Compton, Robert

              
ORAL HISTORY OF ROBERT COMPTON
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
October 10, 2013
 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is October 10, 2013. Hi, I’m Don Hunnicutt in the home of Robert Compton, 76 Rolling Links Blvd, Oak Ridge, TN, to take an oral history about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. May I call you Bob?
MR. COMPTON:	Sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Bob, please state your full name, place of birth, and date. 
MR. COMPTON:	Robert N. Compton, November 28, 1938. I was born in Metropolis, Illinois, the home of Superman. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That's interesting.  Do you take Kryptonite?  Uh, give me your father's name, place of birth, and his date.
MR. COMPTON:	Robert Wilson Compton, gosh, January 15, 1914, in Metropolis, Illinois also. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Your mother's maiden name? 
MR. COMPTON:	Wava Jennette Lambert.   
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall her place of birth and date?
MR. COMPTON:	She was born in August 13, 1919, and it was Metropolis, Illinois, also. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How about your grandparents' names? Do you remember on your father's side? 
MR. COMPTON:	On my father's side, it was Orlon R. Compton and he was born in Kentucky somewhere. My grandmother's name was Annie Leeper Compton. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What about on your mother's side of the family?
MR. COMPTON:	My mother's side was Wava Jennette Lambert and her grandfather was Edward Burns who was descended of the family of Robbie Burns, the famous Scottish band?
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Can't help you there.  What about your father, Scots?
MR. COMPTON:	Scotland, Scotland is what I was trying to come up with. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What about your father's school history?
MR. COMPTON:	He went to Metropolis schools all the way through high school. He was an average or better than average student. He took physics and chemistry in high school, which everybody didn't do. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did he go to college?
MR. COMPTON:	No. No one from my family went to college. He had seven brothers and three sisters, none of which went to college. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What about your mother's school history?
MR. COMPTON:	She went to schools in Metropolis. She had a scholarship to go to University of Cincinnati on music scholarship but she married a guy from the other side of the tracks, my father.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You have sisters and brothers? 
MR. COMPTON:	I have one sister. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Her name?
MR. COMPTON:	Her name is Susan Carpenter now. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where was she born?
MR. COMPTON:	She was born in Metropolis also. She is three years younger than I am. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How about your father's work history, what did he do?
MR. COMPTON:	My father, his work history really began here in Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my father and uncle were out rabbit hunting that day and they came back to learn that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and that sort of started things. He was in and out of work there in Metropolis, Illinois. There wasn't much to do in that little town. He would take odd jobs and work various places. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor all of his brothers volunteered to go into the service. He volunteered to go in the Navy and he was supposed to go into the Navy. He took the exams and did pretty well. They came and told him that he was going to be sent to Lexington, Kentucky, to a radar school and then he would be sent to a place called Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he said "No, I'm not, I'm in the Navy". They said no, you're not, you're going to Oak Ridge. He had no idea that was part of the war effort, but he basically went there. That was his first real job actually. It was here in Oak Ridge. The rest of the jobs were sort of off and on. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	We'll go into that a little bit later. What about your mother? Did she work while she was raising the household?
MR. COMPTON:	She worked at what's called a Fair Store off and on, more or less. It wasn't much of a job, but it brought in some money. She stopped that after they had to pay people to keep my sister and I and that was almost more than she was making so she stopped and she was a homemaker the rest of her life. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What grades did you attend in Metropolis?
MR. COMPTON:	I attended first through the second, probably. Then we came to Oak Ridge, and then we went back after the war effort was over. We went back to Metropolis. I went up through the fifth or sixth grade there, part of the sixth grade. When we came back to Oak Ridge, my dad worked for the City of Oak Ridge, what was called MSI at that time. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall what school was like in the first and second grades in Metropolis?
MR. COMPTON:	Yes, I do. Very much. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Give me a little example of how that was?
MR. COMPTON:	It was much more rigorous, I would say. Much more rigid. You sat in your desk and you did what you were supposed to do. I thought it actually was more of a challenge in school there than when I came here to Oak Ridge. When I came to Oak Ridge, you could get up and go to the restroom and come back. It was more disorganized here in the classroom. I just remember that everybody didn't pass there in Illinois. I mean, there were kids in my class in the second grade that had flunked the second and first grade maybe twice. As a matter of fact, they were going to put me back one year, because I was the youngest one in my class and they said I wasn't mature enough to go on to the second grade. I talked the teacher out of it. I said why don't you put me in the second grade for a week or two and see how it goes, so my mother and I convinced them that I would go on to the second grade. It was mainly I just wasn't paying attention in class. So that told you that it was a little more rigorous there, you didn't pass unless you passed. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When the family came to Oak Ridge, did the family come all together or did your father...
MR. COMPTON:	No, my father came first. He came down here. I can't tell you how long that was, but then we came down on the railroad, I remember that. We actually went to Lexington first and spent some time in Lexington while he was going to school there. Then my mother and sister and I went back to Metropolis while my father came to Oak Ridge. He was here in Oak Ridge for a while. I don't know exactly how long that was, but then we joined him. We came down on the train and got in at the L&N Station over there where the World's Fair site is now. Then we came here shortly after he was already established. We lived on a little flattop out on the west end, Reed Lane it was called. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall riding the train? 
MR. COMPTON:	Oh yeah, yeah I remember. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me about that. 
MR. COMPTON:	I remember the smell, the smoke, and the jostling. You were always, you know, by the time you got off the train, you were tired because the train did a lot of wobbling and everything. I got car sick usually, and I got train sick, so I remember that, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you get on the train in Metropolis and then ride all the way?
MR. COMPTON:	No, that I don't remember, where we got on the train up there, but we ended up at the L&N Station in Knoxville over there and it seemed like we stopped every little bit. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That would have been a steam locomotive I presume?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, it was coal fired steam. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So when you got off at the L&N, how did you know where to go from that point?
MR. COMPTON:	My dad met us there. He would carry us back. I remember one time, we did more than one of those trips, we actually hitchhiked, got out on the street, the four of us, and hitchhiked into Oak Ridge. We came in on Clinton Highway, I remember that because of that airplane that is sitting out there that's being refurbished. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	The airplane service station. 
MR. COMPTON:	The airplane service station, I remember that, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So, that was quite an experience. Did you get a ride right away, or did it take some walking? 
MR. COMPTON:	We were doing a lot of walking. I just remember vaguely hitchhiking a ride one of those times. I don't remember which one it was. Now, how we would have gotten here otherwise, I don't know, because we didn't have an automobile until I was in high school, so that was quite a while away. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That's kind of interesting that the family walking down the road with their suitcases I presume? 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, I guess so. I just don't remember. I probably was too small to be carrying much.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So, tell me a little bit about your father, when he came to Oak Ridge and he went to work, what was his job?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, his job that I know now, he was one of the guys who worked on the calutron, the mass spectrometer. He was a troubleshooter, I guess you would say. He wasn't in a design area or the scientific part of it. He was in the part that they go in and fix things when they went wrong, the electronics. I remember he would come home and talk about a few things that happened during the day. It was pretty dangerous to go into those cells without making sure the high voltage was clamped to the ground. You had to hook these voltage leads on top of the power supplies that were giving the energy for the ion separation process. I guess he was maybe over some of the women that operated the mass spectrometers too. The people you see on the calutrons. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So he was more like a maintenance man?
