Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Dean Warren

              
ORAL HISTORY OF DEAN WARREN
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
October 1983

Transcribed by Jordan Reed 
MR. WARREN: Hello!
MR. LARSON: This is now a tape recording, a video tape recording of Mr. Dean Warren. We will actually turn the microphone over to him to start the recording at this time. Take it away, Dean.
MR. WARREN: Thank you, Clarence. That was Clarence Larson. My brother-in-law, husband of Jane Warren Larson and I understand I am probably talking to my children, Roger and Guy, and my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or whoever. This is the middle of October, 1983. I am going to tell you a little bit of my younger experiences. My father, Stafford Warren, was a vigorous Californian who came off the farm and went to the University of California, the University of California Medical School, where he married and met my mother. Like most young men, he associated with someone he looked up to and Dr. Whipple, and got him into a new field called radiation. When he finished graduate work, he went over with my mother to Europe in fact and met Madam Curie and toured some of the work that was being done in radiation in Europe right after the end of World War I. Then Dr. Whipple went to the University of Rochester as Dean of the new medical school and took my father with him. That is where I was born along with my brother. My sister was born in California. But in any event, my father became probably the leading expert in the United States in the field of radiation. It was one of those gratuitous accidents of history. He was in the right place at the right time so when the Manhattan Project came along he was drafted, commissioned in the Army to be in charge of the medical safety program for the Manhattan Project. He and my mother, and my brother and sister and I moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I was then at the senior level, a senior in high school. I transferred down to the new high school in Oak Ridge. I was in the first graduating class at that high school in which there were 3 boys and 26 girls. It was because most of the kids in high school were from the construction families in Oak Ridge and moved around a lot and that progressed very fast in school. Most of the boys were at draft age and had gone into the service because the war was on. Well, after the, after graduation from high school…
MRS. LARSON: You were valedictorian.
MR. WARREN: was valedictorian, but that was due to the fact that this new high school had standards terribly below what I was used to. Everything was multiple choice, they didn’t give you no problems. I can remember as a side playing basketball and we went around and played all the local towns and there were fights on the floor because everyone had moonshine whiskey. In fact, see in chemistry, I was taught how to do two things in that senior high school. One was how to distill from corn alcohol and the other was to make some gun cotton. See Oak Ridge High School was staffed with local teachers and Eastern Tennessee in those days had been a hillbilly, very primitive kind of area. So this new influx of northerners, many of them children of academic achievers, some even Nobel Prize winners, was really a cultural shock to everybody down there and to ourselves. Anyways, I was 16 when I graduated from high school and I went for a year to the University of California because it was thought that the University of Tennessee wasn’t good enough in those days. So I had to go out of state anyway. So I went to the University of California then that summer when I was 17 and a half, I joined the Navy and went to boot camp and medical course school in the Navy and then after a short period of work in a hospital in California, the war ended but then there was an opportunity to volunteer for the Bikini Atom Bomb Test. In the meantime, my father had been appointed to be the medical director of those, the Bikini Atom Bomb Tests, and he pulled strings when I volunteered. He suggested I volunteer and when I did volunteer he pulled strings so that I was appointed to his radiation safety section. At that time, I was a pharmacist, made third in the class, a very elevated position. So I went to a damage control school for a little bit and I learned how to repair a Geiger counter and then I was transferred to the USS Haven, a hospital ship in the Bay of San Francisco where my father was and all the radiation safety people were.
MRS. LARSON: Can I interrupt and ask a question or two?
MR. WARREN: Certainly. That’s my sister, Jane Larson, who is asking this question. 
MRS. LARSON: I would like to ask you to back up just a little bit and explain a little more of your training in the Navy before you went to the hospital and what you did in the hospital, before the war ended. 
MR. WARREN: Well, I went to boot camp at the Great Lakes Training Center.
MRS. LARSON: For how long?
