Blackwood, Lloyd

              ORAL HISTORY OF LLOYD BLACKWOOD
With wife, Barbara Blackwood
Interviewed by Bill Wilcox
Filmed by Keith McDaniel
April 6, 2011 
Mr. Wilcox: This is Bill Wilcox, and I’m interviewing at my home Lloyd C. Blackwood, who now lives in Knoxville. This is April 6, 2011. Lloyd, thanks so much for calling me and telling me something of your fascinating story of – as I told you at the time, I don’t know that we’ve ever had a chance to interview somebody that started off in construction and ended up as a construction supervisor and then an elected politician in Oak Ridge. So we’re very anxious to get your story today. Wonder if we could start off though before you came to Oak Ridge. Could you tell us something about where you were born and raised? 
Mr. Blackwood: I was born in Etheridge, Tennessee. My father was a Methodist Minister. I was born in a Methodist parsonage in – on February the 15th, 1917. That makes me ninety-four years old today. Part of my early childhood was spent in West Tennessee. We moved to Florence, Alabama, when I was fifteen and I lived there and married there, my first marriage. I lived there until I came to – well, I went to Charleston, West Virginia, to a rubber plant, synthetic rubber plant, worked there before I came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Wilcox: That was in the World War II, then.
Mr. Blackwood: Yes, that was in 1942 when I went to Charleston, West Virginia.
Mr. Wilcox: How did you get to be a plumber?
Mr. Blackwood: I got a job working for a plumbing and heating company as a helper. I worked four years as a helper before I was able to take an examination and become a plumber or a pipefitter. And I worked at TVA in Sheffield, Alabama, when I first got my journeyman’s book. Then I worked [at an] aluminum rolling mill. 
Mr. Wilcox: This was in Florence?
Mr. Blackwood: It was in Sheffield, Alabama. Yeah, the Local Union’s in Sheffield, Alabama, 760.
Mr. Wilcox: I see. Well, what attracted you to Oak Ridge then? How’d you hear about it? It was supposed to be a big secret.
Mr. Blackwood: Big secret. When we finished up at Charleston, West Virginia, we had contacts with the unions, and the union business manager in Charleston, West Virginia told us that they need men in Knoxville, Tennessee, at a Clinton Engineer Works. So I came down here on the 27th of June, went to the business agents the next morning in Knoxville. He gave us a referral card to come out here. Stone & Webster’s Personnel was at Elza Gate on the right-hand side. Also, the rationing board was there. And down about a half a block on the left-hand side was where you got your examination. And then we went straight to work at Y-12.
Mr. Wilcox: Was that still outside the gate?
Mr. Blackwood: No, it was inside the gate.
Mr. Wilcox: It was inside the gate.
Mr. Blackwood: Inside Elza Gate, yeah. And we went to work the next morning, we’d always been used to working. There wasn’t anything to do. The foreman – we reported to a foreman. He told us to get lost. He didn’t have any pipe. And there were woods all around Y-12. So we were used to working; it just tore me all to pieces, just walking is all you could do.
Mr. Wilcox: But they hired you and the other guys that came with you?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, the one man came with me from Florence.
Mr. Wilcox: But there was nothing for you to do.
Mr. Blackwood: So after about three or four days, somebody told me – gave me a little tip. He said if you want to go to that telephone outside the Personnel there in Y-12 and call the motor pool, they’ll send you a car, and you can just see what’s going on in Oak Ridge. He didn’t call it ‘Oak Ridge’ then. Said they’re building a town up there. So the next morning I went to this telephone which was outside, picked up the phone and said, “Give me the motor pool.” I said, “This is Mr. Blackwood down at Stone & Webster Personnel. I need a car.”
Mr. Wilcox: [laughter] Lloyd, that was good.
Mr. Blackwood: So, “How long do you need the car?” I said, “Oh, a couple hours.” So here come a car, government car, of course, and it had hired taxi drivers and women and everybody from cripples – all able-bodied men who didn’t have a deferment was in the Army. So he came to Personnel, and we were going to quit and go back to Florence. So we went in there and finally got to see the Personnel Manager: tall, slender fellow. I don’t remember his first name, but his last name was Piper. And of course he was surprised I had called and made an appointment. I told him who I was. I was Mr. Blackwood, of course. And he didn’t – he told the guard to let us in. Here’s two plumbers standing there, two craftsmen. And that didn’t suit him too well, I don’t think. And he wanted to know what the hell we wanted. And I told him we wanted to quit, that we was down in Y-12, that we had been down there three or four days and hadn’t had a thing to do, didn’t have any pipe. We wanted to go back to Florence, Alabama, where we could get us a job. And he jumped up and he said, “I want to go back to Alabama, too.” He was from Montgomery. He said, “Get your butts back down there and stay down there because,” he said, “there’s going to be plenty to do.” And this is the first time I heard this. He said, “I’m not going to tell you what we’re doing here, but we’re going to win this damn war.”
Mr. Wilcox: Wonderful.
Mr. Blackwood: So we got in that car and went back down there. In about two or three weeks, well, we started getting pipe, we started working. And at that time, there wasn’t any plastic pipes for sewage lines. It was cast iron. And cast iron went into a hub, about four inches in there, and you put oakum in there, which is a type of yarn, and you pack it, then you pour lead in it. During the war you didn’t pour lead because there wasn’t any. It was going into bullets. So we had what they called a teigle. It was a black substance that you could melt and pour in there, and it set up real hard. And that’s what we used in our lines.
Mr. Wilcox: What was that called?
Mr. Blackwood: Teigle. I don’t really know what it was made of. But we worked on that, and we worked on 9731, was the first building in Oak Ridge – I mean in Y-12. Worked on that and – 
Mr. Wilcox: Putting in the sewer lines.
Mr. Blackwood: Putting in the sewer lines. Then we started putting in acid lines, glass piping. I had never seen a glass pipe.
Mr. Wilcox: That was something new for a pipefitter.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, absolutely. Then we went down to 9202 and 9204, worked those two jobs. Back and forth. And we was in 9731 in the spring. Went to work one morning – MPs were walking around with submachine guns all around 9731. We thought probably that the Germans had invaded us. What they’d done, they brought in that silver because you couldn’t get copper to use the grounds for the electricians. And this 9731, I don’t know what was in that building, but it had a magnet. It was a big, huge building. And it had a trench poured under all around it, and that’s where they put this silver. It was three inches wide and eight [feet] long. And as electricians that had to drill holes in it to fashion it to the brackets in that ditch – it wasn’t a ditch, it was a concrete trench, and then stand and watch them because they had to catch the shavings because it was – 
Mr. Wilcox: Silver.
Mr. Blackwood: – solid silver. But anyway in – 
Mr. Wilcox: Can you remember what month that was? Was it still in the summer?
Mr. Blackwood: It was in the spring of the year 1944 when they brought that silver in there. And we finished up 9731, and was about finished with 9204. I had had experience on instrumentation, bending copper tubing and soldering instruments. And I heard through the grapevine that they were going to need an instrument man down in K-25. And I talked my way into the – getting down there. It was either in September or October of 1944.
