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Northwest Public Television | Taylor_Diane_Bob
Man one: Okay
Robert Bauman: All right. Good to go?
Man one: You ready?
Man two: We're ready to go.
Bauman: Okay. All right, well, we'll get started. And I'm going to start first by having each of you say your name for us. Make sure we have that on there. So go ahead.
Bob Taylor: My name is Bob Taylor.
Bauman: All right.
Dianne Taylor: And I'm Dianne Taylor.
Bauman: And Dianne is spelled with two Ns?
Dianne Taylor: Two Ns, yes.
Bauman: Okay, great. And my name's Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And today is June 10th of 2015. And so, if we could start maybe, start, Bob, maybe, with if you could tell us a little bit about your family and how they ended up coming to the Tri-Cities area and when that happened.
Bob Taylor: My father was employed by the US federal prison system. He went to work as a guard at McNeil Island in 1934 for the Department of Prisons, the US Bureau of Prisons--there, I'm finally saying that correctly. And he started off as a guard and was employed at McNeil Island from 1934 actually until he retired in 1955. But the real story to talk about is how I happen to be sitting here. And in the early stages of the creation of the Manhattan Project and what was developing here with the acquisition of all the lands for Hanford, very early in that process, the US Army went to the Bureau of Prisons and contracted for a minimum security type prison camp to be constructed here in the Richland area. The purpose of that being the minimum security prisoners would be farming the lands and the orchards that were being acquired by the Manhattan Project, but would have no men available to take care of the fields and the orchards. And so the Bureau of Prisons contracted with the Department of the Army on behalf of the Manhattan Project to maintain those fields out in Vernita, White Bluffs, all in this area. And they agreed—they, the Department of the Army--agreed to build a, what they call, prison camp. It turned out to be right out on the bend of the Yakima River right near Horn Rapids Dam. And they constructed buildings, facilities, kitchens, dining areas, administration buildings, and the facilities to house and support approximately 250 federal prisoners who were brought in in early 1944 to take care of the agricultural needs of this area. And my father, who was at that point then had been with the federal prison at McNeil Island and had become a senior guard, was chosen to come over here and become superintendent of this camp. The name of the camp is Columbia Camp. And that's a little story in itself. The people in Washington, DC, were out here and didn't quite know the geography. They knew the Columbia River was here somewhere nearby, and even though the Yakima is a much smaller river, they didn't realize it. And so they named this federal prison camp Columbia Camp simply because they were on a river and they thought they were on the Columbia River. That's how it came to have the name Columbia Camp. Anyway, they started bringing the prisoners in in early 1944. And as I say, they typically for the next three and a half years, had about 250 prisoners on site at any given time. I think the number in the various information files I have, there were probably more like 700 prisoners rotated through this area. But the facilities were actually to hold about 250. So my dad took over as superintendent of the prison camp. He came here in early 1944, and initially they had—and I have many pictures of the whole camp, the buildings, and also the housing—there were initially 16 Quonset huts that were built out there for the initial officers and their families to move. At the time he came, those were the first. We moved in here actually on D Day, 1944, June 6th, in the middle of a major windstorm. And my mother who was born and raised in Western Washington, to arrive here in those kind of conditions—I don't have to say that we had no air conditioning, and fans weren't even really very available. We moved into a Quonset hut. We ultimately, by the next spring, they—the Army, the prison—built eight more fancy housing. They brought in prefabs, the basic 609 square foot prefab that everybody in Richland is familiar with, of which there are still hundreds of them. That was the new fancy housing, and my dad as superintendent was able to claim the first one in the row next to the administration building. So in the next spring, then, we moved into a prefab. Again, I have lots of pictures, family pictures, of our housing. The kids, we were bused into Richland. Initially we all went to Sacajawea the first year we were there. And then when Jefferson grade school opened in the fall of '45, we all went there, switched over to there. We had a couple of older kids—family, kids in the camp—that went to high school at what was then called Columbia High School. My mother was a teacher, actually ended up teaching at Columbia High School part of the time that we were here. So as families living at Columbia Camp, we were bused into town, pretty much bused back home. And we played. As kids we played in the heat of the summer and cold in the winter and just pretty much in the desert surrounding the camp out there. The camp itself existed from early 1943. In early 1947, they started—they, again, the US Bureau of Prisons and the US Army--started writing back and forth corresponding about the continued need for the maintenance of the orchards and the fields and ultimately decided that it wasn't necessary anymore. And some of those fields ultimately were left to go, and others were maintained I guess in other ways. In the files that I have, my dad's files, I've got a tremendous amount of correspondence between he and the officials in Washington, DC. The Department of Army, I've got synopsis of what all was done during those period of years. I have interesting files about prisoners and some of their experiences in managing them as agricultural workers, how they got them to work every day, how they kept them fed every day. There's a lot of material in the files that I have of my dad's about that sort of thing. There's a lot of information about the contract itself between the US Army and the Federal Bureau of Prisons as far as payment of fees and expenses and also the type of crops that were harvested in volume and in prices and that sort of thing. It makes for very fascinating reading to have this kind of information available to me about what went on out there. Then ultimately in the fall of 1947, I think we were about the last to leave as a family. We left in November of '47. And basically the place was abandoned. I have, again in the files, there's information about dismantling the camp and sending knives and forks to Leavenworth and dishes to somewhere in Arizona. So there's a lot of very detailed information about the camp. But the long and the short of it is that the camp existed for those three and a half, almost four years. And very, very, very few people anywhere even know about it. The families, the other families, were rotated to different jobs. Three or four of the families went back to McNeil Island. Others went to Arizona, Leavenworth—other federal prison camps. And everybody just went their own way, and nobody was left here to even be a historian for what all went on. And thanks to my mother, who keeps all these documents and records and letters, and even—there's a lot of letters between my father and my mother when he first came over here, where he's giving examples of daily life here in Richland in 1944 that are just fascinating reading. And the cost of a rental house that the government was charging for people and the cost to buy a refrigerator, things like that. So it's really fun for us to be able to come and sort of make some of this information available as to what Columbia Camp was all about over many, many, many years in Richland, because nobody was here to contradict that statement. A lot of people said, oh, it was a prisoner war camp. And ultimately, finally, that got changed. There was some documentation. At the present time, out at the day camp, there's a kiosk out there with a few pictures and a commentary posted out there, a little parking lot that you can drive to that gives just an extremely brief summary of what Columbia Camp was. There's a picture of a man, a far distant picture of a man standing in front of the administration building. Cannot guarantee it, but I think it—I'm pretty sure it's my dad. He was the superintendent of the camp, so his picture's out there in that kiosk for anybody that wants to go out there and look. But that's what Columbia Camp in a nutshell was all about. We have many, many, many pictures of the camp, the buildings, the dormitory buildings, the kitchen, the administration building, the power plant, the steam plant. And then we ourselves have taken pictures recently from some of those same positions, including the foundation of the steam plant that we've got so we can supplement a lot of what I've been talking about. Well, everything that I've been talking about we can supplement with pictures, and letters, and documents, and correspondence, and files.
Dianne Taylor: Memories.
Bauman: Yeah, right. So really interesting, and so first of all, let me confirm that there are still rumors out there. I've had students tell me, wasn't there a prisoner of war camp?
Dianne Taylor: Really?
Bauman: Oh, yeah.
Bob Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bauman: Or, wasn't a Japanese internment camp here?
Bob Taylor: That's what--
Bauman: No.
Dianne Taylor: Mm-mm.
Bauman: So this is great to--one great thing about interviewing you is to clarify that for people as well.
Dianne Taylor: One of the things that I'd like to bring in, because we didn't know about this for so long. Dad would not talk about his prison experiences. He was a loving, wonderful, wonderful father and grandfather and wonderful father-in-law. But this was never discussed. It wasn't until he died and I'm going through all of their things because Bob's an only child that I find all of this stuff. So Bob's mother's in a nursing home. She's quite elderly. We find this stuff. We get so excited over these pictures. Of course, she thought we were crazy to move to Richland anyway because her memories are not the Richland it is today. So we went, took all these pictures. And all she did was she took them from me, put them down in her purse. And I said, well, Mom, this is exciting. We found all dad's stuff, and we want to talk about it. No, it's secret. She would not talk about it. It was secret. And this is in 19--when did she die?
Bob Taylor: Well, this was in 1995, I think, that we--
Dianne Taylor: It was so ingrained in her, the secrecy of their lives, that even after all that time, she couldn't talk to us. So we took the pictures. I said, mom, I've got to have the pictures. And we took them back. But I think that's when it really hit me what their lives must have been like living here at that time.
Bauman: Right, that even that, which was only tangentially connected to Hanford--
Bob Taylor: Exactly.
Dianne Taylor: Yes. Yeah.
Bauman: Was very secret, right?
Dianne Taylor: Yeah, absolutely.
Bauman: So let me ask you a few questions. So first of all, what was your father's name?
Bob Taylor: Harold E. Taylor.
Bauman: Harold Taylor, okay. And your mother's name?
Bob Taylor: Doris C. Taylor.
Bauman: Okay. And so it was the three of you when you--well, your father came initially, and then you and your mother came.
Bob Taylor: Right, in June.
Bauman: In June of '44. And you mentioned the dust storm.
Bob Taylor: Termination wind.
Bauman: So, and you said that it could hold about 250 prisoners at the camp at once.
Bob Taylor: Yes.
Bauman: So it was minimum security. So what sorts of--but they were federal prisoners.
Bob Taylor: They were.
Bauman: So what sorts of crimes would these men have committed?
Bob Taylor: The vast majority of federal prisoners were not necessarily minimum security, but they were white collar crimes. In some cases bank robbers would sometimes fit into the category, depends on the nature of the individual. But bank robbers weren't necessarily restricted from ever being in the so-called minimum security camps. And, see, we went back to McNeil Island, where my dad then took over the minimum security part of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. And so some of these same prisoners went with us back over there. That's kind of an aside, but it's part of explaining to you, or answering your question about minimum security and who qualified. I'll finish that answer first. A lot of them were conscientious objectors. And in fact there's correspondence in the files where prisoners would be sent here to Columbia Camp, but they were always—the conscientious objectors—they were always being monitored, talked to, perhaps convinced that it would be to their best interest if they would revoke their claim to being a conscientious objector and go back and join the Army and basically reinvent themselves in society. And there's a few prisoners did that. We've even got in those boxes, we've got a couple letters that one or two of them wrote to my dad personally thanking him. He's gone back, he's gone in the Army. He feels better about himself. So we've even got that kind of stuff in the file. Anyway, then, just as an interesting aside, when you talk about minimum security versus the hardcore inside the walls type, like at McNeil Island, state prisoners—murders, that sort of thing—of course they're maximum security. But any white collar crime, including—might not sound like white color crime—but bank robbery, that sort of thing, there can be any number of--
Dianne Taylor: In those days.
Bob Taylor:--forgers. There can be any number of kind of people that aren't really hardcore criminals, but they've made mistakes. They've done things bad. But they know that they're decent people. And these are the people that, even on McNeil Island, again, same as here, they would stay in a minimum security area and do the weeding, doing the gardening, doing the orchards, doing the fields, like over there like they were doing here. My dad, as superintendent of the camp at McNeil, we had kind of a beautiful estate, ranch home estate with about an acre and a half of rockeries and gardens and rose trellises. And we had five--as a kid, I never mowed the yard. I had five prisoners that—we did, the family did—that took care of our yard and our place. It was kind of a strange childhood that I had. But that's what minimum security means, that they could be trusted. They were called trustees, as a matter of fact.
Bauman: And so about how large of a staff was there working at the camp?
