ridge. Well, one reason, because my folks were here. I was talking about working for General Electric. The office closed in Oak Ridge and I went to Georgia and I was there for five years and they offered early retirements. They were having a big downsizing, you know, and if you were over fifty-five and had twenty-five years of services you could, you could retire. I stuck my hand up real quick, you know, “I want to retire! I’m ready.” My manager says, “No, you can’t.” And I said, “Yes, I can.” Well, he didn’t want me to retire, and I said “You can find somebody else to do the job, not that you're paying me that much, but you could probably get somebody else younger and pay them less.” And, anyway, I said, “I just think I’ll retire.” And I knew then I was coming back to Oak Ridge. Atlanta is a good place to visit. There are wonderful things to do in Atlanta, but it’s on the fast track, and I didn’t want to do that, so I retired. I knew in August that I was going to retire and I would come here to visit my daughter I would pick up the Oak Ridger and [look for] houses for sale, you know.
Mr. Kolb: What year was this now?
Ms. Rivas: This was [inaudible]. I would look around, and one Sunday I picked up Friday’s Oak Ridger and saw a house for sale by owner and I called the number and told them I would drive by and I did the drive by and I went home and I called them back and I said, “I’d like to see the inside of that house and when can I come by?” And she said, “About 3:30, 4:00.” I said, “No, by then I’m going to be hopefully halfway to Atlanta.” She said, “Well, okay, come by in about thirty minutes.” I said, “Okay.” So I came by and I did the walk through of the inside and I walked around the outside and I came back in and I had asked them how much they wanted for it and I made them an offer and they came back with another one and I made them another one and we came in here and sat down at the dining room table and signed the papers.
Mr. Kolb: In one afternoon.
Ms. Rivas: One afternoon, and I was on my way back to Atlanta and I thought, “Oh God, what have I done?” But I am glad I did.
Mr. Kolb: Who lived here before that?
Ms. Rivas: The original people that lived here were Rothermels. He was a lawyer in Oak Ridge, one of early lawyers in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: For the AEC or for the federal government?
Ms. Rivas: I don’t know if he was federal government or not. It must have been, because this is an “F” house and there aren’t but 53 “F” houses in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Larger than a “D”, then.
Ms. Rivas: Larger than a “D”, a little bit more square footage. But it has – and this used to be – it was a wall there but with a doorway that went into the kitchen. It had a dining room, kind of a separate dining room, and since I’ve torn the wall down and opened it up, it’s more open. The “F” houses had separate dining rooms because they were just allotted to the higher-ups, the big brass, whatever.
Mr. Kolb: Those that had the pull.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, those that had the pull got the “F” houses. So anyway, I have not regretted buying the house nor moving back to Oak Ridge because this is home and this is where I want to be. Oak Ridge has grown so much. My sister was visiting not too long ago, and I said, “Let me go show you something.” We drove out to some of the newer housing sections, and she says, “I can’t believe this is Oak Ridge.” And I said, “Why not?” You know, it grows like any other place, but when you drive through some of the old cemesto areas, you can still see original Oak Ridge, which I love.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, if you go out to West [Outer Drive], you go out to Outer Drive, East Drive.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, and then you get to River’s Run and whatever the one – what’s the one way down?
Mr. Kolb: Oh sure. Now we’re getting down in the middle of town, Len Hart’s place right there on Lafayette. It’s amazing how fast that’s been going up, filled up this year.
Ms. Rivas: Where the old service center was. That’s one thing about Oak Ridge, if you’re talking to Oak Ridgers, you always say – instead of Willow Ridge or Willow Place, you would say, “where the old service center used to be” or “where the old French’s Building used to be.”
Mr. Kolb: And then, like, the Garden Apartments are always going to be Garden Apartments. They can call them what they want; they're Garden Apartments.
Ms. Rivas: That's right, and where the skating rink used to be.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Ms. Rivas: My dad would never let us go to the skating rink. Evidently there had been some kind of a ruckus or something going on down there one time and he read about the one time and we’d say something about going, he'd say, “You’re not going to that skating rink.”
Mr. Kolb: Like going to a pool.
Ms. Rivas: That’s right. He didn’t want his girls going to a skating rink. I said, “But everybody goes down there.” “You’re not going! Not my daughters, noooo.” He was – 
Mr. Kolb: Very protective.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, that’s right, he was very protective.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well you’re in the majority. We just stick around and that’s the way it is; that's the way it should be.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, it’s true.
Mr. Kolb: I think ORICL is a great organization, too.
Ms. Rivas: Another thing about Oak Ridge is we have a lot of highly educated people. We have some that aren’t, but everybody gets along. I think that people here don’t wear their professionalism or whatever it is on their shoulder.
Mr. Kolb: No, like Dr. Alvin Weinberg. I was at the lab when he was the Director. Ms. Rivas: Yeah, I’ve known a lot of Ph.D.s that I had no idea they were Ph.D.s, but whether it was Bill or Sue or Mary or whoever, that’s who they were, and then you find out they’ve got a doctorate in this, they’ve got a doctorate in that. But it has not made a [difference].
Mr. Kolb: No class distinction.
Ms. Rivas: That’s right and [it’s too bad] that it can’t be that way – 
Mr. Kolb: More places.
Ms. Rivas: Yeah, right, politics and other things. But we won’t go into that.
Mr. Kolb: Right. Well, okay Pearlie, I think you covered the waterfront unless you want to add something else.
Ms. Rivas: No.
Mr. Kolb: Then great.
Ms. Rivas: Not that I know of. If I come up with anything I’ll call you and say put a P.S. on the [tape].
Mr. Kolb: Thank you very much.
Ms. Rivas: You’re Welcome.
Mr. Kolb: Been great.
[end of recording]