Sapirie, Sam R.

              ORAL HISTORY OF S.R. SAPIRIE

Interviewed by Joan Carden, Ada Misek and R.H. Lafferty
Representatives of the Oak Historical Society

June 6, 1972

At the home of Mr. & Mrs. Sam Sapirie
 
[Tape 1 Side A] 
Interviewers:  We’re at the home of Mr. & Mrs. Sam Sapirie.  Mr. Sapirie was Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, Oak Ridge Operations Office in Oak Ridge for 21 years.  He retired from this position and the AEC on February 18, 1972.  Mr. Sapirie, when did you come to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Sapirie:  I came to Oak Ridge initially in July of 1946.  At that time the program here was under the direction of the Manhattan District of the U.S. Corps of Engineers.  Shortly thereafter however, on the 1st of January of 1947, the responsibility was transferred by the Corps of Engineers to the Civilian Atomic Energy Commission.  At the time I came to Oak Ridge, the people who had been running the program under the Manhattan Engineer District were largely leaving.  I guess you might call me one of the first of the new breed.  I came to Oak Ridge because of the future I saw and the peaceful uses of atomic energy, rather than the wartime uses.  I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to have been here through a period in which the peacetime uses of atomic energy have materialized.  At the time we came to Oak Ridge the community was far from the settled community it is now.  At that time, I remember they were just starting to pave the streets and pave the sidewalks and one of the momentous policy questions had been considered at that time of whether you should have sidewalks on both sides of the streets or just on one side.  Of course it was settled and clear at that time, on one side of the street because of the added cost.  Everything that we did in Oak Ridge at that time cost tremendous amounts of money because of the magnitude and the scope of the program.  For example, when fences were built around the garbage cans, the time Jack Franklin was certifying ???? putting closures around the garbage cans.  Well when you do that even though they only cost $200 a piece there were 9,000 of them, so this becomes a tremendous amount of money.  When you look at an item like this in the budget, it shows up as a tremendously large amount and this was one of the items that Oak Ridge was criticized for in the -?Hickams?- hearings which you remember back in the early days in 1947 or ‘48.  In 1946 when I came to Oak Ridge, my first assignment was as Assistant Director of Operations.  At that time Walt Williams, Walter J. Williams was Director of Operations.  Walt, in my opinion, is one of the unsung heros of the Atomic Energy program.  He was responsible for the construction of the Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which was known then as K-25, and the electromagnetic plant, which was known then as Y-12.  At the time I came here, the construction program was essentially completed and Walt was then responsible for operations, in addition to the remaining items of construction.  The Oak Ridge office was headquarters for the entire Manhattan Engineer District, not only what we now know of as the Oak Ridge Operations Office.  Consequently, we had responsibility for activities in Hanford and the raw material program in what is now New York Operations.  We had responsibility for the Argonne Laboratory at Chicago and the Los Alamos activities out in New Mexico.  However, on the first of January of 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission Civilian Agency took over responsibility for the program and at that time the military gradually phased out.  However, there was a transition period in which Walt Williams was set up as the Manager of Field Operations and from Oak Ridge, he ran the entire field program.  While the Civilian Atomic Energy Commission was going through the formalities, getting organized and making plans, developing an organization to take over responsibilities for the future of the Atomic Energy Program, so Walt was here in Oak Ridge and I was still his Assistant.  However, shortly after that, during the Fall of 1947, the Operations Offices were set up to assume responsibility for the different field activities. For example, there was a Hanford Operations Office out in Hanford, Washington, that had responsibility for the Plutonium production program out there.  There was an Albuquerque Operations Office that had responsibility for the weapon’s program.  The Oak Ridge Operation Office was the last one set up.  The Manager of the Oak Ridge Operations Office, the first Manager, was Jack Franklin who was brought here from American Airlines, where he had been Vice President in charge of Engineering.  His Deputy was Dick Cook and my job in that organization was Director of Production and Engineering.  However Jack Franklin stayed here only about a year and a half, and then Dick Cook replaced him as Manager, and I stepped up to the position of Deputy Manager.  Dick was the Manager a little less than two years, and he left here to go to Washington to become Director of Production at the AEC Headquarters in the middle of February 1951.  I replaced him as Manager of Oak Ridge Operations at that time.  I held that same position for exactly 21 years.  During that period of time, we spent 3 billion dollars on expansion facilities.  We spent 8 billion dollars on operation of our facility.  I’m extremely proud of the fact that in spite of an expenditure of over 11 billion dollars that’s billion, not million, 11 billion dollars, there wasn’t a single investigation, or a single case of fraud or any misappropriation or misuse of the government funds.  We were fortunate, of course, in having extremely competent operating contractors.  As you know the AEC plants, and prior to that Manhattan Engineering Districts Plants, were operated for the government by industrial firms as contractors.  When I came here in the Fall of 1946 each of the three major plants had a different operating contractor.  The Oak Ridge National Laboratory at that time was operated by the Monsanto Chemical Company.  The Y-12 plant, the electromagnetic plant, was operated by the Tennessee Eastman Corporation and the Gaseous Diffusion Plant, the K-25 plant, was operated by Union Carbide.  