MR. WARREN: I guess it was about three months, and that was where they inducted sailors. We had marching and discipline. We all lived in barracks. We learned a few things like tying knots and things but largely it was to infuse some discipline and to get the recruits use to the idea that they had to take orders. And then we took exams to qualify or not for special schools and at that time, being the son of a doctor, whom I admired I thought I was going to be a doctor. I passed these tests and volunteered for the medical corps thinking I would learn while I was in the Navy. So then they sent me to the medical corps training school in San Diego, California. I went out there for, I can’t remember how long at this time, it was probably four months.
MRS. LARSON: Is that all? 
MR. WARREN: It was a cramped course of memorization of medical terms; a medical foreman is a glorified nurse, probably unglorified nurse. You probably work as an assistant to a doctor. Anyway, I graduated from that and was then assigned to a hospital and I became a hospital attending in California. I had a choice and I picked that because it was right near Hayward where a lot of our relatives lived. I became the assistant to a GU specialist.
MRS. LARSON: A gynecologist?
MR. WARREN: Well, it was a male gynecologist. It was a man who dealt with syphilis and all sorts of diseases like that. So, I didn’t enjoy that too much. Maybe that’s what persuaded me not to go further in medicine. As I related, we finally sailed out of the Golden Gate on the USS Haven. I was very seasick, as I think most people are on their first travel out of the Golden Gate. We arrived in the atoll of Bikini. I was assigned for the first shot to a destroyer that was downwind from the Bikini Atoll. The first shot was in the atmosphere and while we were waiting for the shot, the destroyer laid powerless. It just turned off its engines and just lay in the water, which is very calm and the sailors spent their time shark hunting. What they did was they got ropes with shrapnel on it, put big slices of salami on it and then would catch sharks and partly butcher them and throw them back over and then chum with the blood and agony of the other sharks for other sharks. We got dozens of sharks and I remember sleeping in the destroyer, the beds of the destroyer were five feet long and my feet stuck out into the gangway. Every four hours the watch changed. The guys would charge down the gangway and my feet would hit the perpendicular bracings for the beds. It wasn’t made for tall people. In any event, I also remember that first shot. I remember this kind of vaguely, but there was a signet on the ship who determined that he was going to cause a line to be engraved on his retina, so he could use it in the future to measure experiments with. So he had fitted, you were suppose to look away when the bomb went off, he had made a little tool to put over his eye with a little slit on it. He was going to look at the bomb and get that line engraved. He did that, but I don’t know how successful he was. But that was…
MRS. LARSON: Do you remember his name?
MR. WARREN: No, no, I do not. But that is one of the ridiculous things that happened down there. I also remember after that first shot, it’s amazing what one remembers. I remember I was just 18, but we went back then to the atoll and had a little recreation. And at the atoll, they had of course moved off all the islanders, but they then had recreation for the sailors there, the personnel of the task force. What they did was they put a barbed wire fence down the middle of that atoll. On one side of that barbed wire fence, they had a little building they had built for officers, nurses and Waves. On the other side were the enlisted people and that really irritated me. But what really irritated me was that on the officers side they had a shark net and on our side they didn’t have a shark net. That’s right. That’s what the services were in those days, especially the Navy. It was very castered. The second, I remember a lot, and then the second blast, I was in a sort of like a PT boat. It wasn’t really though. It was a very small craft with a Geiger counter and another guy or two. The second blast was underwater and it was so bad it lifted up a ship up the side of the calm and you could see it from where we were. It was the most astounding sight. I still remember it very vividly with color coming through the water almost like a rainbow from the heat of the bomb itself. Afterwards, then we went in as close as our Geiger counters would permit us because the Navy wanted to save the ships. The ships had been oriented around the bomb at varying distances away from the bomb and some of the ships were sinking. They wanted to save the ships. I know my father had a very great, lot of trouble with Admiral Vandy and some of the other Navy men who resented this colonel telling hardened battle worn, battle people that they couldn’t go on these ships because of some invisible danger that they didn’t really perceive, that they didn’t think was real. That’s all hearsay however because I was not in those meetings obviously. After that second test, I remembered I really enjoyed myself with my little Geiger counter. We went out on the reefs, I remember going out with a Dr. Donaldson, who was a professor of biology at the University of Washington, who became famous later in life for crossing salmon with steelhead. He was quite a guy. There was another man in this group, another biologist, Plumkey, or something like that, who later became rich for selling salmon eggs for fishing. You use to be able to; you could buy little bottles of salmon eggs which you use for trout fishing. Well, he invented the method of doing that, and his name is on a lot of bottles of salmon eggs.