MR. COMPTON:	That's the way I would describe it, yeah, maintenance or fixing problems. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did he describe about the magnets and the pull of the magnets? 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, yeah. He would say if you had a wrench in your pocket, you'd have to cut your pants off to get to walk away from it, because it would stick you to the magnet. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	We've heard stories about bobby pins being pulled out of women's hair, things like that. 
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, I'm sure it would, yeah, sure. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did the family live when they first came to Oak Ridge as a family?
MR. COMPTON:	We lived out in the Robertsville area. We lived on Reed Lane, which is no longer there. It's one of the newer houses now, but we lived in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill in a flattop. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember how many bedrooms in the flattop? 
MR. COMPTON:	Two bedrooms. Mother and Father had one and my sister and I had one, yeah. We had indoor plumbing and we had water in the house. When we lived in Illinois, we lived in a shotgun house and had a toilet about a block away it seemed like. We had no water in the house. Of course, the only thing electrical we had was two lights, one hanging down in the kitchen, and one hanging down in the living room. The bedrooms didn't have any light. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Describe for me what you remember how a flattop looked. 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, it was a box. To us it was great. There were no winds coming in through the holes and all the windows were completely closed over. It was a great place for us. It was uptown for us. It was close, but I don't remember bumping into too many people in the flattop. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember what kind of heat you had in the flattop?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, it was coal heat. There was a furnace in there. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did you get your coal? 
MR. COMPTON:	I think somebody just dropped it off every week. I can remember even as a little kid carrying it to the stove there. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Coal box outside?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, there was a coal box outside at the street. They would drop it at the street and then you'd bring it into your house. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Were the sidewalks leading into the flattop made out of wood, do you recall?
MR. COMPTON:	Yes. If there was a sidewalk, it was wood. I don't remember any concrete or asphalt walkways anywhere. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall your mother, where she would go grocery shopping at in those days? 
MR. COMPTON:	We would always use a bus. The buses were really one of the great things about Oak Ridge. You could go anywhere on a bus with very little money. I guess we must have shopped down at Jefferson Center. A lot of it, you just shopped where you could find the food because you had to stand in line for certain things. That was also, Dad had a steady job and we had food all the time. When we were in Illinois, that wasn't the case. We weren't always fed all the time. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you father have a car, no you said you didn't have a car until you were in high school. How did your father get back and forth to work?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, bus. Yeah, everybody took the bus back then. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember how you knew which bus to get on in those days?
MR. COMPTON:	When I was really young, I didn't go anywhere by myself. I walked to school at Linden School. I remember going to Linden School the first time and I couldn't find my way back because I got off at the wrong place and all the houses out there look alike so I think Mom and Dad had to come and find me. I was wandering around, I got off at the wrong place and then it was impossible to find my way back to the house. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Would that have been the third grade you started at Linden?
MR. COMPTON:	No, I think maybe second grade. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What do you remember about Linden School versus the school you came from, you said you came from a more rigid and strict environment. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, I think that it was tougher in Illinois than it was in Oak Ridge. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	From the total environment or the subjects, or?
MR. COMPTON:	Uh, everything. I think they were asking more of you there in Illinois. You had to perform at a higher level. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you feel like you were a little bit ahead of the other kids in the class when you first started?
MR. COMPTON:	You know, I didn't pay much attention to that at the time. I didn't have any problems when I was here, lets put it that way, but I was always being, my mother was always being called back to school in Metropolis that I wasn't performing at the level that I was capable of. I said well look, I'm making good grades, what's the problem? Yeah, but you can do better and they were always prodding you. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So I guess your mother was proud that she didn't receive any calls once you were in Oak Ridge. 
MR. COMPTON:	Right. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That's kind of interesting that the school differences, most people that came to Oak Ridge came from a school that was just the opposite of what you describe. 
MR. COMPTON:	The schools in Metropolis were very good, even though there weren't many jobs for people, the teachers were very good. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Were there more students in the class in Oak Ridge than in Metropolis?
MR. COMPTON:	I'd say there were more in Metropolis actually. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Hmmm. Interesting. Did you like school?
MR. COMPTON:	I liked parts of school, yeah. I never have liked English very much, and you really didn't get much science back in those days, lower levels anyway. I love music. That was always the thing. We had this guy who came around that taught music there in Metropolis. We didn't have that much in Oak Ridge, but we had music, and I like that a lot. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Kind of walk me through a typical day of going to school in Oak Ridge. 
MR. COMPTON:	You mean in the..., in the elementary schools I don't remember much. I just remember being much more lax than it was in Illinois. When I got to high school, I can talk more about the high school because I remember more of that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	We'll go to junior high first. 
MR. COMPTON:	Junior high, it was good. I don't remember a whole lot. The only thing I do remember is I had a junior high school teacher that said I probably shouldn't take any more math after junior high school, because her idea of math was adding and subtracting and dividing, which is not math, that's arithmetic, so I could never put my mind to doing menial things like that. I don't know if I ever made a B in math after that, after you get into high school and college and graduate school. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did I ask you what year it was your family came to Oak Ridge, or did you say?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, I can't remember, it was '43 or '44. It must have been '43, but I've tried to figure that out and I've asked my sister that too, whether we can be a member of the ‘43 Club or not. I don't remember. My dad may have been here in '43. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That qualifies you. 
MR. COMPTON:	Does it? Okay. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Well one way. 
MR. COMPTON:	I think my dad was in '43. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	One of the ways you can tell if the streets were still unpaved and the sidewalks were not finished and things of that nature [inaudible] in '43. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, I'd say most of them weren't. I remember a lot of mud, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	It was probably '43. 
MR. COMPTON:	I think so, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember some of your teachers in elementary school?
MR. COMPTON:	Uh, in Illinois I do.  Miss Marberry, I remember them, but I don't remember any teachers here. I can't even remember the woman that told me that I shouldn't take any more math classes. It's probably the best thing she could have told me, because it just made me mad. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What junior high did you go to?
MR. COMPTON:	Jefferson Junior High School. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where was it located?
MR. COMPTON:	It was located where the old high school was, above Jackson Square at the top of the hill up there. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You rode the bus to school?
MR. COMPTON:	I usually walked. I didn't like riding the buses. I would run lots of time. I ran to Jefferson, I ran to Robertsville. I went to Robertsville for one year, I don't remember, that must have been part of the sixth grade or seventh grade. Maybe that was the seventh grade. Yeah, Robertsville was the seventh grade and then Jefferson Junior High School was the eighth grade. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Now that would have been a long walk. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, but I did it. I mean, I would run usually. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What were some of the classes you took in junior high?
MR. COMPTON:	I don't think you had much choice. Everybody took the same thing pretty much. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you take any shop classes?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, I did. I enjoyed that. I remember the shop teacher, Mr Teague, I think his name was. So I've still got some of the things we built in there, that was good. I enjoyed that a lot. He was a good guy. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	They need that in schools today. 
