Carol, Walt

              ORAL HISTORY OF WALT CAROL
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
July 9, 2002

 













 
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Walt let’s get started. Let’s talk about first how and why you came to Oak Ridge a little bit. 
Mr. Carol: Well, my father came out here with a company from Kansas City, Missouri and he was in on the building. He worked for a company called Roane & Anderson that was named after the local two counties because some of the local people really didn’t like these outsiders moving into the hills is what I was told, and so that’s why it was named that and he was involved in the construction of the plants and – 
Mr. Kolb: Which plant? Or do you know? 
Mr. Carol: I can’t remember. And then we stayed on through the end with a company called Management Services Incorporated and at that time it was headed by Lyle Whorl and he worked for them until he retired which was in the early ’70’s. 
Mr. Kolb: What age were you when your family, when you came here? 
Mr. Carol: I was about the third grade.
Mr. Kolb: Nine years old? Something like that?
Mr. Carol: Yeah. I went to Pine Valley Elementary School. I lived on Pleasant Road in a “B” house, which was a nice house really in those days. It wasn��t like the trailers or the real spartan – 
Mr. Kolb: It was a real house.
Mr. Carol: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: How many other children in the family?
Mr. Carol: Just myself. 
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember any of your teachers’ names off hand? 
Mr. Carol: I can remember the second school I went to, which was Cedar Hill. I can remember a teacher named Mrs. Webster, but that’s the only teacher that I – when we moved up to Orchard Circle in another “B” house and when I went up there, I changed to the Cedar Hill. 
Mr. Kolb: We’ve got to ask, what year did you come in, your family come here? Approximately. 
Mr. Carol: Approximately very late in 1942. My mother had been issued badge number thirteen, and I can remember there was one market in Oak Ridge and she went down to do her shopping and she was issued a ticket for buying meat and her number was number nine hundred, so you bought whatever else you needed there and then you’d just come back when you thought nine hundred was coming up so you might get ��� 
Mr. Kolb: You had to wait for your number to come up, in other words? 
Mr. Carol: Right, you drew numbers like you do in a lot of stores today to be waited on, because by the time you get to nine hundred, you might be eating bologna that night, so a lot of people went out and went to local farms and we’d buy eggs –
Mr. Kolb: Produce? 
Mr. Carol: Yes, and buy meat from the local farmers, and so I remember going outside of Oak Ridge to farms near Oliver Springs and in Clinton and those areas. If you happened to be very friendly with the local people, you kind of kept it a secret because you didn’t want everybody else out there competing. 
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? 
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah and –
Mr. Kolb: Your own personal supplier. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: You said this store you bought from, was that a new store that was put up or one that was already here? 
Mr. Carol: Oh that was a new store; it was a store that was built for Oak Ridge. 
Mr. Kolb: Where was that located? 
Mr. Carol: I couldn’t tell you. I just remember riding around in the car with my mother. 
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t on Jackson Square or –
Mr. Carol: Yeah, I think it was. It was what was the Downtown, Elm Grove it could have been. 
Mr. Kolb: So you saw this town grow from nothing almost. 
Mr. Carol: Yes. 
Mr. Kolb: You saw all the trees going down and streets being put in, and initially you lived in a house? What did you live in, initially? 
Mr. Carol: It was a “B” house. 
Mr. Kolb: They had built a “B” house already that early? 
Mr. Carol: Yes, but the streets weren’t all paved and there was no gutter or –
Mr. Kolb: Were the boardwalks in? 
Mr. Carol: Boardwalks downtown all over. 
Mr. Kolb: But by your house? 
Mr. Carol: Some places they did, and some places you just walked alongside the road. But I remember when it rained hard that these gutters along –  they were just made with a bulldozer, just scooped out. And of course they would wash out, and I remember the red clay and the mud and –
Mr. Kolb: That’s the topic of conversation of most early [Oak Ridgers], how you dealt with the mud.
Mr. Carol: Yeah, and I do remember prefabs; there were prefabs scattered among the other houses, and I remember they tested one to see how fast they could put it together. You know, they come in two sections, three sections, and four sections. They just set them on a wood platform that was built, and they timed it from the time they started till the time they finished; it was three minutes. See you just grab two halves, shove them together, caulk it down, put the weather stripping on, and you had a house. 
Mr. Kolb: These came off a back of a truck? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah they just lifted them up with a crane. They just built a platform; they didn’t skirt it or anything. It was just there. 
Mr. Kolb: Now these were prefab houses, these are not cemestos? 
Mr. Carol: Well, they called them flattops, but we called them prefabs too. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, we call them flattops today. 
