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ORAL HISTORY OF MONA RARIDON
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
August 30, 2013
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is August 30, 2013 and I am at the home of Mrs. Mona and Dick Raridon here in Oak Ridge. And we're going to be interviewing both Mona and Dick, and Mona, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
MRS. RARIDON: You're welcome.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the beginning. Tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family.
MRS. RARIDON: I was born the year the Dow Jones bottomed out at 41 near Frankfurt, Kentucky. I have been known to say I was born 50 feet off US 60, front room of a house with a narrow front yard.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. RARIDON: My father died the next year of cancer and my mother re-married just before I was five. All this is Franklin County.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: I went to school first at Peak's Mill and then 10th grade, I guess, I went to Elkhorn High. Within the next dozen years, they had consolidated the whole thing into one county high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, you said Franklin County? And that is...? Where's that? Where is that?
MRS. RARIDON: Frankfort.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Frankfort, right. And that is between... that is the state capital, isn't it?
MRS. RARIDON: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, that's where you grew up. Now what did your father...? You said your father passed away from cancer and your mother re-married. Now, did you have brothers and sisters?
MRS. RARIDON: I have a half-brother 12 years younger and my step father had children and step children and they were all grown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, I see.
MRS. RARIDON: The youngest one of that batch was a bombardier in a Flying Fortress in World War II and was killed in a bombing raid on the ball bearing works in Germany.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? The... Now, what did they ...? what did they do? What did your stepfather...?
MRS. RARIDON: Farmed.
MR. MCDANIEL: They were farmers. So you grew up on a farm.
MRS. RARIDON: My stepfather was 20 some years older than my mother and so he retired and gave up farming about 1945, and we moved into the edge of town.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So what year did you graduate high school?
MRS. RARIDON: '49.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1949 and so, you remember... you were old enough to remember the war and all that was going on at that time. What do you remember about it? What do you remember your folks saying about it?
MRS. RARIDON: I can remember them turning on the radio on December 7th and this is a cut-down -- this was a library table and the radio was sitting on it. I could see the... It was late in the afternoon; I could see the sun slanting over it. The wartime rationing and so forth didn't affect farmers much. They could get extra gasoline, extra sugar for canning. The big highlight of my war memories was when we get... our turkeys went wild and we couldn't capture them for the market and the manager of the local Kroger store came out with his gun and shot them out of the locust trees where they were roosting so he would have...
MR. MCDANIEL: Turkeys...
MRS. RARIDON: Turkeys for his customers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? My goodness. The... You said you graduated high school in '49. Did... So what were you interested in after high school? Were you going to go to college or...?
MRS. RARIDON: Oh, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: I was pretty sure I would be useless at most things so I better get educated. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: My mother had been a school teacher. She had taught for 10 years and she went to school at Western.
MR. MCDANIEL: Western Kentucky?
MRS. RARIDON: Western Kentucky. It's all Kentucky until we get to Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: And because I had tried to get jobs, summer jobs, and you can only get them in a small state capital the year before an election and the year after when they're paying off the faithful.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: And my stepfather did... was ... did some politicking.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. RARIDON: So, getting jobs in that little town was so difficult that I, well I... I did ... well in science. So I decided that I had better continue that because I never wanted to have to search and search for jobs again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And at that time, your science degree would do it for you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: So I went 18 miles away to Georgetown Baptist College.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And, after four years there, I was going to go 'til I ran out of smarts. (laughter) So I was looking for a graduate program and I -- I don't remember how I happened on -- the AEC radiological physics fellowship. But I got one and here I am with 20 guys.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. RARIDON: I always thought that I was the extra that was added in and sometime or other one of them told us that they were the extra because they didn't want to go to Rochester to one of the other sites that was... had this program. There were three, I think, at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about the program. Tell me what was it?
MRS. RARIDON: You had a year of graduate work at Vanderbilt.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: And you came here in the summer. And what we basically did was to shadow health physicists at their jobs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: So we were at the Lab, I don't know, 10-12 weeks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And what does a health physicist do?
MRS. RARIDON: Radiation protection.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: See to it that you don't have any radiation damage.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: At that time, everybody at what became Oak Ridge National Lab, wore a film badge so that you knew how much you had. We ... we went with people who did the reading of the badges and all that kind of thing. And there were... I remember there were places they said, "This guy will take off his badge before he goes into his lab so it doesn't show that he had too much radiation."
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. RARIDON: So, there was one place that we were supposed to put on gas masks and go into and I didn't go because they couldn't get a gas mask to fit my head.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. RARIDON: They were too big or something.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. RARIDON: The... One very strong memory to me... they had all these radiation gizzies you don't, I don't think you see anymore. There was one they called a Cutie Pie and it looked like a ray gun and it was some sort of ionization chamber.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And I was holding this thing -- the Graphite Reactor was still going in those days -- and they pulled something out of the holding tank, they'd put it down in water to keep the radiation out. I looked... I was holding this gadget and they pulled that thing up and I was reading 7-R. Not MR -- R.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: I stepped behind one of the boys, I was reading 1-R through his body. Nobody was looking at me and I went around the corner, concrete corner of the reactor, to... Well, the first thing they taught us was, radiation effects on women are cumulative.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: That you're born with all your eggs and, beware.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, I was not the hotshot I thought I was. I had ended up with one C that wasn't balanced by an A -- you had to have a B average to keep your fellowship and to get your degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: So, I went back to Kentucky and taught school for two years in something called Old Kentucky Home School on Stephen Foster Avenue in Bardstown, Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. RARIDON: So, I taught math and the physical sciences, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, that sort of thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Also, if you were new, they dumped all the old chores on you. The... so that gave me the junior play (laughter) and the next, you know...
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: No ... What does a science major know of dramatics?
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: So, I got the junior play and the next year I had the senior play, the yearbook and the senior trip to Washington to which I got to escort -- there were two other small class, there were two other chaperones -- seniors to Washington on the train. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year was that?
MRS. RARIDON: Was right before we got married... '56.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that's I was about to say mid-50s.
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were teaching at the school, doing all the extra work and then you took a class of seniors on a train to Washington.
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, and you ... And keeping all those little girls separated from all the soldiers and sailors that were walking the streets of DC was part of your work.
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand.
MRS. RARIDON: Also, they'd never... These, oh, these were country kids, they hadn't been out much, shall we say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. RARIDON: And they were... They discovered the joys of spraying shaving cream all over a sleeping buddy and all that kind of thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course...
MRS. RARIDON: But anyway... At the end of that summer, we were married.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, when did you... where and when did you meet your husband?
MRS. RARIDON: Oh! Here!
MR. MCDANIEL: There! He was in the...
MRS. RARIDON: He was there and I'm here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay, so he was in the program with you.
MRS. RARIDON: Oh, yes, yes. We dated, pretty much, that year and then broke up, then later decided to get married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: The ... You know, I wanted to tell you something else. I feel like I have been on the edge of the beginnings of things that have really made a difference in our world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: Because in the summer of 1952, I had a job in the U.S. Naval Proving Grounds in Dahlgren, Virginia, for the summer. I had a cousin who was working for Naval Ordinance Lab in rocket fuses or something, told us that we, you know, that there was the possibility of applying for a government job, so I spent the summer there. And you can't imagine! They were doing simulated bomb drops into the Potomac and there was some... Oh, there was, like, 50 college boys and about six of us girls.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: So, there were... with a hand-held theodolite, they'd track these things down, somebody taking data, and I was operating a glorified calculator called a Friden to do the calculations on it, which I don't remember much about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. (coughs)
MRS. RARIDON: But at one point...