MR. COMPTON:	They do, absolutely. They do. Welding would be another one that they ought to have. They've got the welder, welding machines. We could get into that if you want to, about the high school, but they need more of that, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me your typical dress when you went to elementary school in Metropolis versus Oak Ridge, was there a difference?
MR. COMPTON:	No. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was the dress?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, the dress for me was t-shirt. We couldn't afford anything. My mother would make me shirts. She would make the shirts and I hated them. They didn't fit and they were always made out of some that didn't feel good so I wore t-shirts, even when the temperature was down to zero, I'd still wear a t-shirt to school. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So what did you think about Oak Ridge as a young person, when you came here, the mud and the disarray of everything. What did you think about that, do you recall?
MR. COMPTON:	It didn't bother me. The thing I liked the most was the buses. You could get around anywhere. You didn't have to walk in the mud, you'd just take the buses everywhere. I didn't like riding in a bus to school, I don't know why that is, but I never did ride the bus to school. I always walked or ran. I was usually running because I was usually late to get to school. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When you became of age, did you have any jobs that you earned money? 
MR. COMPTON:	I've worked my whole life. My parents have even to this day have never given me a penny, even when going to school, etc. I mowed grass, I sold things, whatever I could do, I delivered newspapers. When I was in Illinois I spent a lot of time selling mistletoe during Christmas time and made a lot of money then by those standards. That kept me, I had money for just about anything I wanted. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What age was that you first started working like that?
MR. COMPTON:	Probably second grade. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You mentioned mowing grass. 
MR. COMPTON:	I mowed grass all the time, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you use a push mower or a reel type mower? 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, a push mower. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That was pretty tough work, wasn't it?
MR. COMPTON:	Well the yards were small then. Although if you got a big yard, you got more money so that didn't bother me. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall how much you made mowing yards?
MR. COMPTON:	About a dollar fifty, something like that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you carry newspapers as well?
MR. COMPTON:	I carried newspapers, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What about Coke bottles and collecting Coke bottles for deposit?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, did some of that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Lightning bugs? Did you ever collect any aluminum foil off of cigarette packs?
MR. COMPTON:	Yep. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I heard in an interview some time ago, I didn't recall that. What did they do with that, do you remember?
MR. COMPTON:	I don't remember what we did with it. I remember turning it in somewhere, but I'm sure it was part of the war effort though, just trying to remember. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall when your mother washed clothes, what she used to wash clothes?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, she had, in Illinois, she had a washing machine that, we lived in a shotgun house and the washing machine was in the very end of the house. Then she had a coal oil stove that would heat the water to make it. Then she had a ringer that we were not ever to get around it, because you'd get your hand in it. It would ring the clothes out. There was one time when the coal oil stove turned over, fortunately my dad was there that day, because he worked at this plant where you would come down in the morning and if they needed you, you would work, if they didn't they'd send you home. Fortunately that day he was sent home. This thing turned over and the end of the house burned off, actually it burned down. We had an outside water spigot and he put the fire out. Then he just nailed up the back of the house so we didn't have that part of the house then. We paid 400 dollars for the house. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me what a shotgun house looks like. 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, it's just one where you go from one room to the other. It's just linear. Between two houses like that so you're like that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You open the front door and look out the back door? 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, you open the front door and look out the back. Although when we nailed up the end of the house, you couldn't look out the back then, after that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When the family came to Oak Ridge, did you bring your possessions with you?
MR. COMPTON:	We didn't have much though. I mean, we didn't bring anything other than clothes. I don't think there was anything else. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So when you got to Oak Ridge, what did your mother use for washing clothes?
MR. COMPTON:	I'm not sure, we may have gone somewhere to do that. She did that, I didn't do any of that. I don't remember that part of it. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember clothes lines outside?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh yeah. In the wintertime they'd be frozen stiff. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	In junior high, what did you see different when you went to junior high than elementary school?
MR. COMPTON:	I don't know. It's sort of a continuum for me, I didn't see any difference in the junior high school. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Were the classes any more rigid than elementary?
MR. COMPTON:	I don't think so, no. The thing I remember most is that nobody failed. Everybody passed. That was very different from Illinois. If you didn't do the work, you didn't pass, and that kept you on your toes. You know, you were afraid of not passing. Like I told you, I talked the teacher into passing me onto the second grade. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	From junior high, you went to the high school. Where was the high school located?
MR. COMPTON:	The high school was where it is now. I think we may have been the first class. I'm not sure, '56 was my graduating class. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What did you see in the high school that might be different than junior high?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, the thing that really lit me up was the math and the science. It was probably a lot more different than in Illinois, of course I didn't go to high school in Illinois, but I had a very good physics teacher in high school, Mr [Shank sp?] and I got very involved in science at that point, and math and chemistry, everything. I still didn't do very well in English. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	During the summertime in between grades, what did you do for fun?
MR. COMPTON:	I was into every sport. I played everything. It was always sports with me, baseball, tennis, running, whatever, but that was about it. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You also worked during the summer?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, mowing grass. There weren't many jobs back then, like there are today. You know working at McDonald's or places like that. There weren't many opportunities for that, but you made your opportunities. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What do you remember about going to the movie theaters when you were growing up?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, maybe I shouldn't say this, but one of the first things was slipping in, even though it was only a nickel or 20 cents or 15 or whatever, I think I remember down as low as a nickel. You'd always still figure out ways of slipping in to the movies, yeah that was a big part of Oak Ridge, going to the Ridge Theater and the Central Theater, and the ones out at Jefferson. But I didn't slip in all the time. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I understand it was about nine cents to get in and you could take a quarter and get in, buy a Coke, and popcorn, and have a big time all day long. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yep. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So you like music quite a bit. Did you play an instrument? 
MR. COMPTON:	My mother had a piano when I was in the seventh grade and I took to that. I didn't have any lessons, but I sort of taught myself to play it. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you play any other instruments?
MR. COMPTON:	No. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What type of sports did you mainly like?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, I like all of them, everything. All of the above. I played basketball in high school up to a point and I quit my junior year or senior year and started playing for a semi pro team here in town. I could never quite break in to the high school basketball thing, but I went off to college and made the Varsity as a freshman, so I was a pretty good basketball player. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Who was the basketball coach at that time?
MR. COMPTON:	Ben Martin. I ran track for Ben, he and I got along very well. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So when you were running track, what did you perform in?
MR. COMPTON:	Whatever they needed me for. I high jumped some, ran the hurdles, and the quarter mile, half mile, whatever was needed. I did that in college also. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Running hurdles kind of interests me, it always has. How did you ever become to the point where you could hurdle over the hurdle or jump over the hurdle?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, I was a good jumper. I didn't really excel too much in high school although I ran on the relay teams, which is what Oak Ridge was noted for back then. I started out running the hurdles until a guy named Winston Russell came along. He was a freshman, I was a junior or a senior, and Ben Martin asked me to show him how to hurdle. So I went over with him and after about a week, he was beating me, so I said I'm not going to run the hurdles anymore, so he took over for that. He doesn't remember that, but I do. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you ever do any pole vaulting?