Mr. Carol: A lot of them are up on the lake now for summer homes, you know. 
Mr. Kolb: There’s a lot here still on Outer Drive. 
Mr. Carol: The only problem, the roof was flat. 
Mr. Kolb: They put a little pitch roof on them now. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Okay, flattops, that’s interesting. I never heard that. Three minutes? 
Mr. Carol: Yes, they just wanted to make a special case to time it, and they had everything ready, but still, they could put fifteen of them together in a day. 
Mr. Kolb: It took longer to move from one site to the next one than to actually put the house together. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, they went out and put all the base, the wood frame that they set it on, and so it was fast. 
Mr. Kolb: And your family came from where? 
Mr. Carol: Our home was Carthage, Missouri, but we came from Kansas City because my Dad was with construction then. He was actually in a marble company called Carthage Marble. They used it in banks, but when WWII broke out, the prices of marble, I mean, marble business just disappeared. 
Mr. Kolb: So he heard about this big project here? 
Mr. Carol: Right, he had contacts in Kansas City, and one of the companies was Long’s Construction Company and they were part of the – the labor company was Stone & Webster, but see, they changed that name so that the locals – there was some animosity about these outsiders moving in this hill country, and frankly a lot of them just didn’t like it. Of course, when I was here, they had MPs on the gate when I first got here, and then they changed over to guard services to release the MPs for military.
Mr. Kolb: But what about your neighbors and the people that you immediately came in contact with, where did they come from? 
Mr. Carol: All over. There were scientists that worked actually on the bomb and people really didn’t know what they were making. One of the jokes was they made blackout pants for lightening bugs. 
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? I never heard that one. There’s a lot of stories but I never heard that one. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, but no one really guessed. We had a neighbor that did know, but he never disclosed it. It was a very well kept secret. 
Mr. Kolb: Did the secrecy affect your lifestyle? Or how did it affect your lifestyle? 
Mr. Carol: Well the only way it affects your lifestyle was going in and out of the gate, ’cause there was a fence all the way around it, you know, patrolled with dogs. But I used to play out around next to the fences and out in the woods and ��  
Mr. Kolb: You really didn’t see the fence until you went way out? 
Mr. Carol: Yes. 
Mr. Kolb: So normally you weren’t really aware of it. 
Mr. Carol: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever hear anyone talk about their work? I mean, people over here discussing their work at all? Of course, you were a child, but your father, did he ever discuss his work, what he was doing? 
Mr. Carol: No, you know, I knew he was construction, so it didn’t matter whether he was working on the plant or on the streets or whatever that happened to be. But I had neighbors that were involved with Union Carbide and most of those people didn’t disclose anything. I mean, in those days people were very patriotic, and everybody knew there was a war going on, and the people were very involved in it and supported it and, you know, it was scrap drives and that type of –
Mr. Kolb: Victory gardens. 
Mr. Carol: Yes. 
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that’s interesting. But you did mention that, you said there was some animosity. Now how did you feel after, when you went to Clinton or did you, when you had contact with the locals outside –
Mr. Carol: Well, it was like, the first thing you did was put Tennessee license – see, you didn’t have to license your car inside of Oak Ridge, and so the smart thing to do was to go buy and put Tennessee license on. 
Mr. Kolb: So like your Missouri plate was not there anymore. 
Mr. Carol: That’s right. 
Mr. Kolb: So you look like a native. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: As far as your car. How about your accent? Did people detect? 
Mr. Carol: Oh they could detect that. Missouri’s not quite as different but there [were] a lot of people from New York and you can spot them, you know, right away and –  
Mr. Kolb: But some people had some –  
Mr. Carol: Yeah, and another thing that I noticed in those days, very few women smoked and the people down here being, I don’t know, so lot of them were very religious and they didn’t believe in having a drink or smokes or – and I can remember a lady with my mother going out to buy eggs, and she threw her cigarette out. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, she was smoking? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, because she was going to go in the house and she didn’t want the lady that was selling the eggs to notice that, and she watched and then listened and she figured out that this lady was chewing tobacco. And I remember that when she went back, the lady that was with my mother, her name was Mrs. Taylor, she streamed out her cigarette and lit it because cigarettes were hard to find; you know, it was during the war. 
Mr. Kolb: But they were available to some degree, rations. 
Mr. Carol: Rations everything: gas was rationed, meat was rationed. You know, you had to have everything, so –
Mr. Kolb: We’ve been told that children were sent down to get into the cigarette lines, and then when they got up close to the counter the person behind the counter would know a certain person and would call these persons’ parents to come down to take their place in line so that when they got up there, their parent was there; the child couldn’t get the cigarette. 