MR. MCDANIEL: Excuse me.
MRS. RARIDON: ... they took us on a tour of their two computers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: And it wasn't until much... recently I read the biography of Grace Hopper and I found out I had been looking at Mark II and Mark III -- Mark I was at Harvard -- and those are probably, I haven't checked to see what else was going on in the world, probably the second and third computers, ever. And they wouldn't do much of anything, I would think.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was that?
MRS. RARIDON: '52.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that was '52, oh, yeah.
MRS. RARIDON: And I also read that that was the place where the thing shut down and somebody on the night shift went looking for the problem. Found a moth fried on the contacts and taped it to the log and said, "Here is your computer bug." And that, I think, is where the term originated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. RARIDON: Now, I don't remember. One of... There were two different types. One was strictly electrical contact. Now, if you can imagine a computer bit in something the size of a post office box, just an electric contact in there and, you know, it took up a whole room and this thing wouldn't do what your pocket calculator would do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, exactly, exactly.
MRS. RARIDON: But, you know, looking back, I think, "Gee, had I only known what I was seeing!"
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, sure...
MRS. RARIDON: Oh, and the other thing about that summer was... A whole lot of those guys were from New York City. They had come through probably the most competitive -- they had to compete for state grants -- education process ever. And they'd sit around at coffee break and they'd talk about...I remember hearing them talk about 'green functions'. I didn't know what a green function was. When I got home, I looked in my math books, "Oh, yeah! That's what that is!" We didn't talk...
MR. MCDANIEL: So these guys... these were the cream of the crop. They were super smart.
MRS. RARIDON: They were. One of them was Mel Schwartz.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: Mel Schwartz, along with Leon Letterman, got the Nobel in '88, 30 years later. And I remember hearing that he got it for work that was, like, 10 years after this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right. Wow.
MRS. RARIDON: And the other guys ended up full professors at, you name it: Columbia... Oh, and there were a couple of the girls. One of them, I don't... disappeared. I don't know what happened to her, but the other one taught at George Mason. They were -- I had no idea what I was looking at except I knew they were smart.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. RARIDON: And my little Baptist College just didn't have me... You know, I had good teachers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: But they weren't that...
MR. MCDANIEL: Caliber.
MRS. RARIDON: That caliber. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand.
MRS. RARIDON: So, anyway, back to...
MR. MCDANIEL: You got married.
MRS. RARIDON: I got married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yep. In '56.
MRS. RARIDON: Yes. Dick had a job at Convair for the summer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Where's that? What is that? Where is that?
MRS. RARIDON: They were building big airplanes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Is it in Kentucky?
MRS. RARIDON: No, this is Texas.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Texas. Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: He has a sister that lived in Texas.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: And... Hot. They quit counting after 50 days we hit a hundred.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: We had this little apartment with only a swamp cooler and I have all the paper to put together the senior yearbook because they didn't get it done during all that other stuff. (laughter) So, he's going to... out to work every day, comes home. He has air conditioning and nearly passes out from the heat every day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, that was the first three months. We went back to Nashville for him to finish his course work on his Ph.D. I taught at Goodletsville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: I didn't even get started for a month. They were... they had more kids than they knew what to do with. And they'd... I think they had them sitting on the bleachers part of the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow...
MRS. RARIDON: But I taught then. One of the, didn't have him in class, but one of the homeroom kids was Bill Monroe's son.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really? Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: So... The professor he wanted to do his research under got a better offer and left Vandy, so he came over here to see...
MR. MCDANIEL: Dick did...
MRS. RARIDON: Yes. To see who he could work for and he ended up working for Kurt Krause. I came over and there was... This program that we were on, the thing, had been going on I'm not sure how many years, but the gal that was two years ahead of me was working in what later became OSTI.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. And that... OSTI is the ...?
MRS. RARIDON: Office for Scientific and Technical Information.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: She had been sending me job applications when I was up in Kentucky teaching because they needed people, so I got... about a month after I got here, I had a job there. She was pregnant and left there and, mind you, she got almost to the Ph.D. She had her Master's.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: So help me, so far as I know, she never worked a day afterwards. Having had all that physics under her belt and doing well in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, there I am at OSTI for about 16 months. Dick lined up his research and interviews hither and yon and ends up going to what is now the University of Memphis. He taught in Memphis for four years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: And I had two daughters.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. So, now, where were you? You went to Memphis.
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah...
MRS. RARIDON: Oh, I, you know, I left OSTI, and hung around here by myself.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: The...
MR. MCDANIEL: So he goes to study...finish his studies or teach at University of Memphis.
MRS. RARIDON: He taught.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, he taught at University of Memphis.
MRS. RARIDON: And, after four years, academic politics got to him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: And he came back here and worked for Dr. Krause.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year was it you all came back to Oak Ridge?
MRS. RARIDON: '62.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you came back to Oak Ridge in 1962.
MRS. RARIDON: With a two or three month old baby in arms and a three year old. So (laughs) I wasn't very good at stay-at-home. I remember very well the day he came home from work and I said, "Tell me something, tell me some gossip, tell me a dirty joke, anything!" (laughter) I'd been home with these little daughters babbling along, not saying anything really.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you were, I mean, you know, you're smart and, you know, you had... You wanted to do things, too, I'm sure, you know. For any woman who feels like she must stay at home with her children while they're young like that it was a challenging time.
MRS. RARIDON: So we went ... We built this house and I did all the trekking around and overseeing and picking this and dealing with all the contractor junk. They'd... Sometimes they'd look at me like, "You're not supposed to know anything!" (laughter) The... We moved in here December of 1964. Sometime that spring, the landscapers grading that had run over the drain tile, stopped it. And it came a big rain and I had an inch or two of water in the basement and the kids had chicken pox and I had the flu and somebody from OSTI who knew me before said, "Would you like a job?" (laughter) Oh, yeah! And Dick was always quite willing for me to work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: So willing, he would do the paperwork. You know, the paperwork that goes with a government job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MRS. RARIDON: And because... Oh! One thing, about 1953, is getting your first Q clearance and the FBI coming around to your small town checking on you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, sure, absolutely.
MRS. RARIDON: Dick had... was from Kellogg, Iowa, and they only had a night watchman. They talked to him and he called up Dick's mother and says, "Has Dick ever been in trouble?" (laughter) And she says, "Of course not!" So... But Frankfort was claimed 12,000 and was probably bigger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: They went to the sheriff, who had known my father. See my name was different than my stepfather's. I was a Herndon. And so... Then they went to the county attorney, see all this comes... People tell you, "What's going on?" you know? And he thought and thought, and then he said, "Oh! Jake Gross' stepdaughter." So then, you know, he... I'd have some sort of reference.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: And you try to get your fingerprints taken in a little town! I was in Georgetown. I went to, you know, the Post ... I tried the Post Office, they sent them off -- "No, these aren't any good."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: Tried the police station -- same thing. Went... I guess I went police, post office, and police. They finally got some that the FBI, I guess it was, would accept. Anyway, there I had a flashback.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MRS. RARIDON: The thing is, I've been told I have a grasshopper mind, so I had flashback to that. So anyway...
MR. MCDANIEL: That's good, though. That was a good story.
