Philippone, Richard

              
ORAL HISTORY OF RICHARD (DICK) PHILIPPONE
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
September 3, 2013

 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is September 3, 2013. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of Richard L. Philippone, 323 Louisiana Avenue, Oak Ridge, Tennessee – to take his oral history. May I call you Dick? 
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Please state your full name, place of birth, and date.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	My full name is Richard Louis Philippone. My date of birth was Jan. 11, 1925.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Your father’s name, please.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	It was Samuel J. Philippone, and he was born in 1898 in Palermo, Sicily.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Your mother’s name and place of birth.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	It was Mildred Sophie Philippone, and her place of birth was in Denver, Colorado.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall your father’s father’s name?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes, his father’s name was Louis Philippone.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where was he born?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, it was Palermo, Italy [inaudible] born in Stockholm, Sweden.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall how your parents met each other?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes, my dad was in World War I, and he developed – he was then in the Navy, and he developed tuberculosis. The only cure for tuberculosis was for the servicemen – they sent them to Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado, because it had clean mountain air, and they kept them – they wrap them up and kept them on a porch at the hospital so they could breathe the air there. He wound up with an arrested case. Then when he got the feeling better, he went to a dance and met my mother at the dance. My mother worked as – they called her a bindery queen there. She worked for a printing company. They bound these things, and so he met her there. That’s how they met.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall how, he was born in Italy – how he arrived in the United States?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, he arrived when he was only three months old, and he was really mad because he says, “Now I will never be president.” We always told him, “There are plenty of other reasons why he will not be president.”
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Why did his parents come to United States?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Because of the better opportunities. They were farmers, and they were told that there were better opportunities.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What type of schooling did your father have?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	He finally wound up – he graduated from the University of Denver as an accountant.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let’s go back to, you mentioned about they had your father wrapped up. What do you mean by wrapped up?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I mean they put on jackets and stuff like that because you know Denver can get cold in the wintertime there. In the summertime, it was okay. They made sure that he didn’t get pneumonia or something like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How about your mother’s school history?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	My grandmother died when she was fairly young there. My mother finished the eighth grade, but she had a brother and sister. She had to take care of them because her dad was still alive. She only finished the eighth grade there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	In Denver, Colorado?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	In Denver, Colorado.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall her telling you about how times were in Denver, Colorado?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	They were fairly tough there at that time. My dad or my grandfather – she said that they were fairly wealthy in Sweden, but he rejected that. She said they even had a pipe organ in their house, and that was kind of unheard of. He rejected that and said he wanted adventure, so he came here and started working in building the railroads from Denver west to take the ore, the gold out of the mountains there. We lived with my grandfather for several years, and he would always tell me stories about premature explosions with that dynamite black powder going off and that sort of stuff. I really got a good history lesson of how it was done there. Then some of the Swedish friends there they would say that although he was just a wiry young man there, they said he took down some pretty big people there because he was a very smart boxer. He would just knock them out.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did they become U.S. citizens?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, they became U.S. citizens very shortly after they moved there. They came into New York through Ellis Island, and then he got a job as landscape gardener at some of the biggest estates out there in Long Island. They stayed there for a while there. There was a lot of discrimination against the Italians at that time. In fact, there would be signs in the windows that said, “Italians need not apply.” He said, “Maybe we could do better if we go out to Rochester, New York.” So they moved up to Rochester, but they ran into the same there. My dad didn’t put up with that. He joined the Navy, so he got away from that. I had an aunt – two aunts and an uncle who – they were kind of light skin. They changed their name to Phillips, so than they could get a job. As I say, a lot of people don’t understand.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was that timeframe?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	This was and probably – it would have to be in the 1920’s maybe. It was after the war, but it was in the 1920’s.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How did your family end up in Colorado?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	It was just my dad that moved to Colorado. The rest of them stayed in Rochester and Buffalo and that whole area there. There were a lot of Philippones up there because there were seven kids in that family there. To show you how times changed there, he had one of his – one of my cousins wound up as district attorney for Rochester for Monroe County, and another one was a carpenter. They came from different branches. They were both named James. And this fellow who is a carpenter kept getting these things – “Could you help me? Can’t you help me get Bill out here? You can do something, can’t you? You’re the DA?” It was stuff like that. So he changed his number.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That’s quite a different contrast from “don’t apply here” to being the district attorney.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	That’s right. Like I said, things changed pretty remarkably.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Am I right in saying that your father was the one that works in the railroad?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	No, my grandfather – my Swedish grandfather worked on the railroads.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When you grew up, did you grow up in the Denver area?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes, we grew up in the Denver area.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was school like from what you remember attending school?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	The Denver schools were rather unique because the first thing there, it was on a semester basis. That you could attend – once you get past 6 years old, you could attend – you’re going to first grade. What happened was you went in there, and you would have completed all your coursework in January of the year you graduated or would be graduating there. The usual thing was – what would you do? I was interested in engineering, so I would take some advanced math courses in the mornings, and then in the afternoon I would go out and work. That got interrupted because World War II broke out. They said, “You can’t do that. You can get drafted right away. We’re not going to get put up that way.” The Colorado School of Mines was the only college that was on a semester basis. All the rest were on quarters. They started – their semester would start toward the end of January, and they said that they were – we went up to Colorado School of Mines, and they said they had a bunch of people that had flunked out the first semester, and they were going to offer these courses again. We can register for those. I said okay. In those days, Colorado residents could register for $35 a year – a semester rather. I registered on one day, came home. Then I got this card that said, “Greetings from the government. You have been selected. You are 1A.” I went up to the dean and said, “Give me my money back. I’m out of here.” He said, “Wait a minute. I’m going to put in some deferments to the draft board. I’ll just throw in your name with them. If you get it, okay. Otherwise, I’ll give you your $35 back.” I said okay. They kind of gave a blanket deferment, and then mines went on an accelerated schedule there. They compressed everything, and so I started the college there. Then about April, I got a letter that said, “We have made a terrific mistake. Just rest assured that at the end of the six months, you will be the first to be called.” I knew that the draft board – they didn’t call them up until the middle of the month. If you could get a letter from one of the services saying that you could go to trade school or something like that, one of the service schools, then you can give that letter; and then you could probably get in there because all those would be gone. So I volunteered to be drafted with a West Denver group that was about the third of the month there. They took the letter and said, “Okay, you can go in the Coast Guard.” Of course that was – it was one of those things that – the Coast Guard is under the Navy. I went to Signalmen’s School in New London, Conn. That was known there. Most people welcome servicemen, but New London had signs on the lawn that said “Dogs and sailors keep off the lawn.” That meant that we rendered just below a dog. Then they said that every three weeks we could leave the area. That had the most, you might say, strict policy there because shore patrol were all over that area there. They make you show your papers. They boarded every bus that left there, every train, even hitchhikers. They would pick you up and ask where your papers were. When you did have time, you could go down to New York or New York City. There was a train I took down to New York City. The other place you can go was Hartford, Connecticut. You’d say, “Why would you pick Hartford there?” One of the reasons you pick Hartford was they had all those big insurance offices up there. They had no bases – no Army bases or anything near there. The Knights of Columbus used the hall. I don’t know if they sponsored it or not. They had a dance on Saturday nights. It was very difficult there because the women outnumbered the guys about four to one. They kept cutting in on you. You could dance with a girl for some time, and pretty soon another woman would cut in and keep cutting in on you. Then on Sundays in those days they had a state theater there. The state theater would have a movie and then a dance band up there. You were going to the theater, and there were never two seats together. There was always a girl, a seat, a girl, a seat, a girl, a seat. It was really a big deal for a service man to be that overwhelmed there. A lot of times we would just go to Hartford. If you went down to New York, New York had a system there were either things were free or you just paid full price. If we went down to New York City, they have that Stage Door Canteen there and stuff like that. You could go there, and the food was good there and stuff like that. They would give out tickets to Broadway plays and that sort of thing man – besides just seeing the sights around New York there. We would do that. What we would do is, the train coming back there – the last train you could take left Grand Central Station at 12:30 a.m. It would get into New London about 3:30 or 3:45. There was a limited number of buses – the sub-base and the Coast Guard train station were on the other side. If you got on that bus, you got back to the base at 4 o’clock. The bugle would sound at 6, so you had two hours of sleep. What we would do at Signalmen’s School there is the guys that had liberty – they would call for blinker drill, where they would shut off the lights. The people that were there – they could answer the lights, and they would just go to sleep during that period of time. Then at night, the lights were out at 9 or 10 o’clock. We would unscrew all the light bulbs, so we could go to sleep early.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What year was that?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	This was in 1943.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let me back you up just a minute. You had sisters and brothers?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What were their names? 