Mr. Carol: Sure. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever get involved in that? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, but my mother never smoked and I was never –  
Mr. Kolb: Did your father smoke? 
Mr. Carol: Well, he did, but I never, they didn’t do that. I never had that problem. 
Mr. Kolb: But you did have rationing lines for everything, you know, meat especially.
Mr. Carol: That was probably one of the main problems was buying food. I mean, we weren’t starving but, you know, things like meat and sugar and those type of things were difficult. 
Mr. Kolb: But I guess your father had enough income to buy what you needed.
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: You got by, you weren’t hurting as far as –  
Mr. Carol: Yeah, he was very well paid, and actually I think we paid thirty-six dollars a month for rent which was –  
Mr. Kolb: Very low. 
Mr. Carol: Compared to the wages. 
Mr. Kolb: And that included your fuel –
Mr. Carol: Yes, coal. 
Mr. Kolb: Electricity and utilities; just water, electricity, and coal. 
Mr. Carol: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: For heat, no air-conditioning of course.
Mr. Carol: Oh, no.
Mr. Kolb: People talk about how sooty the coal fired furnaces, stoves were. Did you have that experience in your house too? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, you can get a back flow, you know, where it will blow the soot out, and it was constant cleaning and could look something like a Pennsylvania town I guess. But those things people didn’t worry about so much. I mean, it was part of the war, it was – and some of them came from a lot worse conditions, I mean this was really a step up. 
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, including the local, especially the local –
Mr. Carol: Certainly. 
Mr. Kolb: They were out farms, and the loss of property, they were making good money when they worked here. They got a job here. And a lot of women were working that normally hadn’t worked before either.
Mr. Carol: That’s right. 
Mr. Kolb: Upper class, so they were in better, I guess. Did you ride the buses much as a child? 
Mr. Carol: I rode the bus all the time. You see, you go down to the movies and then ride the – of course, I walked a lot to school, I could ride a bicycle to school, but sometimes it’s just easier ’cause I’d cut through. I’d never follow the street, you know, you knew all the shortcuts. 
Mr. Kolb: There were boardwalks and connected streets, but the buses were there and you could –
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did your parents ever use it? Did your father have – he had a car but did he ride it to work or did he take the bus to work, or how? 
Mr. Carol: He usually drove his car or they carpooled, so they’d leave the car home for my mother if she wanted to go shopping, but I was one hundred percent on the bus. And if the bus was running late or something, I’d just take off, take short cuts. 
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t that far for you was it? 
Mr. Carol: No, and it was safe, you know. 
Mr. Kolb: You were a single, only child, so did you have buddies, friends on the same street that you’d pal around with, I mean, that you’d walk or did you go by yourself?
Mr. Carol: Oh, I walked with the other kids, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Lot of kids around. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. In fact my neighbor on Pleasant, I just saw him at our fiftieth anniversary, and his family also moved to Norris. 
Mr. Kolb: What’s his name? 
Mr. Carol: His name is Charlie Wells. 
Mr. Kolb: Wells. Where does he live now? 
Mr. Carol: He lives in Norris. 
Mr. Kolb: So he would be an early Oak Ridger too? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, he was one year younger. He graduated in ’53 but we had – all the classes were there, but, just, we were the host because this was our fiftieth anniversary. 
Mr. Kolb: Well back to Oak Ridge, did you or your family – this is a dry area, no liquor, and so how did that affect you or your family? Did it affect you at all or did you know what was going on in terms of –
Mr. Carol: Well, there were bootleggers all over. My father and my mother drank and –
Mr. Kolb: They used the bootleggers? 
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah. Now there were dry counties and wet counties so you could –
Mr. Kolb: Oakdale was wet, I understand. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: But you had bootleggers –
Mr. Carol: Anderson County was dry, Knox County was dry –  
Mr. Kolb: I think Oakdale was the closest. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. Or out of state. 
Mr. Kolb: Well yeah but bootleggers were where? Just outside around Clinton or –
Mr. Carol: Our taxi driver –
Mr. Kolb: You’d just meet them at the gate or what? 
Mr. Carol: Well they were inside. 
Mr. Kolb: They came inside?
Mr. Carol: Well you could call a taxi. 
Mr. Kolb: Okay so there were taxies in Oak Ridge? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that. Okay, wasn't aware of that. And they were serving bootleggers too? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Just call them up and they bring it to your door. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: I just never thought about that. 
Mr. Carol: I didn’t know exactly where it came from, but I know that when my parents would go out and then, you know, to somebody’s house and they’d have cocktails, but they all seemed to know where to go, and people would go some place and buy, you know, a couple of cases and come back and give them to other people, sell them, yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Had a bulk order kind –
Mr. Carol: Middlesboro, Kentucky, that’s a close one too. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah. Talk about coming through Kingsport. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, Virginia, of course, was always wet by state. I think state owned store. 
