Ergen, Viola

              ORAL HISTORY OF VIOLA ERGEN
Interviewed by Elizabeth Lieberman
October 3, 2002 
Interviewer: My name is Liz Lieberman. I’m recording this on Thursday evening, the 3rd of October, 2002 at the home of Viola Ergen as part of the American Association of University Women’s Oral History Project.
Mrs. Viola Ergen: My name is Viola Ergen. Today is October 3rd, 2002. I live at 103 Orkney Road in Oak Ridge. I volunteered to participate in this oral history project of the Oak Ridge branch of the American Association of University Women with the understanding, one, that this audio tape will be given to the Oak Ridge Public Library and to the Oak Ridge Historic Preservation Association, two, that I will review the finished tape for changes or corrections and will verify that it is then the finished tape, and three, that during my lifetime, none of this tape can be quoted directly without my written permission. I came to Oak Ridge in June of 1947 as a pregnant wife. I came because my husband had a job here with NEPA [Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft], the nuclear propulsion project, in which they were trying to devise a nuclear powered airplane. I have lived here continuously ever since that time. I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I grew up. I attended the University of Minnesota and received a degree in Accounting and was probably one of the first women who had degrees in that field. I have used my education in my job after that as Senior Accountant at the University of Minnesota. Later on I worked for the Gallup Poll at Princeton and I used part of my knowledge as a statistician for that organization. We came to Oak Ridge in 1947, and while I was here I did not work while I was raising my children and family. I have five children, all of them born in Oak Ridge, and all born at the Oak Ridge Hospital. All of them attended the Oak Ridge schools and went on to the University of Tennessee. The important events of my life – I have three sons and two daughters. At this point, no one lives in Oak Ridge. I have one son who lives in Knoxville, one who lives in New York, one who lives in Colorado, and a daughter who lives in Illinois, and one who lives in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. While I was raising my children, I did a good deal of volunteer work. I worked with the Girls Scouts for eighteen years as a leader, and after that I became a board member for a number of years and worked as a Finance Committee Chairman. I’ve also been involved with the Arboretum Society and was Treasurer of that organization for seven years, and I am still involved with the American Association of University Women, where I have also been on the board and Treasurer at different times. With the death of my husband in 1971, I went to work as a business manager for the Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge, and I have just retired in January of 2002. I think one of my most satisfying experiences might be working with children in Oak Ridge in different ways. Living in Oak Ridge has been a wonderful experience because of the feeling of space that we have in this community and of having the woods and the Greenbelt so close to our living center. It’s been a great place to bring up children, and they have loved living in Oak Ridge. Many times they’ve gone down into the woods to the creek to catch crawdads and fishing in the little creek down below us or just playing in the woods and swinging on the vines. Also I have met a lot of friends coming to Oak Ridge. Not knowing anyone, it was easy to make friends quickly and get involved in different hobbies or groups in which you were interested, and there were always a number of people interested in those same things. I have met some wonderful people from other countries in Oak Ridge, also. I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been able to do that living in the big city of Minneapolis. Comparing Oak Ridge today with what it was in the ’40s, it’s probably, depending upon your age and how you feel about things, maybe not quite as wonderful as it was when we first came here, when we had to put up with muddy sidewalks and lack of some foods during the war era and afterwards. It has made a difference, and now, of course, everyone has more technology in their homes and we have more televisions, so I think there’s a lack of, probably, communication that we used to have in the olden days. And perhaps because of the age, it’s a little more difficult to make friends since one is losing a number of older friends at this point.
Interviewer: Viola, I would like to ask you about your husband. I know he was a famous scientist here and I think you should tell them about his work and contribution.
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Yes. My husband was born in Vienna, Austria. He had his Ph.D. there in both mathematics and physics. He was a nuclear physicist. He went from Vienna to Sweden, and there he worked at the Wenner-Gren Institute and was one of the charter members of that institute and worked on the atomic energy and was working with experiments on atomic energy. With the war beginning in 1942, he came to Princeton to see Dr. Smythe, and was told that he wanted him to come back to this country, but he should have a permanent visa, so he spent nine months in Cuba so he could get a permanent visa to come to the United States and stay here. He came then and worked in Wisconsin with Dr. Heath at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and worked on a number of secret projects at that time. He went to Minneapolis in 1942 to work with the Minneapolis Honeywell Company, who were working on a very secret project at the airport. The secret project turned out to be the automatic pilot for airplanes. That project was finished in 1945 and he went to RCA to work on the Guided Missile Program. That was in 1945, and then, of course, in 1947, he came here to Oak Ridge to work on the nuclear airplane. Since that project did not fly and the group being from Cincinnati, Ohio, General Electric went back there, and he took his job with the laboratory then in 1952 and worked on a number of things, mostly reactors and the nuclear powered submarines.
Interviewer: Viola, I think when you said the beginning of the war, you said ’42. Wasn’t he in Sweden?