MRS. RARIDON: I go back to work, you've got to have your clearance reactivated. Basically, we've had a clear... A Q clearance from the time we were 21, off and on, until we retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. RARIDON: And he may have some kind of clearance now 'cause he goes out there some.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. RARIDON: At one point, they were going... And every five years you've got to be reactivated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: So, I'm sitting here with this form and I say, "Someone not in education, not in work, so and so, who has known you at least five years. What do I do for that?" Dick says, "Give your friend, Thelma, a thrill." Thelma's husband was just back from Japan. He'd gotten caught in, I don't know, he should have been too old for the draft. But anyway, he'd been in Japan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And the FBI knocks on her door, she wonders, "What on earth has Pete gotten into?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. RARIDON: It was only me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. That's funny.
MRS. RARIDON: So, about, oh, the interesting thing about my going back to work was, it was a new program, part time programs for professional women.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: And it was the baby of Mary Bunting, who was the first female AEC Commissioner.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: I think she had been widowed with children and had, you know, had all the struggles of trying to do a full-time job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And so she thought that there should be something where women with children could keep their skills up, but anyway, it was 20 hours a week with a fraction of the benefit and it was like -- perfect!
MR. MCDANIEL: Perfect.
MRS. RARIDON: Like having your world with a fence around it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: I had a cleaning lady who had been saying, "Why don't you go back to work and then I'll only have one house to clean." And she was from out around Marlow and she had more sense than her kin and was used to fending with the world for them and I thought, she can handle the emergencies for my kids and, one thing about government is you can take leave an hour at a time, so if ... if they needed something I could ... it was three miles away...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: I could be home and take care of things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: Also, I could arrange my 20 hours a week -- however. So, I worked two ... I would work two and a half and everything for the church and for the kids happened on a Tuesday. So, as a general rule, I didn't work Tuesdays. So, I worked that for nine and a half years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. RARIDON: And then we ...were becoming... Let's see... I guess we became ERDA first. Somebody says that sounds like a disgusting disease.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. RARIDON: Energy Research and Development Authority or something, and then it was DOE. ERDA lasted four years. So, all of a sudden... Oh, what we did... I never said what the work was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that's I was about to ask you what was it you did.
MRS. RARIDON: It was abstracting and indexing scientific reports. And they were... when they set up this thing; they very carefully did not give librarians any great function. They said librarians are the people who think that reports are those things that don't stand up on the shelf properly. (laughter) So this really, this outfit really started in '48, I guess. They started with abstracts of de-classified documents because the research that had been done during the war should be made available, if not classified, to the world of science. And all your main scientific journals, Physical Review, Chem. Abstracts, all those ... Well, no, that's abstracts... but anyway, your big deal scientific publications required refereed material. That meant that you couldn't put an article in unless your peers thought it was worthy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: But they wanted to put in their wartime research without the hassle, so they... that was... Declassified Documents was followed by Nuclear Science Abstracts and I worked for that 'til its demise. It ... But anyway, that was so you could... You categorized and you had ... they did book type indexing, at the beginning, 'cause that's what Chem. Abstracts did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: And to make your scientific material more available, the -- and this went on, it was probably not... Early '70s, when they began to computerize things and...
MR. MCDANIEL: But you did it for nine years.
MRS. RARIDON: No, I did 20 hours a week for nine years
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, you did 20 hours a week for nine years. Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: Then, when they began to take in all of energy as DOE, we'd be trying to get information from geology or ... anyway. I worked more... I was still technically 20 hours a week, but I'd work 37, 38, all of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: And by now your kids were older, too. I mean, they could...
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, the youngest one resented it when I'd work more. She thought she needed transport here and there from time to time.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's what they do.
MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, I worked at that, let's see, 30 years, probably the next 10 years I was working the extra hours and we were doing the extra sciences which was not covered by nuclear.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And, of course... When was the Carter administration?
MR. MCDANIEL: That would have been the mid-'70s, mid to late-'70s.
MRS. RARIDON: We used to have a series called, 'Understanding the Atom.' They were available at the museum and various places or we'd send them out to people. It may have been a warped version... vision of what Carter was about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: But the thing that came down to us was that he was anti-nuclear.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: We had to get rid of all those things and our categories were renamed to not show so much nuclear.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. RARIDON: And... Anyway. He knew the hazards of nuclear. He didn't know the hazards of geothermal -- pulling all the arsenic, mercury, what have you, out of the earth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Solar cells, I don't know about them. I've been out of it for so long. I've been retired for 19 years. But solar panels, if you were just doing heating, copper's expensive and if you did aluminum and you were in a climate -- aluminum tubing in these things -- and you were in a climate where you need anti-freeze, the combination of aluminum and anti-freeze is catastrophic corrosion. So it... There are all sorts of things, you know, that these seemingly innocuous energy sources, you have to take into consideration. And... Anyway.
MR. MCDANIEL: So.
MRS. RARIDON: Carter didn't do us any good.
MR. MCDANIEL: He didn't do the nuclear industry any good, did he?
MRS. RARIDON: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: I interviewed -- just a little stop right there, for just a second and I'll tell you -- I interviewed Percy Brewington last week. Do you know Percy Brewington? He was the fellow that worked for the ORO who was in charge of building the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. He's not a big Carter fan, to say the least.
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, anyway, you worked for another 10 years.
MRS. RARIDON: With more hours.
MR. MCDANIEL: With more hours.
MRS. RARIDON: Almost, basically full time.
MR. MCDANIEL: And then you had another 10 years there.
MRS. RARIDON: There... To understand what we were doing... I guess when I came back we were already gearing up for computer. But you assigned... besides the indexing, you were assigning a certain range of key words to each document. And this... In the beginning, all you could search online was the title, author, abstract and key words. So, they had to be right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, I came back and I had to do key ... in '65, we started doing the key words.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: We also had this tie-in with IAEA in Vienna.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And that was an everlasting hassle. (laughter) They... Because when we went into all energy, they couldn't... we had to be agreeing on terms for their thesaurus and ours.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, the last 10 years I spent on a thesaurus and dealing with Vienna and, I mean, if you can imagine a manager saying to you, "I don't care if you spend $100 on a telephone call, get this straightened out with Vienna." One of the people over there, I finally decided he had a Ph.D. in CE -- Civil Engineering. Concrete! So I felt like I was dealing with somebody set in concrete.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: But there was basic philosophical differences and management wouldn't accept that, either place.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: Because you're doing two different... It's not quite apples and oranges, but two different things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. RARIDON: So, at some point -- we sent people over there all the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: To Vienna?
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah. Don Davis, I don't know how many years he spent over there. He's still alive at 90-something. You'd send them over and pretty soon, they were in the nuclear mindset at IAEA. And at one point one of them says, we're on the phone and he says, "Can't you get on the internet? We're starting on the internet." Internet? (laughter) So I told Dick that, and he's... he may have been over at Y-12 at that time, but he walked out in the hall and said, "How do you get on the internet?"
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was this? About?
MRS. RARIDON: I'll really have to think about that. I really don't know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, the guy ways, "You are if you want to be." So, then for a while, I'd give the messages to Dick. He'd carry them in and send them to Vienna for me until we got on the internet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, wow.
MRS. RARIDON: Oh, that was a strange thing. When getting computerized, in the government, there was a... they said, "No computers for our sites."
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: So our first computer was a data entry device.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really.
MRS. RARIDON: So ... on the requisition.
MR. MCDANIEL: It just couldn't be called a computer.