MRS. LARSON: I’ll be darn.
MR. WARREN: So anyways we did that. I can remember finding these giant clams that you could put your foot in and they would close. Then if the tide rises you drowned. It was really an interesting experience.
MRS. LARSON: Did anybody do that? 
MR. WARREN: Well, it’s a ledge, but not on the task force I believe. Another thing I remember from those days was that at night the plankton, apparently in the day, the plankton, which are little minuscule organisms that a lot of the fish, like whales, feed on, during the daytime, they go down to deeper levels. Then at night they come up again. The plankton had become radioactive by the underwater explosion, so when they came up, the radiation level increased significantly in the lagoon and after while they had to move the fleet out, just because of that one phenomenon. I remember then to sort of tie this off. I remember Dad slept all the way back on the boat. He was exhausted. When we got back, we returned at that time to Rochester…
MRS. LARSON: One question. Were you with Dad on the boat? Or were you in…
MR. WARREN: No, I was down with the enlisted and Dad was in officer country. Then just to end it on a nice note, then my dad and mother and myself; Dad and I both got out of the service about the same time, and we went to the Margery River in Nova Scotia and went salmon fishing. I remember that very well. I don’t know where Dodge was. You were still in Oak Ridge, I believe, Jane. 
MRS. LARSON: That’s right. I was. Now, Dodge might have been in school.
MR. WARREN: We had a great time. I remember I had a little trout fishing rod, fly rod and I caught a 35 pound salmon on it and the rod fell apart and I was trying to put the rod on and keep the fish on and it took me an hour and a half and the pole was permanently bent after it, but I caught the fish. It was quite an exciting day. We had a good time. So, Clarence, I think I have run out for right now.
MR. LARSON: Alright. That’s fine. So that’s chapter one.
[Break in video]
MR. WARREN: So here I am back after recharging my batteries. When I came back from Bikini, I of course had a year of college and my family was living in Rochester. So I went to the University of Rochester for about six months. My brother, Roger, Dodge, was going at that time. But then my father was hired by the University of California to start a new medical school in Los Angeles at the University of California, Los Angeles.  So we transferred to UCLA, both my brother and I. I can remember driving out to California from Rochester in a beat up car that belonged to my family and in the middle of the Painted Desert it broke down and my brother and I had to hitchhike and we carried a generator out and my brother is very good at these things. I was always encouraging. Do all the work because he is very hand oriented. But anyway, I remember driving through the Mohave Desert into Los Angeles, no, it was Yuma. It was terribly hot. We had no air conditioning of course. In any event we arrived in time to go to the Rose Bowl. I remember that. Anyway, we went to UCLA. I had a very good time at UCLA. I switched out of pre-med and spent most of the time just engulfing in the humanities which I hadn’t had any of in my schooling. I took an awful lot of philosophy and political theory and things like that. I remember one summer however, I did something adventurous. I took a bus up to Seattle and then went steerage up the Inside Passageway to Alaska where I had a job on a fishing boat, a salmon fishing boat for a canner. We didn’t fish with lines. What we did was we went out on this boat to fish traps. What they did is off the coast of Alaska, this is  the panhandle of Alaska, they chained together a stream of logs and then under the logs was a sunk net, a long net with sinkers on the bottom, so that salmon coming up the coast would follow this net out and then there was what they called a trap which is a big log, floating log contrivance with a series of nets hung from it, that were concentric so that the fish could go in, but they couldn’t find a way out. Then we would go out there and on each one of these traps would be a little log cabin and there would be somebody there tending the trap. But what he was doing was not tending it, but protecting it from fish pirates. What would happen is at night these fish pirates would come up with another boat, shine a search light on this little cabin and maybe fire a shot with a rifle and tell the trap tender to stay in the cabin, and then they would go in and empty out all the fish. Also these poor trap tenders, if there was a very bad storm, they had a row boat, and they had to row to the shore which was rocky and wild and everything else. It was a very dangerous job because if they didn’t want to row in the rough seas and so they waited to the last moment to row and then they had to row in very rough seas to make it to shore. So it was a very dangerous job. In any event, on the fishing boat I was [with] a group of guys with strong backs and weak minds and we went in and scooped out these big King salmon, Coho salmon and Dog salmon, it’s funny I remember those names. We would take them back to the cannery. We worked all summer. Alaska must be, have been then, and probably still is, like the United States was when it was first discovered. It was virgin forest and just bursting with game and wild ducks that were so fat that it took a half a mile to take off from the water. 