MR. COMPTON:	Yes, I did. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me about pole vaulting. This kind of intrigues me of how you run down the runway and you plant the pole and then, how do you propel yourself up over the bar?
MR. COMPTON:	That's an interesting question you ask, because we built a pole vault pit down on the corner of Marquette Road and, what's the one by the Baptist Church near  Maryville Circle. There's a corner there, Phillip Parrot and the Parrot's lived right on that corner. There was a place there so a number of us, Tommy Chilton was one of them, who became a really good track athlete (Olympic broadjump). We built a pole vault pit, a high jump pit, and a track up around where the Baptist Church was up there. That's where we learned to pole vault. The pole I used was made out of a cedar tree. It's a wonder we didn't kill ourselves. If that thing would break or we'd fall on it, but two of us became good pole vaulters. I came in second in the KIAC for two years in a row and won it one year. I became a pretty good high jumper. I held the high jump record at 6'5" in Kentucky for a long time at Berea College. Ben Martin came by there one day and saw us all out there. I didn't excel in high school but I did okay. I did take four first places in a three way meet with the University of Tennessee and the University of Cincinatti.
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Well, the style of high jumping is quite different today than it was then. 
MR. COMPTON:	I held the record until the Fosbury Flop came along. That's where it's sort of a cheat. You have your center of gravity going under the bar instead of going over it, it's where you go over backwards. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Wasn't that more of a scissor jump, you might say?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, the scissor didn't last very long. That was back when I was in junior high school. I remember winning the junior high school using a scissor jump, but there your center of gravity was going way up over the high jump bar. The Western Roll was where you roll over, you kick this leg up, and then it goes over, and then the other one flips around. The center of gravity goes over the bar, but really close to the bar so you can jump a lot higher. When the Fosbury Flop came along about 15 years after I quit, it changed the whole equation. Everybody started jumping over 6-1/2 feet right away. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I presume that was named after an athlete?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, Fosbury, Dick Fosbury was the guy's name, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Well, now the runway was a certain length? Kind of describe that to me. 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, in high school it was dirt or grass. You just had enough space to if you approached from the Western Roll or the Eastern Roll, Western Roll was when you jumped that way, the Eastern Roll was the other way, you jump over. The other thing about the Fosbury Flop, it came along at a time when the runways started to be some kind of composition, either tar or concrete, or whatever you jump off. You can get more speed. Because speed determines how high you jump. It's basically this speed here, you plant your foot and you go over. The faster you go, the higher you're going to go. So, ½ mv squared equal mgh, and so your height is determined by how fast you can approach the bar. So that changed the whole high jumping. People jump 8 feet now. Oh yeah, that was the other thing. We landed on sawdust and I saw more than one person break something falling on it. You know, you came down and the pole vault in particular. When you come down in sawdust, you couldn't pole vault with today's pole vault or you couldn't high jump with this Fosbury Flop in today's world, because you had sawdust, you couldn't land on your back in sawdust. You'd do it maybe once is all.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you date a lot in high school?
MR. COMPTON:	No. I was kind of a shy kid. I had one sort of girlfriend in high school. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did you go on a date?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, movie. Usually a movie someplace.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How did you get there?
MR. COMPTON:	By the time I was in high school, my dad had a car so I would take the old Pontiac. In junior high school you just walked. I remember taking a girl out. We lived in Woodland. We lived over on Marquette Road and I'd walk up to the top of the hill and then we'd walk to the movie and back. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember when your family moved to Woodland?
MR. COMPTON:	Probably 1950, that's when we came back the second time to Oak Ridge. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Now let's back up a little bit. The family left Oak Ridge when?
MR. COMPTON:	I would say '45 or '46. I can't remember exactly when that was. Whenever it was very soon after Tennessee Eastman left, or I guess it was Tennessee Eastman. When they left, Dad was out of a job. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That was when Union Carbide came in, after they left?
MR. COMPTON:	I guess it was Union Carbide. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Why was he out of a job? 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, because most people left Oak Ridge and there weren't any jobs to go back to. We went back to Illinois and we went back to that same house and we went back to the same situation for a few years where he would be either working or not working that particular day.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How'd you feel about that? What age were you when that happened?
MR. COMPTON:	I would be about 10 or 12 years old. He had a tough life, because he found a job in Kentucky across the river, Paducah, Kentucky. He would hitch hike to work, so he would get up at like 4:00 in the morning and I'd walk down with him to the end of the highway there to go to Paducah. I would wait until somebody picked him up and then he would come back later that night because he'd have to hitchhike back, that's how he would get there and back. Then he started throwing up blood, really heavily. He was working in the ordinance plant and the doctors told him he was losing more blood than he could replenish himself so he had to quit that job. That was the only steady job he had, but his lungs were being affected greatly by the acid he was working in. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you hate to leave Oak Ridge and go back?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, I did, because I knew what we were going back to. We weren't eating a square meal all the time and it was a different world. It was a nice place to live though, Metropolis was. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When did the family come back to Oak Ridge?
MR. COMPTON:	Uh '50. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What brought the family back? 
MR. COMPTON:	Uh, my dad got a job here in Oak Ridge thanks to a long time friend of his, he grew up with in Metropolis, Dutes Fitchpatrick, he was a plumber here in town for a long time. He worked all the plants. He got my dad a job with MSI, Management Services Incorporated. He was an electronics guy. He fixed radios and one thing or another. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How did he know about a job in Oak Ridge. 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, Dutes Fitchpatrick got him the job actually. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How did you feel about moving back?
MR. COMPTON:`	Oh I was happy to get back yeah, we were glad to get back.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I bet your mom was too?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, yeah. We were all happy to get back to Oak Ridge and have a steady job and you know, have everything that we needed. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did the family come back in an automobile this time?
MR. COMPTON:	No, no we came back on the train again. This time I guess we must have carried some stuff with us, I don't remember, we had a radio, I remember that, but that's about all. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Give me the date again, when the family left Oak Ridge. That would have been about what?
MR. COMPTON:	I can't remember, '46 or '45. We could look it up as to when the plant shut down. Oh, not shut down, but when Tennessee Eastman left. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	After the dropping of the bomb?
MR. COMPTON:	After the big, yeah, to the big bomb?
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember where you were when you heard about that bomb?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh yeah. Very much so. We were there when we learned that the bomb had stopped World War, had ended the Japanese endeavor anyway. We were there in this flattop there on Reed Lane and everybody was outside banging pots and pans. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you have a radio at that particular time?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, that's how we learned about it, from the radio. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you enjoy listening to the radio?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, absolutely. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What were some of the programs you listened to?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, Inner Sanctum, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, everything. Everybody listened to those every night. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Lone Ranger?
MR. COMPTON:	Lone Ranger, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That was their way of communicating, wasn't it?
MR. COMPTON:	It was, yeah. Everybody watched the same, or listened to the same things every night. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How about the Oak Ridge swimming pool? Did you visit it?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh yeah. That was a great place. That was really, really great. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me how you remember how it looked in those days. 