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, and for the longest time our computers were at the Lab. They had some IBMs dedicated to us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And the interesting thing, one interesting thing to me was, OK, we had data and data and data, unfortunately in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is Formula Translation or something like that. It was never meant for text.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MRS. RARIDON: Well anyway, you could combine two terms. You wanted this one and this one and whatever came out of it. Well, this one had 100,000 postings, this one had 100,000 postings and it shut down the computers out there and you'd have to call somebody and say, "Can you get those things going again?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. RARIDON: We went from punch tape ... Did you ever see punch tape?
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-uh.
MRS. RARIDON: Do you know punch cards? IBM cards?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, punch tape; it's like a reel-to-reel type thing, isn't it?
MRS. RARIDON: Yep. You know, just went... as you went to the snack bar, you'd go by the computer room -- they had all glass -- sometimes, one time I remember everything in there looked like a cake thing sitting on top of a washing machine, you know. I don't know what was going... I guess those were reels inside that top thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. RARIDON: But, you know, we went from... And we worked so hard trying to retrieve the material we put in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: We wanted it specific and all and I ... and we had to study Boolean algebra, we had to do this, that and the other about retrieval.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's kind of wrap up your work. So, you did that for a while. You did that until you retired, is that correct?
MRS. RARIDON: I did the thesaurus and negotiations and so forth and odd requests for information. You know, the front office, "We want to know something." Okay, they hand me a report or an abstract, "I want everything that we have like this." One of them I realized, because of how it was input, there was no way I'd ever get that out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: By the usual retrieval methods.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: And then I remembered. Scientists stick to their stuff, they don't hop around. So I took the authors and I traced those guys until I had about a hundred references.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Okay. I'm so smart and I go and I hand this in -- no way could I have done it that fast. And he said, "Go back and do it again." I said, "There's nothing else out there."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And I wouldn't do it. I was... How did I get so brassy? So finally they took one of our contractorsand put her to work. She spent two weeks and got two more references than I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. RARIDON: So anyway, you got good at it if you thought around ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: But then, when I see Google, my mind is blown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MRS. RARIDON: Where did they get those search engines? Of course, there's one of my former cohorts -- we get together for lunch once a month -- he said, "But it's not the pertinent information."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: You're not getting the real type stuff. Anyway, I retired on Groundhog Day, 1994...
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: ... and, except for judging a few elementary school science fairs, I was through with science. I'd had it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: And so I thought and thought and thought... well, the thing was, my father died of cancer at 44, my mother died of cancer at 58. I was 6-...almost 62, and I thought, "You know, I might actually..." Well, when I started thinking, it was back younger than that, I was thinking, "I might actually live to retire and what am I going to do?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And I thought back to college how much I had enjoyed a writers' group.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: So I took writing courses and they were... had a really nice, at that time Roane State here in town had a really nice writers' center. They don't have it any more, I don't think. So anyway, I, you know, I wrote personal essays and I'm down to poetry now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: I've had, four years ago I had a little volume printed and I'm about ready for another one and, course there's church and there's choir and there's all of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you've been involved in your church, you were telling me, Chapel on the Hill...
MRS. RARIDON: 50 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: 50 years.
MRS. RARIDON: This time.
MR. MCDANIEL: This time.
MRS. RARIDON: We attended there... See we were back here '57-'58 while he finished his degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And we were... You know, I think I've... I think we've seen about every minister except the very first one. Oh, and I was in Toastmasters for years and I continued some after I retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: And my daughter, younger daughter, was into miniatures, you can see that kind of thing back there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: So, they started up a group that met in the after work and so I thought I'd go and somewhere along the line I thought, "Wait a minute! This is her interest, not mine."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: And that's when I went back to writing.
MR. MCDANIEL: You went back to writing. So you've been involved in, since you retired, writing. Has that kind of been your main...?
MRS. RARIDON: Well, I'm now on the board of Tennessee Mountain Writers' Conference.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. RARIDON: I'm so arthritic, I can't ... Well, okay, I spent the ... 10 years... I was diagnosed with metastasized ovarian cancer in… 71.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. RARIDON: And I have been in remission for six years. I had one bout... I had two bouts of chemo with remission in between.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And what year were you diagnosed?
MRS. RARIDON: When I was 71.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, that's right, when you were 71. Okay.
MRS. RARIDON: Born in '32, 70- what's that? Oh, 2003.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, 2003.
MRS. RARIDON: We went to China in 2002 and I got... Anyway...
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you've been in remission.
MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, I had ... yeah, I had... I was hollowed out and I had six months of chemo and two and a half years later I had to have eight months more. So it's been six years since I had any.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. RARIDON: I was trying to think where my retirement had gone and a lot of it went to cancer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly, exactly. Well, good. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything else you want to tell me about your life in Oak Ridge? I mean, you've been here a long, long time.
MRS. RARIDON: Well, we never saw any reason to go anywhere else. It's... It's kind of like the academic life, when you're, you know, in the professional realm.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. RARIDON: The... East Tennessee is beautiful and I certainly wouldn't want to go to Iowa where he's from. (laughter) You know, it's like, the climate's good: Why go anywhere else?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. RARIDON: And we have travelled. He says he's got 60 countries.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow.
MRS. RARIDON: He says I have 56, but it was so hot on this last one I didn't even set a toe on Croatia, so I don't think I get to count that. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, very good, very good.
MRS. RARIDON: That's it?
MR. MCDANIEL: That's it. All right, well very...
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mrs. Raridon’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.