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I had one sister, and her name was Mildred Gloria, but she went by Gloria.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When you were growing up, how was your home life? What do you do for hobbies?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	We lived in North Denver with my grandfather, and Gloria was seven years younger than I was there. I can remember there if something happened, I would get blamed for it and stuff like that. My dad said, “We don’t want an argument.” I sure as heck wanted an argument because she was saying that I did something that I didn’t do. We got along pretty well there and stuff like that. My dad was a very strict disciplinarian. The Italian way is that you do it like I said. I remember times when he would try to do something, and he said, “Just don’t stand there with your teeth in your mouth. Get over here and help me.” That was tough love, but he would do that. The other thing is in our household there – my dad was never physically attacking my mother, but mentally he did. He would restrict how much money she could have. She used to confide in me and tell me – she said, “If I just had two cents I could give to the church or do what I want to, I would appreciate that.” But they still enjoyed – it was funny. That’s where we first got our love of music. My dad of course was Italian, and my mother was Swedish. They both enjoyed symphony music and opera. I would remember they would tell the story that there was an opera playing at that Denver Civic Auditorium. They wanted to see that opera, and they said, “We’ll take Dick and sit in the very last row of the balcony. If he acts up, we’ll just take him out.” We went to the opera, and they said not only did I not act up there, but I seemed to enjoy it. I was looking around all the time. I wasn’t making any noise or anything like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How old were you then?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I was three months – six months old, pardon me – six months old.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you consider your family poor during those times?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, even though my dad was an accountant. What happened of course was when I was born, he got laid off. When my sister was born, he got laid off. That was seven years – that was 1932 when that happened. He came home from the hospital. Of course, and those times they kept the women in the hospitals for two weeks. He said, “Well, Dick, I know it’s your birthday, but I don’t have any money to buy you anything. I sure as heck can’t bake a cake, so you got a baby sister for your birthday.” As I say, we grew up there. Of course – there was a lot of toughness there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What did you do for fun?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	We played a lot of ball. We only lived a half block from the schoolyards there. We would choose up sides and start playing ball in the street there. Our parents would be up there, and they would get real mad. Those cars parked on the street, you know – they would chase us and say, “Go up to the school grounds and play.” We had some very good girls that were really good baseball players – tomboys. They were really good ballplayers and stuff like that. They were always the first ones chosen for these teams. We would go out there and play there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall how you chose for teams?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, this side would have – they had two sides, and one side would pick a team or a player, and the other players would do that, and then we would play ball up there and stuff like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	It seemed like you always had someone that was in charge.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, that’s right. As I say, we had fun doing that. Then of course in those days Denver had streetcars that ran all over town and stuff like that. In those days, if you got 10 cents you could go see a movie on Saturdays. They were mostly cowboy movies – serial-type stuff. We would walk up to the Federal Theater, which was about 12 blocks. Right next to the Federal Theater, if you had another nickel, you could buy a hamburger. For 15 cents, that was a fun day and stuff like that. The other thing is that they had two big amusement parks – Elitches Gardens and Lakeside. Elitches Gardens – you could go out there and the rides were 5 cents. There was no admission fee to the things or stuff like that. The Denver Post was the leading newspaper there. There were two papers – The Denver Post in the Rocky Mountains News. Well, The Denver Post – it was a classic example of yellow journalism. What they do is they take all the credit and get somebody else to pay for things. It was that The Denver Post picnic out there, but somebody else had paid for it. At Elitches – and then they would have special rates and stuff like that. There was a whole book called “Timber Line” that gives the history of The Denver Post there and the yellow journalism and stuff like that. The post was printed on Champa Street there, and when they had the big fights in those days – they broadcast the radio there, and people would stand outside the paper to listen to the broadcast. I guess some people didn’t even have radios in those days. You could watch the presses roll, coming up the print presses stuff like that. That was kind of fascinating.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What kinds of dress did boys and girls wear in those days?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	There were some in knickers which were terrible as far as I was concerned, but then they had kind of work pants and stuff like that. Corduroys were a big thing there – long pants were a big thing. Corduroys with a more dress-up stuff. They had blue jeans, I guess, too – a little bit different types. A lot of people had big overalls, too. Workers would have that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When you were in high school, did you date?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me what a typical date was like in those days.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	In those days you could either go to the movies, or else the amusement parks had big ballrooms. That was a better date to go there. They would have all the big name bands out there. Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey – everybody would play there. They would play there for a couple of weeks, so that was what you would do there. Then of course you had all the high school sports and stuff like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When you heard about Pearl Harbor, where were you?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I was studying for finals or some examinations at home, and I happened to look up there. I saw a car coming down there with a kid holding up a newspaper. I turned on the radio, and my parents – I thought my sister was with them. She wasn’t with them, as she was with me. I’m almost positive she was not. They had gone to the Denver Theater. They had several big movie houses down there. They had organs om them and stuff like that. They stopped the movie when Pearl Harbor was announced because we had a lot of servicemen. We had Lori Field and Buckley Field and stuff like that. They just stopped the movie and said, “All servicemen report immediately to the bases there.” They ran out there, and she said that they stopped the movie and the soldiers went. Of course at that time they had these streetcars that went out to as close as they come to Lori Field there. This line was East Colfax, and at rush hours would run every three minutes. Other times it would be every five minutes that there would be a street car coming down there. They got all those people out there. And when they came back home, we were kept listening to the news and stuff like that. I finally got a paper, we had the radio on all that. I think the most discouraging thing was when I woke up the next morning, that would be a school day – Monday. We had lost at Bataan, and then [inaudible]. I really felt that the United States was in danger over there it doing with that. Of course at the same time they were losing on the mainland, too, China there – the Chinese there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How old were you at that time?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	That would be 1941, so I would be about 16 or 17 and stuff like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you think about joining the military at that time?