Well in, I think it was May of 1947, Tennessee Eastman indicated to the Commission that it wanted to be relieved of its operating responsibilities of Y-12.  So after considering various alternates it was decided to ask the Union Carbide Corporation to take over responsibility for operating the electromagnetic plant as well as the Gaseous Diffusion Plant.  And then in February 1948, Monsanto told the Commission it wanted to be relieved of the responsibility for operating the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and here again we considered various alternates and asked Carbide to assume responsibility.  I’m real happy to be able to state very conclusively that these decisions were sound decisions.  Carbide has done a tremendous job of operating the plants and I’m extremely proud of the accomplishments of the various operating organizations at the three major plants here.  Of course, in addition to the three major plants, we also had here the agriculture laboratory, research laboratory, which is operated for the commission by the University of Tennessee.  We also have here the main headquarters of Oak Ridge Associated Universities, which in the Fall of 1946 was organized and called the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies.  At that time a representative of an organization of thirteen southern colleges and universities, which banded together to provide liaison with the Atomic Energy Commission and the development of nuclear energy in the southern part of the country.  Since then, the organization sponsored and now has 41 members and is now known as Oak Ridge Associated Universities.  Here again the Commission was extremely fortunate in having a highly competent operating contractor and ORAU is continuing to do an extremely good job for the Atomic Energy Commission.  
Now to reminisce a bit more back in 1946, the government was not only the operator of the research and production facilities here, but we also had responsibility for operating the community.  We were running the schools and the hospital and the library and the city and police force and fire department and the whole works.  I can tell you frankly that there were more headaches involved in the rental housing and the running of the community than there were involved in the operating of the tremendous plants.  As a matter of fact when Jack Franklin was manager here, I would estimate he spent 90% of his time on community problems and community activities.  Well, when Dick Cook took over, why he spent at least half his time, probably a little more than half his time on community activities.  Well, by the time I took over, I had had experience then in the engineering, the construction and the production activities and I just didn’t think I had that much time to devote to community activities.  I really didn’t know enough about it to be able to contribute enough to justify that much time anyway, so we had a particularly good man running the community activities, Fred Ford. He knew a whole lot more about it than I did.  So I told Fred he was responsible for it, I’d back him up and I’d try to stay out of it as much as I could.  Well, even though I made that a firm statement, I still got telephone calls at 3 o’clock in the morning from wives crying because they had a two-bedroom house and they needed a three-bedroom house and other similar problems.  But in each case I would tell them to call Fred Ford the next morning.  After a certain amount of time people caught on and stopped bothering me and they were then calling on Fred Ford.  Well, it was quite clear to me, that it was somewhat inappropriate to have the federal government running a local community.  Consequently I did everything I could to help support the residents of Oak Ridge when they decided that they would like to incorporate and take over management of the community.  There again, another one of the great satisfactions I’ve had out of this business is to see the fine job that the City of Oak Ridge is doing in operating the community.  They’re doing a far better job than the federal government could’ve done and probably at a lot lower cost to the taxpayers both locally and throughout the country.  The school system of course is also being well operated at this time. Here again we had through the years many problems with schools.  I remember when the Supreme Court made the decision that it was unlawful to have segregated schools.  The school system in Oak Ridge at that time was, frankly, made up of segregated facilities.  At times there were a lot of people who were in favor of immediately changing over to integrated schools and there were other people who were continually opposed to integrated schools.  I recommended to our people in Washington that we take a year to plan for the integration of schools.  Ken Nichols, General Nichols was General Manager at that time and he supported me in the recommendation.  We had a year of excellent planning and the following September the schools were integrated.   Here again I was tremendously pleased that the integration of schools here were actually a model that should have been followed throughout the rest of the country.  The school system under the civilian operation now is continuing to uphold the high standards that the Atomic Energy Commission insisted upon, because of the high caliber of people that we were trying to recruit and retain as employees at our highly technical facilities.  It’s quite interesting, I think, that there seemed to be a close core relation between the education of our employees and their decisions to live in Oak Ridge.  About 47 percent of the employees of the AEC and its contractors reside in Oak Ridge.  But of those with Bachelor of Science degrees about 55% live in Oak Ridge, those with Masters of Science degrees there are about 70% that live in Oak Ridge and those with Doctorates, there are 84% live in Oak Ridge.  I’ve never quite been able to reach a conclusion as to the precise reason for it, but I’m quite sure that a large part of the reason is the desire to have the higher caliber of education available to youngsters in Oak Ridge, as compared to the schools in some of the surrounding communities.  I’ve been talking quite a while.  Do you have any questions at this time?
Interviewer:  When you had problems integrating the schools you had to do a little busing or almost busing, didn’t you?  