Mr. Kolb: Now, your mother, did she work or not? 
Mr. Carol: She never worked. 
Mr. Kolb: Housewife? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Of course, you were going to school. Did you get involved in any other activities as a child? I mean other than Boy Scout or any –  
Mr. Carol: Yeah, I was a boy scout. I can’t even think of the troop number, but when I left Oak Ridge I was a Life Scout, and then I became an Eagle the first year I was in Norris, and then I just more or less dropped –
Mr. Kolb: Was that a church sponsored troop, or do you remember? 
Mr. Carol: I can’t remember who sponsored it, but I know we went to Camp Pellissippi. 
Mr. Kolb: Still there? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. Yeah I was up by there. I know that area very well ’cause I worked at the Norris Boat Dock in ’49, ’50, ’51 worked for Troy Dice up there. 
Mr. Kolb: As a teenager? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, and I drove the speed boat, you know, that takes people up. I think it was seventy-five cents an adult and twenty-five cents per children; carried about six or eight people. 
Mr. Kolb: Pretty good job, I guess. 
Mr. Carol: Oh, it was fun. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, did your parents go to some church? 
Mr. Carol: Well, there weren’t all the denominations. There was a community church, and that’s what we went to all the time when we were here. 
Mr. Kolb: And you had to rotate through the different denominations, had different denomination services? 
Mr. Carol: Well, basically the one we went to, it was one person and, you know, it was Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist. Now, of course, the Catholics had a priest, and he would handle that, and I guess the Jewish people, but –  
Mr. Kolb: But Chapel on the Hill was there real early? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, but we went in a school auditorium. 
Mr. Kolb: Oh okay, which school was that? 
Mr. Carol: I was thinking it was downtown someplace. 
Mr. Kolb: When you say ‘downtown,’ you mean Jackson Square? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah someplace –
Mr. Kolb: Well that would have been Elm Grove was the closest school, wasn’t it, to Jackson Square? It’s down the street, just down Tennessee Avenue there and theaters were used for church services, as I understand, sometimes, movie theaters.
Mr. Carol: Yeah, right. 
Mr. Kolb: And there’s one in Jackson Square, of course, Grove Center and several others. Did you have recreation to that, your family, or did you –
Mr. Carol: Oh, my dad loved to hunt and fish, and so we were always up – we’d go over on the lakes and fish. 
Mr. Kolb: You and your dad or –
Mr. Carol: And he had buddies that they’d take you fishing. 
Mr. Kolb: Plenty of good fishing around here. 
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah, excellent. It was in those days; I don’t know how it is now. 
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s more lakes now; there were rivers. Yeah it’s still good. Melton Lake is good fishing, Norris is good. And so he’s the sportsman kind of person? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Any other – the tennis court dances were big time but maybe that was more single people –
Mr. Carol: Yeah, my mother and dad went to dances, but it was like with the company dances and –
Mr. Kolb: Indoor type? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. Of course, I didn’t go. 
Mr. Kolb: Bill Pollock who had some radio system that went to all the outdoor sites, the tennis courts, is still alive in Oak Ridge. In fact he still has a little business, PA business; it sets up for providing sound systems in Oak Ridge. He’s in his eighties, too, of course, but still – not doing well, but he’s still around. He started way back then, I understand. So what do [you] remember from the kind of general activity, the pace of things? It was totally different then, of course. You were a child, so you couldn’t compare with anything, but did it seem like it was just going real fast and there was a lot of people just working night and day? 
Mr. Carol: I think the biggest thing I noticed was these people were from all over the world. And so most of them came from their hometown where they knew everybody, you know, where their family lived, their grandmother, their great grandmother and all that, where here you didn’t know anybody till you met your next door neighbor. And then, of course, wherever the men or women worked, then they met people, and that’s the way that they socialized. 
Mr. Kolb: Same way with you in school; you’re getting new kids all the time, right?
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: And schools are growing like crazy, right? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause the population coming in all the time. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, what one kid knew about hunting and fishing, you know, they were completely lost. See, they grow up in the city. I noticed that in the Boy Scouts. A lot of city kids, they just didn’t comprehend being out in the woods, and I knew a lot of the things in the Boy Scouts before I was in the Boy Scouts. 
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s right; that’s sort of your family background. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. Small town. 
Mr. Kolb: You were better prepared in some respects. 
Mr. Carol: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: They call it ‘culture shock.’ Some people say that women – one good friend of my sister said her mother cried for three months straight when she came here from New York. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, I missed my grandmother and my family, all my grandmothers, and of course my mother did also, but they adapted, they met people who were good friends forever and –
Mr. Kolb: You bonded real fast too because you had all this common problem to deal with. 