MR. COMPTON:	I don't think it's changed much, has it? It seems like it's been pretty much the same way. One of the biggest pools in the southeast I think. The water was cold, clean. I spent a lot of time there. That was great. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Water has always been cold. Last year the water, when we had that heat wave? I took grandchildren down there and the water was like bath water and I couldn't believe it. 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, they got it from a spring I think, didn't they?
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Right, they still do.  Did you have a bicycle when you were growing up in Oak Ridge?
MR. COMPTON:	Yes, I did. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What kind of bicycle?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, I had a, I called it a Peewee Herman bicycle. It had everything on it. I'll tell you the story about how I got that bicycle. I would have never done this, but my parents, I had saved like 150 dollars from selling mistletoe and so one Christmas, I woke up and there was this bicycle, it was a fantastic bicycle. I found out how much it cost and then I found out that my parents had used my 150 dollars to buy that bicycle and I would have never done that. As my wife will tell you, I'm pretty frugal, I guess you'd say. I had this bicycle and I kept it till I went off to college. That was from 1940 something to when I went off to college. It had bells and whistles, I mean it was a super duper bicycle. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember the neighborhood kids getting together and playing any type of games?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh yeah, oh yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What type of games did you play?
MR. COMPTON:	It was always sports. I don't remember playing too many games, but if baseball was in season, that's what we played. Hide and seek at night. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What about bowling or did you go to the bowling alley or skating rink? 
MR. COMPTON:	Uh, that cost money, didn't it? No, I didn't go bowling. I may have gone skating once or twice. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember standing in line for food items at the grocery store?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, yeah. With my mother, I never stood in line, but I mean, I was with her. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You left Oak Ridge and then you came back to Woodland is a housing area. Tell me where Woodland is located in the city. 
MR. COMPTON:	It's right in the center, I would say. I don't know about the geographic center, but, you know, it's right next to the Downtown area. It was centrally located so you could walk anywhere you wanted to go. I always took the bus sometimes, but it was pretty easy to get around there. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Before you left Oak Ridge, do you remember the gates?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, I do. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you ever have any opportunity to go out and come back through the gates?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, we went through that lots of times. We'd go to Knoxville, on occasions there would be a bus that you could get on to go to Knoxville, and you had to go out the gates and come back. I remember going over on Gay Street and just standing on the corner. I don't know why we went, we didn't have any money to spend for anything. We wouldn't have spent it anyway, but I remember wanting to go see the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, you ever hear of that? 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Yes. 
MR. COMPTON:	We would stand out there any listen to it from the outside. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	It was on Market Square. 
MR. COMPTON:	On Market Square, yeah. Well I thought it was on Gay Street, but that's in Market Square area, yeah. We did go to the S&W and eat a couple of times though, the old S&W Cafeteria. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That was a famous eating place. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, it was highlighted. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you ever go into the department stores and ride the elevator?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, yep. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What about over to Sears store and ride the escalators? Did you ever visit that?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, yep.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That was a thrill for a kid. 
MR. COMPTON:	The thing I liked most was just hanging out on a corner and watching all the characters go by, because there were different people, and I'm always a people watcher.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	There was a contrast of coming to Oak Ridge and going over there, wasn't it?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh yeah, yeah. Because Oak Ridge was kind of homogenous, you know, everybody was young, everybody was intelligent, I don't want to say intelligent, but you know, everybody was the same. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember, it seemed like everybody got along with each other here in Oak Ridge. 
MR. COMPTON:	That's a good point. There wasn't a lot of competitiveness among people, I think. The thing I liked most about Oak Ridge was there weren't any enclaves of you know, you might be living next door to the head of the laboratory, or some scientist or something. There wasn't bifurcation. There wasn't a strata of wealth in one part and not so much in the other part. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You know, I have talked to ladies that came with their husbands from a large city many years ago, and when they got to Oak Ridge they said why did you bring me to this Godforsaken place, and you know, if they haven't passed away, they still live here. They never went back. 
MR. COMPTON:	I know, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	There's something about the atmosphere and the people here.  
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, it was. My mother and dad made many, many friends. They were, my mother was one of the founders of the Trinity Methodist Church here in town so she knew everybody. She was very outgoing.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did the family do any activities outside the house, that you can remember? I know money was a tight situation to some degree. 
MR. COMPTON:	One thing that you might find interesting is when television came along. There weren't any close by stations so you couldn't get reception. My dad, being an electronics person, we would go up on top of Louisiana Avenue and he had a key to get in and we could plug in the TV. We plugged the TV in and would raise an antennae up in a tree. He and another guy actually made television antennas that he sold to Sears & Roebuck. They would do this on the side. My dad was a pretty smart guy, so he built these antennas that we could pick up stations a long way off. We would go up on top of Louisiana Avenue in the summertime and take all the neighbors with us, because everybody knew everybody, and we would go up there and sit and watch television, like Lucille Ball or you know, some station. We'd pick up Cuba if the heavy side skip was right. We could watch Cuban programs. We usually got Atlanta or even New Orleans down in Louisiana. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Would that have been where the water tower was?
MR. COMPTON:	That's where the water tower still is. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When the family lived in Woodland, what type of house was that?
MR. COMPTON:	It was cemesto. It was a duplex. We lived on one end and another family lived on the other end. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was that address?
MR. COMPTON:	124 Marquette Road. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you like that house better than the flattop? 
MR. COMPTON:	Actually, no. Partly because there was so much noise, usually, coming from the other end of the house. There was a guy that lived there with his family and they always made a lot of noise, all hours of the day and night. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you have your own bedroom at that time?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, my sister and I each had our bedrooms. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall how the house was heated?
MR. COMPTON:	Coal. Also, it had a stove, but then it would pump air to all the rooms, where in the flattop you just had a stove in the middle of the house and then it would radiate out, diffuse out. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did the family have a telephone?
MR. COMPTON:	Um, I don't think we did. We did on 124 Marquette Road, yeah we had a telephone there. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Were you on a party line?
MR. COMPTON:	I think we were, yeah we were on a party line. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me a little bit about party lines that you remember. 
MR. COMPTON:	Uh, you had to be careful what you said, because somebody else might be listening in, but you know. You didn't always get, you pick up the phone and somebody was on it, you had to put it down. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You were supposed to put it down. 
MR. COMPTON:	You were supposed to put it down, yeah. So . We had one of those in Illinois too as I recall later on. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How did you know when to answer the phone?
MR. COMPTON:	I think the number of rings, but I don't remember. Honestly I don't believe we got many phone calls. I don't remember using it much, but we had one. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let me back up a little bit. When you were younger, before you left Oak Ridge, you weren't 12 years old at that time were you? Did you have an ID badge? Do you remember having an ID badge?
MR. COMPTON:	I don't think I did. I can't recall. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Probably weren't old enough. What do you remember about going through the gates and coming back through?
MR. COMPTON:	Pretty straightforward. I don't remember having a problem going in and out of the gates. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did they search the cars?
MR. COMPTON:	Sometimes, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Just a random search?
MR. COMPTON: 	Just a random search, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you stay in the car or did you have to get out of the car?
MR. COMPTON:	I don't think we got out, but I think most of our going and coming at those times when we didn't have our own car, we were on a bus, so it was more they would come on the bus and go through the bus. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember which gate you went in and out of? 