Mr. Sapirie:  The Oak Ridge School system, of course, has been dependent on busing, basically ever since it was first established.  The busing was required to take the individuals to the closest school regardless of the color of the student or the type of school he was going to.  But, at the time we integrated the schools, it was necessary then to close down only one school that had been available for the elementary grades for the black children, and reassign those children to several of the elementary schools that had previously been available to the white children only.  But the busing was not arbitrarily done, it was done to take them to the nearest school.   
Interviewer:  Still the nearest school?  
Mr. Sapirie:  It was to the nearest school.  Now, we had two junior high schools and one high school.  Of course, all of the black students went to the one high school and initially at least they were taken to the closest junior high school.  I remember our son, Steve, was a Senior in High School the year when we were doing the preparatory work to the integration of schools.  He was, I think he was Vice President of Student Council at that time.  But in any event he was one of the leaders in some of the exchange visits between the black high school and the Oak Ridge High School where the students and the teachers, faculty became acquainted with each other.  He got a lot of satisfaction out of that.  Steve now is with the World Health Organization.  He’s stationed in Geneva and he is on a task force that does work with the developing nations.  He spent two months last fall in the Philippines, this spring he spent two months in Kuala Lumpur, Indonesia.   He left the first of June for Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya, Africa.  We’re hoping that he’s going to be able to come home on home leave in August.  Oh yes and bring his bride with him.  He was just married two weeks ago in Geneva to a girl who was born in Hong Kong.  She’s English and we’re acquainted with her, and real pleased.
Interviewer:  Did you think that your son, Steve was more well adjusted for integration because of your situation in Oak Ridge, than he would have been if he had lived in Knoxville for instance?  I felt that with both of my children this was the case.  
Mr. Sapirie:  Yes, I’m sure it was definitely the case.  I think that the people of Oak Ridge are more cosmopolitan than the people of any other community in the country.  And I think they were more receptive to the integration of schools than the typical southern community.  At least our scientific personnel come from all over the country, in fact from all over the world.  There are quite a few foreign participants in the activities at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  We’ve had a number of training schools for both foreign and domestic scientists and graduate students.  I think one of the real accomplishments of the activities here has been satisfying training responsibility.  
It might be of some interest to you if I would summarize quite briefly the responsibilities of Oak Ridge Operation.  Would you like for me to do this?  Interviewer:  ???? 
Mr. Sapirie:  Oak Ridge Operations, at the time that I took over as manager here in February 1951, had responsibilities basically for the activities here in Oak Ridge and a small area of activity in Miamisburg near Dayton, Ohio.  Since then there has been growth from a total of about a billion dollars of facilities to about three and a half billion dollars worth.  This has been the result of building two additional gaseous diffusion plants, one at Paducah, Kentucky and one near Portsmouth, Ohio.  We’ve also built a Feed Material Production Center at Fernald near Cincinnati, Ohio.  That plant is operated for the Commission by the National Lead Company.  The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company operates the gaseous diffusion plant of Portsmouth, Ohio, and Carbide operates the gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah.  We also have a laboratory in New Brunswick, New Jersey which does precise analytical work in Uranium and other elements of interest to the atomic energy program and it also does research developing ???? analytical techniques.  It also has the responsibility for the research laboratory in Puerto Rico, known as the Puerto Rico Nuclear Center.  It is operated for the Commission by the University of Puerto Rico.  At that installation we provide training in both Spanish and English, not only to Puerto Ricans, but also to scientists and students from throughout Latin America.  We do research work on activities that are related to the topics but also of direct interest to the Atomic Energy program, such things as extending the shelf life of tropical fruits, (mangoes and bananas) or eradication of the sugar cane borer, work on rainforest ecology or marine biology in the Caribbean area.  In addition, of course, we have responsibility for some three hundred off-site research contracts with universities and research institutions throughout the South.  We have responsibility for the activities here in Oak Ridge that I previously mentioned, the agriculture research project, the Oak Ridge Associated Universities activities that include operation of our Cancer Hospital here.  They include handling of the fellowship program for the Commission on a nationwide basis.  They handle our exhibits program both the Atomic Museum here in Oak Ridge and the traveling exhibits.  And then they have a training activity in which they provide isotope handling techniques training.  We also have responsibility, I say “we” just by force of habit of 21 years, I guess I’ll have to stop saying that.  But we also have responsibility for the design and construction of new facilities.  During the last 21 years that amounted to some 3 billion dollars worth of activities.  It is still continuing at a fairly large…  Several of the last large projects that we’ve completed was expansion of the Y-12 plant at the cost of $125 million.  The next large program is going to be the expansion of the Gaseous Diffusion Plant to increase the fast end or efficiency and continue to provide a capability for enriching Uranium, which will be used with fuel for nuclear power plants.  I mentioned when we started, that I came here as one of the new breed, thinking about the peaceful uses of atomic energy.  One of the primary peaceful uses of atomic energy is in the production of electric power.  And without nuclear energy, this country and the world would certainly be in a difficult situation, in trying to provide fuel to satisfy the ever growing needs for electric power.  Nuclear power is now economically competitive with fossil fuel generated power in many parts of the United States and in many parts of the world.  There have been well over 100 million kilowatts of nuclear power capacity, ordered, under construction, from the plants that are now in operation.  The relative rate of construction of nuclear power plants, in my opinion, will continue to grow and by the end of the century well over half of the then total capacity will be nuclear power.  