Mr. Wilcox: And that building was started by then.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah, it was already going. It was already down there, yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: They were building it, though; lots of people there.
Mr. Blackwood: Yes. It was twenty-three buildings down, three buildings across and twenty-three back; fifty-three buildings under one roof. I went to work for an Irishman by the name of Bill Shay.
Mr. Wilcox: For what company?
Mr. Blackwood: Midwest Piping. They were subcontractors under J. A. Jones. Stone & Webster – I’ll go back just a little bit on Y-12. Stone & Webster built Y-12 and Tennessee Eastman came in there and operated it.
Mr. Wilcox: Did you work for Stone & Webster or for a sub?
Mr. Blackwood: I worked for Stone & Webster.
Mr. Wilcox: For a sub. They had lots of subcontractors.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, but I worked – they had their own pipe people.
Mr. Wilcox: Do you remember the names of any of them? Do you remember a guy named Nicholson? Doesn’t matter. I just – I happen to have an organization chart of Stone & Webster and the piping supervisor was a guy named Nicholson. 
Mr. Blackwood: I want to talk to you – 
Mr. Wilcox: Well, back to K-25.
Mr. Blackwood: Okay. Went to work with this Bill Shay, who was an Irishman out of New York. He belonged to a No. 2 Local, Plumber’s Local in New York. And in about the middle of November, they sent him to – they were needing people so bad, they gave him a general foreman’s rating and sent him to New York to recruit plumbers and pipefitters to come to Oak Ridge, paid his expenses and paid him general foreman’s 
pay. And they gave me his job. That’s when I got my first job as a foreman. And I guess in the first part of the year, we were installing tubing. Now, there’s two hundred and fifty instrument panel boards in K-25. There’s ten in each building, fifty-three buildings.
Mr. Wilcox: Big panel boards.
Mr. Blackwood: Yes. I remember the Bailey Instrument Company made all the instruments for K-25. Sometime after the first of the year, they asked us all to work two or three different Sundays and give all the money to build a bomber called the Sunday Punch. I had sixty men working for me. Two men would not work, those two sons. 
Mr. Wilcox: But all the rest would.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. I had to get permission from Colonel Cornelius, who was General Groves’ man. He was over K-25. I had to get permission for him to fire them because they was needing people so bad. But anybody that wasn’t loyal enough to this country to work those Sundays, I didn’t want see them.
Mr. Wilcox: You didn’t want them.
Mr. Blackwood: I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t want to even look at them.
Mr. Wilcox: [laughter] Good for you.
Mr. Blackwood: So I fired them. 
Mr. Wilcox: Did it stick?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yes. I had to get permission from the Army to do it, though. But anyway, going back to it, I want to mention the scale. Plumbers and pipefitters were getting $1.625 an hour. A foreman made $1.875, and a general foreman made $2.125 an hour and got time-and-a-half for overtime. It was the same scale – in other words, the wages were frozen during the war. There was no raise. Sometime in 1944, they started taking out five percent victory tax to help pay for the war. In the last part of May – well, before that though, I want to explain something about copper tubing. Those building racks had about three-hundred quarter-inch copper tubing lines in them stacked in – coming from this – there was ten cells or ten units in each building, and therefore you had ten instrument panel boards. The panel boards were ten foot long and about seven foot high. We put all the instruments in them and tubed them up. They told me, I guess it was about February or March, said, “You’re going to get thirty women tomorrow.”
Mr. Wilcox: To help put the copper tubing together?
Mr. Blackwood: I said, “For what?”
Mr. Wilcox: [laughter]
Mr. Blackwood: Now, we had to sweat the tubing. You didn’t have Swagelok fittings then.
Mr. Wilcox: No, you had to solder them all together.
Mr. Blackwood: And it was real nasty. The flux was all over everything.
Mr. Wilcox: Silver solder, wasn’t it.
Mr. Blackwood: In those trays, yeah. “They’re going to clean that tubing for you.” Well, I didn’t want them, so I picked out one of my men, and I said, “He’ll be” – [laughter]
Mr. Wilcox: He’ll take care of the women.
Mr. Blackwood: “I don’t want those women.”
Mr. Wilcox: [laughter]
Mr. Blackwood: I had too much already.
Mr. Wilcox: Did they come?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah. And they were – some of them were women of the night. Some of them were nice people. But they got them out of Chattanooga and Nashville and anywhere they could get them.
Mr. Wilcox: Anyway you could get help.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: Let me interrupt. Was the work that you did on the instrument lines in the K-25 building or was it in an instrument shop somehow?
Mr. Blackwood: No, it was in the K-25 building.
Mr. Wilcox: It was in it?
Mr. Blackwood: In the building, yeah. There was ten panel boards in each one of those buildings. And we did all the work in the building itself. We brought the panel boards in. Brought the instruments in. Put them in the panel boards and run the tubings in those big buildings. And those building trays were so large, they were about four foot wide and about eighteen to twenty inches, maybe twenty-four inches deep. I’m not positive right now. And they used them for walkways. That’s how big they were and how sturdy they were. We had rolling desks. Our desks had casters on them.
Mr. Wilcox: Stand-up.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah, you could just roll them from one building to another.
Mr. Wilcox: Stand-up desks. You didn’t sit down at them.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, no, you didn’t sit down.
Mr. Wilcox: Lloyd, I have some pictures of those instrument panels, and the workmanship is just exquisite. And yet it was wartime, and everybody was in such a hurry. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’d been a little bit sloppy. But it isn’t. The instrument lines, all square bends, beautiful silver soldered joints.
Mr. Blackwood: Absolutely. We – I guess it was probably the last of May. Colonel Cornelius called all the supervision into a big warehouse, all the piping supervision. And he told us – at that time I had the pre-op run, me and my men. They were pulling vacuum on the whole system, one building at a time, and we had to synchronize the instruments. I had two men with me, two Army technicians, I could not pull – if I couldn’t get an instrument calibrated, I’d have to take it out. I couldn’t take it out till that Army man put a tag on it. He had to check it and make sure it wasn’t doing something it shouldn’t and would replace it. We was down to about thirty-two or -three buildings being through the latter part of May. Colonel Cornelius called all the supervision in the building, and he said – he told us, he said, “I have got to have one building a day for the next thirty days because we’re going to end this damn war.” This was in June of 1945. He said, “I don’t care how many hours you work. I don’t care if a man falls out because people are dying every second.” And in the meantime, what he’d also done, they called it his ‘folly,’ he’d built Cafeteria 8 down at K-25. He had built a dormitory. He sent electricians out like a son – talking about sending Bill Shay out, to find electricians. He needed two hundred electricians. He had a dormitory to put them in, had a cafeteria to feed them that stayed open all the time, twenty-four hours a day, give them five hundred apiece if they stayed to finish the job.
Mr. Wilcox: Goodness.
Mr. Blackwood: That was a lot of money back in 1945.