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	No, not at that time, I guess. But then – high school – in the Tramway, the students could ride the streetcars for five cents. The only way we could ride a streetcar was just one for three blocks, and so we would just walk all the way. One day we were horsing around and stuff like that, and some old lady came out and said, “You boys – you have your fun now because you’re just going to be [inaudible].” That group of five or six of them – three or four of them died in the war. I guess she was right on that. It wasn’t until later that you felt you had to go there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	With your father coming from Italy as the war progressed, and Italy got to be an ally with Germany – what were his feelings about that?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Actually when Mussolini took over there, he was not happy at all. At that time Walter Winchell would come on Sunday nights there. He would just scare the begeezus out of them.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let’s go back to when you were in the Signal Corps, and continue to tell me about how long you were there and where you got deployed to.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Actually as far as the service is concerned, when I first joined they sent me to boot camp in Oakland, California. We were there for – boot camp lasted about four months or something like that. I went in October, just before Christmas I guess it was – they sent us to New London, Connecticut. I spent Christmas on the train, and we stopped in Denver. My parents came down there and the gal that – one of our neighbors. I had gone out with her a few times. She came down there. We went on to New London there. I was up in New London, Connecticut, going to Signal School there. After Signal School, we came back to San Francisco, and the Navy had what they call receiving stations there. You’re not assigned anything. They’re just waiting for ships to be built. It got so that they were behind it in building the ships, and they had all these sailors there. They took a bunch of us, and they deployed us up to – they said, “We are running out of room. Go up to Point Reyes, California.” There’s a beach patrol station there. We just sat around up there, and the people up there got mad and said, “You guys just sit around, and we have to do all the work. You can ride the beaches.” This is horse patrol and stuff like that. These damn horses were barely broken in. That was not too pretty.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	After there, where did you go?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	When we came back to San Francisco, I was at the receiving station. One day we get a call and they said, “Hey, you’re a signal man. The signal man on the lightship outside of San Francisco Bay has got appendicitis, you go out there.” I said, “Is that a permanent assignment?” He said, “Hell no, that’s a choice assignment. It’s just until he can recover there for 10 days out, and then you’ll get reassigned.” We go out there, and of course the first day out there the Sacramento River comes in there. It’s just swell, swell. I’m useless. I’m seasick to beat hell and stuff like that. I got my sea legs back and stuff like that. I came back in and said, “Those damn 83 footers, I don’t want any more of those damn things.” I heard some guys looking at me and said, “The Coast Guard is going to man some real large troop transports they’re building.” So I go back to the receiving station and told the guy, “I understand is a Coast Guard is going to man these big transports. I would like to be assigned to that” because it was 620 feet long. He said, “You’ve had sea duty, so okay – I’ll assign you.” I had 10 days of sea duty, but that was okay. He assigned me to that. They were building the ship. It was the USS Admiral E.W. Weberly, AP123. It was christened by the governor’s wife, and the governor at that time became the Supreme Court justice in the United States there. She had a hard time breaking the bottle, but she finally broke the bottle and stuff like that. We commission the ship there. In the meantime, they said, “You have to help design how you want these boxes.” They had flag signals and the semaphores and searchlights and stuff like that on there. We were out of downtown office. It was Christmas time. We got a knock on the door as we’re working in there. This real good looking gal comes, and she says, “Would you guys like to join our Christmas party?” I had never heard of a Christmas party, but Christmas parties were really funny– a lot of alcohol and stuff like that. That was my first taste of office Christmas parties there. A lot of those things really grew to really bad things. When I worked at AEC in Grand Junction, I said, “You have a Christmas party?” They said, “No.” I said, “How come?” They said, “Santa Claus got way too frisky.”
MR. HUNNICUTT:	After you were on this particular ship, where did you go from there?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	From there they had shakedown cruise, and we went down to Long Beach. We would run the shakedown off of Catalina Island. Our crew was – we had about 530 sailors on there, and then we had about 35 marines, too. We had 620 sailors and 35 marines. The marines – the battle stations where the 5-inch guns, the ship had 45-inch guns, and then they had twenty 40 mm guns, and then they had forty 20 mm guns. Their station was that. Then they would have these planes towing this target there. We did a message back, and the marines that fired that gun – they said “That was in front of the plane. Exercise over.” They never lived it back down. After we completed the shakedown, then we went back up to San Francisco to be assigned to troops there. We were up at a dock, and we started unloading the troops. We said – one of the other things we did, too, is we had these long binoculars – the spyglasses up there on the things like that. We started doing that. A lot of times you could scan the apartments that were up there, and you could see women out there and stuff like that. We started selling looks to other crew members to take a look up there. It was about 5:30 at night, and they said – they untied the ship, and this will sit in the harbor and said, “We will to stay out here.” We didn’t stop. When the Golden Gate Bridge falls behind you, and that the Farallon Islands were out there – they start falling behind you, you know you’re not going to spend the night in the states here. Then this guy comes up there, and he says, “All you pollywogs – your hour of doom is coming.” In order to become a shellback and join [inaudible] and become a shellback, meaning you had crossed the equator there, you have to go through this. So he said, “There’s a big exercise we go through there that you’ll have to pass in order to become a shellback.” We knew we were not going there, and so we were headed for New Guinea. They had about 4,000 troops aboard there. We were trying to catch them up to where their unit was there, so we went down to – the thing was that they had this big tank there. Then they had the Royal Barbers there, and then they would give you haircuts. They had half-moons where you lose all your hair and stuff like that or all the fancy designs and stuff like that. They would do that to the enlisted men and stuff like that. Every once in a while, they take some of these army officers it just throw them in there, too.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How long were you in that particular service?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I was in the service from 1943 to 1946.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	After you got out of the service, what did you do?