Interviewer:  Mr. Sapirie, as Manager of the Oak Ridge Operations do you see orders or instructions from the Chairman of the Commission, or do you work with individual divisions?  Can you give us some information on that?  
Mr. Sapirie:  Well that’s a good question.  I’ve been chatting my bride over, my bride of some 36 years that I’ve retrogressed in my retirement.  I used to have a boss 500 miles away and now I have one 5 feet away.  I’m still working on the laundry list of items that she developed over the last twenty-five years.  But to get back to your question, Joan, the Manager of Oak Ridge Operations is responsible to the General Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, who is in turn responsible to the five member Atomic Energy Commission.  Now that is probably over simplified, because the Manager of Oak Ridge Operations has a large staff, which is more or less parallel to the large staff that the General Manager has at AEC Headquarters.  Naturally, since the various organizational units both here and in Washington are interested in similar activities and similar responsibilities, there develops through the years a close tie between, say, the Production Division at Oak Ridge Operations and the Production Division at AEC Headquarters to use an example.  The day-to-day operations are handled informally, directly from Division Director here to Division Director in Washington.  However, all policy matters and all decisions are handled through the Manager of Oak Ridge Operations, and the Manager signs all the mail that covers any policy matter, although the Division Director has the responsibility to sign mail on detailed activities that are of a non-policy nature.  All budget requests that are developed in the field are channeled to AEC Headquarters by the Manager of the Field Office, the Oak Ridge Operations Office in this particular case, and in defending the budget it is the responsibility of the Manager and his key staff to undertake the budget defense before the AEC Organization at AEC Headquarters in Washington.  However our budget, after it is developed here in Oak Ridge, is then consolidated, with the budgets from other field offices and the other activities of AEC Headquarters has direct responsibilities for, into a single budget that is then submitted by AEC Headquarters to the Office of Budgets and Management. The Office of Management and Budgets, it is called now.  I’m having trouble with that because it used to be called the Budget Bureau until about two years ago, and that’s the way I still try to think of it.  But in any event the Budget Bureau represents the Executive Office of the President and has the responsibility of challenging the budget of each executive agency, such as the AEC, and then recommending to the President the action to be taken on the budgets as submitted by the Executive Department.  These are then consolidated into what becomes the President’s budget and that is then submitted to Congress each January.  Congress holds hearings which are attended by the Commissioners and the General Manager and the key headquarters personnel.  After the hearings, before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and before the budget committee, both the Senate and the House, the bills are presented to the Congress to be voted on.  After they are voted on, the bill is then sent to the President for signature.  After the Appropriation bills are signed by the President, the funds are allocated by OMB to each Executive Department controlled in Washington and cuts up this pie into the various segments and sends to each field office a financial plan, such as the one to the Oak Ridge Operations Office and the total now approaches five hundred million dollars a year for operations.  We …
[Side B]  
Mr. Sapirie:  I think I know the question that you are asking.  The contractors operate our plants.  They operate as coordinated contractors that we called integrated contractors.  Their business activities are part of the business activities of the Atomic Energy Commission.  All of their financial documents are part of our overall financial system.  The materials they buy are bought in the name of the federal government and immediately become the property of the federal government.  There is an extremely close working relationship between the organization and employees of our operating contractors and those of the Atomic Energy Commission.  As a matter of fact, if you get in meetings between the two organizations, it’s sometimes impossible to tell who gets his check from the AEC and who gets his check from the contractor.  They work that closely together.  The requirements are identified by any of three or four different sources.  One might be the operating contractor or his organization may determine that the plants could operate more efficiently if we were to improve the barrier inside the Gaseous Diffusion Plant.  To do this would cost a certain amount of money.  It would improve the efficiency a certain amount, reduce the production cost so much per unit of production, and would pay off the cost of the improvement in such-and-such a period of time.  Their recommendation is then considered by the AEC both here, first here and if we agree with it, we support it and it’s submitted to Washington.  If it is supported there it then may become an item of our next annual budget.  Another way that requirements are identified would be by a member of the Atomic Energy Commission staff here.  He may have an idea that something being done at one of the plants could be done more efficiently if it was done in a slightly different way, which might require modification of the equipment or the facilities.  