Mr. Wilcox: It was, but they were desperate.
Mr. Blackwood: But he told us, he said, “A building a day. I’ve got to have it. I don’t give a damn.” I’d stay down there sometimes two or three days at a time. He said, “You can sleep your men in four-hour shifts or two-hour shifts. Wake them up and put two more down, but I want them on this job.” And that’s the way we did it.
Mr. Wilcox: That’s real pressure.
Mr. Blackwood: It was pressure. At the end of June we turned over the last building. And I had a deferment from my draft board in Florence, so I went home, told my draft man, who was head of the draft board, I was ready to go. We was through is what I was told.
Mr. Wilcox: Really?
Mr. Blackwood: He said you want to go from Clinton, Tennessee, or do you want to go from – come back to Florence. I said, well, I’ll go from Clinton. So that’s where I went, and I was – had been accepted in the Navy, and I had about I think thirteen or fourteen days left when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and they notified me to stay home. “Don’t come.” [laughter] But anyway, we had K-27 already started, which was three buildings. And they told us to go ahead and finish that, which was really a tie-in to K-25, K-27 was. What it did, I don’t know.
Mr. Wilcox: It was the first addition to K-25.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: Worked well.
Mr. Blackwood: What they did during this war – I want to go back a little bit and tell you. They never gave us a drawing. We had flow sheets. We’d just see a little bit at a time. In other words, we didn’t know what was going to happen in the next building, and we didn’t know what was in those lines. Of course, we knew what was in our instrument lines. As far as the process piping, you had no idea. And most of that piping was nickel lined, sprayed with whatever, you know. And I had an experience out in K-27. The instrument job was so big in K-25 they had two general superintendents. One was a fellow by the name of Scott from St. Louis. That’s where Midwest Piping’s home office was. And the other was Bill Wiederman. He was from Chicago. Bill Wiederman was my general superintendent. But when I went to – on the pre-op run, me and my sixty men were loaned to J. A. Jones. We worked on the supervision of an engineer by the name of Victor Seidel. He was a German. You get him mad, he’d just goosestep over to K-25. But he was a fine, fine human being, and he really knew instrumentation. Well, when I went home to tell them I was ready to go to the service, Bill Wiederman left. Mr. Scott and I had not gotten along too well. He’d given me some bad information two or three times about when a building was ready for me to go into it to do the pre-op run. And Mr. Seidel finally told him, he said, “You don’t tell us the truth, so from now you put it in writing. You turn a building over to us, you tell it to us in writing,” which was the thing to do. Well, anyway, while I’m gone, my general superintendent leaves. Mr. Scott cussed me back to my tools. So I came back, and I went and told Mr. Seidel that I was going to quit and go back home. He said, “No, I want you to –” he said, “Can you get sent back out here with J. A. Jones?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, you do that tomorrow in the morning.”
Mr. Wilcox: So you switched from Midwest Piping to J. A. Jones.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, I terminated myself that day. The next morning I – 
Mr. Wilcox: Hired into Jones.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. The next morning, why, a man from Knoxville and a friend, a buddy of mine wrote me a referral from the Union so I could hire in over across the river, was the Personnel then. And I hired in, and they made me a superintendent. And he said, “Now, I want you to go down to Mr. Scott’s office down at K-27, and when you go in the door, I’m going to call him.” So I go down there. Scott’s a man about fifty years old. I’m twenty-nine at the time. And when I walked in the door, I only had a tag on because regardless of how many Q-clearances you had, when you hired back in, why, you got a tag and it took four or five days to clear you.
Mr. Wilcox: Get your badge.
Mr. Blackwood: Get your badge made. When I walked in the door, the phone rang. Mr. Scott picked up the phone, and I could – Seidel, that German voice, you could hear him. He said, “Coming in your office is going to be a Mr. Blackwood, sir. I think you know him.” He said, “He will give you directions on – to start with, no drawing can be changed without Mr. Blackwood’s approval. He’ll tell me how many people you can work. He’ll tell you whether you can work overtime or not.”
Mr. Wilcox: This is a fifty-year-old man?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: [laughter]
Mr. Blackwood: And I’m 29. He reached up and got a hold of my tag. His face turned red and purple. He said, “You don’t waste much time, do you?” I said, “No.” I said, “I didn’t this time.” But anyway, that’s a – we got along all right. I told him, I said, “I’m not going to mistreat you, but if you lie to me like you did before, I’m going to run you off.” But anyway that worked out all right.
Mr. Wilcox: That worked good.
Mr. Blackwood: Then we finished K-27. We moved into the Cafeteria 8 building, which is on the right-hand side coming up from K-25 back in the woods there now. The Atomic Energy Commission told us they wanted us to write a history of K-25. They had – Comstock & Bryant had been the prime electrical contractors. They had written a history of K-25. The Army had written a history of K-25, and none of – it didn’t match. They wanted J. A. Jones to write one, and I was kept on for that purpose. I was the only mechanical person there. And there was five of us. We went out and got the information. There was a fellow by the name of Jones. He wasn’t related to J. A. Jones, but he worked for – we were all working for Jones.
Mr. Wilcox: Edmond? 
Mr. Blackwood: No, it wasn’t Edmond. Edmond was the one who took over when the old man died. He was – 
Mr. Wilcox: Edmond was the big – 
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, he was an old man.
Mr. Wilcox: He was the chief engineer at K-25, Edmond. 
Mr. Blackwood: And Ray Althoff. Do you remember Ray Althoff?
Mr. Wilcox: No.
Mr. Blackwood: Well, he came in after Edmond I think and went back. Anyway, we – 
Mr. Wilcox: Did you get that history written?
Mr. Blackwood: We spent – yeah, we did. We spent about I guess six weeks. Every building we had to get the size of electrical, the wattage – I mean, the electrical that went in there, the size piping, that’s the drinking water and sewage. We had to get everything.
Mr. Wilcox: Details.
Mr. Blackwood: Detail it. Sizes of the building and the whole – everything. And it got to be probably at AEC. It should be up there right now. We finished with that, why we got a job to go to X-10 with Monsanto Chemical Company. 
Mr. Wilcox: Before you get into X-10, let me stop and ask you where – I’m real interested in where you were living, Lloyd. When you went to 9731 in 1943 June, of course there wasn’t any place to live.
Mr. Blackwood: No, I was living in – I had a room in Knoxville on Laurel Avenue. And in September – August – about the 20th of August, I got a trailer, Section 10, which is right across from where the First Methodist Church is now. Lived there. It was a two-bedroom.
Mr. Wilcox: Trailer, for you and your wife.
Mr. Blackwood: Yes. And I had two children. I had two children that started school at Robertsville School September 1st, 1943. Before Christmas, I got a three-room trailer, which is at the end of Vermont Avenue, the first where you come up the hill. On the left and down the street down there was a trailer office. Lived there until I went to K-25. I got a flattop.
Mr. Wilcox: A flattop up on the ridge?