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Actually, some of the things that we went from there – it turned out that these troops were not [inaudible] there. They said, “We are going to have a beach party down here, but that’s just below the equator.” It was just like taking a hot bath. There was no refreshing thing there. The big problem with the ship was that our quarters were right above the laundry, so our floor was always hot. They had designed a system there where the ventilation would come down there about this the floor. We decided that you got very little ventilation from that, so we unscrewed that stuff into that thing out of the way there so we could stand under that and get some ventilation there. But my bunk was right above the floor there, so I’m always sweating every night there because it’s that hot there because the water temperature is high up there. They said, “We are going to go up to Manas Islands,” which is a big holding area for the Navy is there where a lot of ships and stuff would be in there. “We are going to join a 50-ship convoy.” We were out there on a Sunday afternoon, and we had a dance band who had played on the West Coast. They inducted all those people on there, and then they put the whole band on there to entertain the troops while we were traveling there. Jimmy Greer was the director. He was very friendly, particularly with me because he had played Elitches and stuff like that, and he said, “That was really a choice assignment because you’re there for two weeks, and you get off. You can go to the mountains. We really enjoyed playing in Denver there.” He’s up there talking with us, and then a Navy plane came. He started buzzing the ship there. He flew on back, and they went back and he picked up another mechanic there. It turns out this pilot was drunk, so he came in low. We saw him, and we said, “I don’t think he can get out there.” Every one of us was standing by the rail there – I went behind a 40 mm gun. This band director there just stood there, and when the plane hit the ship, all he did was just turn his head. It was like he was frozen there. Unfortunately it had one of these compartments there, and one of the sailors was killed besides the three people on there. We had this big hole in the ship, and we were supposed leave the next morning. They got while there is up there, and they welded up the side of the ship and stuff like that. We want with the 50-ship convoy, and we had three destroyer escorts that have gone through there. Then you had to go to the Philippines, and then you had to go through the Straights of Mindanao there. There are still all kinds of Japanese up there. We’re going through there. As I say, we could have been fired on. You could go any faster than the slowest ship, and the slowest ship could only make 6 knots per hour. You’re just sitting ducks out there, but we did get through. We did get through. We got into Manila harbor. They just released the Tacloban prisoner war camp there, and there were about 1,400 people – American civilians there. MacArthur said, “You are the biggest ship in the harbor. Take these people back to the states.” They came aboard, the people who cooperated with the Japanese were all fat and sassy. Those who didn’t for him was basket cases there. They had to put them on special diets so they wouldn’t eat too much to start with and stuff like that. We got out in the deepest part of the ocean there – Marianna Trench there. It’s 7,000 feet deep or something like that, and one of these girls died. We had no refrigeration where we could keep the body. She had a burial at sea, and that was the lousiest funeral I’ve ever been to.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	After you got out of the Navy, tell me about your work experience.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	A little bit more there – we went into – when we went into Long Beach there, of course all the fire hoses were doing that because all these people were coming back and stuff like that. The captain is expecting that we would dock there. The first two people up the runway or the gangplank were two naval officers that put our captain under arrest. Everybody was wondering why, and they said, “For illegal transfer of government property.” What he had done was when we would go to these islands there, he didn’t like to wait for transportation to go to the islands there. We could’ve had a landing barge to take him to shore, but that he would have to wait first. He talked to some colonel over there, and he traded a landing barge for a Jeep. We would always load this Jeep up, and then he could go do what he wanted to do on the island. That’s what did him in there. They relieved them of his command and stuff like that. We got another skipper aboard. His name was Capt. Coward, but he was no coward. He was full-speed-ahead guy. Then we left. After we got the troops off – I mean the refugees off – we went to the Panama Canal. For some unknown reason there you couldn’t take Pacific ammunition into the Atlantic war zone. We thought we would get liberty in Panama, but instead of that we were unloading ammunition and loading ammunition. We would pass these big boxes of ammunition. We had a black fellow there, and he was really strong. He would be the last one there. He would take these boxes of ammunition. We were having a hard time moving them ourselves because they were 50 or 60 pounds. He just lifted them over his head and set them up there. We finished that after midnight, and then the captain felt sorry for us. He said, “Maybe I will let you guys, have the crew go ashore in Panama there.” He let us go ashore there. The men at all these bars there found out that it was liberty and a bunch of sailors coming in there, they all opened up there. We just got roaring drunk. This one place had really good fried chicken and stuff like that. We would just order a chicken, but we would still be drinking and stuff like that. We finally got back to the ship, and we just had one hell of a time going to getting the ship away so we could get underway there. He let more of the crew go and stuff like that. We finally got there, and then we went over and started taking troops. We started bringing troops back to the states there. Then the last trip we made from there we went to – we were on our way to the South Pacific for the invasion of Japan, and went back to the Panama Canal. We were off the island of Hawaii. We were west of Hawaii, and the radio man called me and said, “Dick, they dropped some damn bomb, and one bomb blew that whole damn city.” It progressed there, and then they dropped the second bomb. It’s one of those things that sticks in your mind there – when they dropped the second bomb, the Japanese were going to surrender. Then Russia declared war on Japan. I can still hear the boos from all these troops aboard there because they just wanted to get the spoils. They hadn’t fought a damn thing with the Japanese. They were their allies. So we got into – we went on to Manila there, and of course that was devastated. Then we started bringing troops back from these things. Then finally, they had this point system where to get out of the Navy – I had my points and stuff like that. I thought I was going to get discharged. Instead of that, they put me on another ship there. I wrote my dad and said, “I won’t be coming home after all.” He thought about it and said, “Hell with that noise.” He sent a telegram to the senator there who was head of the Armed Forces committee. He said – the senator sent the thing back there, “Do not assign Dick Philippone to the ship there.” Then the executive officer – I had been out of stuff like that. Everybody said, “Political influence, political influence.” He said, “I’m going to see what all this is about.” He came back and he said, “No, you won’t be assigned to this other ship.” Then I found out that the reason why and stuff like that, so I did get discharged in May of 1946.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I see from your bio here that you went to work for the US Bureau of Mines. Tell me a little bit about what you did there.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	The first job I had – when I graduated from college there, we were going through Depression. We took a senior trip to the Midwest there to see all these big steel plants and stuff like that. You could bet half of them were closed. We came back there, and it was very difficult to get a job – particularly in metallurgy. They were just laying off and closing plants and stuff like that. I finally – we got married, and then I started looking for a job. I went down to the employment office there. They said, “We have a job for a cement inspector for the city and county of Denver.” I went down there, and I kind of talked – it was organization and personnel in those days. I talked to him, and I went up to the engineering department. He said, “Oh, hell. You haven’t even got a course there, but you’ve got a damn good course in surveying there. We have a job as an instrument man on a survey crew.” I worked on that job for about six months, and that I had signed up for a civil service job – just an engineering job. They called me and said they had a topographical engineering jobs. Civil service, you’re supposed to interview the top three candidates. I go out to the USGS office there in the Denver Federal Center, which is Remington Ram’s plant, and asked him – he said, “What’ve you been doing since you graduated from college?” I said, “I’ve been surveying for the City of Denver.” He says, “You want this job?” I said, “Yes,” because it paid $256, and that other one paid $196. I said, “Heck yes, I want the job.” He said that – he just call the secretary and told her, “Tell those other two candidates that the job has been filled.”