This would then be discussed first with the operating contractor to make sure that we weren’t off the beam, and to make sure that the idea was in fact a constructive idea.  Then the details of developing the idea might be done either by the AEC staff or by the contractor’s staff.  But, in any event, they would work closely together and the final plans and the cost estimates would be submitted by the contractor to the Operations Office and by the Operations Office to AEC Headquarters.  A third way that ideas originate would be someone at the Washington headquarters to say that we have need for a new product.  We would like for you to develop a proposal for putting in facilities to let us manufacture this product.  That request then comes from the AEC Headquarters to the Operations Office in the field.  We then discuss it with the operating contractor and ask him to develop a detailed proposal.  During the development of these proposals there is a close working relationship between the AEC staff and the contractor staff but after it is developed in the form of a proposal and the cost estimate, it is then submitted through the same channels to AEC Headquarters and ultimately becomes a part of the commission’s budget.  The fourth and less frequently used route, would be for the Joint Congressional Committee to make a request to the Atomic Energy Commission to give consideration to some certain problem or some certain idea.  This is then taken up through the same channels: AEC Headquarters sends a request to Oak Ridge Operations Offices, Oak Ridge Operations Office staff discusses the ideas with our contractors and considers the various alternates and then develops a specific proposal based on the alternate that appears to have the most advantages.  In each case we try to consider not only the specific proposal but also the alternates that might serve the same purpose and consider the relative cost, the relative advantages and disadvantages, the time factors, the later operating costs that would be involved and come up with the overall plan that seems to do the best job.  One of the important roles of the field office is to do a good job on long range planning.  In the Oak Ridge Operations Office we have an organization, a division we call the Operation Planning and Power Division.  The contractor has a somewhat similar organization that does overall planning at the specific request of the production division at AEC Headquarters and the division known for your applications at AEC Headquarters.  They in turn are doing an extremely good job using advanced analytical techniques and extremely large computers, and in helping the AEC develop and analyze the facts.  They do not make specific recommendations.  Recommendations are made solely by AEC Commissioners or staff members because it is the AEC that has the final responsibility, but the contractors do the leg work, the detailed analysis and keep the AEC from making serious mistakes.  
I think one thing that you folks might be interested in, in the nature of history, is the program of producing radio isotopes.  I remember the first shipment of radio isotopes was made from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory on August the 2nd in 1946.  This was shortly after I came here.  I came here in July of 1946 and that was the first promise of peaceful use of atomic energy to be realized.  That first shipment was a few millicuries, made up of a few millicuries of Carbon 14.  It was sent to the Bonnard Skin and Cancer Clinic in St. Louis.  Following that, use of radio isotopes continued to increase by medicine, by the medical profession, by agriculture, by industry and for research.  The production of radio isotopes at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory grew from this first shipment of a few millicuries to a total of over 3 million curies.  Now that’s going from millicuries, a thousandth of a curie, to 3 million curies, about 5 or 6 years ago.  At that time our early commission, as a manner of policy, tried to encourage private industry to take over the responsibility for producing radio isotopes.  Industry in fact has assumed an ever growing fraction of the production of radio isotopes so that the AEC is now producing only those isotopes that are somewhat unique or cannot be produced by industry at a profit.  The radio isotopes usage is now accepted as standard for many medical applications, used routinely by industry. They’re used in agriculture and they continue to have tremendous value in research.
Interviewer:  You mentioned that once in awhile the Joint Committee would send down a directive that we do something here in Oak Ridge.  I remember the worst one they ever did was the Gas Cooled Reactor.  Would you care to comment on that?  
Mr. Sapirie:  I don’t think so Bob.  That’s the kind of history that I don’t think is particularly pertinent to activities of Oak Ridge.  I will say that the Gas Cooled Reactor concept is basically a good concept and at the present time, as you know, there is a large plant a 500,000 kilowatt plant, being built by the Colorado Utility at Fort Saint Vrain.  It is a concept that has potential.  It has been supported strongly in other places in the world.  Great Britain, for example, has its own reactor economy based on Gas Cooled Reactors.  It just happens that the Atomic Energy Commission was not able to afford to support completely the many different concepts that were being sponsored.  Here in Oak Ridge the Molten Salt Reactor concept is the one that has the strongest support.  There was substantially less enthusiasm for the Gas Cooled Reactor although I do think that the people at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the architects, engineers and the constructors all worked real hard on the EGCR when the assignment was made to Oak Ridge.