Mr. Blackwood: Jefferson Avenue, 376 Jefferson Avenue, and lived there until I had another child. I had a third child. This was by my first wife. She’s passed away. Anyway, I got a three-bedroom flattop on West Outer Drive, 795 West Outer Drive. Still sitting there. And what they did, they furnished you coal. You had a coal box out in front. I had a big old dog that laid under my coal box. They kept coal in your coal box. And when you were in the trailers, they furnished the kerosene. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, I think we paid ten dollars, ten or twelve dollars a month because we were not making a lot of money. See, superintendents during the war were making a hundred dollars a month, I mean, a hundred dollars a week. They were making a hundred dollars a week. They offered me a – when I went to work with J. A. Jones as a superintendent, that’s what I made was a hundred dollars. And the flattops, I don’t remember now exactly what – it was in the twenty-three or -four dollars a month. And then I got the “C” house over on Vista – 107 Vista Road. The way I got that house, I was Chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee, and Dr. Bromback was the doctor for AEC. He lived at 107 Vista Road. And a month before he left Oak Ridge, he had his – we met with him once a month. He had us to meet with us in his home, and he told us that night he was leaving on the 1st of July, I think it was. And so I immediately, of course, went up and asked Mr. Fred Ford for that house. He told me I couldn’t have it; it belonged to Carbide. I had to go to Paul McDowell who was his assistant and a good friend of mine. He got me the house.
Mr. Wilcox: When was this? Is this after the war?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, this is in [1950].
Mr. Wilcox: This is long after the war.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah, this is [’50].
Mr. Wilcox: Okay. I wanted to get that information, but we need to go back to X-10.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. In these trailer parks they had washhouses. One side for the white men to go and take a shower and one side for the women, and then a washroom for them. I’ll get to when we bought the places later. But anyway, we went to X-10, and they was building a laboratory up there, and they sent me up there as a – over the pipework – we brought a Handley Company in from Chicago, a piping company to do the pipe work, subcontracted under Jones.
Mr. Wilcox: Did you say Hughes?
Mr. Blackwood: No, Handley.
Mr. Wilcox: Handley?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, Jim Handley owned the company. And what was funny was I was up there and had the office setup. I was up there and I had an office manager was all I had with me. And I was running the job and had a fellow by the name of John Wheeling came in. Our chief engineer left; his name was Waylon. He went back to New York. They brought a fellow in by the name of John Wheeling. Oh, he was already there, of course, but they brought him as Chief Engineer for J. A. Jones. And I’d been up there a couple of weeks, and John called me one day – and of course I had a government car – and he wanted me to come back down to the office, which was the old Cafeteria 8 building in K-25. And I said, “What do you want, John?” He said, “I want to ask you a question.” He said, “You’ve got a superintendent’s rating.” He said, “What are you superintendent over?” I explained to him and why and how I’d become a superintendent, and why and all of that stuff. He said, “Well, I can’t figure out who has got the biggest title, me or you.” He said, “I’m Chief Engineer.” I said, “Well, John, I’m working for you.” He said, “Well, do you care if I send you over to Personnel?” Personnel was right behind cafeteria. “And have your rating changed to field engineer?” I said, “John, I don’t care what name you give me, as long as you don’t change my money.” He said, “Well, your money will stay the same.” So I had to go over and get changed to a “field engineer” to suit his ego. Anyway, we stayed in X-10 until I came over as general superintendent later and built the Biology Division outside of Y-12.
Mr. Wilcox: Did you work at X-10 at all, or was it physically at Y-12?
Mr. Blackwood: No it was just physically Y-12, and it was physically K-25. When I went down there, I worked about three or four weeks before they sent Bill Shay off.
Mr. Wilcox: Sure. So you were over there when they built the Mouse House.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. In fact, I was General Superintendent. I had all the crafts over there. And finished that job and then we built the Isotope area in X-10, and I went back over there as Mechanical Superintendent. And then when Hughes came in here to build K-29, they had a – this was really something funny – when they came in for their bid and everything, they said, “Well, how much experience have you all had in instrumentation?” Well, they hadn’t ever had any. Caden Hughes hadn’t. They was out of Toledo, Ohio. They said, “Well, maybe we ought to bring Midwest back in here and give them a subcontract.” They said, “No, let us do the first building.” They said, “We’ll prove ourselves.” So I was sitting over there with an engineer whose name – I think his name was Barnett or Burnett. Barnett, I believe.
Mr. Wilcox: Hugh Barnett.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: I know him.
Mr. Blackwood: He had worked with me down in K-25. He said, “Well, I tell you what” – he asked them if they had anybody. They didn’t have anyone. He said, “If you get Lloyd Blackwood, he’ll build that job for you.” They called me and J. A. Jones offered me a superintendent’s job at K-29. So I went down there and stayed down there until – went down there, I guess it was – 
Mr. Wilcox: This is, what, 1949?
Mr. Blackwood: Forty-nine, yes. And I stayed down there until I was elected county court clerk of Anderson County.
Mr. Wilcox: Now, we need to hear that story, of course. But K-29, do you remember that, inside that building?
Mr. Blackwood: Yes, sir.
Mr. Wilcox: That was quite a sight to see. They didn’t have any of those boxes around the equipment. It was all out in front of everybody, so it must have been easier to pipe it up.
Mr. Blackwood: Well, it was a lot easier. [laughter] They gave me a – 
Mr. Wilcox: Do you need some water?
Mr. Blackwood: No, thanks. They told me you could call anywhere in the United States you want to call on your phone there to get instrument people. I had to have three hundred and fifty instrument men.
Mr. Wilcox: Three hundred and fifty?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. That’s what I got for that K-29 job. And I did, I called – I could get somebody that would come in there from West Virginia or from Montana. “You got a buddy or somebody I could call?” And I’d call and get them to come in.
Mr. Wilcox: Is that right?
Mr. Blackwood: I had a fellow that was a real religious guy that was a great instrument man.
Mr. Wilcox: One of your foremen?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. I put out on a – set a panel up in Building 3, which you didn’t have to be restricted. You had to get a Q-clearance to get into the main building. And as number 2, started putting pipe in it, well, you had to be Q-cleared to get in there. But I had about sixty men in my fabricating shop loading the building trays and all of the trays that went out. And so anyway, I had this foreman. I’d get ten men; I’d go to Union on Monday morning, and then you had to fill out a resume of your experience and everything to send it out here before you could be hired. I’d go up there and go in there and look at the resumes that they had and I’d say, “Send me these ten,” or these five or whatever, I saw somebody that had the experience. Otherwise, if we hired somebody on the instruments and they couldn’t do it, they terminated them. They wouldn’t let them go on process. So for nine months, we had a call in for forty men for K-29. No, it’s K-33, I’m sorry. K-29 we hired like that. But this foreman I had would – he had two or three instruments in the panel up there and two or three gauges or recorders, and then the instruments inside, and he said, “Run me a piece of tubing from here to here.” They couldn’t wire. Not qualified for work assigned. Sent them back out.