Bob Taylor: Here at Columbia Camp, there were 24. 24 with families, and then there were another ten to 12 that lived in Prosser, Benton City, some of them right here in Richland that would come to work. So there was less than 40 total staff, 24 of whom were on site with families.
Dianne Taylor: Tell him the story that you were telling me about Dad writing a note about getting these guys to come in on Sunday for roll call.
Bob Taylor: Oh, it was one of the notes, one of the memorandums to his officers in the files that I read. It's something to the effect—no, I guess it was a memo to the entire camp, to the prisoners and the officers. And it's just kind of a tongue-in-cheek, that it seems to be hard to get prisoners to make bed call or duty call or account for themselves on the weekends. And it was just kind of an interesting, the way he wrote that even on the weekends, they still, after all, are prisoners and have to account for themselves. They actually only had I think it was three escapes. Nobody actually ever fully totally escaped. They had three that walked away, but they were caught along the river on the way to Benton City. So that was part of the minimum security idea is that they weren't particularly threats. They knew they just needed to serve their time and get out. And so they weren't trying to break out.
Dianne Taylor: And where could they go? That's the desert. There's no transportation. That's one of the stories Dad did tell me about two of the guys walking to Benton City. And of course they didn't get there because there's nowhere to hide.
Bauman: And so how old were you then when you came here?
Bob Taylor: My birthday's in July, so I was six years old when we moved here in June. And as I said, it was D-Day. And then just turned seven in July, and then I was ten when we left in late '47.
Bauman: Okay. And so what was that like as someone roughly between the ages of seven and ten living out here in the camp in initially a Quonset hut? Is that right?
Bob Taylor: Initially in Quonset hut and then in a prefab. Well, first of all, six-to-ten-year-olds don't really think about hot and cold. The only thing that we were ever really cautioned about by our parents is it's a little problematic to go running around in the desert barefooted. There were rattlesnakes. Never got bit by one. Saw a few. But we had the swimming hole right there at the bend of the river for summertime, spent a lot of time in the swimming. The pictures you can see the two rows of Quonset huts. It was kind of, I call it a parkway, which wasn't necessarily what you would call a bunch of grass in 1944. But nevertheless, there was a grassy strip, two street, two roads for cars, and the Quonset huts and in the middle grassy strip that that's where we played our soccer and mostly soccer that we played there as kids. And we were either in the river, out there in that strip, or just wandering out in the desert barefoot. And with our bicycles, there's a picture I've got showing me standing beside a tree that was very near our house that I crashed into and cut my head open. That sort of thing as living here as a kid. We were typical kids, even though we were--in fact, my entire life growing up was always subject to prison service. We lived on McNeil Island, which was, when we went back, I mean, my grade school and my high school years, I went to school in Lakewood Tacoma, Clover Park High School. But we still lived on the island. We had to catch a prison launch back and forth every day. As kids growing up, none of us ever had the typical life experience of just walking to the store, walking to the theater. We didn't live on Swift and could walk down to the Village—to the theater. We never had those kind of experiences. Speaking of the theater, we did get to come into town. Our parents would carpool or whatever, and we'd come into town to the Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix movies on Saturday afternoon at the Village Theater here in Richland. But it was never anything we could ride our bike to or walk to.
Bauman: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, about getting into town and how often you were able to do that. And what was the town of Richland like? What sorts of memories do you have?
Bob Taylor: Well, I mean, you've got all the pictures as a historian. You know what Richland basically looked like in 1944, 1945. It was like that. I mean, we came into school. The first year I said we went to Sacajawea. The second year, we from then on went to Jefferson. We would become friends with kids in the class and do things with kids in the class, but it was always more difficult. I was in Cub Scouts. My dad would have to drive in to make separate arrangements to go, and to some of the other kids out there as well, to come in to the Cub Scout meetings. One of my memories, and I'm not sure why, but one of my memories was one of the girls' parents had--and I don't quite understand it now, but her parents had—I can't say they owned, but maybe they did—a large enough piece of ground that she could ride her horses. And I remember some of us—and it was like right here. It was straight north from Jefferson that we would come out of town, although not very far, and ride horses out here in the open prairie. And it might have been right here. I don't know. But we were able to socialize to some degree with the kids in town. But again, one of the things that I have to say, it's like my mother. Even as kids, talked about secrecy. We were instilled with absolutely every bit of that, just like the adults. We absolutely were. And it was just a way of life, so we didn't question it. We didn't try to violate it. We just--everything was secret.
Bauman: So you didn't talk to anyone about the camp at all really?
Bob Taylor: Just that we lived out there. And that was all.
Bauman: Right. So did you know what Hanford was, what was going on?
Bob Taylor: No, not until the bomb was dropped and the paper headline right here in Richland. That's when we knew what was going on. The road now as you go out there is not the same road it was then. What is Horn Rapids Road, which comes across—wherever we are—comes across, that was the road that we came in on. So we came in a little further north into Richland than we do now, where the intersection is. And so right at that corner right there was the beginning of the trailer camp where so many people were living and so many of the kids in school with me were living in the trailer camp. And there was a wire fence along the road, and so we just knew we were outside the fence, and something was going on on the other side of the fence. But we didn't know what it was—until the article came out in the paper.
Bauman: You mentioned, so, the prisoners, would they get transported, then to different fields--
Bob Taylor: They were bused.
Bauman: --to different farms then?
Bob Taylor: There were like, I think as I recall in reading the files, there were sometimes as many as ten different gangs or groups, for lack of a better term, that were bused out to the various sites. And that's part of what's in my dad's files is just the logistics of taking--they called it dinner then--lunch out to feed everybody at lunchtime, and just the difficulties of that sort of thing in running this prison camp. Because some of them out in Vernita, for instance, they basically had to leave with the lunch service right after breakfast to get it out there. Because the road, the road was not great going out to Vernita from here. The road that we drive now and think nothing of was basically just a dirt road in those days going out there. Because the road, the paved road, bent south and went to Benton City when you go out that way. So yeah, there were a number of different orchards. I can remember clearly the—what are now all the Richland ranches on Cottonwood and Birch and Cedar, all those where all the Richland ranches were ultimately built in 1948. All of that was cherry orchards. And we always had one or two crews harvesting the cherries, for instance, right here in town. And a couple times my dad brought me out and actually I helped them pick cherries. So that's just one of my memories is picking cherries in what is now that major housing part of Richland.
Bauman: Right. Now, so, in 1947, when the camp closed and you left, I assume maybe your mother was probably happy about going back to the west side? [LAUGHTER]
Bob Taylor: Extremely, yes, extremely happy to get back to the cool west side, yes.
Dianne Taylor: She was a tiny, tiny, lovely lady, a teacher. Heart and soul a teacher, and totally supportive of Bob's father. But she wasn't happy to be here at all. [LAUGHTER] And she was very, very happy when they finally left.
Bauman: You mentioned she taught at Columbia High School.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah.
Bauman: What did she teach?
Bob Taylor: English, primarily English. And she was in charge of the journalism one school year.
Dianne Taylor: She had to quit teaching, though, because of her duties as--and the words are official hostess of the camp, which is really interesting. She organized bridge activities, social activities, to keep the wives that were thrown out here in the middle of the desert happy. Because of course they weren't working, very many of them. So she worked that first year at Hanford, and then she quit and was kept busy keeping activities going on for the women and children.
Bauman: That's very interesting. Were there a lot of children around your age you were able to play with?
Bob Taylor: I'm trying to remember. There were, of my own specific age that were my closest friends, there were seven of us that were either within one grade one way or the other. I think there were some older kids that came into high school. Our bus—I think there were about a total of 12 or 14 of us rode the bus into town. There certainly weren't two kids in every household of the 24 officers that worked there. Some of them were more senior and kids were grown and gone.
Bauman: So did you have your own bus, then, that would just take a group of kids from the camp?
Bob Taylor: I guess, yeah, we must have, that there was just a bus that came out and got us and took us back into town. There was nobody else to pick up. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And do you remember how you felt about first of all coming here? Do you have any memories of that, and then when you left in 1947?
Bob Taylor: I certainly had no--at age six, everything in the world was exciting to me. I think I mentioned earlier heat and wind, that sort of thing didn't really mean much of anything to me. I have no recollection of being upset about being here, other than knowing that my mother was upset about being here. I liked it here. I had good friends. I was kind of disappointed to go back to McNeil Island. Three of my closest friends at camp that were out there too--let's see, Kenny and Jerry and—
Dianne Taylor: Were they out there then?
Bob Taylor: Yeah. There were, I think, five of us actually went back to McNeil Island. So, at least I wasn't--had my friends going back there with me, which made it better. And then we had a very--from a prefab in the desert, we went back to a fairly palatial estate that we lived on because of my dad's position, so I liked that. And then that next year I started junior high at Clover Park. And so starting then I went back to--I rode the boat to Steilacoom and caught the bus to school. And then I was off on a whole 'nother part of my life. I think I'd say I was probably happy to be leaving, but not the way my mother was happy to be leaving.
Dianne Taylor: Well, I think it was a pretty idyllic childhood for kids like this. They've got the free reign of the desert, within reason. They've got the swimming pool. Nobody was worrying about jumping into the Yakima River. And they had friends, and they'd go into the movies. We've got a picture of Bob--we think it's Bob--with his buddies. There was a picture in Richland years ago at the post office there was a little museum.
Bauman: A kind of display.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah. And there's a picture of the kids outside the Uptown--not the Uptown, the old Village Theater. And we're pretty sure he's there. But the stories he would tell me, running around, riding their bikes, it was--
Bob Taylor: I just think of it as fun and unique. I really do.
Dianne Taylor: What about the stories about Dad and the baseball field? They had a baseball field there for the prisoners, for their recreation.
Bauman: Oh, at the camp.
Bob Taylor: Well, that was their big activity on the weekends. They had a very nice ball field. Again, there's pictures of it outside of the administration building. And my dad was a good guy. For somebody in 1934 to survive starting as a prison guard at McNeil Island, those were tough times. Those were really tough times. I don't mean living as a family, my mom and dad. I mean just as a human being who felt some degree of emotion about people. Prison guards anywhere in any prison in 1934 were really tough, mean guys. They had to be. But when he came over here, he really--and it shows in his correspondence--he really had a lot of humanity and caring. And he ran a really great camp here and has lots of letters saying so from people, from superiors. What started me on that was just her idea about the baseball. He wanted to make sure that they had sporting activities to do things with over the weekend.
Bauman: Recreation and entertainment.
Bob Taylor: Yeah.
Bauman: I find it very interesting neither of your parents really talked about this stuff, but they kept--
Dianne Taylor: Yeah, oh yeah.
Bauman: --the photos and the documents that you didn't even know.
Bob Taylor: Yeah. We didn't realize they had all that.
Dianne Taylor: And Dad would talk about it a little bit. It wasn't like he never talked about it. But he told me the story one time about the prisoners escaping, and he talked some of these things. But it wasn't something that you talked about very much. It was once in a while. I mean, like every few years there'd be a comment. But Mom didn't talk about it at all, other than the teaching, which of course she loved to be a teacher and loved doing that. But it was a very, very quiet non-discussed part of their lives.
Bauman: Are there any other either events or things that happened that were humorous or special things, memories that stand out in your mind about your years here?