[break]
The question you raise is a good question.  Why does the Atomic Energy Commission use contractors to operate our facilities rather than using government employees?  Well, there are many other federal agencies that do in fact use government employees for all the operations.  A good example is the Tennessee Valley Authority right here in the Tennessee Valley.  TVA, in my opinion, has an extremely efficient and very effective organization.  However the program of the Tennessee Valley Authority is a somewhat simpler and more straightforward program than that of the Atomic Energy Commission.  We have found that the use of contractors gives us a high degree of flexibility.  We are able to expand or contract our activities as the need changes, very effectively and very efficiently through the use of contractors.  If we suddenly have a large new design program, we are able to receive competitive proposals from architect or engineers firms that have large organizations.  We’re able to select the one that gives us the proposal of the best organization for that specific job at that particular time.  The same applies to construction. Now if we had a stabilized program of design construction as TVA has, it might then make sense to have government employees to do the entire job.  But our program is so dynamic that this just is not practical.  We have found from the early days in Manhattan Engineer District that industry does have the capability organization-wise to satisfy practically any need that we can dream up.  I’ve participated in a number of contractor selection procedures in selecting contractors to operate our facilities or to do our design and construction work, and I’ve been impressed at how enthusiastic industry is to make available to the Atomic Energy Commission their star performers to do the job.  Invariably we’ve been able to start off at a run with an organization that is already experienced in a certain type of activity by getting industry to perform the assigned task.  So I think that it is a highly efficient way to run the business. There are a lot of detail advantages that are quite secondary to that primary one I mentioned, one is that if we operate with use of federal employees, they’d all have to be done within the federal civil service regulations, the federal civil service salary schedules, whereas using contractors they are not bound by the same limitations.  They, of course, have to justify their expenditures to us but as long as they operate for the Commission suchly as they do their own activities, we find very little to object to.
Interviewer:  A few years ago they splintered the General Electric Company out at Hanford and the rumor was going around here that they were going to do the same thing for Carbide.  I’m happy to say they didn’t.  Have you ever regretted that you didn’t do this like Hanford?  
Mr. Sapirie:  Well, let me answer that Bob, by pointing out that I was one of the strong proponents for signing the responsibility for the Y-12 plant to Carbide at the time that Tennessee Eastman left, and assigning the responsibility for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Carbide at the time Monsanto left.  I think that there is a tremendous economic advantage in having a single contractor operate these three major facilities.  They are able to do a more efficient job of procurement, of employment.  They are able to reassign people between the three plants.  They are able to handle their labor relations on a coordinated basis so as to do the best job, both for the laborer and for the government.  And there are a number of other distinct advantages. So I can answer your question in a very positive manner.  I was strongly in favor of retaining the total activities under the Carbide contract and I think the decision to do so was the proper decision.  [tape break]  
I think one must recognize that there is a distinct difference between the situation out in Richland, Washington and the situation here in Oak Ridge.  Several years ago when the Commission made the decision to segment the activities at Richland, Washington it was done with recognition of the fact that the AEC’s program there was scheduled to be cut back.  An effort was made to establish industry in that particular area so as to protect the community and ensure a viable continuing operation by industry in that particular area.  Here in Oak Ridge on the other hand, the activities had been quite stable and if anything I would expect them in the future there could be some nominal growth.  But there was no specific reason for segmenting the activities here at Oak Ridge as there was in Richland, Washington.
[tape breaks]
Alright you’ve asked me to tell you a little bit about the early history of our family in Oak Ridge.  When we came here, we were assigned a government-owned house, which we rented at 100 Ogden Circle.  It is the same house we live in now.  We love the location.  We love our view and we like our neighbors and as far as I’m concerned we would like to stay here forever.  As far as our children are concerned, our son was in the third grade.  He was eight years old.  He had already been in schools in Edmundton, Alberta and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in Fort Worth, Texas before we came here and this was the third grade, but he did finish up his elementary and high school education here in Oak Ridge.  I think he received a wonderful education here.  He was one of the recipients of a Navy Scholarship under the Holloway Plan, which was a competitive type scholarship.  He went to Purdue for two years under that, and then he decided to transfer to the University of Tennessee where he finished his college education in 1960.  He then went to Navy OCS at Newport, Rhode Island and received his commission in the Navy.  He had assignment on ships that were stationed on the West Coast.  He had four years sea duty in the Pacific. Afterwards he was re-assigned to a computer center in Washington for an additional two years and he stayed on there two years more as civilian employee of the Navy Department.  While in Washington he received his Masters Degree from American University.  The degree was in computer utilization.  Following that he was asked by the World Health Organization to transfer to Geneva, Switzerland, where he has been for almost four years on an extremely interesting assignment.  He is a member of a task force that is helping develop medical plans for developing nations throughout the world.  So far he’s been to exotic places like Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, India and in the present time he’s in Africa.  Now as far as our daughter, she was born in Fort Worth, Texas just about three days before I left Fort Worth to come to Oak Ridge to assume my first assignment here.  My wife and daughter moved here about a month later.  So she was a month old when she established residence in Oak Ridge.  She went through the Oak Ridge school system.  She went to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for two years and then she also transferred to the University of Tennessee where she received her degree.  I think that was in 1968.  She immediately decided that the place that she would like to live would be Texas so she went to Dallas, Texas, and acquired a teaching assignment there and she is still teaching there.  She is now married and enjoying life fully.  I think the experience of both our youngsters in going through the school system here and growing up here in Oak Ridge was the finest thing that could have happened to them.  They both are very proud of Oak Ridge and I think have profited quite a bit from it.  