Mr. Carol: It’s pretty easy for the kids except their Christmas or Thanksgiving or that time of the year ’cause you –  
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever go back to Missouri and visit your grandparents or whatever during the war, or did they come here? 
Mr. Carol: My dad was never off but we – I had gone back with my mother on the train, and the trains were full of servicemen and they were all very polite. You know, I was small enough, they’d make me a seat on their duffle bag, and I could ride – you know, they’d give you chewing gum. So we really only needed one seat cause I’d sit in there, but not very often. We didn’t go back very often. 
Mr. Kolb: But you did occasionally, and then what did people think about you or your family, your mother, when you got back to those areas where – what did they ask you about? I mean, did they –
Mr. Carol: You know, people were going everywhere. The men that weren’t in the service usually, unless they were in the city where they had a war plant they left, you know, they didn’t – my home was Carthage, Missouri, while a lot of those people went to Kansas City to work on the bomber planes. Everybody was moving around, you know, they didn’t –
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t that unusual. 
Mr. Carol: No. 
Mr. Kolb: But you were from a ‘secret city,’ and then you said, “Oak Ridge.” How did they react? 
Mr. Carol: Well, they’d ask what they made here and nobody knew. 
Mr. Kolb: You just said it was a secret. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, I mean we had no idea –
Mr. Kolb: That was unique, the fact that you couldn’t tell them, but other than that –
Mr. Carol: Oh, there were pools and things, I can remember, to guess what they were making.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, in the offices, you know. 
Mr. Kolb: Put money down? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: I never heard about that, but I could understand it. Did anybody win anything when it was finally announced? 
Mr. Carol: Well, some people did, I guess, but I remember overhearing them talk about what they were making, and we had a couple of neighbors that I’m sure knew but they didn’t disclose anything. And actually, I don’t think people really pried it, you know. I guess there are people that wanted to know real bad, but for most people it’s just another part of the war. 
Mr. Kolb: We’ve been told that the Army, I guess, had spies in the plant, so that they were there to pick up on anybody that was talking, and if they talked, they were gone, just like that. So if people were aware that they could lose their job, in other words, if they did talk out of turn, that was probably an atmosphere you know –
Mr. Carol: Well, that’s probably what kept the conversations down. 
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t get a second chance.
Mr. Carol: That’s right. 
Mr. Kolb: You remember reading the newspapers in the, you know, whatever was published? There was first the Oak Ridge Journal, I think came out first before the Oak Ridger was started. It was kind of a silly newspaper as I understand it.
Mr. Carol: Well they had them mimeographed, a newsletter that went around, the old mimeograph with the ink, and you’d run it by hand. I just remember seeing those things, but a lot of people took the Knoxville Sentinel too. 
Mr. Kolb: Yeah to get outside news. 
Mr. Carol: Or the Clinton Courier, I think. Oliver Springs, I think, had a newspaper. 
Mr. Kolb: Did it talk much about Oak Ridge or not? 
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah, I mean, their business went up, anything they sold, you know, everything was in short supply, furniture. Of course, they didn’t make any –
Mr. Kolb: There were so many people here at one time that weren’t here before that the demand was huge.
Mr. Carol: That's right. Well, the merchants appreciated it, and the local citizens, you know, we overloaded their supplies on it too so –
Mr. Kolb: There was a Copeland family that ran a store down around Robertsville. David Copeland is still alive; he’s the son of – his father was in business, I forget his name. So there was Copeland-something-business. I think it had a gas station on Robertsville Road towards the west end near Robertsville School. Do you remember anything about that? 
Mr. Carol: No. Well, if he had a gas station – there were very few, so, you know, gas was rationed. That’s one reason people didn’t travel back home on a car, because getting the gas to get there. 
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you talked about the war effort being important and how y’all kind of pitched in with what you could do collecting aluminum foil and with your gardens and buying war bonds that sort of thing. Everyone sort of cooperated in that. A lot of emphasis on that. 
Mr. Carol: Well you had a little book, and you had to buy the stamps, nickel, dime stamps you’d buy some of and then glue them in, and then when I got to $18.75, I think it was, you got a twenty-five dollar bond and –
Mr. Kolb: I forgot about that. I did that as a kid, what little money we had. Put a little bit in that. Did you have any contact with Afro-Americans, the black people, the black community at all? 
Mr. Carol: Well, you know, there weren't many around. 
Mr. Kolb: Not many, yeah. 
Mr. Carol: They had the jobs that they had, you know, a lot of janitorial jobs and that type of job. 