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That $256 – was that a month?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	A month, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	And then after that, I noticed you went to work for the AEC, Atomic Energy Commission.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	First, I went over to the Bureau of Mines in Salt Lake City, and then in Salt Lake City, I was a metallurgy engineer. The big thing they were working on – they were working on two things. They were working on manganese – they needed manganese. We did work on an experimental basis there. Then I had a pilot plant down at Boulder City, Nevada. Then they send you down there to run that pilot plants, but they send you down for three months. You couldn’t take your wife or kids or anything like that. It was a single things there. You would be doubted Boulder City there for three months. The problem was that you would get your salary and a small per diem that barely covered your food down there. Then you would be down there for three months. Then you would come back in and work here for a while, and then they would send you back down there. My wife is got the kid up there and stuff like that. I said, “This is nuts.” I talked to the Atomic Energy Commission in Grand Junction, and they sent me a resume. They said that they would make a decision later and stuff like that. So I said, “Forget about that.” I saw that again. I filled it out, and then they called me back and said, “We have a job over here.” Of course at that time, the Bureau of Mines at Salt Lake City – mainly there were three people that were non-Mormons there. The opportunity for advancement in the Bureau of Mines was very limited. Some of those guys had been at the beginning level for years. If they got up to the second level, they were there almost permanently. He figured that these people wanted to stay in science, so they’re not going to move anyplace. Then Kennecott Copper opened a big research thing. One of the leading persons they had there – he went over to Kennecott. The guy who originally got me when I first moved there and told me about the jobs over there, I wanted to get back into metallurgy, so that’s the reason I went there. He went with Mattel. So when this came up there – a stable organization was losing three people there. So they did everything in their power to not let me transfer, telling me what a terrible boss this guy was and stuff like that and how bad that would be and stuff like that. I still ignored all that and went over to Grand Junction there with the Atomic Energy Commission. It was a funny thing when we first moved over to Salt Lake City. It was January, and Ralph and his wife invited me over for dinner. He said, “Let’s see about an apartment.” He goes through and he says, “Ladies only, ladies only, ladies only.” His wife says, “What do you mean ladies only? That’s LDS only – Latter-Day Saints only.” I finally found an apartment that was an upstairs apartment on the north side of town there. The guy had furnished the apartment with all railroad salvage things. All the appliances were new, but the [inaudible] had a big dent in the side there, and he put that up against the wall. Other things were of similar quality. They were good things, but everything had problems with it and stuff like that. We had that upstairs apartment there, and then downstairs was really a deal there. This job was not take much, so I had to have a bus pass to get to work and stuff like that. We were so poor that we couldn’t both use the bus pass. I would go downtown, and that she would go downtown.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let me stop you a minute and ask you – where did you meet your wife?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I met my wife when I was back in college. A lot of my good friends there said – we weren’t interested in the young college gals in those days. We were much older than them at that time. He called me and said, “Dick, I went down to the YWCA, and they have a business girls meeting down there. They have meetings, and have a dinner, and then they have a dance afterward. There are a lot of good looking women down there. Come down there.” I ignored that for two or three minutes. He said, “You should really come, Dick.” So I go down there, and they had a circle dance. The gal I was supposed to dance with was not very good looking at all. Lois was standing next to her, and she was really good looking. So I just cut in front of this guy. I never did that before. I cut in front of this guy and asked her to dance, and she did. And then I asked to take her home.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was her name?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Lois.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was her maiden name?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Lois Reed. She was originally from Casper, Wyoming. Then she had gone to college – it’s now in Northern Colorado University. It used to be Colorado State Education College.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	We were talking about your marriage. Tell me about the date and where you got married.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	We dated for a year. What happened was we would go to dances and stuff like that, and then when it came skiing season I had taken up skiing and stuff like that. The next thing I knew Lois decided that she would want to do skiing, too. So she had taken lessons. She had to work on Saturday mornings, and so on Sunday they had a ski train that went up to Winter Park, Colorado, through the Moffat tunnel. Our date for that weekend was we would go up to take a ski trip up there. We did that several times like that. Then I met with one of my friends who died in the war. I would always check with Mrs. Denny there, and she told me – she said, “Dick, you are of different religions. This is just not going to work. You should break up with her.” So I went over to break up with her. She looked particularly good, so I wound up proposing. She said, “I have to think about this.” So we’re coming back on the ski train, and she said, “I decided – let’s get married.” I kidded her because – I said, “This damn skiing is the most expensive sport in the whole world.” She said, “How do you figure that?” I said, “Four kids – it’s just cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where was the wedding?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	The wedding was in Denver, and it was at St. Filomena’s Church. Lois took lessons. She had to take lessons at that time, but he was a very – he worked with my – his sister worked with my dad at Rocky Mountain Motor Company. So he was very understanding and stuff like that. We were married in the church. My dad and mother at that time – if you married a non-Catholic, you married in the rectory. You couldn’t even get inside the church. That had changed and stuff like that. Then we had a reception at the Argon Hotel. We had a honeymoon down in Colorado Springs at the Antlers Hotel there, which later turned – tore down, but it became – they put in a bunch of pictures in the bar there and moved the bar over there and stuff like that. Then we went back for our 50th there, and all those things were still there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How many children do you have?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	We had four children.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Their names were…
MR. PHILIPPONE:	The oldest one was Robert. He was born in 1950. He was born of a Catholic father, Presbyterian minister, and we had a Jewish doctor and a Jewish hospital. She went through all day. We got her in there at 6:30, and I got back at 6:30 at night. Then she does really started going into labor there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You have more than one child?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, the second boy was Donald. He was born in 1953, and he was born in Grand Junction, Colorado. Then our daughter – our oldest daughter was Susan, and she was born in Grand Junction. She was born on Valentine’s Day of 1957. Then the youngest was born in Grand Junction, and she was born in 1960 – June 1960 and stuff like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You have some information there beside you that you would like to show.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah. A lot of this stuff is from the thing there. I had an introduction that would introduce me. I said – if you remember a television commercial where fellow and his boss came out of an airport, I think it was Hertz rental car. It’s raining very hard, and the boss says, “They’ll pick us separate here.” He says, “Not exactly.” And to see them both running through the rain to the car. “Not exactly” describes Dick Philippone’s career. For example, although he was on an accelerated schedule for freshman year and never took less than 23 semester hours, he didn’t finish college in four years. It took him six years before he actually graduated, was a metallurgical engineer because World War II was going full blast. He joined the US Coast Guard, but the coast he defended was not exactly the US coast, but the coast of New Guinea, Manus Islands, the Philippines, on board a troop transport. Although the ship was loaded with 4,500 troops bound for the invasion of Japan, that did not exactly happened. They dropped the atomic bomb. After college he worked for the Bureau of Mines, then the Atomic Energy Commission. He worked in the uranium milling industry as a liaison engineer between the mills and the feed material plants. They found more uranium than they needed so an opportunity came to Oak Ridge to be retreaded into a nuclear engineer. He brought his family with them for 10 months to attend [inaudible], but to stay Oak Ridge wasn’t for 10 months. It was more like 42 years. A job opened up at the operations office, and he has worked on the Molten Salt Reactor nuclear studies group, particularly on the agro-industrial complex. Then in the heavy session test program and the last several years as program manager for the fuel reprocessing programs. He retired from government service in 1985, but had three job offers from private industry. His friend, Bob [Worksbank], who had left the Lab and was working for Bechtel convinced him he should work for Bechtel because he would not have to leave Oak Ridge and stay right here – not exactly. His career Bechtel has included 15 trips to Japan, eight trips to the UK in Europe, 19 trips to Russia, plus work at Hanford and several international labs. He is currently working on the decommissioning of the K-25, K-27 projects and maybe won’t have to go so far to go to work. Of course that lasted until Bechtel ran out of the contract. I worked for Bechtel for 26 years. At the 25th anniversary there, Bechtel is a family-owned business. It’s not stockholder-owned business. They say once you work for Bechtel, you always worked for Bechtel because they treated you like family. As I say, for example – they would like to keep any of your frequent flyer miles. You could do something yourself or your family. Lois went to Japan four times. She went to Europe. She went to the UK. In fact, we’ve been to the UK so often that I went to give blood, and they said, “We won’t take your blood.” I said, “It’s because I’m older?” They said, “It’s because he spent too much time in the UK, and you may have mad cow disease, and we will never collect your blood.”