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| Rating | |
| Title | Raridon, Mona |
| Description | Oral History of Mona Raridon, Interviewed by Keith McDaniel, August 30, 2013 |
| Audio Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/audio/Raridon_Mona.mp3 |
| Video Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/videojs/Raridon_Mona.htm |
| Transcript Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/Transcripts_and_photos/Raridon_Mona/MRaridon_Final.doc |
| Image Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/Transcripts_and_photos/Raridon_Mona/Raridon_Mona.jpg |
| Collection Name | COROH |
| Interviewee | Raridon, Mona |
| Interviewer | McDaniel, Keith |
| Type | video |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Contamination; Health; Nuclear Energy; Oak Ridge (Tenn.); Radiation; Schools; Security; World War II; X-10; Y-12; |
| People | Brewington, Percy; Bunting, Mary; Carter, Jimmy; Davis, Don; Hopper, Grace; Kraus, Kurt; Letterman, Leon; Monroe, Bill; Rose, Jack; Schwartz, Mel; |
| Places | Bardstown (Ky.); Chapel on the Hill; China; Columbia University; Dahlgren (Va.); Elkhorn High School (Ky.); Frankfort (Ky.); Franklin County (Ky.); George Mason University ; Georgetown (Ky.); Georgetown College (Ky.); Germany; Goodletsville (Tenn.); Kellogg (Iowa); Marlow (Tenn.); Nashville (Tenn.); Naval Ordinance Lab (Dahlgren, Va.); New York City (N.Y.); Old Kentucky Home School (Ky.); Peak's Mill School (Ky.); Potomac River (Va.); Roane State Community College; Rochester (N.Y.); Stephen Foster Avenue (Bardstown, Ky.); U.S. Naval Proving Grounds (Dahlgren, Va.); University of Memphis; Vienna (Austria); Washington D.C.; |
| Organizations/Programs | Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); Convair; Department of Energy; Energy Research and Development Administration; Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); International Atomic Energy Agency; Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies (ORINS); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Office for Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI); Tennessee Mountain Writers' Conference; Toastmasters; U.S. Navy; |
| Things/Other | AEC Radiological Fellowship; Federal "Q" Clearance; Friden calculators; Graphite Reactor; |
| Notes | Transcript edited at Mrs. Raridon's request |
| Date of Original | 2013 |
| Format | flv, doc, jpg, mp3 |
| Length | 52 minutes |
| File Size | 177 MB |
| Source | Center for Oak Ridge Oral History |
| Location of Original | Oak Ridge Public Library |
| Rights | Copy Right by the City of Oak Ridge, Oak Ridge, TN 37830 Disclaimer: "This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise do not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof." The materials in this collection are in the public domain and may be reproduced without the written permission of either the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History o |
| Contact Information | For more information or if you are interested in providing an oral history, contact: The Center for Oak Ridge Oral History, Oak Ridge Public Library, 1401 Oak Ridge Turnpike, 865-425-3455. |
| Identifier | RARM |
| Creator | Center for Oak Ridge Oral History |
| Contributors | McNeilly, Kathy; Stooksbury, Susie; McDaniel, Keith; Reed, Jordan |
| Searchable Text | ORAL HISTORY OF MONA RARIDON Interviewed by Keith McDaniel August 30, 2013 MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is August 30, 2013 and I am at the home of Mrs. Mona and Dick Raridon here in Oak Ridge. And we're going to be interviewing both Mona and Dick, and Mona, thank you for taking time to talk with us. MRS. RARIDON: You're welcome. MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the beginning. Tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family. MRS. RARIDON: I was born the year the Dow Jones bottomed out at 41 near Frankfurt, Kentucky. I have been known to say I was born 50 feet off US 60, front room of a house with a narrow front yard. MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh... MRS. RARIDON: My father died the next year of cancer and my mother re-married just before I was five. All this is Franklin County. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: I went to school first at Peak's Mill and then 10th grade, I guess, I went to Elkhorn High. Within the next dozen years, they had consolidated the whole thing into one county high school. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, you said Franklin County? And that is...? Where's that? Where is that? MRS. RARIDON: Frankfort. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Frankfort, right. And that is between... that is the state capital, isn't it? MRS. RARIDON: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, that's where you grew up. Now what did your father...? You said your father passed away from cancer and your mother re-married. Now, did you have brothers and sisters? MRS. RARIDON: I have a half-brother 12 years younger and my step father had children and step children and they were all grown. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, I see. MRS. RARIDON: The youngest one of that batch was a bombardier in a Flying Fortress in World War II and was killed in a bombing raid on the ball bearing works in Germany. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? The... Now, what did they ...? what did they do? What did your stepfather...? MRS. RARIDON: Farmed. MR. MCDANIEL: They were farmers. So you grew up on a farm. MRS. RARIDON: My stepfather was 20 some years older than my mother and so he retired and gave up farming about 1945, and we moved into the edge of town. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So what year did you graduate high school? MRS. RARIDON: '49. MR. MCDANIEL: 1949 and so, you remember... you were old enough to remember the war and all that was going on at that time. What do you remember about it? What do you remember your folks saying about it? MRS. RARIDON: I can remember them turning on the radio on December 7th and this is a cut-down -- this was a library table and the radio was sitting on it. I could see the... It was late in the afternoon; I could see the sun slanting over it. The wartime rationing and so forth didn't affect farmers much. They could get extra gasoline, extra sugar for canning. The big highlight of my war memories was when we get... our turkeys went wild and we couldn't capture them for the market and the manager of the local Kroger store came out with his gun and shot them out of the locust trees where they were roosting so he would have... MR. MCDANIEL: Turkeys... MRS. RARIDON: Turkeys for his customers. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? My goodness. The... You said you graduated high school in '49. Did... So what were you interested in after high school? Were you going to go to college or...? MRS. RARIDON: Oh, yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: I was pretty sure I would be useless at most things so I better get educated. (laughter) MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: My mother had been a school teacher. She had taught for 10 years and she went to school at Western. MR. MCDANIEL: Western Kentucky? MRS. RARIDON: Western Kentucky. It's all Kentucky until we get to Tennessee. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: And because I had tried to get jobs, summer jobs, and you can only get them in a small state capital the year before an election and the year after when they're paying off the faithful. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: And my stepfather did... was ... did some politicking. MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh... MRS. RARIDON: So, getting jobs in that little town was so difficult that I, well I... I did ... well in science. So I decided that I had better continue that because I never wanted to have to search and search for jobs again. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And at that time, your science degree would do it for you. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: So I went 18 miles away to Georgetown Baptist College. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And, after four years there, I was going to go 'til I ran out of smarts. (laughter) So I was looking for a graduate program and I -- I don't remember how I happened on -- the AEC radiological physics fellowship. But I got one and here I am with 20 guys. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. RARIDON: I always thought that I was the extra that was added in and sometime or other one of them told us that they were the extra because they didn't want to go to Rochester to one of the other sites that was... had this program. There were three, I think, at the time. MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about the program. Tell me what was it? MRS. RARIDON: You had a year of graduate work at Vanderbilt. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: And you came here in the summer. And what we basically did was to shadow health physicists at their jobs. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: So we were at the Lab, I don't know, 10-12 weeks. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And what does a health physicist do? MRS. RARIDON: Radiation protection. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: See to it that you don't have any radiation damage. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: At that time, everybody at what became Oak Ridge National Lab, wore a film badge so that you knew how much you had. We ... we went with people who did the reading of the badges and all that kind of thing. And there were... I remember there were places they said, "This guy will take off his badge before he goes into his lab so it doesn't show that he had too much radiation." MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. RARIDON: So, there was one place that we were supposed to put on gas masks and go into and I didn't go because they couldn't get a gas mask to fit my head. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really? MRS. RARIDON: They were too big or something. MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh... MRS. RARIDON: The... One very strong memory to me... they had all these radiation gizzies you don't, I don't think you see anymore. There was one they called a Cutie Pie and it looked like a ray gun and it was some sort of ionization chamber. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And I was holding this thing -- the Graphite Reactor was still going in those days -- and they pulled something out of the holding tank, they'd put it down in water to keep the radiation out. I looked... I was holding this gadget and they pulled that thing up and I was reading 7-R. Not MR -- R. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: I stepped behind one of the boys, I was reading 1-R through his body. Nobody was looking at me and I went around the corner, concrete corner of the reactor, to... Well, the first thing they taught us was, radiation effects on women are cumulative. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: That you're born with all your eggs and, beware. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, I was not the hotshot I thought I was. I had ended up with one C that wasn't balanced by an A -- you had to have a B average to keep your fellowship and to get your degree. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: So, I went back to Kentucky and taught school for two years in something called Old Kentucky Home School on Stephen Foster Avenue in Bardstown, Kentucky. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. RARIDON: So, I taught math and the physical sciences, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, that sort of thing. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: Also, if you were new, they dumped all the old chores on you. The... so that gave me the junior play (laughter) and the next, you know... MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: No ... What does a science major know of dramatics? MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: So, I got the junior play and the next year I had the senior play, the yearbook and the senior trip to Washington to which I got to escort -- there were two other small class, there were two other chaperones -- seniors to Washington on the train. (laughter) MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year was that? MRS. RARIDON: Was right before we got married... '56. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that's I was about to say mid-50s. MRS. RARIDON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were teaching at the school, doing all the extra work and then you took a class of seniors on a train to Washington. MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, and you ... And keeping all those little girls separated from all the soldiers and sailors that were walking the streets of DC was part of your work. MR. MCDANIEL: I understand. MRS. RARIDON: Also, they'd never... These, oh, these were country kids, they hadn't been out much, shall we say. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure... MRS. RARIDON: And they were... They discovered the joys of spraying shaving cream all over a sleeping buddy and all that kind of thing. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course... MRS. RARIDON: But anyway... At the end of that summer, we were married. MR. MCDANIEL: So, when did you... where and when did you meet your husband? MRS. RARIDON: Oh! Here! MR. MCDANIEL: There! He was in the... MRS. RARIDON: He was there and I'm here. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay, so he was in the program with you. MRS. RARIDON: Oh, yes, yes. We dated, pretty much, that year and then broke up, then later decided to get married. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: The ... You know, I wanted to tell you something else. I feel like I have been on the edge of the beginnings of things that have really made a difference in our world. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: Because in the summer of 1952, I had a job in the U.S. Naval Proving Grounds in Dahlgren, Virginia, for the summer. I had a cousin who was working for Naval Ordinance Lab in rocket fuses or something, told us that we, you know, that there was the possibility of applying for a government job, so I spent the summer there. And you can't imagine! They were doing simulated bomb drops into the Potomac and there was some... Oh, there was, like, 50 college boys and about six of us girls. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: So, there were... with a hand-held theodolite, they'd track these things down, somebody taking data, and I was operating a glorified calculator called a Friden to do the calculations on it, which I don't remember much about. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. (coughs) MRS. RARIDON: But at one point... MR. MCDANIEL: Excuse me. MRS. RARIDON: ... they took us on a tour of their two computers. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: And it wasn't until much... recently I read the biography of Grace Hopper and I found out I had been looking at Mark II and Mark III -- Mark I was at Harvard -- and those are probably, I haven't checked to see what else was going on in the world, probably the second and third computers, ever. And they wouldn't do much of anything, I would think. MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was that? MRS. RARIDON: '52. MR. MCDANIEL: So that was '52, oh, yeah. MRS. RARIDON: And I also read that that was the place where the thing shut down and somebody on the night shift went looking for the problem. Found a moth fried on the contacts and taped it to the log and said, "Here is your computer bug." And that, I think, is where the term originated. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. RARIDON: Now, I don't remember. One of... There were two different types. One was strictly electrical contact. Now, if you can imagine a computer bit in something the size of a post office box, just an electric contact in there and, you know, it took up a whole room and this thing wouldn't do what your pocket calculator would do. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, exactly, exactly. MRS. RARIDON: But, you know, looking back, I think, "Gee, had I only known what I was seeing!" MR. MCDANIEL: Well, sure... MRS. RARIDON: Oh, and the other thing about that summer was... A whole lot of those guys were from New York City. They had come through probably the most competitive -- they had to compete for state grants -- education process ever. And they'd sit around at coffee break and they'd talk about...I remember hearing them talk about 'green functions'. I didn't know what a green function was. When I got home, I looked in my math books, "Oh, yeah! That's what that is!" We didn't talk... MR. MCDANIEL: So these guys... these were the cream of the crop. They were super smart. MRS. RARIDON: They were. One of them was Mel Schwartz. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: Mel Schwartz, along with Leon Letterman, got the Nobel in '88, 30 years later. And I remember hearing that he got it for work that was, like, 10 years after this. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right. Wow. MRS. RARIDON: And the other guys ended up full professors at, you name it: Columbia... Oh, and there were a couple of the girls. One of them, I don't... disappeared. I don't know what happened to her, but the other one taught at George Mason. They were -- I had no idea what I was looking at except I knew they were smart. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure... MRS. RARIDON: And my little Baptist College just didn't have me... You know, I had good teachers. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: But they weren't that... MR. MCDANIEL: Caliber. MRS. RARIDON: That caliber. Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: I understand. MRS. RARIDON: So, anyway, back to... MR. MCDANIEL: You got married. MRS. RARIDON: I got married. MR. MCDANIEL: Yep. In '56. MRS. RARIDON: Yes. Dick had a job at Convair for the summer. MR. MCDANIEL: Where's that? What is that? Where is that? MRS. RARIDON: They were building big airplanes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Is it in Kentucky? MRS. RARIDON: No, this is Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Texas. Okay. MRS. RARIDON: He has a sister that lived in Texas. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: And... Hot. They quit counting after 50 days we hit a hundred. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: We had this little apartment with only a swamp cooler and I have all the paper to put together the senior yearbook because they didn't get it done during all that other stuff. (laughter) So, he's going to... out to work every day, comes home. He has air conditioning and nearly passes out from the heat every day. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, that was the first three months. We went back to Nashville for him to finish his course work on his Ph.D. I taught at Goodletsville. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Okay. MRS. RARIDON: I didn't even get started for a month. They were... they had more kids than they knew what to do with. And they'd... I think they had them sitting on the bleachers part of the time. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow... MRS. RARIDON: But I taught then. One of the, didn't have him in class, but one of the homeroom kids was Bill Monroe's son. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really? Okay. MRS. RARIDON: So... The professor he wanted to do his research under got a better offer and left Vandy, so he came over here to see... MR. MCDANIEL: Dick did... MRS. RARIDON: Yes. To see who he could work for and he ended up working for Kurt Krause. I came over and there was... This program that we were on, the thing, had been going on I'm not sure how many years, but the gal that was two years ahead of me was working in what later became OSTI. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. And that... OSTI is the ...? MRS. RARIDON: Office for Scientific and Technical Information. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: She had been sending me job applications when I was up in Kentucky teaching because they needed people, so I got... about a month after I got here, I had a job there. She was pregnant and left there and, mind you, she got almost to the Ph.D. She had her Master's. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: So help me, so far as I know, she never worked a day afterwards. Having had all that physics under her belt and doing well in it. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, there I am at OSTI for about 16 months. Dick lined up his research and interviews hither and yon and ends up going to what is now the University of Memphis. He taught in Memphis for four years. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: And I had two daughters. MR. MCDANIEL: All right. So, now, where were you? You went to Memphis. MRS. RARIDON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah... MRS. RARIDON: Oh, I, you know, I left OSTI, and hung around here by myself. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: The... MR. MCDANIEL: So he goes to study...finish his studies or teach at University of Memphis. MRS. RARIDON: He taught. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, he taught at University of Memphis. MRS. RARIDON: And, after four years, academic politics got to him. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: And he came back here and worked for Dr. Krause. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year was it you all came back to Oak Ridge? MRS. RARIDON: '62. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you came back to Oak Ridge in 1962. MRS. RARIDON: With a two or three month old baby in arms and a three year old. So (laughs) I wasn't very good at stay-at-home. I remember very well the day he came home from work and I said, "Tell me something, tell me some gossip, tell me a dirty joke, anything!" (laughter) I'd been home with these little daughters babbling along, not saying anything really. MR. MCDANIEL: And you were, I mean, you know, you're smart and, you know, you had... You wanted to do things, too, I'm sure, you know. For any woman who feels like she must stay at home with her children while they're young like that it was a challenging time. MRS. RARIDON: So we went ... We built this house and I did all the trekking around and overseeing and picking this and dealing with all the contractor junk. They'd... Sometimes they'd look at me like, "You're not supposed to know anything!" (laughter) The... We moved in here December of 1964. Sometime that spring, the landscapers grading that had run over the drain tile, stopped it. And it came a big rain and I had an inch or two of water in the basement and the kids had chicken pox and I had the flu and somebody from OSTI who knew me before said, "Would you like a job?" (laughter) Oh, yeah! And Dick was always quite willing for me to work. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: So willing, he would do the paperwork. You know, the paperwork that goes with a government job. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course. MRS. RARIDON: And because... Oh! One thing, about 1953, is getting your first Q clearance and the FBI coming around to your small town checking on you. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, sure, absolutely. MRS. RARIDON: Dick had... was from Kellogg, Iowa, and they only had a night watchman. They talked to him and he called up Dick's mother and says, "Has Dick ever been in trouble?" (laughter) And she says, "Of course not!" So... But Frankfort was claimed 12,000 and was probably bigger. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: They went to the sheriff, who had known my father. See my name was different than my stepfather's. I was a Herndon. And so... Then they went to the county attorney, see all this comes... People tell you, "What's going on?" you know? And he thought and thought, and then he said, "Oh! Jake Gross' stepdaughter." So then, you know, he... I'd have some sort of reference. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: And you try to get your fingerprints taken in a little town! I was in Georgetown. I went to, you know, the Post ... I tried the Post Office, they sent them off -- "No, these aren't any good." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: Tried the police station -- same thing. Went... I guess I went police, post office, and police. They finally got some that the FBI, I guess it was, would accept. Anyway, there I had a flashback. MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. MRS. RARIDON: The thing is, I've been told I have a grasshopper mind, so I had flashback to that. So anyway... MR. MCDANIEL: That's good, though. That was a good story. MRS. RARIDON: I go back to work, you've got to have your clearance reactivated. Basically, we've had a clear... A Q clearance from the time we were 21, off and on, until we retired. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. RARIDON: And he may have some kind of clearance now 'cause he goes out there some. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. RARIDON: At one point, they were going... And every five years you've got to be reactivated. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: So, I'm sitting here with this form and I say, "Someone not in education, not in work, so and so, who has known you at least five years. What do I do for that?" Dick says, "Give your friend, Thelma, a thrill." Thelma's husband was just back from Japan. He'd gotten caught in, I don't know, he should have been too old for the draft. But anyway, he'd been in Japan. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And the FBI knocks on her door, she wonders, "What on earth has Pete gotten into?" MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure... MRS. RARIDON: It was only me. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. That's funny. MRS. RARIDON: So, about, oh, the interesting thing about my going back to work was, it was a new program, part time programs for professional women. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: And it was the baby of Mary Bunting, who was the first female AEC Commissioner. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: I think she had been widowed with children and had, you know, had all the struggles of trying to do a full-time job. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And so she thought that there should be something where women with children could keep their skills up, but anyway, it was 20 hours a week with a fraction of the benefit and it was like -- perfect! MR. MCDANIEL: Perfect. MRS. RARIDON: Like having your world with a fence around it. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: I had a cleaning lady who had been saying, "Why don't you go back to work and then I'll only have one house to clean." And she was from out around Marlow and she had more sense than her kin and was used to fending with the world for them and I thought, she can handle the emergencies for my kids and, one thing about government is you can take leave an hour at a time, so if ... if they needed something I could ... it was three miles away... MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: I could be home and take care of things. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: Also, I could arrange my 20 hours a week -- however. So, I worked two ... I would work two and a half and everything for the church and for the kids happened on a Tuesday. So, as a general rule, I didn't work Tuesdays. So, I worked that for nine and a half years. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. RARIDON: And then we ...were becoming... Let's see... I guess we became ERDA first. Somebody says that sounds like a disgusting disease. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. MRS. RARIDON: Energy Research and Development Authority or something, and then it was DOE. ERDA lasted four years. So, all of a sudden... Oh, what we did... I never said what the work was. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that's I was about to ask you what was it you did. MRS. RARIDON: It was abstracting and indexing scientific reports. And they were... when they set up this thing; they very carefully did not give librarians any great function. They said librarians are the people who think that reports are those things that don't stand up on the shelf properly. (laughter) So this really, this outfit really started in '48, I guess. They started with abstracts of de-classified documents because the research that had been done during the war should be made available, if not classified, to the world of science. And all your main scientific journals, Physical Review, Chem. Abstracts, all those ... Well, no, that's abstracts... but anyway, your big deal scientific publications required refereed material. That meant that you couldn't put an article in unless your peers thought it was worthy. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: But they wanted to put in their wartime research without the hassle, so they... that was... Declassified Documents was followed by Nuclear Science Abstracts and I worked for that 'til its demise. It ... But anyway, that was so you could... You categorized and you had ... they did book type indexing, at the beginning, 'cause that's what Chem. Abstracts did. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: And to make your scientific material more available, the -- and this went on, it was probably not... Early '70s, when they began to computerize things and... MR. MCDANIEL: But you did it for nine years. MRS. RARIDON: No, I did 20 hours a week for nine years MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, you did 20 hours a week for nine years. Okay. MRS. RARIDON: Then, when they began to take in all of energy as DOE, we'd be trying to get information from geology or ... anyway. I worked more... I was still technically 20 hours a week, but I'd work 37, 38, all of that. MR. MCDANIEL: And by now your kids were older, too. I mean, they could... MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, the youngest one resented it when I'd work more. She thought she needed transport here and there from time to time. MR. MCDANIEL: That's what they do. MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, I worked at that, let's see, 30 years, probably the next 10 years I was working the extra hours and we were doing the extra sciences which was not covered by nuclear. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And, of course... When was the Carter administration? MR. MCDANIEL: That would have been the mid-'70s, mid to late-'70s. MRS. RARIDON: We used to have a series called, 'Understanding the Atom.' They were available at the museum and various places or we'd send them out to people. It may have been a warped version... vision of what Carter was about. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: But the thing that came down to us was that he was anti-nuclear. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: We had to get rid of all those things and our categories were renamed to not show so much nuclear. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. RARIDON: And... Anyway. He knew the hazards of nuclear. He didn't know the hazards of geothermal -- pulling all the arsenic, mercury, what have you, out of the earth. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: Solar cells, I don't know about them. I've been out of it for so long. I've been retired for 19 years. But solar panels, if you were just doing heating, copper's expensive and if you did aluminum and you were in a climate -- aluminum tubing in these things -- and you were in a climate where you need anti-freeze, the combination of aluminum and anti-freeze is catastrophic corrosion. So it... There are all sorts of things, you know, that these seemingly innocuous energy sources, you have to take into consideration. And... Anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: So. MRS. RARIDON: Carter didn't do us any good. MR. MCDANIEL: He didn't do the nuclear industry any good, did he? MRS. RARIDON: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: I interviewed -- just a little stop right there, for just a second and I'll tell you -- I interviewed Percy Brewington last week. Do you know Percy Brewington? He was the fellow that worked for the ORO who was in charge of building the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. He's not a big Carter fan, to say the least. MRS. RARIDON: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: So, anyway, you worked for another 10 years. MRS. RARIDON: With more hours. MR. MCDANIEL: With more hours. MRS. RARIDON: Almost, basically full time. MR. MCDANIEL: And then you had another 10 years there. MRS. RARIDON: There... To understand what we were doing... I guess when I came back we were already gearing up for computer. But you assigned... besides the indexing, you were assigning a certain range of key words to each document. And this... In the beginning, all you could search online was the title, author, abstract and key words. So, they had to be right. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, I came back and I had to do key ... in '65, we started doing the key words. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: We also had this tie-in with IAEA in Vienna. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And that was an everlasting hassle. (laughter) They... Because when we went into all energy, they couldn't... we had to be agreeing on terms for their thesaurus and ours. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, the last 10 years I spent on a thesaurus and dealing with Vienna and, I mean, if you can imagine a manager saying to you, "I don't care if you spend $100 on a telephone call, get this straightened out with Vienna." One of the people over there, I finally decided he had a Ph.D. in CE -- Civil Engineering. Concrete! So I felt like I was dealing with somebody set in concrete. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: But there was basic philosophical differences and management wouldn't accept that, either place. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: Because you're doing two different... It's not quite apples and oranges, but two different things. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. RARIDON: So, at some point -- we sent people over there all the time. MR. MCDANIEL: To Vienna? MRS. RARIDON: Yeah. Don Davis, I don't know how many years he spent over there. He's still alive at 90-something. You'd send them over and pretty soon, they were in the nuclear mindset at IAEA. And at one point one of them says, we're on the phone and he says, "Can't you get on the internet? We're starting on the internet." Internet? (laughter) So I told Dick that, and he's... he may have been over at Y-12 at that time, but he walked out in the hall and said, "How do you get on the internet?" MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was this? About? MRS. RARIDON: I'll really have to think about that. I really don't know. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: Anyway, the guy ways, "You are if you want to be." So, then for a while, I'd give the messages to Dick. He'd carry them in and send them to Vienna for me until we got on the internet. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, wow. MRS. RARIDON: Oh, that was a strange thing. When getting computerized, in the government, there was a... they said, "No computers for our sites." MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: So our first computer was a data entry device. MR. MCDANIEL: Really. MRS. RARIDON: So ... on the requisition. MR. MCDANIEL: It just couldn't be called a computer. MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, and for the longest time our computers were at the Lab. They had some IBMs dedicated to us. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And the interesting thing, one interesting thing to me was, OK, we had data and data and data, unfortunately in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is Formula Translation or something like that. It was never meant for text. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. MRS. RARIDON: Well anyway, you could combine two terms. You wanted this one and this one and whatever came out of it. Well, this one had 100,000 postings, this one had 100,000 postings and it shut down the computers out there and you'd have to call somebody and say, "Can you get those things going again?" MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. RARIDON: We went from punch tape ... Did you ever see punch tape? MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-uh. MRS. RARIDON: Do you know punch cards? IBM cards? MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, punch tape; it's like a reel-to-reel type thing, isn't it? MRS. RARIDON: Yep. You know, just went... as you went to the snack bar, you'd go by the computer room -- they had all glass -- sometimes, one time I remember everything in there looked like a cake thing sitting on top of a washing machine, you know. I don't know what was going... I guess those were reels inside that top thing. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. RARIDON: But, you know, we went from... And we worked so hard trying to retrieve the material we put in. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: We wanted it specific and all and I ... and we had to study Boolean algebra, we had to do this, that and the other about retrieval. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's kind of wrap up your work. So, you did that for a while. You did that until you retired, is that correct? MRS. RARIDON: I did the thesaurus and negotiations and so forth and odd requests for information. You know, the front office, "We want to know something." Okay, they hand me a report or an abstract, "I want everything that we have like this." One of them I realized, because of how it was input, there was no way I'd ever get that out. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: By the usual retrieval methods. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: And then I remembered. Scientists stick to their stuff, they don't hop around. So I took the authors and I traced those guys until I had about a hundred references. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: Okay. I'm so smart and I go and I hand this in -- no way could I have done it that fast. And he said, "Go back and do it again." I said, "There's nothing else out there." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And I wouldn't do it. I was... How did I get so brassy? So finally they took one of our contractorsand put her to work. She spent two weeks and got two more references than I did. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. RARIDON: So anyway, you got good at it if you thought around ... MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: But then, when I see Google, my mind is blown. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure. MRS. RARIDON: Where did they get those search engines? Of course, there's one of my former cohorts -- we get together for lunch once a month -- he said, "But it's not the pertinent information." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: You're not getting the real type stuff. Anyway, I retired on Groundhog Day, 1994... MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: ... and, except for judging a few elementary school science fairs, I was through with science. I'd had it. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: And so I thought and thought and thought... well, the thing was, my father died of cancer at 44, my mother died of cancer at 58. I was 6-...almost 62, and I thought, "You know, I might actually..." Well, when I started thinking, it was back younger than that, I was thinking, "I might actually live to retire and what am I going to do?" MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And I thought back to college how much I had enjoyed a writers' group. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: So I took writing courses and they were... had a really nice, at that time Roane State here in town had a really nice writers' center. They don't have it any more, I don't think. So anyway, I, you know, I wrote personal essays and I'm down to poetry now. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: I've had, four years ago I had a little volume printed and I'm about ready for another one and, course there's church and there's choir and there's all of that. MR. MCDANIEL: And you've been involved in your church, you were telling me, Chapel on the Hill... MRS. RARIDON: 50 years. MR. MCDANIEL: 50 years. MRS. RARIDON: This time. MR. MCDANIEL: This time. MRS. RARIDON: We attended there... See we were back here '57-'58 while he finished his degree. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And we were... You know, I think I've... I think we've seen about every minister except the very first one. Oh, and I was in Toastmasters for years and I continued some after I retired. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: And my daughter, younger daughter, was into miniatures, you can see that kind of thing back there. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. RARIDON: So, they started up a group that met in the after work and so I thought I'd go and somewhere along the line I thought, "Wait a minute! This is her interest, not mine." MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: And that's when I went back to writing. MR. MCDANIEL: You went back to writing. So you've been involved in, since you retired, writing. Has that kind of been your main...? MRS. RARIDON: Well, I'm now on the board of Tennessee Mountain Writers' Conference. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. RARIDON: I'm so arthritic, I can't ... Well, okay, I spent the ... 10 years... I was diagnosed with metastasized ovarian cancer in… 71. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? MRS. RARIDON: And I have been in remission for six years. I had one bout... I had two bouts of chemo with remission in between. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And what year were you diagnosed? MRS. RARIDON: When I was 71. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, that's right, when you were 71. Okay. MRS. RARIDON: Born in '32, 70- what's that? Oh, 2003. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, 2003. MRS. RARIDON: We went to China in 2002 and I got... Anyway... MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you've been in remission. MRS. RARIDON: Yeah, I had ... yeah, I had... I was hollowed out and I had six months of chemo and two and a half years later I had to have eight months more. So it's been six years since I had any. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. MRS. RARIDON: I was trying to think where my retirement had gone and a lot of it went to cancer. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly, exactly. Well, good. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything else you want to tell me about your life in Oak Ridge? I mean, you've been here a long, long time. MRS. RARIDON: Well, we never saw any reason to go anywhere else. It's... It's kind of like the academic life, when you're, you know, in the professional realm. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. RARIDON: The... East Tennessee is beautiful and I certainly wouldn't want to go to Iowa where he's from. (laughter) You know, it's like, the climate's good: Why go anywhere else? MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. MRS. RARIDON: And we have travelled. He says he's got 60 countries. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow. MRS. RARIDON: He says I have 56, but it was so hot on this last one I didn't even set a toe on Croatia, so I don't think I get to count that. (laughter) MR. MCDANIEL: Well, very good, very good. MRS. RARIDON: That's it? MR. MCDANIEL: That's it. All right, well very... [End of Interview] [Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mrs. Raridon’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged. |
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