Bob Taylor: One of my major memories actually was the very first summer we were here. And three or four six-year-old boys never, ever, ever, ever got in trouble. But for some reason, we chose to go into the crawl space underneath our Quonset hut. I mean, there was no foundation in the sense you'd think of a foundation. But there was a raised floor and so there was space under there with snakes and bugs and spiders. And my parents never specifically told me, don't ever go down there. You'd sort of think that was understood. But three of us, one hot, hot, hot day, we thought, well, it was just boiling hot outside. It was boiling hot in the Quonset hut. Those things are not fit for human habitation without air conditioning. And so we got the smart idea it might be cooler down there in the crawl space. So we got down in the crawl space, and then for some reason some guards--I say guards—some of the men came around doing some kind of a check of the housing. I don't know what they were necessarily—but here we were, little boys where we were pretty sure we weren't supposed to be, and the adult men walking around sounded like we just knew they were looking specifically for us to get us in trouble. That's kind of silly, really, but it was a big thing for me as six years old to be down there where I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be and knew what kind of trouble I was going to be in when they found us. The other thing is the coming into the shows in the afternoon and standing in the line outside the theater. And, as I say, Tom Mix, and Hopalong Cassidy, and whoever else, the Saturday afternoon shows at the theater. I remember going to those a lot.
Dianne Taylor: One of the fun things that we go out to there. We hadn't been there for a few years, out to the camp. It's just kind of fun to walk around and realize what was there--the families, the men—brought together from all over the country for one purpose. And they fulfilled their purpose and kept the orchards going and the fields, and then they left. And to me there's a lot of kind of neat spirit and ghost—ghost isn't the right word. But there's a sense that there was something really interesting, good happening here—good or bad depending on the way you looked at it. But it's just an interesting place to go and walk around out there. You should do it sometime.
Bauman: Yeah. And a unique place.
Dianne Taylor: Very unique, very unique. And it's fun to walk around, and we think we found the kitchen. So I'm thinking about the guy making the good cinnamon rolls. He was there. And you think you found where Dad—where the office was.
Bob Taylor: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can identify where the administration building was. But the various cement foundations or partial foundations that are still out there can pretty well match up with the pictures that we have from back then.
Bauman: Well, great. Maybe this might be a good time, then, to sort of end this part, unless there's something we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to in this part of the--
Bob Taylor: Well, I've covered the things that I certainly, the bullet points that I had in mind that I wanted to cover. There's probably always more things to talk about. Part of it is sitting and having the box and going through and pulling a piece of paper might remind me to say something else. But I feel comfortable right now in saying that anybody watching this interview is going to know a whole lot more about what Columbia Camp was about than they knew before. And that's the main point of what we're trying to accomplish here.
Dianne Taylor: There were no fences at Columbia Camp.
Bob Taylor: Right.
Dianne Taylor: There were no fences.
Bob Taylor: Right.
Bauman: Right. And these were all male prisoners, right?
Bob Taylor: Oh yeah.
Bauman: Yeah, well, maybe this would be a good time to end this part, and then we can look at some of the photos and have you comment some of those.
Dianne Taylor: I wish that they had shared it with--Bob's mom and dad had shared it with us sooner, because there would be so many more stories and so much more understanding.
Man one: Okay, so I'm going to give this. Why was it located--I mean, I know it was located for the orchard support and stuff. But why where it was? Ever hear why it was located?
Bob Taylor: I don't specifically know, other than it was near Hanford. It was on the river, which helped with the infrastructure. It was away from this burgeoning 1,500 population big town of Richland.
Man one: And yet kind of remote.
Bob Taylor: And kind of remote. I mean, it was remote for those days.
Bauman: Like you said, escaping was tricky because--
Bob Taylor: Yeah, it was far enough.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah.
Man one: It was Alcatraz in its own way.
Dianne Taylor: Well, it was. It was, because it was--I mean, can you just imagine being out there and trying to escape? And how are you going to get water? It's the true desert.
Bob Taylor: I guess the real answer is, if you realize that Hanford took everything from here north and they weren't going to go across the river, and here's Richland, and down there is Benton City, and this is the Yakima winding out there and just kind of a nice little bend in the river of the Yakima.
Bauman: I love that they call it Columbia Camp even though it's not--
Dianne Taylor: Isn't that funny?
Man one: I know, it's great. Close enough.
Bauman: They didn't know their geography very well.
Dianne Taylor: Yeah. We know it wasn't Bob's father because there were guys from Washington out here long before that. But it's kind of interesting.
Man two: Well, [INAUDIBLE] will bring that light around, put it behind that camera if it'll reach. If it won't I'll bring--or just unplug it and I'll move this cord.
Dianne Taylor: What you doing?
Bob Taylor: Just got one minor issue. I'm just seeing if anything's--
Dianne Taylor: Yeah, this guy had no clue what it's like to be raised in the city, because he started--
Man one: The stories that you tell remind me of this other guy I knew that had grown up--his father was in the Navy. And he grew up on Midway, I think. Midway or Wake Island where it was a mile this way, and it was two miles that way, and that was it.
Bob Taylor: Yeah.
Man one: And as a kid, he loved it. Down at the beach, having a good time, going to the movies, all he wanted, soda pop and all that stuff. But the parents were going crazy.
Bob Taylor: Oh yeah.
Dianne Taylor: Well, when we got this little note from Bob's mother--there's pictures in there of the women of the camp. And if you watched at all the Manhattan Project TV show that was on for a while, these gals are—it's the same women.
Victor Vargas: We're rolling.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Stephanie Janick?
Stephanie Janicek: Janicek.
Franklin: Janicek.
Janicek: Just like it's spelled.
Franklin: Okay, Janicek. On January 24th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Stephanie about her experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Janicek: Stephanie Anne Dawson Janicek. Stephanie is S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E. Anne, A-N-N-E. Dawson, D-A-W-S-O-N. Janicek, J-A-N-I-C-E-K.
Franklin: Great. So tell me how and why you first came to Richland.
Janicek: My family came to Richland in 1949 when I was seven years old and I was in the first grade. My father had been a Montgomery Ward's manager in the '40s and he managed stores all over the state of Washington. And he was so successful that they wanted to promote him to a regional position where he'd be traveling a lot, and he said I don't want to do that. So he and another Ward's manager who decided to be a silent partner talked to officials in Richland and decided that they were going to be the first store to open in Uptown Richland. The area had been set aside, there were no buildings; it was just empty lot. And the downtown area was too small and crowded, so they wanted to develop Uptown as sort of an outdoor mall, if you will. Dawson Richards was the first store built and opened. And it opened in June of 1949.
Franklin: What was your father's name?
Janicek: Grover Dawson.
Franklin: And was Richards the silent partner?
Janicek: Jim Richards was the silent partner. He owned an orange grove and walnut trees in California, and so he was down there. They owned the store 50/50 for many years until my brother bought out Mr. Richards. And he would come up occasionally to see how things were going. But Dad was doing a great job, and everything was going well.
Franklin: So tell me more about Dawson Richards store. What kinds of products did it sell?
Janicek: Dawson Richards started out as a men and boys clothing store. And they had a little logo of a man wearing a suit and a hat and a little boy with a cap and a coat, because boys wore coats in the old days, you know, when they went to church. It said Dad and Lad. That was one of the early symbols of the store. And so it was a really interesting store, because my father wanted to cater to all the men in the area, most of whom worked at Hanford, regardless of their station in life. And so, for instance, he had two lines of suits; the expensive suits were made by Kuppenheimer and the less expensive were made by Timely. He had two lines of shoes. The good shoes—or the more expensive shoes, rather, were Florsheim's, and he had Winthrop shoes for the everyday guys. And he did the same with sweaters and pants and shirts and neckties and pajamas and socks and everything you can think of. He also had—because there was almost nothing. Everybody had to go to Seattle or Spokane or maybe Yakima—I don't know what was in Yakima in those days—to get their clothing. And especially the managers at Hanford. So they were tickled to death that they had a store that they could shop at and be very finely-clothed. And he—my dad—specialized in, oh, talls and shorts and stouts. He catered to every single size, and if he didn't have your size, he would get it for you. And I remember one of the signs in the store said, OshKosh, because my father carried OshKosh B'gosh overalls. He really wanted to have clothing for everyone. Regardless of their station in life. And it became a wonderful gathering place. People would just come in to talk. My father was very outgoing, and we would have gatherings of high school kids, because he also carried letterman jackets, letterman sweaters. He sold the chenille letters and numbers for the cheerleader and song leader outfits. When Christ the King opened their Catholic school for kids, the students wore uniforms, and my father sold, at very deep discounts, the corduroy pants and white shirts and navy sweaters that the boys wore at the school. He really wanted to provide whatever the community needed and it worked out quite well.
Franklin: Okay, great. So there wasn't—were there any men's stores or stores of a similar type in Pasco and Kennewick at the time?
Janicek: There was—I don't know how old the Sid Lanter's store was in Kennewick; I think that was probably there most of the time. I don't know if it preceded Dawson Richard's or not. There was a small men's store in downtown Richland. I might be able to remember the name of it later on. But just at this moment, it is—oh, was it something like Harvey's or—I don't recall. But my father's was such a good sized store that he had wonderful variety. He had Pendleton woolen shirts and jackets, and he had Jantzen's sweaters and swimsuits. Carried a lot of name brands that people were comfortable with.
Franklin: And you said that was the first store in the Uptown area?
Janicek: Yes, it was. And the next store that opened was a sporting goods store right next to Dawson Richard's and it was originally called Frank Barry, which was the name of the owner. And a few years later that was sold and it became BB&M Sporting Goods, which was owned by three gentlemen with the last names of B and B and M. And then some years later they moved up the street. Dawson Richards was on the Jadwin side of Uptown Richland, and they moved farther up the street. I don't know—is there a—I don't think there's a BB&M now, is there? No, it's gone. Okay.
Franklin: I've only been here a year, so—
Janicek: Oh, okay.
Franklin: My memory is—
Janicek: Okay.
Franklin: I don't have a long institutional memory.
Janicek: And you know, if we had time, and I'm sure we don't, I could walk you around the entire Uptown area and tell you most of the stores that originally were there. The other oldest store was the Spudnuts shop. God bless them, they're still there.
Franklin: Yes, they are.
Janicek: And still the same family owns it.
Franklin: And still very delicious.
Janicek: Yes, yes.
Franklin: So the Uptown was the first commercial—major commercial district in Richland, right?
Janicek: Yes, it was. And because they had wonderful, big parking lots all the way around the stores, people could just park and walk all the way around the square and get everything they needed. We had Stanfield florists and Parker hardware, and banks, and there was once a grocery store there, we had a theater—we had—everything you needed, you could get somewhere. And several shoe stores, jewelry, china and silverware—just—they just filled in everything that a person would need so that nobody had to go to Spokane or Seattle to shop anymore. Unless they really wanted to.
Franklin: How long did your family own Dawson Richards?
Janicek: Let me think. My father sold to his manager, his long-term manager, George Anderson, and George's family. They bought out my father in the early '70s. And the store actually closed—ironically, the store closed in 1999 on its 50th anniversary.
Franklin: So it was open for exactly 50 years.
Janicek: Yes. And the gentleman who bought it—it's now a much smaller store. The gentleman who bought it retained the Dawson Richard's name, which tickled me to death, and he still sells tuxedos and letterman sweaters and jackets. And he also rents out tuxedos for weddings.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Janicek: Then there were years when my father bought out the building—oh, I don't know, bought or rented—the building next to Dawson Richard's and they opened a women's department called Lady Dawson. And so from inside Dawson Richard's, you could just walk through to the ladies' department. That was successful for a number of years. Eventually, they closed the boys' department and then they closed the women's department, and in the end, Dawson Richards was just men's clothing.
Franklin: Was that, probably, just because of competition from larger department stores?
Janicek: Yes, we knew when Columbia Center was built that there would start to be more competition. Just a lot of people were going over to Columbia Center and while they were there they did all of their shopping. So a lot of people made a point of coming to Dawson Richard's for one reason or another, but not necessarily for kids' clothes.