Then when I graduated from UCLA I applied for Rhodes scholarship and I won the state of California competition, but in those days at least perhaps to today, they then went on and you had to win a group of nine states. So you were competing with a second group. Well, the other eight states were all the desert states and I thought that since I had won the state of California that I had it knocked and I was all ready to go to England, and I lost. So then I still had GI Bill left, so I applied to the London School of Economics because I wanted to go to England and I got accepted. So I went to the London School of Economics after I graduated from UCLA and I remember going, we went on a boat. I went on a boat from Quebec. This boat had taken immigrants from Italy and it was filthy dirty. There were rats on it, but I had a great time. I remember we landed in Cherbourg and I went on a train, there was an evening train to Paris and we came out of the Paris underground from the railroad station. I had met some other students on the boat, we came out on the Left Bank and the chestnut trees were in bloom and there was a big statue of Balzac by Rodin and the cafés were all ablaze and there was singing. It was a very romantic time. 
MR. LARSON: Fascinating.
MR. WARREN: That summer, I went early in the summer. I spent that summer in France and then went back to England and then enrolled in the London School of Economics. At the London School of Economics, I didn’t work terribly hard. Every chance, I had I toured. I went to Scotland. That Christmas, another guy and myself, a Canadian, no, he’s not a Canadian; he’s an American who’s now a staff member in the Congress. He and I, we were so cold. In England, it was in 1950, it was after the other war. There was no central heating. The flat I had, you had an electric element and you had to put a sixpence in it to get the electricity to burn for a while. I can remember sitting and studying in my little room in somebody else’s flat with this element between my legs, a blanket around my legs and then smelling my hair burning. We had rations; I had meat once a week. We were pretty squirrely. So he and I went south looking for the sun. We got to southern France, it was still cold. We got to Spain, it was still cold. We got to Gibraltar. We crossed over to Spanish Morocco, and it was still cold. We had to give up at that time. We got to Seta, the capital of Spanish Morocco, we saw a belly dance and then we turned around and came back up. 
Then that summer in 1951, I was president of the London School of Economics graduate students and there was a, so I got to know everybody there. There was a girl whose name was Irene Tinker, who is quit wealthy apparently, and she had written her, she wanted to write her thesis and get a degree on the Indian representative institutions for India. So she wanted to go to India and she decided why waste a wonderful experience by going by boat. So she bought a car and she decided she was going to drive to India. She then looked around for people to go with her. She got an Englishman named Alan Bay to go and then she got me to go. Alan put some money in and I convinced her that I was a great mechanic. (Laughter) And because of my pharmacist made background, I was also a medical man. (Laughter) Now, Irene was quite a liberated gal and quite persuasive and one of the real problems with this trip was the intervening countries, many of them were totalitarian and hard to get into, but she found that several princes of these country were attending Oxford. She went up there; she got visas to every place. So anyway, we took off in our English Ford, Ford Anglia, and went…
MRS. LARSON: In the summer?