In going back to the early days of the city of Oak Ridge I think we all recognized that after the war, there was a need to plan for normalizing the community.  The first thing we had to do was to declare the city portion of the area out of the controlled area.  The Oak Ridge area had about a hundred square miles at that time.  About a little over 60,000 acres.   It was all surrounded by a fence and there were military police guarding the entrances to the area.  You had to have either a pictured badge or a pass to get in or out.  Certainly that was no way to promote a community, so in 1949 the decision was made to relocate the controlled area fence so as to exclude the community.  And they had a big celebration at which there were movie stars and other dignitaries and everything from fireworks to brass bands, but it was a necessary step and it was quite successful.  Many of the people objected to the idea of opening the community because that would let peddlers come in and let some of the relatives come in that they might not want, but it all worked out very well and nobody was harmed by it.  That was the first step towards normalizing the community.  We also recognized the need for long range planning and we hired engineer firms to develop master plans.  We hired other firms to develop economic plans to determine whether or not it would be possible to have a viable community with having only a single industry, basically the federal activities here.  It was concluded that if people were satisfied with a so called bedroom community, it could be done at reasonable cost and have a highly desirable place in which to live.  Well, there were many plans and a lot of work to be done towards incorporation and disposal of property that required authorizing legislation to be passed by Congress.  Public Law 221 provided the authority for the government to sell the property here and to give priority to the occupants.  Within a matter of a year or a year and a half Oak Ridge went from being a city with the smallest percentage of occupant-owned property in the country, to the city of the highest percentage of occupant-owned property.  I think one of the gratifying things was to see the improvements the people in Oak Ridge made on these houses when they purchased them.  The ingenuity of the people was just remarkable and from the government ownership period in which practically everybody lived in the cemestos that looked alike, to the privately owned period when everybody had modified the same cemestos to brick veneer or put poplar or redwood siding on them or add a room as Dick Smyser used to call it, the “bulging walls period”.  There was something new to go through and enjoy them.  I think even during the, or even in the part of the city that was part of the original residential area, Oak Ridge is now quite attractive.  Of course, as you know, there are other new residential areas that have modern homes of all types of architecture just like every other city in the country.  The last housing development that the Atomic Energy Commission put in, completely at government cost, was the group of housing we called the Garden Apartments.  That was a group of about 453 units of modern apartment housing that was constructed and occupancy was assigned by the government as was the occupancy of all other housing.  But when Congress authorized the sale of housing, the apartments were sold.  They continue to be available for rent and now provide good housing for people who prefer to rent rather than to own their own housing.  We also had two other types of housing rather late in the program.  One we called Title Eight and the other Title Nine housing in several parts of the community in which real estate developers constructed privately financed, privately owned housing that was insured by the federal government and rented to qualifying occupants and then ultimately sold.  Since then however, the housing within the city, all of the new housing, had been provided by private industry and there continues to be more demand for housing than the supply adequately satisfies.  
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Well I’ve been asked to say a few words about the new AEC building.  I think that it is significant from a historical point of view because of the fact that for so many years we occupied a temporary war-time-constructed facility of some seven wings that we were holding up with paint.  I was also quite proud of the fact that it lasted long enough to have the completion of construction of our new federal office building.  I know at the time of the dedication of the new building near Al Bissel and his few remarks mentioned he’d had a horrible dream the night before.  He said he woke up with a nightmare but his dream was that he and Sam Sapirie were painting the old office building, just the two of us.  I followed Al on the program, but I didn’t say it but I should have said that that was only half the story.  The end of the story was that after we finished painting the building we backed away to admire our work and all of a sudden the building fell over: it couldn’t stand the weight of an extra coat of paint.  That’s getting a little bit off the subject.  The new building, we have is actually a Federal Building rather than an AEC Administration Building although the AEC Oak Ridge Operations Office occupies over 90% of the space in the building.  GSA constructed the building with the authorization provided by Congress and appropriations provided by Congress.  Congressman Joe Evans who was the congressman representing this district, was quite influential first in recognizing the need for the building and second in sponsoring it before Congress.  I think the people of Oak Ridge owe him a vote of thanks for his astuteness in recognizing the need and his competence in getting the authority for the building.  The building is a modern office structure and I think in addition to physically satisfying the needs of the Atomic Energy Commission it also has a psychological lift to the community and recognizing that the Atomic Energy Commission activities here are actually permanent and justify the availability of a permanent office building…
[Tape 2 side A]
Mr. Sapirie:  ...gratifying aspects of a job such as being Manager of Oak Ridge Operations is the opportunity it gives you to meet outstanding people.  People who are leaders not only in this country but in the world.  Over there on the bookshelf you can see six black volumes of photographs of visitors that we’ve had here in Oak Ridge who I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with.  People like Eleanor Roosevelt; I spent a whole day with her.  The King of Belgium has been here.  The Prince Albert of Belgium has been here.  We’ve had the Heads of the atomic energy commissions of practically every country in the free world, not only the free world but every country that has an atomic energy commission because the head of the Atomic Energy Commissions of Russia have been here several times.  We’ve never had a President here.  We’ve had two vice-presidents here.  During one period of time within a period of a month, I had the experience of spending a day each with three of the outstanding candidates for the presidency, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and John Kennedy were….