Franklin: Ah, it stopped being the destination in terms—
Janicek: Correct.
Franklin: Because there was now competition.
Janicek: Yes, yes, yes.
Franklin: Whatever part of Richland that is.
Janicek: Yes. My dad had a policy of hiring as many high school kids as he could to sweep the floors, giftwrap at Christmas and Father's Day and special events. So it was a really interesting gathering place not only for high school kids, but also they would come home from college and come back to see everybody. You know, if you wanted to see who's who. And my father's birthday was on Christmas Eve. And so everybody would come back and anybody who had ever worked at the store and not goofed up too badly, he would hire them just for two weeks. And they would see each other, and it was—and everybody came to see who's home from college. And they would stand around and sing Happy Birthday during the day, and he'd have cake and punch in the backroom. It was very celebratory. Just lots of fun. A lot of fun to work at Dawson Richard's or to just hang out there. The girls came in to get the chenille letters and numbers for their pep club and cheerleader outfits. People came in whether they bought anything or not. And he didn't care, because he just loved people. It was a fun place to grow up.
Franklin: Did anything change in terms of the store, Uptown, or—when Richland became a private—yeah, a privately-owned city?
Janicek: Not specifically that I can think of. I was in high school at the time, and I remember that Richland became a Model US City. We had a day at Richland High School where a number of the seniors shadowed a Richland official for a day. So we had somebody shadowing the mayor and each of the city council members and the fire chief and the police chief and the city engineer and all of that. And went to—I was the city librarian for a day. And we all went to the city council meeting, in celebration of Richland becoming an independent city. And the other thing that I remember is that we were able to buy our house. Because always we rented. Richland was very much subsidized by the government. We had free garbage and free utilities and—I don't know if the phone was free, but—just a lot of things that they took care of for us in the good old days.
Franklin: Right. But you said they—do you think the attitude was more celebratory, or did the people miss some of those amenities that had been provided for?
Janicek: I'm sure that people missed some of the amenities and realized it was going to cost them more money to live than it used to. But they—I think they also appreciated having choices. Originally, when we came, you can't live in Richland unless you had a job, because everybody rented their house from the government. If you didn't have a job, you left. So if people went to jail or were alcoholics and just didn't—excuse me—[COUGH]—didn't measure up, then they were booted out of town. So there were a lot more choices for people. We—old Richland, no one had a garage, because the city—the government didn't build garages; they just built houses. And so nobody had an attic. Nobody had grandparents living there. It was all young families. Which was interesting way to grow up. I'm sorry. [COUGH]
Franklin: It's okay, and there's water right next to you, too.
Janicek: Oh, splendid. I didn't even see it.
Franklin: What other kinds of civic activities or business activities was your father involved in?
Janicek: Well, as I said, he started out with being on the city council and being elected mayor, because he was very outgoing and because of his experiences as a store manager for Montgomery Ward's, he was kind of a natural leader. So he was involved for a few years with what later became United Way. He got on the school board in about 1951, and he was there for 13 or 14 years. The people on the school board kind of took turns being the president, but he got involved in a lot of school things. He was a co-founder of the Bomber Boosters. He was instrumental in the first and the second remodeling of Richland High School and the building of the Dawald Gym. And he was one of the schoolboard members who advocated for building Hanford High School, which was very controversial, because a lot of people just wanted all their kids to grow up as Richland Bombers. That was kind of a sacred thing to be in the old days. It was sort of like, those other people, they have to go to Hanford. But that worked out. Hanford was an unusual school, because it was high school, junior high, and grade school—all 12 grades, well, plus kindergarten. Then later, when Sacajawea was torn down and rebuilt up in the Richland Village, then they removed the grade school from Hanford. And then Chief Jo Junior High School had been closed for a number of years, and they remodeled it and reopened it. And then moved the junior high kids out of—I don't think—I think Hanford is just high school now, and all the junior high kids are back in either Chief Jo or Carmichael, which is what it was when I was growing up. So he was mostly involved in things having to do with kids and families. He sponsored a Little League baseball team, he sponsored and after-high school basketball league for young men who lived and worked around the Tri-Cities, and—what else did he do? Oh, his business sponsored all of the broadcasts of the Richland Bomber football and basketball games. He was very close friends with all of the coaches at Richland High School. In the old days, when the Richland Bombers went to the state basketball tournament, they were driven in cars. And so my dad and the coaches would put a couple of boys in the back of the car and drive over to Seattle. It was a four days, double-elimination, huge tournament at the Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the UW campus. So, he got to know all of the players as well as the coaches. Just loved that—more of getting to know everybody in the community. He just was that kind of guy. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Okay. Well, that's great. So tell me about growing up in the government town of Richland and what kind of—what your impressions were when you first moved—
Janicek: My earliest impressions—we lived in south Richland for the first year and a half. We lived in an F House, which is a single-family two-story. And our street was only one block long—Atkins. My first recollection is that there were no garages, so everybody parked in the street. But everybody—families only had one car. The men didn't drive to work at Hanford; there were buses that came through. There were three shifts, so Hanford was running 24 hours a day. There were three shifts: the day shift, the evening shift, and the overnight shift or graveyard. So the buses would come through and pick up the workers at corners and guys would all be there with their metal lunch pails and you'd see them going off. And then they'd come back, I don't know, nine or ten hours later and drop them off, because it was quite a drive to Hanford. So the family car stayed at home, but a lot of them—and most of the mothers stayed at home. Very few women worked; some of them worked at Hanford or in some of the businesses, but most of them didn't. And a lot of them didn't drive. So the cars just sat there all day and were only used after Dad came home from work, or to go shopping on Saturday, or to go to church on Sunday. There were a lot of churches in the community, which I thought was kind of interesting. Lots of denominations. My family was Episcopalian, and it was a few years before we got our own church, and so the Richland Lutheran church let us have our services in the basement of their church. So our services were on folding metal chairs with little kneeling pads on the cement floor. It was a little chilly, but it was very kind of them to let us do that until we had our own church. But there were—and we had a lot of Protestant churches called Central United Protestant, Southside United Protestant, Westside United Protestant. But actually, if you asked someone or looked carefully, one of them was more Methodist, one of them was more Presbyterian; some of them, I didn't know what they were. They weren't in my neighborhood and I didn't know kids that went to them until I got to high school. It was a very insular community in a lot of ways. You knew all the kids in your neighborhood, and all the kids in your school, which was—they were neighborhood schools. If you went to church, and most people did, you knew the kids that were in your church. But as a young child, we had no idea what everybody's father did. We knew that most of them worked at Hanford, but we had no idea whether the father was a truck driver or a manager or a clerk or a—you know, scientist. That was beyond us. We never asked, and nobody ever talked about it. So, the kids in my class—when my class graduated in 1960, there were about 417 of us. And for the most part, if you didn't ask, you didn't really know what the other parents did. I knew most of the business community and a lot of those people had kids. People that owned the stores, and groceries and gas stations. One of my best friends in high school was the step-daughter of the man who managed the Desert Inn, which is now the Hanford House. It was neat to sleep over at her house, because she lived in the hotel. [LAUGHTER] And you could swim in the pool, and you had all your meals in the hotel dining room.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Janicek: It was really different. Most of the time, there was no public transportation. There were a few years when there was a city bus, and I don't know—I was young; I was maybe fourth grade, fifth grade, and I remember taking the bus in the summertime to the city library. And I would sit and read books all day in the library, and then I would come home at dinner time. It was one of the things I loved to do, because I was a very bookish person. And then one year, they stopped having the buses. I don't know whether they—and it only cost—I don't remember if they were free, or they cost a dime or something, but it was certainly not restrictive in any way. That was fun. I remember just—even as a pretty young kid—that the Richland Community House on George Washington Way had pool tables in the back for the adults, but every Friday night they had square dancing for the kids. So all the kids would go and learn to square dance. There were a number of callers and you'd be there for a couple of hours. That was a really fun community thing to do, and that was a way to meet people who didn't live in your neighborhood or didn't go to your school. The town was full of young families with young children. I think the only older people who were there were either highly skilled technical men who came with their wives and either they didn't have children or the children had already left home before they moved to Richland. Then some of the older couples, the man was in management. A few of the older couples, the women were scientists or engineers or technologists. There were some, you know—we now are learning—some highly skilled women out there that kind of disappeared into the woodwork. Nobody knew anything about them. One of the curious things that I did not realize for many years is how—I don't know what to say. Almost everybody in the community when I was growing up was—I hate to say it—but they were white. And I didn't know any—I didn't know any, any blacks, any Asians, any—well, there was one Hispanic family that went to my high school, two girl cousins, that were in my class in grade school. And then I guess they must have moved to another part of town, because then I didn't ever see them in junior high or high school. There were a few black families that I got to know, partly because they would shop in my father's store, and partly because—when I went to Chief Jo Junior High, the PE classes were separate: girls' PE and boys' PE, and they had a big curtain they drew down the middle of the gymnasium so that we wouldn't see each other in our shorts or whatever it was. But there would be a six-week session where we danced. And we all learned how to waltz and, I don't know, whatever the jitterbug had evolved to in the '40s—or in the '50s, rather. That's when Fats Domino and Chubby Checker were coming out, and eventually Elvis. So we were all learning to do the twist and all those things—they were fast and loud. And that was fun, because if you had that in PE for six weeks, you learned how to do that stuff, and you didn't feel like such a dorky wallflower. There was one boy in my PE class who was black. And so when it was time for the dancing, everybody would choose their partners. And I was the tallest girl in the school and wore glasses until the ninth grade when I was the first person to get contact lenses. But anyway, so he and I were usually left close to the end of who choses who for a dance partner. Which was perfectly fine with me. I didn't care. I didn't have any prejudices, any reasons to feel any different about him than about anybody else in the class. And he was actually polite and nice and, you know, dressed nicely and cleaned up. He didn't talk much; I think he was probably more shy and scared than I was. But it was an interesting experience, because—it was fine with me, you know? We danced, talked a little bit. But it was the only time I ever saw him. I didn't—I don't think we had any classes together. So I didn't run into him very often.
Franklin: Did he go to the school with you?