Mr. Wilcox: Sent them out?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. But anyway, I came back in ’53 with K. B. Hughes and became Assistant General Superintendent in K-33. 
Mr. Wilcox: K-33.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, I did not work in (K-)31. That’s the only one I didn’t work in. And we had twelve hundred men there, twelve hundred pipefitters and welders. And we – for nine months, we had a call in for forty men a day. We didn’t get forty a day. Sometimes we’d get forty, sometimes we’d get ten and sometimes we would have ten or twelve going back that way because we’d fired them, not qualified for work assigned. 
Mr. Wilcox: Did many of them stay with you from the (K-)29 job? Did you get them back?
Mr. Blackwood: Very few. Yeah, I had one man come when I was – it was kind of funny. He and his son both had worked for me. His daddy had worked with me when I was in Y-12 when I first came here in ’43. A big, nice fellow. And he came back when I was General Superintendent, building the Biology Division in Y-12. And his son was working for me. And he got his referral at local union that afternoon, and come and spent the night with his son that night where he was rooming. He told him, he said, “You know what? I’m going to work with that damn Blackwood.” He said, “How’d he get this job?” He said, “I bet there’s not a hat in Tennessee big enough to fit him.” He said, “No, he’s just like that, always was. Hasn’t changed a bit.” The old man came to work for me the next day, and I had him run some cast-iron pipe, and he was corking the lid around the joint in the building, and I went down and got down on one knee and I said, “Give me a hammer,” and I started doing his work for him. So we got along fine. That’s the kind of attitude people have, because I was young and brash and all that.
Mr. Wilcox: Sure. Well, how about we get back to the county court clerk business. How did you ever get into politics?
Mr. Blackwood: I don’t know. I just – well, to start with, in 1946 and ’47 – I’m going to give you a little school business. I was elected President of the PTA at Linden School, ’46 and ’47.
Mr. Wilcox: Linden School? That’s how you started, PTA?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, in ’46 and ’47. In ’47 and ’48, I had to take it again. Nobody wouldn’t take it. Then I ran for Town Councilman. 
Mr. Wilcox: Advisory Town Council.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. Everything in Oak Ridge, all those things were advisory. Fred Ford run the job, run Oak Ridge. You know that.
Mr. Wilcox: He was the Community Affairs Director.
Mr. Blackwood: He was, absolutely. And I ran for Justice of the Peace in 1949, became a member of County Court. And at that time, Oak Ridge was not incorporated, so County Court was the government for Oak Ridge. A lot of people didn’t know that was the only government you had. In fact, when I was County Court Clerk, I came out here every two years and swore in the deputy sheriffs. The policemen in Oak Ridge had to be deputy sheriffs or they couldn’t make an arrest.
Mr. Wilcox: And you deputized them.
Mr. Blackwood: I came out here and swore them in. And the County Court Clerk from Roane County had to come up and swear them in before they could make an arrest down in Roane County.
Mr. Wilcox: Did you ever bump into a Director of Security out here named Bill – William T. Sergeant?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: Real good friend of mine. He died just a couple of months ago.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, I remember him real well.
Mr. Wilcox: I’m sure you must have done business with him.
Mr. Blackwood: I did. I did.
Mr. Wilcox: Well about how the Advisory Town Council though, that was ’48.
Mr. Blackwood: Well, that was ’48 and ’49. I was on it when – the gate-opening ceremony. I’ve got a picture of me and Rod Cameron. 
Mr. Wilcox: I have it too. I’ve got it in my book here.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, it’s in that book, yeah. And when I went on Town Council, we had a member on the School Board, so I went on the School Board, and they elected me Chairman of the School Board.
Mr. Wilcox: In ’48?
Mr. Blackwood: ’49. No, ’48, fall of ’48. I was elected in the summer of ’48 and served until summer of ’49. So I was in office when the gate-opening ceremony – was the 19th of March – 
Mr. Wilcox: ’49, March ’49.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. And the first meeting – we’d never had a – we were supposed to have – we invited a representative from every school in Oak Ridge to come to our meetings, which were once a month.
Mr. Wilcox: School Board?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. Never had had a black person there, so I brought this up my first meeting as a chairman. I said, “I’d like somebody to make a motion that we invite a representative from Scarboro School.”
Mr. Wilcox: How’d that go over?
Mr. Blackwood: Of course it passed. It passed.
Mr. Wilcox: Good.
Mr. Blackwood: So the next morning – I was the General Superintendent down in Y-12. I got in my car, which was a government car, and rolled up to the school and went to the Principal’s office and told him what my business was. And he said, “Yeah, I have a young lady I’d like to send.” So we went back, and he introduced me to her.
Mr. Wilcox: This is Scarboro School?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. Black teacher. Looked like she was about in her thirties. So I told her when we was going to meet, and “I expect you to be there.” The meeting came, she didn’t come. The next morning, I went to see the principal. I said, “Your representative didn’t show up last night.” And he said, “Well, I don’t know why.” Went back and asked her. She said, “I was afraid I’d be embarrassed.” I said, “You will not be embarrassed.” I said, “You come on up there.” So she did. She started coming.
Mr. Wilcox: She did. Good.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. I’ll tell you a funny one, when I was running for County Court Clerk, one of the ministers over there had a meeting with all the candidates running, county candidates. And the fellow running against me was sitting right in front of him, and he got up and he said – I had told him that I had another meeting that I need to go to, and I said, “If you don’t mind, let me speak as soon as you can, so I can leave.” And he got up and he said, “Now, this is a nonpartisan meeting.” He said, “We’ve invited the Republicans and the Democrats,” and he said, “and Independents.” And he said, “We’re nonpartisan.” But he said, “I’m going to have to introduce a man that needs to go to another meeting.” And he said, “He’s the best friend that Gamble Valley ever had, Mr. Lloyd Blackwood.”
Mr. Wilcox: Is that right? That’s nice.
Mr. Blackwood: The guy in front of me - I can just see the back of his neck when it turned red. 
Mr. Wilcox: Is that right?
Mr. Blackwood: I carried it three to one. Of course, most of the blacks had worked for me anyway.
Mr. Wilcox: You told me a great story about Bob Watkins. Can you tell that?
Mr. Blackwood: I want to tell that. Bob Watkins was one of the finest men that I ever knew. He was a black man. He was a representative from Scarboro Village. We had five districts. Blacks had a district too, so Bob came. Bob was a graduate of Morristown College in Morristown, black college. It’s closed now. And he called me, I guess it was in October. 
Mr. Wilcox: What year? This is ’49 or ’48?
Mr. Blackwood: 1948, first one on the Council. And he wanted to go and talk to me. He came over to my house. I invited him in my home, but he wouldn’t come in. He’d just sit in the car.
Mr. Wilcox: Is that right? Lloyd, that’s the way it was then?