MR. COMPTON:	No. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me how Christmas was here in Oak Ridge when you were growing up, at Christmastime.  
MR. COMPTON:	I don't really have much recollection of Christmastime. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Except when you got the bicycle. 
MR. COMPTON:	Except when I got the bicycle, that was up in Illinois, where I got the bicycle.  That was interesting. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you recall milk deliveries to the door? The milk man and rolling stores?
MR. COMPTON:	Yes, I do. Not very much, but yeah, we had milk deliveries and in Illinois, we didn't have a refrigerator so we didn't have any place to put the milk, so we would just go down the street and buy what we wanted and bring it back, so we didn't have any place to keep it. I remember in getting the milk delivered and picking it up, and I remember a girl over in Woodland falling with a milk bottle in her hand and cut herself really badly. She was a real small girl, lived down the street from us. I do remember that. They had milk bottles then, not plastic. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Were the streets paved in Woodland at that time? 
MR. COMPTON:	Yes, yes. I think by the time we came back, all the streets were paved as I recall. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	It had a different look?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, it was different, it was a different place.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you ever go down to the American Museum of Atomic Energy? 
MR. COMPTON:	Oh yeah, I loved that place, yeah. I went there a lot. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Tell me where it was.  
MR. COMPTON:	When I first started going it was on Jefferson Avenue, down at the west end of town. Even as a little kid, I tried to read all I could, and my favorite thing was to correct the guy that was describing what was going on there. I was kind of a smart aleck I guess. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember what it cost to get into the museum. 
MR. COMPTON:	I think it was free, and I went all the time, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	There was another thing that you could get at the museum that was kind of interesting, remember what that was?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, radioactive dime. I think I still have mine, I'm not sure where it is, however. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where are some of the other special places you remember you'd like to go?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, of course the library, I was there a lot. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where was the library located?
MR. COMPTON:	It was up in Jackson Square, right by the tennis courts now. I used to go out to the rock quarry and swim out there, I never jumped or dove off the rocks like some of my friends did, but that was one place. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where was this rock quarry located?
MR. COMPTON:	This was out here where Rogers and Company is now, you know that rock quarry there. I think there might have been another one somewhere out on the west end. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I believe there's one this side of where they are, it was used by many local guys. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When you were dating, did you have certain rules that you had to abide by, you know being home at a certain time of things of that nature?
MR. COMPTON:	No. Usually the girl you were dating might have that, but I never had any. My parents, I don't remember them ever being upset about me coming in late or whatever.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What year did you graduate from Oak Ridge High School? 
MR. COMPTON:	'56, pick-up sticks.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What did you do after graduation?
MR. COMPTON:	I went to a small college in Kentucky, Berea College. I was planning to go into the military and one of the teachers at Oak Ridge High School found out that I wasn't going to college and she called me and said, "What are you doing"? I said, "I'm going into the military". I think I had signed up to go to maybe the Air Force, I don't remember then, but I remember that my English teacher actually got on the phone and called this college, which I'd never heard of. Do you know about Berea College? 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Yes.  
MR. COMPTON:	It's free education basically, but one was required to work on campus. Not only that, I had a scholarship when I got there that I didn't know about. It was a great place. It was one of the first schools in the South to be integrated and it's an excellent school, and it was free. That was the key. I couldn't go to UT or anyplace else, my parents didn't have any money. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So how did you get to college?
MR. COMPTON:	How did I get there? 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	How did you get there? 
MR. COMPTON:	The first time I went up, my parents drove me up. Every other time I hitchhiked back and forth. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you have problems—
MR. COMPTON:	Until, until I started working here during the summers my sophomore year. My freshman year I went from Berea up to work in the pea fields in Illinois, which was a good experience. That was a very good experience. We averaged 17 hours a day with a pitchfork, pitching peas off a truck into a viner. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was the name of that town?
MR. COMPTON:	Mendota, Illinois. It was just a big flat area and we were trucked out to this area. We all lived in this one bunkhouse. There was another woman there that fed us. I made a ton of money that summer, because they paid you time and a half once you got past 8 hours and then double time from 12 on so there were times when we worked 24 hours a day. You'd grab a nap every once in a while. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You know, there were guys from Oak Ridge that went up there in the early 60s that was still going on. 
MR. COMPTON:	Well, late 50s is when I went up there. I made a lot of money that summer and of course Berea was free. Then I got a job here in Oak Ridge working at Y-12 in '57, maybe '58. The second summer. Then I worked at K-25 for three summers after that while I was still going to school and then to graduate school one year. So at that point, I bought my own car. I bought a '54 Ford. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Can you describe your job without going into any kind of classification issues?
MR. COMPTON:	Uh, yeah. I mean at Y-12 I worked in the calutron area. I did a lot of work with uranium, learned a lot, and did some things with that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you relate to your father about working the calutron area versus when he was out there, did you all talk about it?
MR. COMPTON:	We never talked about that, no. He still wouldn't talk about it, you know. He knew what he was doing, but he didn't talk about it. Then I worked for three summers out at K-25, Gaseous Diffusion Plant. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What were you doing there?
MR. COMPTON:	The first two summers I worked in the Flow Research Division, some of the smartest guys I've ever known worked there. The consultants they had were Jesse Beams from Virginia and Lars Onsager was a consultant, and Dick Present at UT. The group I worked in and worked around was Hal Weisberg and Abe Berman. They were just top notch scientists and I got to know them a little bit. Later Dr. Present was my Ph.D. advisor at the University of Tennessee
MR. HUNNICUTT:	In your description of a smart individual, how do you detect someone like that?
MR. COMPTON:	Well first of all, they are well schooled. They knew everything that you're supposed to know out of every physics book or chemistry book. I mean they know it, but then they can apply it and they can go beyond that. They can solve problems that come up. They were very good at everything they did. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You mentioned you worked at Y-12. Tell me a little bit about that. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, that was 1958 maybe, something like that. My second year at college I spent the summer working out there. It was quite a nice experience. It turned out, that was the summer that there was a criticality incident at Y-12 and some people were, I don't think anybody suffered greatly from it, but they were concerned. A guy by the name of Richard Feynman, you've heard of him I'm sure. Richard Feynman, who at that time wasn't so famous, he is now, but he was well known to the scientific community, even back then. He came there and told them what was going on. What was happening is that there were tanks of uranium that were enriched, that were too close together. If you get them too close together the neutron flux would cause it to go subcritical and you get neutrons coming out. He came up with a scheme called "safe geometry" so you would have to be a certain distance apart, so that was his contribution. He came in one day and sort of analyzed the situation. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Now how did you get these jobs at the different plants?
MR. COMPTON:	I just applied for them and I had good recommendations from all my physics professors and my grades were excellent. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Is Berea College a four-year college?
MR. COMPTON:	Yes. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	After you graduated from Berea, where did you go from there?
MR. COMPTON:	I went to the University of Florida, Gainesville. I got a Master’s degree. Everybody who came in the physics department there had to first do a Master’s degree. Then you would go on to do your PhD. I was at that point of going on. I realized that I really wanted to come back to Oak Ridge and work at the Lab. In so doing, I had to come to UT and take the prelim again. I got my degree from UT, but I worked out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on my PhD. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So how long does it take you to get your Masters and Ph.D. normally. 