Janicek: Oh, yeah, he went to Chief Jo. Well, you have to remember that when I first moved to Richland, there was Camp Hanford that was a military camp north of town. And there was a—at one time Richland had the largest trailer park in the country. And I've forgotten now—I think it was 50,000 trailers. I think, for the most part, those trailers didn't have kitchens or bathrooms, because people ate in—maybe they did. I don't remember, because I wasn't in them. But they had big mess halls where people ate and they fed—I mean, they had constant food. They were either cooking or cleaning up all the time because they couldn't feed everybody at once. And then they had bathhouses in among the trailer camp where people—just kind of like when you go to an RV park, you go to the toilets and sinks and showers. And I don't know—maybe some of the larger trailers had those things. But I know there were small trailers that didn't. They looked like campers, with no plumbing and—I don't even know what they did for lighting. But between the military and the construction workers who lived north of town, there were some black families. And so I have no idea what that fella's family did. But then we had the Brown family. When I was in junior high and high school, we had two basketball stars. And basketball was as big at Richland High School as it was in the state of Indiana. [LAUGHTER] We were Hoosiers West, maybe, I don't know. But Norris Brown and his younger brother, CW Brown, were outstanding basketball players. They played on the Richland basketball teams, and they were among those basketball players that my parents and the coaches drove to Seattle for the tournament every year. They were the nicest guys. Now, the—I don't think there were any black girls in Richland at that time, but there were a lot of black people who lived in Pasco. And so they did their socializing, I think, with people who lived in Pasco. And I didn't know for many years that Kennewick was a—I don't know, they call it, now they call it a sundowner town, that all the blacks had to be out by the time the sun went down. Had no idea! But there was a place where kids went to dance on the weekends and it was called Hi-Spot. And they would advertise on the radio, and everybody listened to the radio. That's how you found out what all the popular music was. And so they would advertise: everybody come to Hi-Spot for dancing and—I don't know. I never went, so I don't know, but I'm guessing maybe they had light refreshments there. Anyway, everybody was invited to come. So, Norris and CW Brown went with girlfriends who I'm assuming were from Pasco, and they were thrown out because it was after dark, and this was in Kennewick. Richland was horrified. I mean, number one, we had no idea that Kennewick had these laws. And number two, these guys were our heroes. They were winning basketball games for us, and they, number three, they were extremely nice and polite and good students and—you know, there was absolutely no reason that you wouldn't want to have them at a teenage gathering. I think—and this is only my person opinion—but I think that that's where a good deal of the Richland/Kennewick rivalry started. Because the Richland people were so incensed that our heroes were thrown out of town. And that was in the late '50s. Let's see. CW was one or two years ahead of me—two, I think. So that would have been, like, I don't know, '56, '57, '58. And Norris had graduated, but CW was on the team that in March of 1958 won the state basketball championship, which was just the hugest thing that had happened to Richland, probably since the beginning of time. It was just a really big thrill. And I was at that tournament, and I was at that game. And it was the biggest thing that had happened to me, too. I was so excited for my team. Because always the state had been dominated by all of the Seattle and Tacoma teams, for the most part, and sometimes a couple from Spokane. And so poor little old Richland that was stuck out in the desert and nobody knew about Richland in particular and nobody wanted to go there. [LAUGHTER] What are these kids doing in our sacred basketball tournament? And we won the whole thing. And that was just very exciting. And CW Brown was on that team. Another member of that team was John Meyers. John Meyers was this—he was built like a Douglas fir. He was just big all over—tall and large. And he was the star of my dad's Little League baseball team. His father was the assistant manager. And he regularly hit homeruns and broke the bat. Regularly. I used to go to a lot of the Little League games, and that was really fun to watch. John Meyers was a star on the basketball and football teams at Richland High School. He played at least two sports—I'm not sure about baseball—but at least he played two sports at the University of Washington where he went for four years, and then he was drafted into the NFL. He played most of his career for the Philadelphia Eagles. So we had a local celebrity. One of several local celebrities that we had. So that was a really—I just loved following sports, and then, I, myself became a Washington Husky. Went with them to the Rose Bowl which John Meyers played in, in January of 1961. And then I ended up marrying a guy from Notre Dame, and so we're big football fans. [LAUGHTER] We've had Seahawks tickets for 19 years. [LAUGHTER] Just was destined to be, I guess.
Franklin: Yeah. What do you remember about civil defense in the Tri-Cities? Do you remember going through defense drills at school?
Janicek: What I remember—there are two different aspects that I remember. When I was—most of the time, after the first year-and-a-half of living in south Richland and going to Lewis and Clark, we moved to north Richland and I went to Jefferson grade school, and then Chief Jo Junior High and Richland High School, which we always called Col High, and most of us in our hearts, it's still Col High and not Richland. But we would have air raid drills maybe once a month at Jefferson. And we would—every class would march out into the hallway where we would lie down on the floor next to the wall. We would lie absolutely flat on our stomachs with our head resting on one arm, and I think maybe that was partly to protect our eyes. And then the other hand behind our necks to protect our spinal cord, I guess. I'm not sure that would have done any good if the Russians had actually bombed us. Because we truly believed that there was a good chance that we were going to be bombed by the Russians. We truly did. And so those were serious, civil defense drills.
Franklin: You mean we as in you believed the Russians would bomb America, or Hanford specifically?
Janicek: Well, we thought that the Russians would bomb America, but that Hanford was a really good target. Because of—by then it was known that we were creating the plutonium for bombs and all of the nuclear activities going on out there. And we thought that, if Russia really wanted to take over the world, that they would want to take out all of the nuclear facilities so that we wouldn't be able to fight back or build up our defenses to eventually fight back. The other thing I remember—excuse me—[COUGH]—about civil defense is that every so often, we would have drills where every neighborhood was told where to go, get in your car and drive out into the desert to get out of town, get away from Hanford. And they would have those—I don't remember—maybe once a year. I don't think we had them more often than that. But you were always cautioned to keep your gas tank at least half full, because there wouldn't be time to go fill up if we all had to evacuate town. Now, I suspect that there was a second reason for those drills, and that is in case anything went wrong and something blew up at Hanford, like Chernobyl. We had an inordinate amount of faith in our government and our scientists and engineers and our leaders at Hanford, and believed they would keep us safe. And Hanford actually has an amazing safety record. Very few things went wrong and caused any difficulties. But I suspect that if something had happened at Hanford, that those evacuation routes would have—and those evacuation routes were marked for a number of years. Eventually the signs all disappeared. But you knew where your neighborhood was supposed to drive to.
Franklin: Interesting. Where was your neighborhood supposed to drive to, do you remember?
Janicek: Well, it was long before I was old enough to drive a car: I was in grade school. And I didn't even know where I was when I was out of town. I didn't know which way was up, down, or west, or south. I'm guessing, since we lived on McMurray in north Richland, we probably went west.
Franklin: Ah. And when we moved up to north Richland, did you also live in an alphabet house, or did you—
Janicek: Yes, we lived in a Q house. The houses on McMurray were all Qs and Rs. And they were all three-bedroom, one-story houses with a full basement, whereas the old houses—the old alphabet houses, As and Fs and many of the others—had a half-basement and then a three- or four-foot high wall in the basement of cement blocks, and then there was dirt behind that. And then some people, after they bought their homes, would dig out—it was called digging out—the basement. But we had a full basement, and really nice backyard.
Franklin: And is that the house that your parents bought when Richland—
Janicek: We were living in that house and then bought it, yes, when Richland sold. One of the tough things about living in Richland is that there was no air conditioning. The houses had swamp coolers, which also were called squirrel cages. They were great, big, huge things that attached to a window and made a lot of noise. It sounded like metal blades going around, very noisy, and water ran through them to cool the air. Well, that made the houses not—it didn't cool the houses that much, but it made them very humid. So, sometimes, you forgot you were living in a desert or a semi-arid desert, because it was very humid along with the heat, and very uncomfortable. But my father's store had refrigerated air conditioning. It was one of the first buildings to have that. I'm guessing that the hospital and—well, no, the hospital used to be little funny buildings. I'm guessing maybe the hotel had it, and maybe some restaurants. But, yeah, that was another reason that people liked Dawson Richards, because it was cool inside on hot days. [LAUGHTER] But that was difficult. And we had a lot of summers when the temperature was over 100 degrees. And, like now, we had some winters when it got down far below freezing, down to -10 or even 0 a couple of times. One of the other interesting weather things about living in Richland in the olden days is when you had the big dust storms, or the termination winds as some people called them, you would have great big huge clumps of sagebrush flying through town about five to ten feet off the ground. And one time, a sagebrush—I have never seen this since—a sagebrush as big as a Volkswagen lodged in front of our front door, and we couldn't get in and out our front door. Because it had blown in and was kind of stuck to the doorknob and whatever we had around the front door. And we couldn't budge it. We couldn't grab a big enough piece, or reach in far enough to grab one of the main stems or limbs of the sagebrush to pull it out. So we'd all have to run around and go in and out the back door. But the worst part of the winds, or one of the worst parts, was the dust, because it got in your eyes. And people were starting to get contact lenses. And that was just absolutely murderous, to have all that dust blowing in your eyes and getting behind your contacts. And people would go around with tears running down their faces from--[LAUGHTER]—from how painful the dust was in their eyes. And people wore sunglasses day and night to try and protect their eyes. Of course, as Richland built up and got more civilized and more of the empty lots became houses with yards and grass and trees and flowers, then the dust was not as thick as it used to be. Some of the dust storms were blinding. They were like blizzards. Oh, and that reminds me. My first winter in Richland, the winter of '49-'50, we had a blizzard that was so bad they would not let any children leave the school until their parents came and picked them up. Well, the dads worked at Hanford and travelled by bus, so it was a while before—I imagine they probably let them go home early to get their kids. I don't know that, but I'm guessing. And we would all be waiting at the school until the parents showed up. It was not a problem for my parents, because I'm sure in a blizzard they weren't selling any clothing, so they just came and picked us up. But it was really bad. I just read—the old Richland Bombers have an online Sandstorm. The Sandstorm was the school newspaper, and we have an online Sandstorm that comes out every single day of the year. And it mentions birthdays and anniversaries of people—married classmates—and announces deaths of classmates and also of favorite teachers. Somebody in the online Sandstorm only a day or two ago wrote about—and I never heard this story before, so I do not know if it's truly true—but wrote about a father who came and picked up his little boy at school during the blizzard, and didn't have a car. And so they were walking home and they got lost in the blizzard and were found frozen to death the next day. I had never heard that before, but I could believe that, because you could not see anything. Absolutely. It was dreadful. I remember that. I have a real good visual memory, and I remember exactly what that looked like. It was fearful.
Franklin: Wow.
Janicek: Yup.
Franklin: Wow.
Janicek: Yup.
Franklin: So you said you graduated in 1960.
Janicek: Yes.
Franklin: And then later on you came back to Hanford?
Janicek: Yes, I went to University of Washington for four years. And I developed this passion for Afghanistan. So I decided the only way—and I had spent a summer in Europe and did all of that and had a good time. But I don't know why, I really wanted to go to Afghanistan. I had studied about it, I had written reports, read books. So I joined the Peace Corps and I said, don't send me any place but Afghanistan. Well, in those days, you took all the tests and if they decide you were qualified—they'd never had anybody ask for Afghanistan, but they had programs in Afghanistan. So I went through Peace Corps training for three months and then went to Afghanistan. And I taught English in a girls' high school. While I was there, I met and married my husband, who was from New York and Notre Dame, and I never would have met him if I'd stayed in Richland or even in the state of Washington. So we had this very unusual Afghan wedding that was written about in the paper last year when we celebrated our 50th anniversary. So we came back and he went to graduate school at Purdue. So we lived in Indiana from '66 to '78, twelve years. And our three children were born there. And then we lived in Indiana. His parents were in New York and mine were in Washington, and the kids never knew any of their relatives, they never got—and we said, well, this isn't good. So we want to go one way or the other. There were a lot of reasons why we didn't want to live on Long Island. It was overcrowded with traffic and polluted air and polluted water, and just a lot of reasons it didn't appeal to us. So we came out to visit my parents, and my husband interviewed at Hanford and got two job offers. So we ended up moving to Richland in 1978. So for marrying a guy from New York who you met in Afghanistan, I never would have thought that my children would graduate from my high school. But they did. So we had three little Richland Bombers in the family besides their mom.
Franklin: And where did you live when you came back to Richland?
Janicek: When we came back, we moved into an A house on Thayer. And it was an A house—that's the two-story duplex—but it had been converted by the previous owner into a one-family house. So we had more bedrooms and more living space and an unusual-shaped yard, and lived on Thayer, a half a block from Van Giesen.