Mr. Blackwood: Yes, that’s the way it was. I invited him every time. Two or three different times he came to discuss things with me. But anyway, he was going to ask for a short bus. He had eleven or thirteen – I’m not positive which – high school students going to Austin-East [High School] in Knoxville. The bus was made up at the bus station here, and by the time it got to Gamble Valley, it was usually full of people, and they had to stand, most of them did, with their books, armful of books, and sloshing them back and forth.
Mr. Wilcox: All the way to Knoxville.
Mr. Blackwood: People cussing them. And in the afternoons, the bus was loaded up at the bus station in Knoxville. By the time it got to Austin-East it was full again; it had the same thing going home. He said, “I’m going to ask for a short bus. Will you back me?” I said, “Certainly.” And he talked to other members too. So he told Mr. Ford, he said – he explained to him just what he had explained to me, and he said, “My children are being mistreated.” And he said, “I’m going to ask you for a bus for my children.” Fred said, “Well, Bob,” he said, “we don’t have any money for that.” He said, “Well, Mr. Ford, l will explain something to you.” He said, “If I don’t have the bus for my children, the Monday after Christmas, I’ll have those eleven or thirteen, whatever, my children, Oak Ridge High School, I’m going to enroll, and nobody can stop me because” he said, “that’s a government school. It was built by the federal government. The teachers are being paid by the federal government, and my children will be enrolled.” He said, “I don’t want to” – he said, “Bob, are you threatening me?” He said, “No, Mr. Ford. I’m making you a promise that’s what will happen.”
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, boy.
Mr. Blackwood: Two or three weeks later, he had a short bus hauling children back and forth. In the spring of that year, they had built Gamble Valley, the new shopping center over there and those houses. A fellow by the name of Cappiello, he’s got a building down here named after him, an Italian insurance man.
Mr. Wilcox: Yes. This is his son. His son is running that now.
Mr. Blackwood: Is he? Well.
Mr. Wilcox: The old man was here then.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, the old man was here then. He was a big operator. Well, in the ’40s, they hadn’t quite finished that building when this happened. But he had gotten a permit concession to run the store and the beer hall. And Bob Watkins had the beer concession, had the beer permit and had to get it from Clinton, from Anderson County. And at the time, I was chairman of the Beer Board down in Anderson County.
Mr. Wilcox: Chairman of the Beer Board? You were everything, Lloyd.
Mr. Blackwood: I had every job, everything you could pile on me, I took it. But anyway, he said Cappiello cannot handle those blacks. What’d he do if a black got drunk and wouldn’t listen and go back to his hutment or wherever he lived, he’d call a sheriff. Sergeant Turner was the one that run the black section for the Police Department here. He’d call Sergeant Turner. He’d come pick him up and put him in jail. He’d go get him out on Monday so he could go to work – or Sunday afternoon. But he brought it up to Mr. Ford. Mr. Ford said, “Well, I think it’d be better for one person to have the whole concession.” Bob said, “I want to tell you something. To start with, Mr. Cappiello cannot handle those black people. I can. I never had any trouble out of them all these years. I’ve taken care of them.” And he said, “I’ve got to have that concession.” And Bob didn’t even drink. He was sober. Didn’t drink. Good man. He said, “Well, I’m afraid that’s the way it’s settled.” He said, “Well, I’m afraid of something else.” He said, “Alexander House over there or wherever you all eat, the first time he opens – Cappiello opens that beer joint,” he said, “me and my wife and little Patricia Anne” – my first daughter was named Patricia Anne and his was too. He said, “We’ll be over at the Alexander House eating with you all on Sunday afternoon at lunchtime.” He said, “Now, what’ll you do when the newspaper people come down here from New York and Chicago, wherever, you send them to me and I’ll tell them how good you treating us.” He said, “That’s going to stop.” He said, “I’m going to cause trouble; I don’t want to, but I’m going to do it.” He got the beer permit.
Mr. Wilcox: He got the beer permit?
Mr. Blackwood: Cappiello didn’t get it.
Mr. Wilcox: Cappiello didn’t get it?
Mr. Blackwood: No. And I told Mr. Ford – no, I didn’t tell Mr. Ford. I told Paul McDowell two or three days later, I was talking to him, I said, “Cappiello don’t know, but I wasn’t ever going to give him a beer permit.” I wouldn’t either.
Mr. Wilcox: What was the problem with Cappiello?
Mr. Blackwood: Well, to start with, he couldn’t handle them.
Mr. Wilcox: Couldn’t handle the blacks?
Mr. Blackwood: He couldn’t handle them, no. I knew most of them, and I knew how they were when they got drunk. They were just drunk blacks. Illiterate a lot of them, couldn’t read or write or nothing else. And Bob took care of them, and he’s the one that should’ve had it. And he died – unfortunately, he died in the summer of 1950. He was thirty-four years old.
Mr. Wilcox: Thirty-four?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: Wow. That’s too young.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. Fine man. I enjoyed him. He was a good man.
Mr. Wilcox: Tell me something more about Fred Ford. He was so important to the city in transforming it from a wartime city to the incorporated city.
Mr. Blackwood: He was. I don’t know. I – 
Mr. Wilcox: What kind of guy was he to work with?
Mr. Blackwood: Very hard for me to work with. When I got the – bought the land for the Masonic Lodge, which was behind the Presbyterian Church, I had to get a letter from the pastor of the Presbyterian Church that they didn’t have any objection to the Masonic Lodge being there.
Mr. Wilcox: Right down here on Lafayette Avenue.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, before Fred Ford would sell any of that.
Mr. Wilcox: You got a permit for that?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, I bought it.
Mr. Wilcox: Okay. Excuse me. I’m sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. Did you get the letter?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, I got the letter.
Mr. Wilcox: From the Presbyterians.
Mr. Blackwood: And took it up there to him. He was hard for me to work with. Our pastor at Trinity Methodist Church – I helped start Trinity Methodist Church. In fact, I was Chairman of the Building Committee when we built it. Our pastor was a single man, and he lived in a little hotel that was down in West Village. It was a dormitory room, I guess. A hotel. A cheap hotel, I guess.
Mr. Wilcox: Yes.
Mr. Blackwood: And when he left, I guess it was in 1949 or ’50, we got a pastor that was married and had a family, and I had an awful time getting him a parsonage.
Mr. Wilcox: And does Fred Ford – was he the one that had to approve it?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah. He had to approve anything we got in Oak Ridge. And housing, if you were a craftsperson, and to begin with, before they moved the trailers out, you got a trailer. If you went to work for Union Carbide or Tennessee Eastman or Monsanto Chemical Company, you got a permanent house like this. But I wanted to tell you about when I took my first trip around this town in 1943.
Mr. Wilcox: Sure.
Mr. Blackwood: You could see five hundred chimneys. They built the chimneys and the fireplaces, and then brought some houses and put them around it. It was all over these hillsides.
Mr. Wilcox: I remember the first weekend I was here, I walked up Pennsylvania Avenue, and the only thing up there was just what you say, concrete pad, fireplace and a chimney. 
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, it was all over these hills.
Mr. Wilcox: That’s all you could see going up the hill.