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me about your work experience when you went to the foreign countries. What did you do?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Actually when I was with the DOE, I was a program manager for this reprocessing of nuclear fuels – advanced nuclear fuels, like [inaudible] reactors and stuff like that. We would have these exchange agreements between the US and the Japanese, the West Germans, and the UK. We would have meetings and agree on certain projects that we were working on together to get the information and stuff like that, exchange information. We would have these meetings and stuff like that. I would be the US representative on those things between the two countries there. And then also when I was in – as program manager, one of the things that really directed me there, first with this type of technology – you had to be very careful about the safeguards of the nuclear weapons and stuff like that. So I got into what was called the safeguards business. It started out as source and special materials. I did that even back in Grand Junction’s days there. What I found was a method they were using for sampling was all wrong. I ran some pilot plants there to prove it was wrong. As a result, they changed their whole sampling system there. We operated the pilot plants and show them that they were getting gypped. They were paying – one of the things that happened was that this stuff would come in 55 gallon barrels, and they would have an honor system where you would just take three holes there and say, “That’s a good sample there.” One day they called me over there and said, “Dick, we hit something and dumped this out, and it had a big iron tooth.” Of course iron is worth about $.40 a pound at that time. Uranium was worth $11 a pound. You are really losing money on something like that. So we changed the system there, and then they gave me what they called the Sustained Performance Award there. They figured that I’d save them $1 million. I think I got this nice certificate and about $200 actually.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Who was trying to camouflage the ingredients?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I think it was the uranium mills. They would sell the concentrate to the government. I was at the other end of them buying stuff.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where was this?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	This was in Grand Junction. We would send the stuff to Mallinckrodt for feed material processing.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Grand Junction is in what state?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Colorado. That’s where they had their big operations office there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When you were working with the Russians and the other foreign countries, did you have any kind of feeling that they were upfront and honest with what they were telling you?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I made very good friends with the actual technical workers there. The main thing we had with the Russians was that under the Stark Treaty, where we were trying to eliminate nuclear weapons, Bechtel got the contract to build the storage facility once they dismantled those weapons there and put them in containers, and then they would ship containers to what they called the Fissile Material Storage Facility there. This was a tremendous facility that was built in [Myak], Russia, which is right on the edge of Siberia there. In fact there is a line where you can put one foot in Asia and one foot in Siberia. While in Siberia it’s cold as heck down there. I think that’s the coldest I’ve ever been because it was well below zero, and the wind was blowing. There’s nothing. My grandson, Bob’s boy, he was in the Rangers. He gave me all kinds of stuff like that. The only thing that didn’t work was you had a hard time keeping your fingers warm, even though these things had warmth in them.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you ever witness any of the Russians weapons disassembly?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah. Actually, what we had is we had the safeguards groups for safeguarding the plant there. The research done for that plant was a joint U.S. effort there, and this was done by the All Russian Institute of Experimental Physics. These guys were brilliant. There’s no question about it there. They were just brilliant. If you didn’t know the answer, the correct thing you would tell them is, “I will get that for you.” You don’t try to bulldoze those guys. I never did that anyway, but that’s something you never wanted to do. Then we also had a design contractor that was helping us with the design up in St. Petersburg. Then of course the main office there where all the [inaudible], which ran that operation there was there. When we first came in there, Yeltsin was the prime minister – the head of the thing like that. He was very easy to work with and stuff like that. But then when Putin came in, he was KGB. He was not easy to work with.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did the local workers treat you any different?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	No, they treated us very kindly. As I say, we make good friends with those people. This one guy – he was extremely brilliant. He gave me a rare Russian coin. The only thing I could give him was one of the Susan B. Anthony dollars that nobody wanted to use over here. They were very good there, and they would look after me. Of course, I was up in St. Petersburg. One night we came back from work, and the guy said, “Do you want to go to dinner?” I said, “I’m not hungry and I’ve got stuff to do.” Of course I did get hungry, so there was a German restaurant up there [inaudible]. I went up to [inaudible] and didn’t talk to anybody, just had my dinner and stuff like that. When I got back in the morning, nobody asked me where I’d been or anything like that. I go in, and one of the Russians says, “How did you like [inaudible] last night?” They said I had been in there. The other incident that happened there is there was a Catholic Church that was a combination of French and English service there they had there. I had to take a subway ride over there, and then I walked about five or six blocks. Then I had to cut over to the church there. The only thing about going to church there is you had to listen to all the readings in French as well as English, so it was a long service. So then I’m coming back, and I turned the corner. There’s a guy ahead of me. For some reason I turn around, and the street is blocked off. I keep walking there. I noticed the street is blocked off down there. There was some expensive jewelry stores along the side there, and they were renovating the building there. I get even with the building, and soldiers come up with their guns. I just kept walking. They didn’t say anything. I got back on the subway, and I asked the guy at the Bechtel office there, “What was that about?” They said it was probably just a training exercise. I had a very uncomfortable feeling that time.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You are familiar with the United States’ methods of building weapons.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	And then you’ve see the Russians.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you feel like that the Russian method was cruder than the United States?