Franklin: What did you and your husband do at Hanford? Because you said you—
Janicek: Well, he's a mechanical engineer. So he started out doing mechanical engineering things. He was involved in robotics. He spent most of his career in the Tank Farms and was a design authority for a number of years before he retired. I began as a tech editor. Became a tech writer editor, and then had several stints as a manager of editors and word processors. And we were producing all of the huge reports coming out of Hanford, mostly reporting on cleanup. Cleaning up spills in the ground, cleaning up buildings—goodness. I worked on documents that were 6,000 pages long. Mostly online editing. When—at the height of the publications flurry at Hanford, we had 100 employees in our department. About 50 editors and about 50 word processors. But as time went on, the editors started editing online, and then we didn't need word processors. Originally we would edit with a red pen, and then the word processors would type in all of our changes. But that morphed into just editing online. I absolutely loved my job. For 27 years, I worked with engineers and scientists and technical people. I felt like it brought me closer to my husband, because I had no technical background at all. But I had very good communication skills and had studied three other languages, and so I have a lot of good ideas about how English should be spoken and written. And really enjoyed doing that for 27 years.
Franklin: 27 years. So then you retired in 2005?
Janicek: No, I retired—he went to work in '78; I went to work in '80. So I retired December 2007.
Franklin: Okay. And how many different contractors did you work for?
Janicek: Well, when I originally came, we both worked for Rockwell. And in fact I worked on the Rockwell proposal when their contract was up. And that was a fascinating experience, because I got to work with national vice presidents of Rockwell. We spent the last three months at a secret facility in Downy, California putting the proposal together. I got to walk through a mockup of the shuttle—the space shuttle that they had built. Oh, now I forgot the question.
Franklin: The different contractors.
Janicek: Oh, yes, yes, yes. So after Rockwell ended up—it was a political thing, and Rockwell lost that contract. The contract went to Westinghouse and Boeing. Westinghouse was already here, but they won the larger contract that Rockwell had. And then the computer functions, including the editing and the graphics and all of the communication things were given to Boeing as a subcontractor to Westinghouse. So then my second employer was Boeing Computer Services. And then the next eight years or so later, the contract was up again, and that was when they went to about 13 different contractors, half of them inside the wall so to speak, and half of them outside. And at that time I went to work for—my job was still the same, and all of my management was the same, but it was just a different name on the paychecks for the company that owned us, and that was Lockheed Martin. And I was still working for Lockheed Martin when I retired.
Franklin: How had Richland changed from when you had graduated to when you came back and began to work for Hanford?
Janicek: Well, first of all, when I came back, a lot of the business had moved to Columbia Center, and there were empty buildings, and aging businesses in downtown Richland. It had spread out a lot in all directions. People were living in West Richland and in South Richland and in North Richland and all over the place. And that's just Richland. I mean, Kennewick grew enormously; Pasco has grown enormously. So I had to kind of get used to driving and living in a much bigger city. And I have to laugh at myself, because even today, I mostly drive—I have it in my mind, a skeleton of the roads that I used when we lived here, when I first got my driver's license in high school and drove around the Tri-Cities. And I kind of stick to those roads, because they're the ones I know the best, and you know, they're my old favorites. But one of the things I noticed is that a lot of people moved into the Tri-Cities who didn't necessarily work for Hanford. And so you didn't have that little small town, we're-all-in-this-together feeling. You know, when people first came to Richland to work at Hanford, as I said, there were no grandparents, no relatives. We all kind of stuck together because nobody knew anybody; we all came as strangers and we came from all over the country. And so there was a real closeness. And I see that in the older classes that write into the online Richland Bomber Sandstorm every day, the alumni newsletter. By the time my kids were in high school and graduating, a lot of that closeness was gone. You didn't know everybody in your neighborhood; you didn't know everybody in your church if you went to church; you didn't know all the kids in your classroom; you didn't necessarily know the parents; you didn't know whether your friends had younger or older brothers and sisters. It just was a lot more socially scattered, I would call it. One of the things I'm pleased about is there's a lot more diversity in the Tri-Cities now. You have people from all parts of the world, all races, colors, creeds, religions. Which is really good. I have to laugh at my kids, because we made sure they grew up without any prejudices. They have had friends—they're all adults now in their 40s. They have had friends of all different colors, races, and creeds. It tickles me to death that we succeeded in raising them that way, because it's only right. What else is different about the Tri-Cities? Well, every day I open the paper and I read about businesses I didn't know were there. All the years I worked at Hanford, I didn't have time to go driving around and shopping and looking around. So I—there are dozens and dozens of restaurants I've never been to. One of the things that really confuses me is, because the Tri-Cities has grown so rapidly, there are many, many, many neighborhoods that I've never heard of the street names before. And when I hear about something being on a certain street, I have no idea where that street is. I have to get out the phone book and hope I can find it on the map. And I've also noticed that there are—in the old days, there was a lot more respect for Hanford than there is now. There are a lot of people in the Tri-Cities who are very anti-Hanford. They think either it's evil or—well, it's dangerous. That's always true. We had—when I lived—when I worked at Hanford, we had a really good safety culture. We had safety drills, we knew what all the different sirens meant, whether they meant shelter-in-place or get out and run for your life. What's going on and what are you supposed to do about it. I think some of that safety culture is lost, because the people who lived and worked here forever have been laid off or have retired or moved on one way or another. We don't have that close confidence anymore that we're all doing the right thing for the right reasons, and keeping each other safe. Some of that has been lost, and I see sometimes that people—new hires come in—and I saw this when I was working there—that sometimes new hires would come in, and they wouldn't take safety as seriously as we thought they should. And, you know, once in a while somebody does something careless that gets them in trouble. There were very strict rules, and I edited a lot of those safety documents about procedures: how you did things, how you had to do things, double-checks and triple-checks on things that sometimes people kind of rolled their eyes and thought, oh, yeah, here we go. But in fact, those things kept you safe if you followed them correctly.
Franklin: It only takes one accident to—
Janicek: Yes.
Franklin: Do you think that that record of safety or the view of safety and the approach to safety changed as Hanford's mission changed from one of production to a little more kind of opaque mission of cleanup?
Janicek: I don't think so, because the people actually involved in the cleanup or, like me, I was reading about all of the dangers in all of the cleanup as I was editing the documents. I think that a lot of us were always impressed with how dangerous it could be and how close we were to somebody goofing up and causing an accident. And certainly, I think right before we came here was when they had the McCluskey incident where Harold McCluskey was badly exposed. It's just astounding to me how well they were able to clean him up and keep him alive and how long he lived, and he actually died of a condition that he had before the accident ever happened. And that actually boosted my confidence that they were doing all the right things. I've been in buildings—I had a Q clearance for a while—I've been in building that were very restricted and—not passwords, but keypads and patrol and safety people and intelligence people and all kinds of things to try and prevent terrible things from happening. Whether it was just luck or whether it was good management, those things, for the most part, didn't happen. I mean, Harold McCluskey was the only one—there have been some accidents where people have fallen and died or have been badly injured. Or I remember one time when they were cutting into a pipe that they didn't—either they didn't have the correct information or they didn't take it seriously. And they cut into this pipe that was supposed to be empty and harmless, and it was full of hot burning steam. It hit these two guys right in the face. I don't remember if they lived or not; I'm suspecting maybe they didn't. But I've—that was a few years ago when—I just don't remember now. Many of us have always been aware of the potential for accidents. Sometimes people coming in from other places, if they didn't work in dangerous situations before, they had to adjust their thinking or they might get in trouble if they—every once in a while, either a person or a company self-reports that we screwed up and didn't do something right. And they don't do that often enough. I mean, we have whistleblowers with personal issues, and we have whistleblowers with true concerns and who have honestly seen something that needs to be corrected. I'm sure it's very difficult to keep all of that in mind. We recently toured B Reactor, which was a fascinating experience. When you look at that huge, big thing and all of those fuel rods. And if you think about what little, innocent thing could have happened or some switch accidentally flipped and what it could have caused. You know, we all remember Chernobyl. I worked—I was in a volunteer group called the Hanford Family that was formed when they were shutting down N Reactor and it was about the same time that Chernobyl happened. A lot of people were really scared and concerned that the same thing could happen at Hanford. So I became their editor and communications person for this group. And one of the things I did was research and interview an expert and find out why it couldn't happen here. And one of the things was the difference between boiling water reactors, BWR, and pressurized water reactors, PWR. And what they did at Chernobyl, you couldn't do here. The reactor would not let you do it or it would shut down. And how these guys had overridden their own safety controls. Again, they didn't take safety seriously enough or they didn't understand the principles behind what they were doing and what they were causing. It was a terribly frightening time. But I published this lovely three-fold pink brochure about why Chernobyl can't happen here, what's different about our reactors from—and then we were just down to N Reactor and the power reactor, the Hanford Generating Station at Energy Northwest. It was an interesting experience to learn that stuff and to put it in language that regular people could understand and to hand it out at functions. We went to a fair in Yakima; we had a couple of things—big—I don't know—exhibitions or shows that occurred in the Tri-Cities, and we had our little booth and handed out our information and told people about why that couldn't happen here. That was an interesting experience. For a non-technical person, I appreciated getting information and putting it into a form that regular folks who didn't work at Hanford or have any technical background could understand. I have no idea how effective the brochure was. But it was interesting to do.
Franklin: Interesting. Did you do any other public relations work when you—at your job at Hanford? Or was that a—
Janicek: Well, most of the time, I was editing big reports. I started after a very short period—I worked for several years with the BWIP project—Basalt Waste Isolation Project. That was the concept where we were going to bury the waste deep in the basalt. I first edited and then managed the editors who edited the environmental restoration—no, environmental assessment document and the—oh, goodness. Now I've forgotten what it was called. Two different versions, one of them was six volumes long about how we were going to safely contain the waste, and some of it had to do with Nevada, which has since [LAUGHTER] In fact, a lot of the waste was going to go to Nevada, and Nevada shut that off. I did have a very interesting experience. I was on a national committee that worked with DOE orders and directives. It had to do with information management, because Hanford and the other government facilities that did things nuclear had to send copies of their reports to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were kept and managed by the government. Some of them were classified and some were not. Most were not. This group would get together sometimes once a year, sometimes two or three times, and go over the DOE directives and bring them up to date on how to manage all this information. And I ended up writing parts of a DOE directive and editing other parts. I think you can still get those online. And I can open that up and see my very own words there. It kind of tickles me to see that. That was a really interesting project. And I got to go see—I got to go to Bethesda, Maryland and see where all of the energy reactors, like the one that we have at Energy Northwest—how they have to report in—I don't know—I think every hour to let them know that everything's all right. And I got to sit at this huge, big console where all of these Hanford and Oak Ridge and Argonne in Illinois and WIPP project in New Mexico and the Nevada Test Site and—anywhere there was a reactor, all the lights flashing and the buttons and the hourly reporting in. They actually monitor that to be sure that nothing—there are not going to be any surprises or any Chernobyls. That was kind of an interesting thing to see.
Franklin: Oh, cool.
Janicek: It was.
Franklin: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about in your interview?