Mr. Blackwood: I see it. That was it.
Mr. Wilcox: And I came back a week later and there were houses around all the chimneys.
[break in recording]
Mr. Wilcox: You mentioned Paul McDowell was a friend of yours. Tell me about Paul.
Mr. Blackwood: He was one of the finest men I ever knew. I just – I thought the world of him. Paul – and I don’t want to get into this too much, but I want to tell you, he belonged to the Masonic Lodge, and I belonged to it. In fact, I was head of the Masonic Lodge here. And he never did come to my lodge. But he and I talked. And if I had a problem that I couldn’t get through to Fred Ford, I’d go to Paul, and two or three days usually it’d be solved. He’d talk Fred into it. But in 1952, I believe it was – it might have been earlier than that –  I’m not positive of the year – but Fred and I guess Paul – anyway, they made a survey of what the people in Harriman and Rockwood and Knoxville was paying for rent, and they was going to raise the rent on everybody’s house. And I got a commission setup in Clinton with Anderson County Court, and I came out here as chairman to hear – to evaluate it. I subpoenaed Fred Ford. He didn’t know what he was getting into; he came. And I had a lawyer that tore him up. I mean, he tore him all to pieces. And of course we voted not to allow any rent increases.
Mr. Wilcox: The County Court said no?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, and County Court was the government.
Mr. Wilcox: What did he have to say about that?
Mr. Blackwood: He never did like me no way.
Mr. Wilcox: He didn’t think too much of Lloyd Blackwood after that.
Mr. Blackwood: No.
Mr. Wilcox: I see.
Mr. Blackwood: That’s something that never got in the history book either, I know it.
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, gosh. Well, what happened to your life after you got – this is a very active period for you, 1948, ’47, ’49, ’50.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, I lived here until ’60 – ’59. And then I went to work for DuPont in Kinston, North Carolina. I went back to work down here – well, to start with, I stayed in politics till ’57. 
Mr. Wilcox: County Court primarily?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. I opened the first – when I ran for office in 1950, I ran on that I would open a Deputy County Court Clerk’s Office in Oak Ridge. In the first week of September, when I was sworn in the first day of September, I believe it was the 5th, I opened that County Clerk’s Office in that little building on Bus Terminal, straight right beside of the police – where the old Police Department was. That’s where I opened it.
Mr. Wilcox: Lloyd Blackwood got the first County Clerk Office in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Blackwood: Yes. And sometime – I think it was in the ’50s, Roland Prince, who was a friend of mine and my attorney, was a member of the state legislature and he passed a bill to make it permanent, and that’s why it’s still here. 
Mr. Wilcox: I see.
Mr. Blackwood: Because we were afraid – he and I were afraid if somebody else came in the office, they could move it anytime they wanted to.
Mr. Wilcox: Move it back to Clinton.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah, and they have people – the old-timers in Clinton accused me – well, Lloyd Blackwood’s trying to move the Court House to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Wilcox: Sure.
Mr. Blackwood: But anyway, it’s still here.
Mr. Wilcox: Did you have a lot of opposition at the time?
Mr. Blackwood: No, not on that.
Mr. Wilcox: Not too much from the Clinton people.
Mr. Blackwood: No, they mouthed. There wasn’t nothing they could do.
Mr. Wilcox: Did you get involved in any of the big liquor referendums?
Mr. Blackwood: Yes sir, I did. We had – the dry forces in Oak Ridge in 1949, summer of 1949, they sent out a revocation order for every beer holder in Anderson County, which was really not smart because people selling packaged beers in grocery stores – in fact, I had – and of course I’m the Beer Board because at that time the whole County Court – there were sixteen members of the County Court – were members of the beer committee. And I had grocery store people, friends of mine – about everybody in Oak Ridge was a friend of mine at that time, I hope – 
Mr. Wilcox: I can believe it.
Mr. Blackwood:  – called me and said, “Lloyd, this is going to kill our business.” I said, “Don’t worry about it.” We went over there and they had to meet in the upstairs courtroom. The VFW women and men, that place was packed, and it was hot. It must have been July or August. It was hot as Hades. And Frank Standifer was the other member of County Court. I took Mike McDermott’s place when he went back to New York. I was elected to take his place. He was the first justice of the peace elected from Oak Ridge to Anderson County Court. Then Frank Standifer. And Frank was a wet guy.
Mr. Wilcox: Mike McDermott was quite a character himself.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, he was, yeah. So when the lawyers had written Mr. Standifer a bunch of resolutions, and he’d get up and introduce them, and they’d cheer him for five minutes, and I’d get up and they’d boo me for ten or fifteen minutes. Them women – 
Mr. Wilcox: What was Standifer? Was he a dry?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, he was wet. 
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, he was wet.
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. But the first thing I did, I made a motion that all of the grocery stores, all of the packaged beer holders be dismissed, and it passed. There was a place down by Gailsburg Hall in West Village. A little place. I don’t know what it ever had been, but they had a beer permit, and they didn’t even have a toilet. They were coming up in Gailsburg Hall where our Rainbow Girls and Eastern Star women would be meeting, half drunk and using the bathroom.
Mr. Wilcox: Lord of mercy.
Mr. Blackwood: So I ordered that one closed. I got that one closed. A guy came and told me, he said, “You a dead man. You won’t live thirty days.”
Mr. Wilcox: A dead man?
Mr. Blackwood: That’s what he told me.
Mr. Wilcox: Lloyd?
Mr. Blackwood: That’s what he told me. I had another one, helped close another one out in the county. She threatened – it was a woman. Right out there close to – Barbara was raised in Lake City, and she knew there’s a place out there by the high school. They called it the Black Cat. She had two places, The Black Cat and The White Kitten.
Mr. Wilcox: How’d they get a permit close to a high school?
Mr. Blackwood: Well, they had a guy – 
Mrs. Blackwood: She had it before the high school was moved out there.
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, I see.
Mr. Blackwood: She had it before that. What the state law says is you can’t have a beer place within a thousand feet of a school or a church. But in cities, they waive that.
Mr. Wilcox: I see. 
Mr. Blackwood: That’s a County law. Anyway, she was going to kill me too or have me killed. And that afternoon – this thing went on all day. I didn’t have a dry thread on me. I got home as two Baptist preachers came to my house, told me, said “Never was so proud of a man in my life.” I didn’t tell them I’d been threatened. I didn’t want to bother them with that because people like that, if they’re going to kill you, they’re not going to tell you about it, I don’t think.
Mrs. Blackwood: Now they did close her place after the school began out there.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah, we closed – what they did, after that day, they elected five members instead of the sixteen members and made me Chairman of the Beer Board. I wound up, Bill, with every chairman job you can get.
Mr. Wilcox: It sounds like it. Well, you’re a good man.
Mr. Blackwood: I was mouthy, I guess. I mean, a lot of stuff was what I believed in.
Mr. Wilcox: Yes. People didn’t have to guess what you were thinking.