MR. COMPTON:	Two years. The way it was back then. Not many people get Master’s degrees today, but everybody had to at Gainesville. Two years for your Master’s degree while you're taking a boatload of courses. Then usually another four years or five years depending upon how efficient you are at finishing up. I graduated in 1965 from UT. Then I just stayed on out there for 30 years after that. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where is that?
MR. COMPTON:	At Oak Ridge National Lab. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What department did you work in out there?
MR. COMPTON:	I was in what was called the Health and Safety Research Division or Health Physics Division at that time, when I first started working there. I worked there as a graduate student as well. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you enjoy your work?
MR. COMPTON:	I loved it, yeah, it was a great place to work. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What did you do after you left ORNL?
MR. COMPTON:	In 1996, about 16 years ago, the division I was working in and the part of DOE that was supporting the work at Oak Ridge as well as at Argonne and other places, decided to compete in other areas, at which point our whole division, at least the scientific part of it, was looking for something else. At that point, I decided to not do something else at the Lab, but I was offered a position of Department Head of Physics at Georgia Tech, and then three other universities made me offers. When UT found out I was leaving, the Lab and UT got together and said if you stay here and go to UT and be a professor there, that you can take all your equipment from the Lab. That was a no brainer. I mean I gave up some money, because I stayed a part time employee at the lab. I had some severance pay I could have been paid myself, but taking all my equipment, which they weren't going to use, was a big plus for me as well as the University of Tennessee, so I brought a lot of stuff over there that other people used, so I must have gotten 2 or 3 million dollars’ worth of equipment that wasn't going to be used, but was very useful at UT.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	For people that don't know, tell me about the Graphite Reactor there and what it's purpose was in the beginning. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah sure. The Graphite Reactor was a product of the initial research at the University of Chicago, you know the Stagg Field reactor there that Fermi had shown that you can breed plutonium and you can breed plutonium which is more fissionable than uranium. So the Graphite Reactor was a big chunk of graphite that had holes in it that you would put the material in and breed the uranium going to plutonium. Then after cooking for a while and making the plutonium, you'd push the remains out in the back side and catch all of that stuff. Then you would separate the uranium from the plutonium. It's hard to separate 235 from 238 because they're the same element basically, so you can't do any chemistry to separate them, you have to do physical things like a mass spectrometer or a centrifuge to separate the 235 from 238, but you can separate uranium from plutonium because of its chemistry. So that's what the Graphite Reactor did, was to separate the plutonium from the uranium. I don't believe any of that plutonium was actually used for the bomb. The information that they gained by doing that, by using that Graphite Reactor to understand how to separate, you know, the uranium and the plutonium, it went into Big Bertha or something at Hanford.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	The B reactor. 
MR. COMPTON:	So that's where the plutonium bomb was made. The uranium bomb was made at Y-12 of course. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So basically the Graphite Reactor was a pilot plant until the Hanford site got up and running. 
MR. COMPTON:	That's right. They used that information to optimize the separation. Now they may have used a little bit, I don't know that much about it, but yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you ever see the first nuclear powered engine that, I can't remember the doctor's name that had that out at the Lab. It was run off the Graphite Reactor, producing energy. 
MR. COMPTON:	No, I don't think I have. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Oh, a little toy steam engine basically is what it was. It was a kind of neat thing to see. How big is the reactor out there? I've seen the wall where you see the illustration. 
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, it's about the size of this house I say, or a little less than the size of this house. What's interesting about it is that in the back, if you ever visit there, what you can do, they had a big bucket of sand with a rope that went to the control rods and an axe, I think it was. If things got too hot, you just break that and this bucket of sand would fall and it would insert rods that it would stop the reactor from going critical. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	They also developed isotopes that were first used in a ship from over there, were you involved in that?
MR. COMPTON:	No, I just know about it, and you know a lot of Y-12 was used to make radioactive materials later on as well as HFIR [High Flux Isotope Reactor] where you take things from Y-12, bring it over to HFIR and then they'd irradiate it then they would use them for medical purposes or whatever. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	If I'm not mistaken, there is a beta calutron, a couple still left in Y-12 that they used to use. 
MR. COMPTON:	There are, but I think they're shut down. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	They are. They used to be open to the public for a while during the summer. I was fortunate to see that. 
MR. COMPTON:	Any new one, if you ever built a new one, would be using superconducting coils rather than, you know, it takes a lot of electricity to run those calutrons. Although the K-25 plant, which pushed uranium-236 through these barriers used more energy than anybody around here, they used more electrical power than the whole state of Texas I'm told, at one time.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I understand Norris and Fort Loudoun Dam both supplied power for that plant. 
MR. COMPTON:	It had to, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Let’s go back a little bit. Did your family ever have a need to use the Oak Ridge Hospital in the days that you were here?
MR. COMPTON:	No, I don't think so. I don't think we ever had an incident. I broke my collarbone playing football, my sister broke her arm riding a bicycle, but that was in Illinois, so I don't think so. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember ever having doctors make house calls to your house?
MR. COMPTON:	No. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What about the dental facilities, did you use those here?
MR. COMPTON:	I don't think so. I don't remember, don't think so. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember the Snow White Drive-In?
MR. COMPTON:	Sure do. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What do you remember about it?
MR. COMPTON:	It's just a place where you would go to get a hamburger and things, you know, whatever. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember where it was located?
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, it was on the Turnpike. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	About where?
MR. COMPTON:	I'm going to guess, where Snappy Tomato Pizza Place is, you know what I'm talking about?
MR. HUNNICUTT:	That's a little bit further than where it really was. It was right across from where the Chrysler dealership is. The hospital took that space.
MR. COMPTON:	Okay, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	It was a gathering point for most all teenagers in Oak Ridge. It had the best hamburgers you ever had. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, I remember that for sure. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did you meet your wife?
MR. COMPTON:	I met her at Berea College. I was a senior and we decided to get married the summer that I was working at K-25. I proposed to her right off this point down here on Melton Lake Drive. I went off to University of Florida and was gone a whole year, so we didn't see each other except for at Christmastime and we got married the next summer. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did you get married?
MR. COMPTON:	We got married in Morganton, North Carolina at Salem Methodist Church. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What was her maiden name?
MR. COMPTON:	Byrd. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Her first name?
MR. COMPTON:	Margaret Milinda, but she goes by Milinda. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did you live first after being married?
MR. COMPTON:	We got married in North Carolina at the Salem Methodist Church, came across the mountain, and in coming over there, I had arranged for a hotel room at the Thunderbird Inn, somewhere across the mountain over there. I'd never stayed at a hotel or motel before, so I didn't know you were supposed to put the money down or at least some kind of guarantee, so when we got there coming back that night, we didn't have a room. They'd already given our room out. So we had to go find a place that I could afford, because we had maybe 50 dollars between us coming back from North Carolina, and I had a job here in Oak Ridge two days later. So we had to get back here. We lived down off of Tennessee Avenue in one of those F houses, or something with the end unit. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	E Apartments?