Janicek: Oh, I remember the Columbia River floods. Before we had all the dams and maybe even before the dikes were built—I'm not sure when they were built. The year before we moved to Richland, I lived—we lived in Vancouver, Washington. And there was a little community on the floodplain between Vancouver and Portland on the Columbia River called Vanport. When the river flooded, the spring of '48, the water came up—maybe to the roof lines of those—it was low income housing and I suspect it was for guys who had just gotten out of World War II and were trying to build their lives and they had young families. The flooding was—it was just really terrible. I remember that and the pictures, partly because my father was one of many people who volunteered to patrol against looting. They would go out at night in motorboats. And he had a pistol that he kept for years. [LAUGHTER] We knew where it was hidden, but we never told our folks that we knew. [LAUGHTER] And we never touched it. Because they had to evacuate everybody, of course. And I have no idea whether people died or were injured during that flooding. But one of the memorable aspects of it was that there was a Jantzen Knitting Mill in that same area. And Jantzen's old logo was of a woman in a one-piece bathing suit and a swimming cap diving. And she was—it was a huge sign and it was on top of the Jantzen building, and when the flooding came, the Jantzen Knitting Mills flooded and she looked like she was diving into the water in the flood. It was just really cool! [LAUGHTER] It was a picture they showed all over the United States. So then the next year, we came to Richland in the spring of '49 and people were all talking about the '48 flood and how bad it was. But I remember a couple of floods that were just about as bad after we moved here. At that time, the only way to get between Richland and Kennewick was on what we called the old river road, which goes through Columbia Park now. And so that road completely flooded. You couldn't get through there. So leaving Richland, you would have to drive south over the hills and there were just—I don't know, farm roads, probably—and go all the way around to get to south Kennewick and then come back into Kennewick. And even worse if you had to go to Pasco. Because the flooding really messed things up. And then some of those river floods would pick up a lot of trees and limbs from the shoreline, as the—and they would have rattlesnakes on them. For some reason, because of how the Columbia River turns when it gets to what was then called Riverside Park and is now called Howard Amon, a lot of those trees and tree limbs would lodge into the bank and all of the sudden we had rattlesnakes all over the park. So that was kind of interesting. [LAUGHTER] Scary! Opportunity for people to go out and see snakes or capture snakes or get rid of them, because rattlesnakes are serious business. But that was one of the things I remember about some of the problems with climate that we had in the good old days.
Franklin: The good old days.
Janicek: Oh, goodness. What else do I remember?
Franklin: Did you go to any of the Atomic Frontier Days?
Janicek: Oh! Yes! Well, especially after we moved to McMurray and I was going to Jefferson School, because Jefferson was right across from the Uptown area and I walked that area every day, knew it very well. And we would have parades for Atomic Frontier Days on George Washington Way. And in the really old days, when there was still a Camp Hanford in North Richland, that parade included—I remember a huge, big—I think it was called Red Dog—looked like a missile or a rocket or something. And then there were some smaller rockets, weapons. And they would haul them through town as part of the parade. And that was kind of fun and interesting to see, because my dad didn't work at Hanford and wasn't involved with the military. So that was all new to me and fascinating to see. They had a beard-growing contest. I think the Richland Atomic Frontier Days were usually in August and all the guys would grow beards for the month of August, and they had—I don't know, some things for kids to do and things for adults to do, and clowns and a few floats. You know, you always had a Miss Atomic Frontier Days, which later became Miss Tri-Cities. That was a rather special event that happened. People would go by and throw candy on all the kids—kids would be there with their tricycles. We would decorate our tricycles with crepe paper strips, or put playing cards in the wheels so they would go click, click, click when the wheel went around and decorate. Sometimes they would decorate up the wagons and put wagons behind the tricycles. So we'd have a lot of tricycles and some bicycles lining the streets of George Washington Way as the parade went by. That was a fun thing to do.
Franklin: Neat.
Janicek: Yeah.
Franklin: Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for talking with us today and sharing your stories about growing up in Richland and working at Hanford. They were wonderfully detailed and I really appreciate it.
Janicek: Oh, well, thank you. I love to think back to the old days and just reading the online Sandstorm everyday kind of tweaks my memory and—old teachers and old friends, and like to pass these things on to my kids who grew up in such a different time and they don't understand about being afraid the Russians were going to bomb you. [LAUGHTER] Some of the other things that went on that led to me being who I am today and led to Richland being what it is today. And I enjoy talking about it, and I realize that because of my father's position, not as part of Hanford, but very much as a part of a community, that I have a lot of great memories. Because I'm fortunate to have a good memory, I still remember a lot of people's names, a lot of businesses' names, a lot of things that went on. When my father was on the school board, there was a little town and school at Mattawa, which—and those people served—that was when they were building Priest Rapids Dam and Wanapum Dam. So the school board, once a year, would get special, special, special permission to drive—they probably were escorted—to drive through the Hanford Site and go out to Mattawa and they would have one school board session that the teachers and the parents could attend who lived at Mattawa because they had no way of getting in to town for it, and that was part of the Richland School District. Now, today, Mattawa's completely gone. I mean, everybody left and the buildings are pretty much all gone and doesn't exist anymore. But I always thought that was very nice and very thoughtful that they arranged to be able to go out there once a year to meet with the staff and the families and see—address their concerns for educating the kids.
Franklin: Yeah. Neat. Interesting. Well, thank you.
Janicek: Welcome.
Franklin: Okay.
Vargas: That it? All right.
View interview on Youtube.
Jack Collins: Now did you hear of people like—names like Alex Parks and some of those that helped sue the government? He was very—he was state legislature, I believe at one time.
Robert Bauman: Yeah—
Collins: From Grandview.
Bauman: I knew about the Wiehls—
Collins: Or Prosser?
Bauman: Dick Wiehl's.
Collins: That had the ferry?
Bauman: Yeah. I talked to Dick Wiehl.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: That was one.
Collins: Ida Mae was in my class at school—
Bauman: Oh really? Oh, there you go.
Collins: We used to walk her down the river where her dad would pick her up and roll her across the river to where the original town of White Bluffs was.
Bauman: Oh, sure, yeah.
Collins: And he had—my grandparents lived in Old Town. They had a house in Old Town there before it moved up to the newer area. And spent a lot of time in Old Town.
Bauman: I think we're just about ready.
Collins: Okay.
Bauman: So we'll get started here in just a minute. And then—
Collins: Yeah. And another thing, are you aware of the Mormons coming out there, when the Mormon Church bought it?
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Okay. Did they tell you the story about the guy that brought his John Deere tractor and a four wheel trailer out from Utah? All the way out from Utah and brought all of his stuff—
Bauman: No.
Collins: And set it down on the black sandbar?
Bauman: No, no, I haven't heard—
Collins: That was quite a story. Can you imagine the time it took him to drive out with a John Deere tractor?
Bauman: That would—no, I can't imagine. [LAUGHTER]
Collins: [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Are we good to go?
Man: Yeah, yeah.
Bauman. All right, we're good to get started. So, the first thing I'll have you do is just say your name and spell your last name for us.
Collins: I'm Jack Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S.
Bauman: Okay, great. And my name is Robert Bauman and today is August 4th of 2015. And we are recording this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So first of all, welcome, and thanks for coming all this way out here-- [LAUGHTER]
Collins: I'm glad to—
Bauman: --for this interview.
Collins: I'm glad to be here.
Bauman: Great. I wonder if we could just start by maybe talking about your family and what brought them to White Bluffs, when they came, and that sort of—
Collins: We came to White Bluffs in the middle of the Depression. [LAUGHTER] And we didn't have much. And my grandfather had moved there ahead of us, lived in Old Town. And he wrote my folks and told them that there was work there. Farm work and stuff. My dad was a good mechanic. And he went to White Bluffs, so we had work. We bought a little farm, ten acre farm, in White Bluffs. And he worked for farmers for years around there. And then when Sam Allard needed a person to help out up at the county pumping plant, he had met my father—I don't know how they met, but maybe through Joe Grewell that run the Priest Rapids power plant. But they asked my dad to come up and they liked him very well, because his dad had had a blacksmith's shop. And my dad knew how to do things, how to make stuff, how to forge, weld, how to do all this type stuff. And they had a lot of machine work that they had to do in the plant in those days. And it was all handwork. They had to hone thrust bearings. We used to go down as kids and help him hone thrust bearings, because it was fun! Sit out on the porch at the county pumping plant. We used to run the chain hoist lifting those big pumps out. There was two 500s and a 750 horse power pump. They were all raw sewer pumps that the water district had bought from Chicago or somewhere back there. They didn't use them, and they were for sale and that's how they got the— This is--I wasn't there when this happened, this is the story that I always got. They did that, and then they had their own power plant—the Priest Rapids power plant. So my father got out there and worked and Sam taught him all the stuff about the plant. And finally my dad ended up as head operator there, running it. He worked there for a number of years. We lived in the house up above the plant. We owned a farm down below the plant, downriver from the plant. We had a 35 acre farm the government took away from us. And then they kept my dad on after the government took over to pump water for all the construction in the water districts. So we had—us and the Potter family, Jack Potter, and his son Jackie, and the three boys of us, Ted and myself and Ray, were the only kids living in the restricted area. We lived at Coyote. And Mom—they hired Mom to haul us down to school every day during school. That was after White Bluffs School had burned and we started going to Hanford. It was 16 miles. So we did that for a number of years. Then the government finally, when the government finished and they were ready to start operating the plants, they had us move out. We moved to Zillah, Washington. And then we saw a lot of stuff in there, what the government did to those people was—was not good. They took their property, and a few people like Alex Parks and some other influential farmers in there took them to court because the government took the property without buying the water rights or any of that stuff. And the people there owned the Priest Rapids power plant, the power lines going to the county pumping plant. And they owned all the canals, the pipelines, head boxes, risers, you can name everything for the water district. A lot of stuff. That was about, probably 20 miles of canals, concrete canal. The government just assumed that. And it took over three years in court to get the government to pay for that. And they just forced the people out with—my folks had very little money when they left there. We lost our farm, we had two farms, we had one down in White Bluffs, we had one up at Coyote, up by Allard's pumping plant was. And then me and my two brothers, we were the ones that were going all over the area out there, selling food to the guys coming out there in the area. All they'd get is peanut butter sandwiches coming out of the mess halls downtown there in Hanford. And those guys, trying to eat peanut butter sandwiches and water in hundred and some degree weather—we'd end up out there with egg sandwiches, candy bars, pop, coffee-- [LAUGHTER] and sell it to these guys. So we got to be their friends, so they hauled us all over the area with their construction equipment. We rode construction trains, the engineers all knew us. They were all buying this stuff from us. So we made a lot of money. We put it all in war bonds. I cashed my war bonds to marry my wife. That was my money that I had when I married her. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: That's great.
Collins: And it was a fun life out there. And we—in the summer, we just stripped down to just nothing but a bathing suit and our bare feet, and we was all over the country out there, just in the bare feet in the desert out there. We were pretty tough kids in those days. [LAUGHTER] Swim in the river, and swim in the canal. And there was a lot of parties went on down at Black Sand bar. Community parties, we had a lot of fun at those. Everybody would meet down there for big swimming parties and picnics and stuff. And then Table Mountain, now where the stuff is all stored—I don't know whether you've heard about Table Mountain where they dug and they put the—
Bauman: Yup, yup.
Collins: Okay. We used to have our church picnics on top of Table Mountain. And used to go out, and we used to follow the sheep herds and stuff that went through there, and get all the bum lambs and stuff. We had quite a herd of sheep that we got from—we had no place to take them. We had to sell them when the government took over. We had cattle and sheep and everything. And they forced us to sell all of that stuff. We got not much out of it. But that's the way the government operates. I got like twelve other stories, a lot of stories that I heard from some of the old timers, how they used to fish for sturgeon. They used to throw like a head of lettuce on a big hook out in the Columbia River.
Bauman: Really? Yeah.
Collins: Or a part of a chicken. And they're bottom feeders, and they had quarter inch rope hooked to those. And they'd take the horses and pull them out, they were so big.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: And that's the—the old timers used to do that. Then we used to go to the—one of our trips at school was to go out to the Indian smokehouses, where they were smoking fish and stuff. The Priest Rapids Indians. That was quite a trip! And we were very familiar with them. And then my dad, when he worked up at the Priest Rapids power plant, when the put the new channel in to channel water into it, my dad worked on that, on running a jackhammer. That was before he went to work at Coyote. And we would go up there when they were going to have their blasts, and watch them blow that rock up. It was big time! They were drilling that basalt up there, and boy that was really a blast when they set all that rock off.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: And we'd see the Priest Rapids Indian kids, they would be in their steam house getting all hot and everything, and they'd come out of the steam house and go jump in the river, naked! [LAUGHTER] Tough little kids! But I don't know where they—they didn't go to school with us. I think they were self-taught up there. But they were very healthy.