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, one of the things – of course they have the [inaudible] thing there. This was an old monastery town. It’s about 400 miles east of Moscow. They took it over, and they called it [Arsomist] 16. They changed the name from [Saroff] to [Arsomist] 16 there. We were going through, and I said, “What is this [Arsomist] 16? Where’s the one, two, three, four?” They said, “We just told the Americans that to make you think that we had 15 more of them like this.” Then they had a Museum of Atomic Weapons, and they had a copy of the Fat Boy. He said, “You recognize that, don’t you? We stole that from you.” They were up front. Then I had the biggest hydrogen bomb ever built. They had a model of that. That thing was higher than the ceiling here and a little bit longer – I would say quite a bit longer than this room is long. They showed that on there. They did a half scale model of that thing and built that, and they set it off and sent a radioactive cloud halfway around the world. Sakharov was the designer of the thing, and he said “I quit. We’re going to destroy the world with these damn things.” They exiled him to Siberia – way into Siberia.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	The Russians had some people that were conscious of what was going to happen if they continued, but they did away with them.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	If you didn’t cooperate, they did away with you. They just got them out of the way there. You could still go through Sakharov’s house. The houses reminded me that these people lived in at that time – our architecture in the ‘20s and stuff like that. They were nice homes and stuff like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	The part that you saw as far as the assembly areas and things of that nature – is that something you can describe without getting into classified information?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	They had some pretty good machine shops. What they really lacked was good instrumentations there. They said, “We don’t want any of that. We want U.S. stuff. It’s much better and much more reliable than the stuff we get here.” One of my jobs – we were designed this equipment and get the equipment that we needed. Then Canberra was the big supplier of this stuff – Canberra and then Ortech down here was the other one. The problem with Ortech was they had no facilities really in Russia, and the ones in Europe there were not too good there. The other problem is that once you have stuff in Russia, it’s really difficult to get it out of there. I would go up there, and we would have an agreement there of what these tests have to be because I didn’t want to send any stuff over there that we would have to take back and stuff like that. Canberra had a really good facility in Moscow itself there, and then they also had access to the plant there, too. We would check all of that out, and we would get agreement there. Then I would go through and inspect the thing. I had the authority from Bechtel, and this guy had the authority from [inaudible] from Canberra to sign these things off. If they passed the test, we would ship the stuff over to Russia. That was the main thing that they lacked there. The container that they built the thing in – it had an inner container there, but there was a space, and they were very worried about somebody sticking a bomb in that space there. They had what they called the Alien Detection System. It was an x-ray. They would use these powerful x-rays to see if there was anything in there. The big problem was that – since I was a metallurgist, I said, “I can tell you down to the [inaudible].” “Hell no, we don’t want that. We don’t want anything about the actual composition of the actual weapon – the plutonium and uranium it comes in there.” We had to do some modifications and stuff like that. This system had kind of a concave screen there were these were shown there, and it was very difficult to make. Then we noticed that this thing started peeling or shrinking a bit. An idea of how smart these people were – we wondered how much more this thing is going to shrink. We ask this one guy, and he said “How much has it shrunk and in which time period?” We just gave him the dimensions. It was 2 mm or 5 mm in four weeks or something like that. He makes a calculation in his head. He didn’t have computers. He said, “It won’t shrink any more than 3 more millimeters.” There was a young engineer, and my friend had another engineer with me. He had a calculator. He motions, “Give me that.” He puts in a quadratic equation and he says, “What did that come out to be?” He says, “2.95.” The last night you are always there, they have this banquet. You have to give toasts. Of course I’m the oldest guy there, so I always have to give a toast. He said, “I’ve always been impressed with the people I met. This time I’m really impressed.” They give these toasts, and the third toast is always to any women that are present. That was always the thing. They were really drinkers over there. It’s surprising though – this one place we met there, they had about three different floors with banquets and stuff like that. This one guy said, “I need a smoke,” so he went outside. He went outside and stuff like that. He said, “There’s a bunch of drug dealers down there.” This is inside a secret city. In order for us to get in there, we are on the list of 100 Americans. That’s all that could be there. You had to get permission for each specific crew. They had this drug culture there. They said, “You just keep away from those guys.”
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you have to wear in ID badge?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah. We couldn’t wear any radiation badges that weren’t supplied back. They had to be supplied by them.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What year was this?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	This was in probably the late 1980s, 1990 period of time there. We had to – we needed to test out this alien detection system. The best place we could test it out was over the United States. They sent a team of about 12 Russians that came over. I had to arrange further stay here – motels, meals, and everything like that. Besides doing the work – we had an agreement with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help us with that sort of stuff there. We brought their work and stuff like that. As I say, we had to do this arrangement for all these other meals. We had two interpreters from Atlanta that came up there to help. She said the big problem with going to a place like Ryan’s, which was alcohol-free – they get in these back rooms, and then they all break out their vodka. She said when they started drinking in the mornings, that’s when she really didn’t like it.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Was anyone monitoring?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, definitely. This one guy there – he would always be with them. He was always with them. But he would never contribute anything in the meeting. He was ex-KGB, and he was also the federal security service there. He kept his eye on these guys.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did they go when they were here?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	We took them to several things. It was around Christmas time. Actually my son had died at Thanksgiving. He was a juvenile diabetic, and he had died. Then we had a memorial service down here for him. In the meantime, I had all these Russians here. Lois had invited them – first of all at the Christmas party, this KGB guy started dancing with the girls in there. Lois and I were pretty good ballroom dancers. I said, “You’re a really good dancer.” He said, “I was a professional, but I lost my partner so I gave it up.” He was really good. We had them over here, and I assumed that they would want broadcast so I had vodka. They really wanted some wine, and they just clean me out of all the wine I had in the place. This guy – these KGB guys – took a real liking to Lois. She had some good food for them and that stuff, too. Every time I would go to Russia and stuff like that, his first question was, “How is Lois?”