MR. WARREN: In the summer of ’51. We crossed the English Channel on a boat and then we crossed the Bosporus from Istanbul to Turkey in a boat. Every other mile was by land. We had a very wonderful time and I can’t believe why my family let me do it because it was sort of dangerous. We were the first people to do this we went by, from, there are several dangerous parts from Baghdad, no, from Amman, to Baghdad, from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad we went by compass for a little bit and then we followed a pipeline across the desert. There was no road.
MRS. LARSON: No road at all?
MR. WARREN: It was a desert, there probably was a track from some car passing along the pipeline. We followed the pipeline so we didn’t get lost. The problem with that Ford Anglia was it had leaf springs and I was always, after we first broke the leaf springs, I had to go to the native quarters in each city and find a blacksmith to make me new leaf springs. So after the first set leaf springs the iron was absolutely terrible and the leaf springs would break. So then I was scared I would break the axle. I remember one time in Afghanistan, waking up in the backseat and Alan was driving and he hit a chuck hole and Irene hit him in the eye and gave him a black eye. (Laughter) So our attention was so bad. (Laughter) We carried jerry cans on our sides, on the fenders and on the top of water and gasoline. I have of course a lot of pictures of this trip, and in Kabul, Afghanistan, I was offered 100 gold Napoleons for Irene. By that time, I was prepared to sell. (Laughter) But we didn’t sell her. We had a very interesting time on that trip. 
MRS. LARSON: Now weren’t you at the Khyber Pass and didn’t somebody want you to smuggle arms?
MR. WARREN: No, but in Kabul, which is before the Khyber Pass, the Khyber Pass is from Kabul, which is the capital of Afghanistan over into Pakistan. I mean you go into old British India over there. We went through the Khyber. When we’re in Kabul, there is a big tribe of Afghanis called the Pakhans, Pashtuns, I guess there pronounced both ways. Anyways, this big tribe that is really on both sides of the border and a lot of these refugees must be of that tribe because they go over to their cousins and uncles on the other side to Pakistan. But these people have been narrowed down as the one to have their own nation, Pashtunistan, it was called, and at that time the Afghans were supporting them because they were trying to break up Pakistan, they were trying to, so when we were there, there was a big Pashtunistan Day or something. We had, every man there had a homemade rifle and they had big dances and celebrations. There was a king in those days, the king of Afghanistan and we were also, I’ll tell you another very interesting story. We went through Iran and in the eastern part of Iran which boarders Afghanistan there is a city called Masshad and it is only about 60 miles also from the Russian border. There was an American consulate there and a radio station obviously spying on Russia. But when we drove in to Masshad the, we had stayed at a caravanserai one day out, a caravanserai is where you have a sort of a mud fort. You drive in, park the car, and you sleep on top of the roof on rugs. They give you tea and some sort of food and Irene had met an Iranian newspaper lady there who turned out to be the Communist Party magazine editor and her husband. I guess the editor was the husband. In those days, there had been, I’ve forgotten the name of the man, a very radical prime minister in those days had kicked out the Shah. And we were having a lot of trouble with him later on. Roosevelt and the CIA overthrew this guy and the Shah came back. In any event, America was in a very delicate situation in Iran and Iran was on the verge of, they were trying to be very independent and they were fighting with us. In any event, we came into Masshad…
MR. LARSON: To interrupt there, the prime minister was Musaddiq.
MR. WARREN: Musaddiq. Thank you, Clarence.
MR. LARSON: Those were very critical times.
MR. WARREN: Those were very critical times, that’s right.
MRS. LARSON: So you were in some danger, or could have been.