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Mr. Sapirie:  ...the three were all here within a month and I had an opportunity to spend a day each with them touring the area.  It was quite interesting to note the depth of their interest and the astuteness of questions and their quickness in grasping the answers.  Another time we had another presidential candidate here, Adlai Stevenson, stopped in Oak Ridge on his first trip after being nominated to run for the presidency by the Democratic Party.  We’ve also had many members of royalty here.  I spent most of two days with Queen Frederica of Greece.  She was quite interested in nuclear physics and I sat next to her in the car coming from the Knoxville Airport to Oak Ridge.  I asked her the simple question why she had developed this interest in nuclear physics and she says, well basically, she was interested in people.  But people are a complex object to understand and she thought that if she could gain an understanding of the smallest parts of nature first, she might then be able to proceed to the more complex parts.  She was quite interested in our nuclear program. We’ve had visits here from the King of Jordan and the King of Thailand.  One of the things we were warned by the State Department before the visit of the King of Thailand was not to ask him about the stage production of “The King and I.”  
[Break in tape]  
Another interesting aspect of this particular job was the opportunity that it has given me to travel to other parts of the world to meet with leaders in the atomic energy program at other places.  The most enjoyable and the most recent trip that I took was about a year ago, to Japan to be the U.S. Representative to the annual meeting of the Japanese Atomic Industrial Forum. The invitation from the Forum was sent to Chairman Seaborg to attend that meeting, but since the primary subject for discussion at the meeting was Uranium enrichment, he asked that I go in his place to represent the AEC.  I enjoyed it very much.  I found it extremely interesting.  It shakes you up a little bit to speak in a microphone in English and have it come out on the public address system in Japanese, but after a short time you gradually got accustomed to that.  The audience of 800 were extremely interested in the program.  You could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium.  While I was there I was also able to visit some of the nuclear projects throughout the country and found them to be extremely interesting.  The Japanese, of course, are dependent upon the importation of all of their fuel, essentially all of their fuel and they don’t feel completely comfortable at being dependent upon the Middle East for most of their petroleum products.  So they are building nuclear power plants at a faster rate than most other countries in the world.  The Japanese of course are purchasing their enriched Uranium from the United States and Oak Ridge Operations is handling these transactions.  Our Uranium enrichment plants at Oak Ridge, at Paducah and at Portsmouth are doing the work of enriching the privately owned feed material.  Many orders have been placed by countries throughout the free world and power companies in the United States for enriched Uranium.  In this fiscal year, the revenue from the sale of enriched Uranium will be on the order of $260 million.  By 1980, just 8 years from now, it will be up to a billion dollars a year from the sale of Uranium enriching services.  So I think that we, here in Oak Ridge, should gain a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that we are helping the entire world satisfy the rapidly growing need for electric power.  I think to place the energy power in proper perspective it might be helpful to know that one pound of enriched Uranium, which in the form of metal, is a little piece about an inch in diameter and an inch long, has the same potential heat as two million six hundred thousand pounds of coal.  In other words, one pound of enriched Uranium will provide as much energy as 1,300 tons of coal. So you see the economic advantage of shipping energy in the form of enriched Uranium rather than shipping it in the form of coal.
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I’ve been asked to say a few words about my retirement plans.  I think the most important decision I made about retirement is that I plan to stay in Oak Ridge.  We just couldn’t think of leaving here.  We do plan to travel some.  There are many places in then world where we haven’t been or we’d like to see. There are other places in the world we’ve been, that we like and would like to return.  I don’t want to be a tourist.  I would like to maybe go to London and rent a furnished place for a month and stay there and then maybe go to Geneva for a month or two, and get to know the local people and use that as a base of operation from which we could then travel a little bit when we feel like doing it.  The one thing that I’ve looked forward to in retirement is having some control over my own time.  With the type of responsibility that the Manager of Oak Ridge Operations has, you’d be amazed at how many pressures there are.  How many demands on his time that forces him to do things that are less important than things that he should be doing in his own opinion that he can’t do.  So the thing that I’ve been looking forward to in retirement is an opportunity to decide that today I’m going to do so-and-so and go ahead and do it, without the threat of the telephone ringing in five minutes and saying that so-and-so over in Congress has raised this question and we have to have the answer by 5 o’clock.  
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Well I haven’t quite achieved my objective here.  For the last twenty-five years I’ve placed my family responsibilities more or less in second place in comparison with my official responsibilities, and I found that during that period of time, Edith developed a laundry list of items, that, part of which, is a little bit out of date but in the event that I have to do a lot of work on, so I’m slowly whittling away at that list.  I think that someday we’re going to get almost caught up and at that time, why we’ll do some of this traveling we’ve been planning on.



Transcribed:  June 2005
Typed by LB