Mr. Blackwood: No, they didn’t have to guess what I was thinking a lot. I’d tell them. But anyway – 
Mr. Wilcox: That’s great.
Mr. Blackwood: Had a lot of good experiences here. 
Mr. Wilcox: Can you say something about Rod Cameron and the gate opening?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, when they had the gate opening, they assigned each one of us five members – we had – I had Rod Cameron. Somebody else had Phillip Menjou or what’s his – 
Mr. Wilcox: Adolph Menjou.
Mr. Blackwood: Adolph Menjou, yeah. I was in the car with him once, we stopped at the Shell station over here. He went in the toilet and come out cussing. It wasn’t clean enough to suit him. He was a Frenchman. Whatever. But anyway, he wasn’t too likeable. Rod Cameron had a – he said a fifteen hundred dollar watch on.
Mr. Wilcox: In those days?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. Diamonds all studded in it.
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, my stars.
Mr. Blackwood: He got drunk one night and somebody stole it from him.
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, dear.
Mr. Blackwood: I had a son at that time about eight years old, I guess, and they were staying in the Alexander House up here. I took my son up there, and he told him there’d be no drinking and no cursing as long as that child is in here. So he was a man of – he was a movie star, and while I guess – I didn’t drink at that time at all, but most of them – 
Mr. Wilcox: But he did?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah, he got sloppy drunk. I didn’t stay with him that long. But Alben Barkley, who was vice president of the United States from Kentucky, he made the opening speech on Blankenship Field.
Mr. Wilcox: Yes.
Mr. Blackwood: And we were on a platform when he made his speech. I will always remember he had the softest hands. He never worked in his life. He was a heavyset person and had fat hands, but it was the softest hands ever touched for a man.
Mr. Wilcox: You shook hands with him?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was a fine man.
Mr. Wilcox: Did he make a good speech?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, he did. He made a great speech and told some stories. I’ve told some of them myself. But I have a bad problem: I can’t forget nothing. I did forget where New York Avenue was. I had Georgia Avenue and New York Avenue mixed up.
Mr. McDaniel: Bill, we need to give him a copy of Operation Open Sesame.
Mr. Wilcox: We do.
Mr. McDaniel: I made a film, a thirty minute film on the opening of the gates.
Mr. Wilcox: I may have one downstairs.
Mr. McDaniel: We’ve got film footage of the platform.
Mr. Blackwood: Can you cut this off a little bit?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, I can cut it down. I’m just going to let it roll.
Mr. Wilcox: I may have a copy downstairs that I’ll give Lloyd, if you’ll replace it.
Mrs. Blackwood: Thank you.
Mr. Blackwood: I’ve got a friend of mine who used to work for the Associated Press, told me that if I could get a copy of this, he’d make as many copies as I needed.
Mr. Wilcox: Did you get involved in any of the union walkouts and strikes during the – right after the war?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, we did, but of course, during the war we didn’t have it. We had some after the war.
Mr. Wilcox: Of course, not during. 
Mr. Blackwood: I was always in supervision. I worked fifty-six years and forty-eight of those years I was in supervision and management, and I would have to go out, but I didn’t have to walk the picket line. I was representing the company and I was in the union too, so I had to walk a pretty tight line. I had to stay friends with the men that worked for me because they got my work done for me. And once they got down on you, well, you was in trouble. But at the same time, management didn’t expect you to get out there and carry a sign either. So I had to be pretty careful.
Mr. Wilcox: You do any pipefitting around the house just for the fun of it?
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah, I’ve been doing it all. I need to do a little right now, but my eyesight has gotten so bad that I don’t do as much as I used to do. I used to do all the work on our church and the parsonage and the neighbors. I’d go do all their work. In fact, I have one friend, a fellow that lives across the street from us now, that he bought a house, and we redone the plumbing on it. That was about fifteen years ago. I could see good then.
Mr. Wilcox: You could help then.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: Tell me about your family. How has that worked out?
Mr. Blackwood: Well, my first wife has passed away. I had three children by my first wife. My oldest son died eight years ago with a heart condition. He was a project manager on construction on a Texas project when he had his heart attack. He had a heart attack when he was fifty-two before he died.
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, dear. But he followed you. He was in construction.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah. In fact, he’d be in California and I’d be in New Hampshire. He’d call me, “Dad, so and so is [applying] – would you hire him?” And I’d say to either hire him or don’t hire him, and whatever I told him, that’s what he’d do. Same thing was happening to me, [if someone would] say, “I worked for your son,” I called Jim: “Would you hire this guy?” He’d tell me yes or no.
Mr. Wilcox: Good.
Mr. Blackwood: And we had a great relationship and great friendship. And my daughter married – my oldest daughter married a man who was a Rhodes Scholar. He’s a professor at a college in Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota. He’s retired now. She’s seventy-five, same age as Barbara. And my youngest son is legally blind. He was a stockbroker. He’s living in Florida. He has one son who is a warden of a prison down there. And Barbara and I have three children. Our youngest – our oldest son is an engineer. He’s working at Turkey Creek. He was chief engineer down there at that nuclear plant. Our daughter lives in Knoxville. She’s married and has one daughter. She lives in Knoxville, and she works for a security company. And our youngest son lives in Cleveland, Ohio. He has a job at a chemical company. And he has three children. We have a good relationship. Everything’s going good.
Mr. Wilcox: Extended family, some close by though.
Mr. Blackwood: I have had extraordinary good health. And just my eyesight’s the only thing that’s bothering me. I’ve got macular degeneration. The last job I did –I worked till I was seventy-three. I retired at seventy as construction manager for Johnson Controls on the Perry Nuclear [Power] Plant in Cleveland, Ohio. 
Mr. Wilcox: Cleveland, Ohio?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah. Then I went back and did five jobs for them.
Mr. Wilcox: After you retired?
Mr. Blackwood: Yeah, after I was seventy-three. The last job I did, I was project manager at Ellis Island. We remade Ellis Island into a museum.
Mr. Wilcox: Oh, I’ve heard about that. Yeah, in New York City, Ellis Island Immigration Museum.
Mr. Blackwood: Oh, yeah. Everything is finished. You ought to go see it.
Mr. Wilcox: Were you there when it was finished?
Mr. Blackwood: I did finish it, yeah.
Mr. Wilcox: Pretty nice?
Mr. Blackwood: It was beautiful. Absolutely. They’ve got a theater there. You just can’t believe it till you go and see it.
Mr. Wilcox: I need to go see that.
Mr. Blackwood: It is beautiful.
Mrs. Blackwood: He has pictures on the jobsite.
Mr. Blackwood: I’ve got a picture too. I’ve got – 
Mrs. Blackwood: The Twin Towers are behind him. They were working on it before the Twin Towers fell.
Mr. Blackwood: I left there twenty-one years ago today was when I retired finally; I left Ellis Island, April 6, 1990.
Mr. Wilcox: Well, this has been a terrific interview. I’ve just enjoyed so much listening to you.
Mr. Blackwood: Well, I’ve enjoyed it.
[end of recording]