MR. WARREN: Not just in, but we became sort of in danger. What happened was we went to the consulate and the consulate’s wife was delighted to see us. We were the only westerners that had been to that city in months. They arranged for a dinner party that night and all the westerners in town, there was a banker and a few others. We were going to stay there that night, and so on. Alan was sick, he wasn’t too healthy. I took the car and an interpreter that the consulate gave me, went down to get some new leaf springs, so is my usual job. (Laughter) When I came back, I found that Irene was gone. Everybody knew including the Iranian servants knew where she had gone. She had met this lady newspaper editor and they had put on these big abaya, a sort of black tent like thing they had to wear and they had gone into the big Shiite shrine there, which is like a big Muslim holy church. Irene of course was an infidel and the consul was scared to death. If they had found her, she would have been stoned to death. So, I went down there with the interpreter and we went in, no, I stayed outside, the interpreter went in, but he couldn’t get to the women. The women were in a different story. I guess he could talk to them, but he couldn’t just go around saying, “Are you there, Irene?” so we went back and went back to the consulate and then the dinner party arrived. Irene arrived finally two hours later, the coldest social atmosphere I have ever seen. 
MRS. LARSON: Boy.
MR. WARREN: Then we went over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan and I took a train from New Delhi to Bombay, and then a ship back through the Red Sea and the canal, the Mediterranean to England. Let’s see, what else did we do then?
MRS. LARSON: Well, we visited you and we took a trip.
MR. WARREN: That’s right. At the end of my second year there, Jane and my mother came over and I joined them and we visited, toured England. Mother had a thing about Roman ruins. She had to see every ruin. She reminds me a lot of Roger. Roger loves castles. Every old castle, he had to see. Mother wanted to see Roman ruins. So we looked at a lot of Roman ruins in England and then we went to the continent. Jane remembers, I didn’t, Jane and I wanted to go to Vienna, which was then in Russia’s hands and Mother was scared to death. My name was very similar to my father, and my father was privy to very classified information in the nuclear weapons program. So she was afraid I would be kidnapped or something. I don’t remember that. I’m sure it’s true. 
MRS. LARSON: That was correct.
MR. WARREN: So, she didn’t go.
MRS. LARSON: That’s right. She stayed in…
MR. WARREN: Brussels.
MRS. LARSON: Ensborough.
MR. WARREN: Ensborough. I’m surprised, well, I guess she thought she couldn’t tell me I couldn’t go. Anyways, Jane and I went and sure enough as soon as we got crossed into the Russian zone, the Russian soldiers took me off…
MRS. LARSON: The train.
MR. WARREN: …off the train. It turned out that my passport had not been properly stamped. Jane foolishly, but very loyally came with me.
MRS. LARSON: I had to throw my suitcase out the window. Do you remember that?
MR. WARREN: Yeah, I remember that. 
MRS. LARSON: And then I rushed out before the train could start up.
MR. WARREN: I’d heard stories about the Russian rape and all that. Jane was scared for me and I was scared for her and here we sat in this little cubicle with this Russian soldier. It was a sergeant and a Tommy gun. I was showing him a Time Magazine with a picture of Eisenhower on it and trying to get a conversation going. 
MRS. LARSON: He pointed to Eisenhower and he said, “No good general.” (Laughter) Real mad. There was a picture, a photograph of Berea on the wall with roses. Do you remember with little violet roses underneath it?
MR. WARREN: Was that before Berea was killed?
MRS. LARSON: Yeah. I suppose we were in a little bit of danger. But it actually…
MR. WARREN: Actually we weren’t but, we could have been. That’s right. So, after all of that we returned to the United States.  And I…
MRS. LARSON: You didn’t say that we, I’m sorry, should I interrupt and say…
MR. WARREN: Go ahead, yeah.
MRS. LARSON: Do you remember then? They put us on a train going back to Ensborough and you were so defiant that you got your passport properly stamped and we got right back on the train much to Mother’s distress. Then we went to Vienna the next day because we had that wonderful evening in the café, do you remember where that Viennese lady serenaded you? She was a singer and wanted so badly to come to the United States and become an opera singer, opera star. She had of course no hope. Vienna was badly damaged in the war and they were all war-weary people, but they serenaded us and gave us flowers in the café that night.
MR. WARREN: Yeah. I remember the music. Yes it was lovely. Can we stop now, Clarence? I’ve run out again.
MR. LARSON: Alright. Very good.

[End of Interview]