MR. COMPTON:	E Apartments, yeah, one of those.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	You lived in the NE1? One bedroom? 
MR. COMPTON:	One of the end, right.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember what that looked like inside?
MR. COMPTON:	It was nice. It had hardwood floors and it was a very nice place. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did it have coal heating as well?
MR. COMPTON:	That I don't remember, we were just there during the summer so. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Then where did you move to?
MR. COMPTON:	We went back to Florida to finish my degree there. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When did you come back to Oak Ridge?
MR. COMPTON:	In '62 to finish my Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Did you have children by then?
MR. COMPTON:	No, no. We had been very careful to not have any children and then it was a long time before we had our first one, like five years before we had our first one. Then they came like that. We had four in a row. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What gender were they?
MR. COMPTON:	I had a girl, Jana, and a boy Derek, and then Amy, and Anne.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Were they all born in Oak Ridge?
MR. COMPTON:	They were all born in Oak Ridge, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do they live in the area today?
MR. COMPTON:	My daughter lives with her husband in Corvallis, Oregon. She works for the EPA and he works for USGS. She has a daughter. She is doing quite well. I won't go into that. Then a son who lives in Seattle. He's a vice president for T-Mobile. He has a daughter and a son. She is a junior in high school looking for going off to school. Then I have a daughter who lives in Knoxville. She and her husband work for Scripps and they have a son. Then I have a daughter who just had a little baby about a month ago. She is a professor at Pensacola State University, it's a four-year school now. He is a pilot. He was in the Coast Guard. He was a fixed wing jet pilot in the Coast Guard but he's now a pilot. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	When your children went through the Oak Ridge school system, what was your opinion of their schooling?
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, I think it was good to excellent, yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Where did the family live after living in Woodland? Did you always live in Woodland, or where did you go?
MR. COMPTON:	No, we moved when I got a job at Oak Ridge. By the way, I was told that I was the highest paid incoming person in 1965, I guess it was, at $13,000 a year, that's what my salary was at the Lab. Then we bought a house on Tabor Road, it was a B house, I think it was. It had beautiful hardwood floors. We went in and sanded it all down. We enjoyed living there a lot. It was cozy, quaint. Then we bought a house for $32,000 over on Berwick Drive. It's in...
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Briarcliff? 
MR. COMPTON:	Not Briarcliff, but that area. Emory Valley I think. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	The B house, how many bedrooms did the B house have?
MR. COMPTON:	The B house, I think, had two bedrooms. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Do you remember what else beside the hardwood floors?
MR. COMPTON:	Well, fireplace, the cemesto siding and things. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	What has been the most amazing thing you've seen in your lifetime?
MR. COMPTON:	The most amazing thing. I would say, besides my four kids, I still don't believe that children can be born, but that's, you know, people talk about miracles, that's a miracle every time you see your child born. I would say that probably the development of the laser. It's an amazing device and I've used those my whole life. I've been a laser scientist among other things. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	There are so many things, it's hard to describe just one, isn't it?
MR. COMPTON:	It is. Yeah, but in terms of a device that is so miraculous, of course the fact that the bomb worked the way it did, I wouldn't want to call that a great achievement, but I remember as a young boy finding out there were 90,000 people killed when that bomb was dropped on Japan the first time, and about the same amount the second time, I don't know why we were cheering actually. I never quite understood why we were cheering, but then when you think about how many people would've been killed, my uncle would have been one of them, would have likely lost his life going into Japan. It would have been a horrible thing. So you know, it was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	But you know the spinoff from what was discovered from the medical standpoint and how to use that material and things has really been a benefit to a lot of people throughout the world. Some people probably wouldn't be alive today if it wasn't for some of the medical achievements discovered from the bombs. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	So there are always seems to be good and bad with that. 
MR. COMPTON:	Yeah, well I think, you know, the good part was that we did it and not somebody else. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	This is very true.  Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like to talk about that comes to mind? Oh, tell me what you're doing presently as far as taking up your spare time? 
MR. COMPTON:	Oh, spare time? I've been working pretty hard at UT as a professor over there. One thing I will say, it takes a lot more of your total time if you're a professor at the university than working at a national lab: you had your weekends free, you could come home at 5:00 and go fishing, whatever. I haven't been fishing in so long I don't know what it's like. It's been consuming to be a professor. You're never through doing something, you know, if you're conscientious. Now I could have been a slacker and done what I wanted to, but if you have students who are working on their degree and you're writing papers, you're on committees, writing proposals, and preparing lectures. It takes a lot of time. You don't have a lot of free time, but I enjoy playing the piano a lot. I do a lot of that. I'm looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, so at 75 I'm thinking of retiring so I'll have more time to do some of these other things, but I've written two books in the last 10 years that are about to go out the door, so that'll be a big load off of me. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I don't know how you find the time to write books.  
MR. COMPTON:	I enjoy that. I think that's what I will do in my retirement. I've got a book that, a talk that I give about a guy named Benjamin Thompson or Rumford, Count Rumford, do you ever hear of him? 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	No. 
MR. COMPTON:	It's a compelling story. There has been one book written, but it's not a very good book, so I'm going to write a book on Rumford I think when I retire also.  
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Well, it's been my pleasure to interview you. I believe that this interview will be a benefit to some student or whoever down the pike. You know, they can go pull these interviews up on line through the library and there is always some kind of information that if a student is looking for, they can find it through these interviews. 
MR. COMPTON:	One thing I would say about students. If students listen to this and they wanted to get something out of it, I would say the following. My only and biggest disappointment in life is not making the high school basketball team. That sounds trivial, doesn't it, right? 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Not necessarily. 
MR. COMPTON:	I knew that I was pretty good and actually when I was a senior they had a vote as to who the best basketball player at Oak Ridge High School was and I won the vote, but then people say, but you're not on the team, how is that possible? I said well, I just somehow didn't click. I went off to college and I made the Varsity, beat out some All-State players and made the Varsity. After I had done that, then my second year I came back to school at the end of the year, I decided that I wanted to concentrate on physics and chemistry. I was interested in having a job the rest of my life that was meaningful. If I hadn't, I probably would have been a high school physics teacher, which is not a bad thing. I mean, it's not at all bad, but I would have reached a different level than I have at the present time. So I would say, there is so much emphasis on sports in high school now. You see it, right? High school football, basketball, and whatever. That doesn't mean a whole lot, you know. I mean, it's not that meaningful. If you're wanting to make a contribution somewhere down the road, and I've made a number of them. One of them, I own a company here in town that makes mass spectrometers and we've employed a lot of people over the last number of years. That wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed on the track of playing basketball and everything. So, anyway, I think there is too much emphasis on sports. There are some really good people who play football and basketball, whatever, that could be contributing at a higher level if they hadn't put so much effort into athletics. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	Well thank you again for your interview and the world has benefited from your knowledge and your teaching I can tell from this interview.  
MR. COMPTON:	I hope so. 
MR. HUNNICUTT:	I wish you well and I hope you continue to teach.  
MR. COMPTON:	Thank you Don. 
[End of Interview]

[Editor’s Note: Portions of this transcript have been edited at Mr. Compton’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]