Mr. Kolb: They weren’t living where you lived, didn’t go to school where you went to school. 
Mr. Carol: No, segregated schools. Well, see until, what, 1948, the restrooms were black and white; water fountains were the same way. They had that out at the dam, at Norris Dam. There was colored and white and two drinking fountains, two different restrooms, everything. 
Mr. Kolb: Right, just traditional, just like it was everywhere else. But you didn’t have much contact with the blacks. Did you see them when you were out in town somewhat and that’s about it? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: And they had the low paying jobs, janitorial. Did they work on construction, like with your father? Did he work with any blacks? 
Mr. Carol: No, I don’t remember him –
Mr. Kolb: – talking about it? 
Mr. Carol: I think the only ones that were here were the ones that were here before they started Oak Ridge and this area. You know, there just weren’t many blacks because the farms weren’t that big. The people farmed their own land. 
Mr. Kolb: But there were a few, right? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, mostly in Knoxville. But, you know, there might be small districts in Clinton. But it was just way separated. 
Mr. Kolb: I guess you got news of the war activity over the radio a lot. 
Mr. Carol: Oh, yeah, mostly the radio. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any families that had sons in the war that you knew about?
Mr. Carol: Well, I had my dad, had brothers. 
Mr. Kolb: Younger brothers? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, he’s the oldest of six boys, and of course they had friends that were in the military. Now, the war was pretty important. I mean, everybody was very conscious of it. It isn’t like the wars we have today where people don’t even know that the war is going on, which is probably one of the problems that we have today. They just think it's something out there; life doesn’t change. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever go to movies where you saw news, saw things on the movie?
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah. That’s where you got that, you know, the movies had news and a short subject and a cartoon, but that’s really the news is what you really watched closely in the movies. 
Mr. Kolb: They called it ‘Movie Tone,’ or something like that. And they were the company that did that. Well, you were here, of course, when the bombs were dropped on Japan and the announcement was made that Oak Ridge was critical to the atomic bomb development. Do you remember what, how did that –
Mr. Carol: It was a huge celebration. 
Mr. Kolb: What were you doing and how did you hear about it? Were you in school that day, or how did you hear about it? 
Mr. Carol: Well, I can’t remember whether I was in school or not, but I remember all over town they were partying and people in the streets and –
Mr. Kolb: Big party. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Big celebration. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Everything kind of stopped to celebrate. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, it was, and I think the people were justly so – they were proud that they had – that they ended the war, basically. 
Mr. Kolb: That didn’t happen for another week or so before they actually surrendered, after the first bomb was dropped and the second one two days later, I guess, so the war didn’t actually end till a couple days later, but then when it happened that fast, then people realized what was going on. 
Mr. Carol: ’Cause most everybody had somebody who was in the war, in the military someplace and they wanted them back home alive, so it was pretty important. 
Mr. Kolb: Even after Germany surrendered, we had to focus on Japan. 
Mr. Carol: Well, they were getting ready to ship all the soldiers out of Europe to invade Japan. 
Mr. Kolb: Right, by the millions. 
Mr. Carol: And no matter what people say, they saved a lot of lives. If they hadn’t developed the bomb –
Mr. Kolb: Right. You think so? 
Mr. Carol: Yes, because they wouldn’t surrender, and that had been the way they had fought on all those islands in the Pacific. They would not –
Mr. Kolb: They'd probably arm their children and women and everything. It was a mass, almost like mass suicide, because, yeah, it was terrible. So it was a big party for a while? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: When the news was out and then right after the war, I understand there was a big drop in the population, kind of, because the construction was pretty much over. 
Mr. Carol: Then it was maintenance, and then some people wanted to go back to where they were originally, and that happened all over the United States. People were building bombers or tanks or whatever, and unless they – you know, there’s nothing in Oak Ridge they were building in Oak Ridge except the atomic bomb, and so they didn’t need any more new buildings. 
Mr. Kolb: Right. So your family stayed here until when, in Oak Ridge? When did you move to Norris? 
Mr. Carol: It was 1949. When they sold –
Mr. Kolb: That was when the gates opened? 
Mr. Carol: That homes were built in Norris, were brick homes, and they were a lot like indirect heating. They had breaker systems, where, you know, here, fused systems. Norris was considered a model town when they built it and the homes were much better construction and just a better house. And, of course, my dad liked to fish, and you’re five miles from the lake where he fished. It was only about 13 miles.
Mr. Kolb: So did he still work in Oak Ridge and live in Norris? 
Mr. Carol: Yes. 
Mr. Kolb: He commuted then. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, a lot of people did. Quite a number of people.
Mr. Kolb: Moved to Norris. 