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What kind of intelligence does the Russian people have over there?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I think it’s pretty good, as far as keeping their people in line and stuff like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	From the nuclear standpoint, are they pretty smart people?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, very smart. You don’t want to underestimate that.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You weren’t surprised too much at what you learned that they knew?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	No. In fact, one of these things here – I have two booklets here, 45 to stuff like that. If you look back in here, this is all in Russian here. They have a lot of pictures and stuff like that of our efforts here on the thing like that. They celebrated their 50th anniversary. This is [inaudible] here …
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Hold that up to the camera.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	This is [inaudible], and this was a Russian monastery town. This was our 50th anniversary. It says “Thanks to the Winds of Change. You are always welcome in [inaudible].” This was sent by one of their experts there. They had “best wishes or sincerely” several of these people in there.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Is this the 50th anniversary of…
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, of the NEF. The NEF is the All Russian Institute of Experimental Physics. They have pictures of Truman and Stalin and then the explosion at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you feel that they copied from the United States?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yeah, they copied this. This is – “We stole this from you.” That first bomb was stolen from us.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let me ask you. When you are traveling overseas and your wife was still here, did she know anything about what you are doing?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	To a certain extent, yeah. Four of us took our wives to St. Petersburg. They were all adventurous gals, so they were on their own. They rode the subways, the transit systems and stuff like that. They had a great time. She was somewhat familiar with what I was doing. Of course I couldn’t tell her anything that was in classified nature.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Your children grew up some in Oak Ridge.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes, they did.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	And they attended the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes, they did. Bob went to St. Mary’s for two years. Don went for four years. He and Dean Frederick, and his good buddy there, they were always in trouble with the nuns. I know they all sighed a sigh of relief when they graduated.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you think that your children got a good education growing up with the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Yes, they did. Don was [inaudible]. Susan was into computers, and Bob is a financial planner. St. Mary’s was overcrowded, and I think there were 54 kids there. He has an extremely good English background, as far as English is concerned. He knows that very well and stuff like that. Don wound up as a city planner before he died. Then Susan was in computers, and she married another guy who was a computer programmer. Mary – she has worked in school systems, and she worked for big shipping company. Then she worked in the school systems down in Charleston, South Carolina, too – the suburbs, Goose Creek. As I say, they’ve all done well. Then Bob – they got married when they were 18, and both parents said, “This is not going to last.” The gal he married – she didn’t have to do a thing. Her parents did everything for her. She didn’t wash the dishes or anything like that. Our kids were just the opposite. They turned to all the time. Bob was very good with kids. He was in the Army, and they were living down in El Paso, Texas. When he got out of the Army, they were down in El Paso there. When Doug was born, that’s just too much for her. She just walked off and left him. She just left. He was stuck with raising Doug. He had to raise him by himself. To show what a good job he did, his son of course went to high school – finished high school. Then he started – he had a girlfriend, and she started out at Arizona State in Phoenix. Then she transferred to Arizona, so he transferred to Arizona. One of his good buddies came back and said, “Doug, you’re just wasting your dad’s money. What the hell are you doing that for? You always like the Army. Why don’t you join the damn Army?” They used to play Army men together when they were kids and stuff like that. He says, “I think I’ll do that.” We tried to talk him out of it and stay in college. He says, “Dad, you didn’t finish college. You went into the Army. Grandpa, you didn’t either. You didn’t turn out too bad, did you? I’m going.” He joins the Army, and then he joins the Rangers. They had some exercise down in South Carolina, and they allow the people to pick the leader. They picked Doug, and they had an officer with them and stuff like that. He calls me aside and says, “This boy should go to West Point. Have him apply.” I talked to Doug, and he said “Officers have a much better time than enlisted men.” So he applies, and of course the commandant down there – he wrote a letter to tell him how good Doug was. And so he got an appointment to West Point from them. The congressman from Arizona thinks he got the appointment there, but he sent a letter, too. The real thing was there. So he goes to West Point. Of course, he’s the oldest there. These other kids were right out of high school. He was the president of the class there. We went up to dinner up there. At West Point there, they had family weekend. We went to dinner, and we got to sit at the commandant’s table. He asked the guys what was the hardest thing. Most of them said the discipline. That didn’t bother Doug at all because he had been in the Rangers and so. He said getting back to studying and stuff like that. He did very well at West Point. One of the things that was impressive there was – you know the President goes to the service academies on a rotating basis. Clinton came to West Point. It was his time to go to West Point. He had just hurt himself – an ankle. He was using a cane or a crutch and stuff like that. Then when it came time to give away the present, I figure the leaders over there or the class would get better and stuff like that. I think there were 920 things. He stood up and shook hands with every single person. We got a good picture of him with President Clinton doing that, so I really had to admire him for doing that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let me ask you a couple more questions. Why did you stay in Oak Ridge? Why did you like Oak Ridge?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Actually, when we were working here it was just supposed to be for nine months. There was a class here. All the kids said, “Get a job here. We don’t want to move.” They got involved with the scouts and stuff like that, and Lois got involved with the Y. They said, “We don’t want to move.” I had a job offer to go to Argonne National Lab after I finished. In the meantime, we had gone on a scout thing with the guy that worked at the Operations Office here. I asked him, “Do you work for the Lab?” He said, “No, I work for the Operations Office. What are you doing? Send me your resume.” So I sent in my resume. I didn’t hear anything back from him, and he indicated that there might be a job for me. I went up and got interviewed there, and I said, “Let me check with Oak Ridge first.” He said, “Please do. I don’t want to fill out all this damn paperwork just to have you say you don’t want the job.” I came down here. He was on vacation. His boss had just lost another engineer. He said, “I want to be fair to you and everybody else. We will give you the job here.” The job opened up here, so that’s how we stayed in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What do you like about Oak Ridge the best?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	I think if you look back there – of course it’s a beautiful area. The natural beauty of the thing. There’s a wealth of things to do whether you get outside. We did a lot of hiking around here. It was much easier – we would hike down to the Smokies, too. I know we went down to Chimney Rock. We were hiking up there, and we were up there, and we were up there close to the top. Lois says, “Did you notice something?” I said, “What?” She said, “We are the oldest people on this trail.” She grew up in Wyoming, and she was used to that. Her parents ran a print shop there, and then they decided they would homestead. They were homesteading 640 acres. To keep the homestead, you had to live on the property for two months. Her brothers and sister and her dad, they ran the print shop. They would just come up on the weekends. Lois and her mother stayed there, and she would stay with the sheepherders. She was riding horses, herding sheep, and stuff like that. She had that adventurous spirit to start with. That just prevailed. She was always that way. As I said, we did a lot of hiking around here. Then we also enjoyed the music. We had just had this love of music. There were so many things and opportunities for that to take place. That was the thing that we really enjoyed.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When did your wife passed away?
MR. PHILIPPONE:	June 5 of this year – 2013. It was 64 years of marriage and 62 years of courtship.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You certainly had an exciting life.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	We sure did. We had been really blessed. The other thing that really impresses us is the people. They’re so kind. It’s one thing to be friendly. When Lois was there, we would go to things like that. One night was a very cold night, and I had left Lois out. I parked in the parking garage down where the Club [inaudible] is. We came out there, and a couple women said – they came up and said, “Let’s help you put on your coats.” I started to walk out there, and I was going to have Lois stay there and I would go get the car. Some young woman came up and said, “I’ll stay with you. I’ll stay with her and watch her.” I said, “It might take me a bit of time. It would be faster if I walk down there than if I have her walk down there.” We got out there, and a lot of people leave at the same time. It took me about a half hour to get up there, and she got Lois in the car. The policeman came and helped her out there. They didn’t know us from Adam. Those were the things that really make a difference.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	It’s been my pleasure to interview you. Your interview will be I’m sure helpful to some person – whether they’re doing a paper or just want to know about Oak Ridge oral history. You had an adventurous life. It’s been my pleasure to interview you.
MR. PHILIPPONE:	Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. If it helps somebody else, that’s fine, too.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Thank you very much. 
[End of Interview]