Mrs. Viola Ergen: He was still in Sweden in ’42, but he came at that time here. He came in ’42 to this country. But he had been working in Sweden in order to isolate the atomic energy. At that time it was just the sort of thing that the Curies were working on also. He was interested in skiing, and that’s one of the things we did here, was to go skiing in the winter up in the Smokies at Indian Gap with a number of other Oak Ridgers who liked to ski in the snow. We made our own rope tow line and it was a great deal of fun. We also liked to do a lot of hiking in this area because the trails in this area are lovely, in all of the state parks, and not too far from Oak Ridge, so it made weekends interesting for our family. We also enjoyed our big swimming pool and it was a daily experience in the summer to go swimming over at the Oak Ridge pool. Oak Ridge is really, I’d say, a very satisfying place to live these days, and I’d recommend to just most anybody.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: One of the things when I first came to Oak Ridge that I was really, really grieved about was the fact that we had segregation in Oak Ridge. I had grown up in Minneapolis without segregation. We had many black students in our classes, and there was never any hint of segregation. So when I saw that there were white toilets for white people and black toilets for black people, I thought this was rather too bad. We ate at the one cafeteria we had in Oak Ridge, and that was also off-limits for the black people, and I thought that, too, was not a proper thing for a town to have. And I was also worried about the fact that our black children did not have the opportunity to attend our high school. I worked with Ida Coveyou in teaching some of the classes for these children while they were still here in Oak Ridge. At that time they were all bussed to Knoxville. Also, I had a young lady, when I first had my children, who helped me, and she lived in a hutment. I had no idea that there were such places for people to live, because those hutments were really very small, they had dirt floors, they didn’t have windows as such, but screens on the windows. The housing was just very derelict and bad for these people, and I really felt sorry for them having to live in these kinds of homes and still be active in a very government town. I was really pleased when the schools were desegregated and the children could come to school. At that time, I was having a scout troop, and it was good for us to have the advantage of having some black children in our troops. They added a lot to our troops because most of them had excellent singing voices, and we loved hearing them sing together for us at our campfires. Politically, Oak Ridge was divided with both Republicans and Democrats. We went to a Democratic meeting one time, to a state convention. It was an experience, because we never heard the nays, we only heard the ayes. As soon as the ayes had made their call, the gavel came down, and so the nays never had a chance to voice their opinion on anything. That finished our short term in the Democratic Party. 
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: We were one of the first ones to have a house built in Oak Ridge. As soon as the government decided that they would sell the land, we made a bid for a piece of property over in East Village. Unfortunately, Dr. Charpie bid more money than we did on that lot, so we did not get it. But very shortly after that, they had another round of bids, and the house that we are living in now is the lot we were able to get. The lot was – we bid five hundred dollars on this lot, which was over almost an acre of land, and two years later, when the city was sold, we paid the government the five hundred dollars and the lot was ours. We built the house in 1954, and we’ve been living in this same house ever since. Before this we lived in a “D” house. We were very lucky. When we first came here, we were not really eligible for a “D” house, but it just happened that a number of Army people had left and there was a [surplus] of “D” houses available, so they said we could have one. So we got this “D” house on Forest Lane. I do remember that the first day we walked into the house, I was horrified, because the place had not been lived in for a number of weeks and there were cockroaches all over the walls and ceiling and on the floors. I’m afraid that it wasn’t what I’d been expecting, but the city came and set off a bomb in the house and I believe the cockroaches were taken care of, and we haven’t had any sign of them since, although I see them around here and there once in a while. They’re not my favorite bug. This is probably one of the better things about Oak Ridge. The lots are not little postage stamp lots like you have living in the city. They all have extensive greens and trees around them, and the streets are not in square blocks, but they’re following the contour of the land, and it makes a very lovely city.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Well, I think that we would’ve probably traveled. My husband was a great believer in travel and he believed that traveling was a good learning experience for the children, so we always took the children with us and he like to travel, so I think that’s why we did. I think we would have traveled no matter where we lived, but it was easy to travel in Oak Ridge and to travel around. After the children were all gone from the home, then I traveled probably more. Katherine Ledgerwood at the High School was very involved in all the travel that I did because she had planned the trips and they were very well planned and we did the trip just as we wanted to do it, not as the Tourist Bureau would have liked us to go.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Yeah.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Well, not just for our family, for a group, for whoever wanted to go.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Yeah. All Oak Ridgers could go on these trips. They were for anybody who wanted to do them, and many times we took several busloads of students with us and we went to all parts of the world, Africa and Australia and New Zealand, China, Europe, England, and each one of these trips were sort of tailored to the people who were going on the trip. The first trip was probably the most exciting, because that was a cruise around the Greek Isles and into Jerusalem, in Israel, visiting Jerusalem, and also into Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, where these countries are still at war, even today.
My husband, of course, being from Europe, had lots of friends in Europe, and so it was always fun to go to Europe because we met so many people and had such interesting places to go with his friends.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Yes, I’m a member of St. Stephen’s Church and have been since we came to Oak Ridge. One of the strange experiences was in the very beginning, we were having church services at the old Jefferson High School, which has been since torn down, and my oldest son was at that particular baptism that we were having for one of the later boys, and I was absolutely embarrassed because what he did was to – he noticed the priest’s long gown, and he squatted down and wanted to see what was underneath that gown, and I think people forgot about the baptism momentarily. But that was John. He’s the oldest child. And I’ve been a member of St. Stephen’s since that time, and I’ve done the usual things. I’ve taught Sunday school. I’ve had the young people’s church service for many years and I was a member of the nursery committee. St. Stephens Church had a nursery school there for a number of years. At the present time I’m not active except as a member.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Well, shopping. Shopping has never been important to me. I hate shopping. I don’t like to have to do more than I have to. The grocery store is my favorite place, because I do have to eat. I don’t like to shop.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Viola Ergen: Well, we talk about progress and that we should progress and it’s true, that I think that we can progress a little more, but our schools are excellent, our living conditions are excellent here, and outside of the higher taxes, I can’t see why we should be more progressive. And I realize that we need to bring a lot of new people into Oak Ridge because the people that I came here with are all aging and the community is becoming more or less a retirement community rather than vigorous young people running the town. So I do hope that we will have some progress here with bringing in new people and maybe some new jobs for people and new kinds of businesses, and maybe new kinds of scientific companies into Oak Ridge, so that we can grow at a very moderate pace. I don’t expect that it would grow rapidly, but so we can keep things going.
Interviewer: Thank you, Viola. We’ll review this tape and you can make sure that everything on it is the way you want it.