Mr. Carol: Moved to Norris. 
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I didn’t know that. 
Mr. Carol: Oh, there’s a lot of Oak Ridgers that moved over there. I don’t know, have you been in Norris? 
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah –  
Mr. Carol: It’s a beautiful city. I mean, it’s not a city. 
Mr. Kolb: Town. 
Mr. Carol: Fifteen thousand people, but it wasn’t that big when we were there; it was about nine hundred. 
Mr. Kolb: I wasn’t aware that people did that, but I guess that’s true. 
Mr. Carol: Oh, people moved to Clinton, built houses. These houses were okay, but they, you know –  
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t know how long the town was going to be here. 
Mr. Carol: That’s true. 
Mr. Kolb: No plan after the war; you didn’t know how it was going to settle out.
Mr. Carol: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: For several years, the government kind of took over. So then you just resettled there, and you went to school in Norris? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, my last three years of high school. 
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you had gone through Junior High, you said, Jefferson Junior High.
Mr. Carol: I did. One of the teachers I knew, Nick Orlando, he was a coach. 
Mr. Kolb: At Jefferson Junior High? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, and he was a tough guy. 
Mr. Kolb: Yep, he had a reputation. 
Mr. Carol: He had a paddle. 
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, he wouldn’t be able to do it today but –
Mr. Carol: Oh, no. 
Mr. Kolb: But he did then. 
Mr. Carol: And it didn’t hurt me a bit. He didn’t hurt anybody. 
Mr. Kolb: Did you play for him? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Did he just coach football or did he coach other sports? 
Mr. Carol: Well he was the head of the athletic department. I think he taught health or some other course; they couldn’t just be coaches. But he was just a little short guy. He was stout and his word was law. 
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t argue with him. 
Mr. Carol: That’s right. Not long, anyway. Well, we had a trip; it was my eighth or ninth grade, we went to Washington D.C. out at Jefferson. 
Mr. Kolb: The whole class, you mean? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, the class that I was in, and, you know, they bused us up there and we stayed about three or four nights and visited all of the sights, the White House, the Smithsonian. 
Mr. Kolb: A big thrill. 
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah, for the eighth grade, and then my senior class did the same thing, so I know Washington pretty well. 
Mr. Kolb: You probably made a good guide during the senior class one: “I’ve been there; I can tell you about that.” That’s great. When in ’49 did you move? Before or after the gates were open? I think that’s the year the gates were open. 
Mr. Carol: The gates opened, yeah, they were open –  
Mr. Kolb: Had you moved before then already or not? 
Mr. Carol: No, they were open. 
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember how there was a vote taken whether the citizens wanted the gates to be open and how that turned out? Do you remember anything about that? 
Mr. Carol: I don’t remember that because I know that they reduced the guards. They wanted them open because they couldn’t afford to maintain. They kind of pulled back. They kept the plants. They had guards on the plant, but it’s a lot of manpower to cover the whole area, so I guess the government decided that they – I can’t remember having any say in it or anybody having any control over opening the gate.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: You’ve given us a lot of good information here today and you told us about your life in schools and moving to Norris after the war in ’49. Could you kind of summarize what you think about most [about] when you came to Oak Ridge and what you remember about your experiences, how Oak Ridge was different from anything you’ve experienced since? ’Cause you’ve lived in other places after you left Oak Ridge. What do you remember most about Oak Ridge that was unique? If you want to put it that way. 
Mr. Carol: Well, as I mentioned earlier, it was kind of a melting pot full of people from all over the world and I hadn’t experienced that. I'd, mostly in the Midwest, and Midwest is the Midwest whether you’re in Ohio, Missouri, or Kansas, and so a lot of different people and a lot of different ideas, but –
Mr. Kolb: Different cultures. 
Mr. Carol: Cultures, right, but that’s about the only thing. 
Mr. Kolb: That’s a big thing. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, and it had a lot of influence on me later in life. I –
Mr. Kolb: Did it open your mind up, too? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, and, you know, you have to get along with different people. 
Mr. Kolb: You see different things happening, you’re not so amazed ’cause it’s –
Mr. Carol: Well, that’s why the local people, you know, resented the people coming in to Oak Ridge. I think they thought everybody here was rich. 
Mr. Kolb: Was that right? 
Mr. Carol: And –  
Mr. Kolb: A little bit of jealousy, you mean? 
Mr. Carol: I think, sure. 
Mr. Kolb: Cause they were making more money than –
Mr. Carol: I think there were about three hundred people living in this entire area. It was my understanding that during the peak times, there were eighty-five thousand people living here in dorms and in halls. 
Mr. Kolb: Trailers. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah, so if you drop eighty-five thousand people from all over the world in the middle of a little hillbilly town in Tennessee, you get a lot of reaction. The merchants loved us and the locals hated us ’cause we took away from their supply as well as –
Mr. Kolb: So it was probably an economic impact, but you think it was a little bit of a cultural impact too? The people were different, you know, strange –
Mr. Carol: Culture was a big thing. And of course this is a big school and you competed with other schools and –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah. Oh, I see. 
Mr. Carol: When I moved to Norris and we played Oak Ridge, you know, it was twice the size. My high school class in Norris, there were thirty-three people, you know, and they’re in the hundreds over here. And I think everybody was taking shots at their high school team. You know, Clinton, they print T-shirts when they beat Oak Ridge. 
Mr. Kolb: Doesn’t happen very often but it has, and they don’t forget it. They had to stop playing them for a while there because there was such a bad rivalry. It got mean, so they just didn’t play for about five years. Now they’ve started again, just football. But they��ve always played basketball. There’s a big rivalry with Clinton, you know, pretty good athletics. So there was a lot of unusual fallout from all this activity. And when it was all over, the fact that the bomb project was successful gave people a sense of pride, do you think? 
Mr. Carol: I’m sure of that. Everybody was pleased, you know, anybody that did anything for the war effort. I think that was universal, whether you’d build airplanes or –
Mr. Kolb: But the fact that you didn’t know what was going on –
Mr. Carol: That’s true. 
Mr. Kolb: And then all of a sudden you knew. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Boom, you know. It was such a novel, a new weapon, totally unheard of, right. The world was never the same, they say, after the first atomic bomb. 
Mr. Carol: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s great. If there’s anything else you think of just speak up, but that’s pretty much what we wanted to get from you. 
Mr. Carol: I think that covers everything that I can. 
Mr. Kolb: Now, you’re living where? 
Mr. Carol: La Conner, Washington. 
Mr. Kolb: And you went out there, why? 
Mr. Carol: I'm retired. I was transferred to the West Coast in 1959 in Los Angeles. I was with a company called Diebold Inc. Right now, the biggest product line is our ATMs, but it’s a bank manufacturing company that’s about two hundred years old, vault doors and pneumatic drive-up systems, night depository, burglar alarms, on and on. 
Mr. Kolb: So you were in L.A.; then you went to Washington when you retired?
Mr. Carol: Well, I went to work for Diebold in Canton, Ohio, and I worked on the East Coast and I worked around, traveled a lot and then I was transferred for a large job for a California bank. The banks out there were large in ’59, you know, seven to eight hundred branches, and so I went out there and worked three and a half years, and then I was transferred to Washington and my boss up there at that time was sixty-eight years old and I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, so I knew I’d take over eventually, and I enjoy Washington state. I enjoy boating and fishing. 
Mr. Kolb: Great recreation. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah it’s –
Mr. Kolb: Almost as good as Tennessee. 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. The town I live in is the tulip capital. We have a Tulip Festival, a lot of Dutchmen around there, large farms. 
Mr. Kolb: I may come up to see you when I get to Washington State. 
Mr. Carol: Sure. 
Mr. Kolb: We’re going to go there. 
Mr. Carol: I got one brochure left I’ll be sure to give you. It’s in the car. That’s our major product, is tourism. 
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? 
Mr. Carol: That’s right. 
Mr. Kolb: That��s important in Oak Ridge too. 
Mr. Carol: We’re right on the Swinomish Channel that connects Northern Puget Sound with Southern Puget Sound, and across the Channel is the Swinomish Indian Reservation. They’re fisherman and harvesters of clams and oysters, and currently, just recently, the casino business. So we have everything, and we can drive fifty miles east –
Mr. Kolb: And get to the big cities. 
Mr. Carol: And with forty foot snow packs up there. 
Mr. Kolb: Up in the mountains? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: For skiing and go south, you can get to the big city if you want to. 
Mr. Carol: Two hours north, Monday, July 1st, I was in Victoria, B.C. for Canada Day. I can go up there in my boat. I went up there in my boat and stayed for four days and came back on the 2nd and came out here on the 4th. 
Mr. Kolb: So you’re a big boater? 
Mr. Carol: Yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: So what you’ve learned here in Tennessee stuck with you. 
Mr. Carol: From Norris Dam, working up there. 
Mr. Kolb: Well that’s great Walt, very interesting. Well you’ve had a good life, sounds like. 
Mr. Carol: Oh yeah. 
Mr. Kolb: Good background. 
Mr. Carol: Right. 
Mr. Kolb: Well we thank you for your memories and we’ll be glad to include them in our collection. Thank you. 
Mr. Carol: Thank you.
[end of recording]