Bauman: So, I'm going to go ask you a couple questions, kinda go back a little bit. You mentioned that your grandfather lived at White Bluffs before you moved there?
Collins: He lived in Old White Bluffs.
Bauman: Lived in Old White Bluffs.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: And what was his name?
Collins: Lyons.
Bauman: Oh, his last name was Lyons?
Collins: Lyons, yeah. [LAUGHTER] What was Grandpa's name?
Woman: Alva.
Collins: Alva Edward Lyons.
Bauman: Okay, okay.
Collins: Him and my grandmother, and they're the ones that taught us. And they had two children that lived with them, they were my mother's parents.
Bauman: Okay. And how old were you then when your family moved to White Bluffs?
Collins: I was in the first grade of school. So that was about, what? '37, '38, somewhere along there.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: And we were the last family moved out of Hanford when they opened—when they started the plant.
Bauman: Right. And do you know how long you were there?
Collins: I went to school—finished the seventh grade of school at Hanford.
Bauman: Okay. And then you moved to—
Collins: We moved to Zillah.
Bauman: To Zillah. Okay. So what was the community of White Bluffs like?
Collins: It was a very friendly community. Everybody got along. I could say we went down to—we had all kinds of community things there. There was nothing else to do. We had a movie theater. The guy that run the ice plant there in town, he put on a show about twice a year, and that was a big thing, going to the movie, down to his little old movie house. Oh, they had church doings and stuff there. And a lot of potlucks. They had a grange there, too, I believe, and a lot of potlucks at the grange. That's about all there was to do there. But everybody was friendly. It was different. They all looked out for one another. And—
Bauman: Now, you mentioned that you had a farm in White Bluffs and then one by the—
Collins: Our first farm was a ten-acre one. It was close to the town of White Bluffs.
Bauman: And what sort of crops did you have there?
Collins: Oh, we—it was old ground, leaded-out ground.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: It wasn't great ground. But as kids we used to, there, we would cut asparagus and stuff. Take it uptown in our wagon, and pull it uptown. We only lived about a half a mile from town. Sell asparagus to the people in town, little bundles of asparagus. Then go to the drug store and buy candy with our money. That was our candy money. I've always worked, even as a kid, I've always worked. We picked fruit and all kinds of stuff.
Bauman: And so you mentioned you went to school in White Bluffs, and then at some point the school burned?
Collins: Yes, I went to school at White Bluffs 'til the school burned.
Bauman: Mm-hm, and then Hanford—
Collins: Can I bring up a thing about the principal there?
Bauman: Oh, sure, absolutely.
Collins: She had—that's the house that we got and they had—her husband run that horse ferry that pulled—I mean the cable ferry that pulled the—across the Columbia River. And she had a way of making the kids mind, she had a rubber hose and she'd take you down to the furnace room, and introduce them to a rubber hose.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Collins: My brother Ray got that one time. [LAUGHTER] And I was always good in school after I heard what happened there! [LAUGHTER] But we need more of that today. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So your family got to stay much longer than most other families after the Federal government came.
Collins: We got to stay, we were the last family moved.
Bauman: When we were talking before, you'd mentioned that you got notice around the time you had some apricots that were—
Collins: Apricot trees, yeah. We were going to plant 15 or 16 acres of apricots on our place. We lost all of our deposit and everything. The government could've cared less. They just—we had to turn them back. They arrived the day that our place was condemned.
Bauman: Wow. And so do you remember how long you got to stay there, like—a lot of people had to move out in '43, early 1943—
Collins: It was about—
Bauman: How long, much longer did you--
Collins: A year and a half or two years.
Bauman: Oh, okay. So that's quite a while longer you had to stay.
Collins: Yeah, all during construction, Dad pumped the water for the construction of the railroads and the roads and stuff. All the water trucks that came there. And he had pumps, pump it out of the canal, he was pumping in any water going on down. And they were using it for all the construction, the water he was pumping.
Bauman: Okay. So he was very valuable to the—
Collins: Yeah, they had—they wanted to move him to Richland and keep him on. My dad only went to fifth grade of school, but he was pretty knowledgeable. In those days, although they didn't go very far. But they wanted to move on down, they'd give him a bunch of training and stuff. But he said, no, he says, I'm not going to take my boys to Richland. Because Richland was a pretty tough town in those days. And so we moved, he left the government job. He was making $150 a month for the water district. We got a house, our lights and water furnished. He worked seven 12s for them. And 'round, all year long. In the wintertime, when they shut the plant down, they were working in the plant overhauling stuff. And then when the government took over, I think he went up to $1,200 a month. And he worked a 40 hour week.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: I can bring up another thing about—They used to hone all the thrust bearings. There were big thrust bearings that these big pumps sat on. They were three stories high, and they were very heavy. They weighed tons. So they brought an engineer out there that was going to tell my dad how to do that. So he said they could do a better job machining them than he could do it by hand. He told them, no, they couldn't. So this engineer, he was going to prove it. So he took one of them and did it. And they took, I think it was a 750 horse pump out of it, and they set it down on it, and he threw the switch. And you have to rock those switches in to bring those motors up to speed there. So big and so heavy that you can't bring them up just once. This guy threw the switch on it, blew the windings out of this pump and stuff, and it cost the government a load of money to tear that pump apart and get it rewound. I don't know that he lost his job or not, but they always believed my dad after that, because he knew how to start them. He never blew one up in years that he ran the plant. They'd never had that happen before. And so a lot of things happened there. They brought guys out that my dad had to teach how to run the plant. They had young college guys. And it was interesting. We used to go down once in a while. We'd sit in for Dad. They brought the power in that was 66,000 volts from up there, and they had to transform down to 2,200 for the pumps. And you had to check those transformers every day for temperature. And then you had to check all the bearings on the pumps and all that. You had to work. And then call the readings in on the gauges there to tell them how much power you were drawing and everything, so they'd know how much power to send from Priest Rapids down to the plant. Because that's the only thing that they furnished power for. So you was always busy there. You had to know what you were doing.
Bauman: Oh, yeah.
Collins: So Dad taught us kids all how to do it. We didn't have nothing else to do. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: You mentioned when people had to leave in 1943 that a lot of people went to court eventually. Do you have any idea how much money your parents got for your property?
Collins: It was very little. We had enough to buy an old leaded-out ten-acre place out in Zillah.
Bauman: And that was enough?
Collins: But it wasn't good. And it took them years, a lot of those people that they went out of there with, the older people, the widows and widwoers and stuff. They ended up in institutions. They had no family, they had no one. And the government just forced them out. They told them they'd come in with trucks and haul their stuff out if they didn't leave. They'd haul them out of the area.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: That's the way they operated with us. We were a very fortunate family, the way we got out. And my father had a truck and he bought a lot of the stuff from those people and we took it out to the auction sales and stuff and sold it. And we'd load up watermelons. And take them to the end of the barracks, we'd buy overripe watermelons. Because they were good, they were good watermelons. And take them in and sell them to the barracks there. And they were very—those people down there were very happy to get nice, ripe watermelons. Because everyone else was selling them green ones, and we were selling them ripe ones.
Bauman: Yeah, you were very enterprising. [LAUGHTER]
Collins: Hey, we did anything to make money. We had to.
Bauman: Sure.
Collins: We didn't have any. We picked lots of fruit, worked in warehouses, did all of that stuff. Oh yeah, and there was another thing, too, that came up. There was an old recluse lived down under the railroad station, under their deck out front. And he had been, and I think you have something about him—he had been a pharmacist, was the story. And he had given the wrong prescription and killed a lady. And he left pharmacy and just ended up a recluse there—I don't—I'd seen him, I'd seen him in the stores and stuff, seen him wandering around town. But that's all I know about him.
Bauman: So when we were talking earlier, you also mentioned that at some point you ended up working at Hanford. Is that right?
Collins: I worked for the telephone company.
Bauman: For the telephone company.
Collins: And Hanford was the area that I had.
Bauman: Right.
Collins: And I had a high security clearance to go out in the Hanford area and build a number of the offices out there. I built West Richland—or I didn't build it, I was in charge of it—when that young fellow got killed, that was one of my projects. When he swung the crane into the powerline and killed him. That was one of my projects. Downtown Richland, I did a lot of work on that one. And Kennewick, I did a lot of work there on all the Kennewick offices.
Bauman: So what time period was this, then, that you were working for the phone company?
Collins: I was working, doing that—that was, oh, I was about 40-something years old, so it would have had to have been '70, in there.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: When they were building the offices out in the Hanford area. We didn't have—our company did not have the Hanford area for the telephone offices—went out of, oh, down on the Columbia River had that. And we did their engineering and construction for them. They farmed it out to General Telephone at that time. That's why it was out there building them. I drilled a lot of grounding wells out there, which—north of where Colonel Rockwell took over to watch what was happening underground. And they locked them up, but we never got to touch them again after we drilled them. They took the wells over. We could use them for grounding for offices, but we had to drill pretty deep because there's no mineral in this ground here. It's very poor grounding in this area. So.
Bauman: Was it—did it feel strange at all, when you were doing that to be back out in that area working? Where you had lived for a while?
Collins: I'd been out there, yes. I'm a pioneer resident. So we got to go on the trips when they took them out there. You used to come out to the White Bluffs-Hanford picnic here all the time.
Bauman: Okay, right.
Collins: And we went out to our old farm one time. We weren't supposed to be there, but we did. [LAUGHTER] And they had burned everything down. Mysteriously, while we—before we left, we had a big barn full of stuff, stored full of stuff—that mysteriously burned. And no one else—no one out there but the people, the government people.
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: And it was other stuff happened out there. The house that we lived in out there got burned. When we were there, we saw the foundation of it and a bunch of ashes. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So, talking about White Bluffs community, who were some of the families that you knew well growing up, or some of your friends when you were—
Collins: We knew Alex Parks. Oh, jiminy. I just can't remember all the names now. It's—
Bauman: That's okay.
Collins: But he was a very close friend of my folks', very influential when they had the lawsuit. Russ Webert.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: Heck, can't remember anymore.
Bauman: That's all right.
Collins: Somewhere, I've got all the school pictures and stuff, too. I'm trying to get them back, of all the years I was in school down there. If you'd want those for your museum, I'm trying to get them back now.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: I may have to go to court to get them, I don't know at this point.
Bauman: Wow. The other thing, when we were talking earlier that you had a picture of the school bus—
Collins: Yes.
Bauman: That you, that you rode.
Collins: That was the school bus that we rode from there to the Hanford School.
Bauman: Right, after the White Bluffs School burned down.
Collins: And my uncle drove it, and we had a lot of—[LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Looked like a pretty small school bus. How many kids rode in that, do you remember?
Collins: [SIGH] There was probably five or six of us on it. It would hold a few more than that, but there just wasn't any more kids up there.
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: And so how long did you go to school in Hanford, then?
Collins: I went to school in Hanford for two years.
Bauman: Two years, okay.
Collins: We were on the double shifting when we went to Hanford.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: You know what—we were on the morning shift, we went in the morning, and then they had a night shift.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: We were on the morning shift. We didn't get to learn too much at Hanford. It was tough when went to another school all day. I had a lot of catching up to do!
Bauman: And how long did that take to ride out there?
Collins: Well, it was about 16 miles.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: To our place, and then the bus went on farther, so--probably another eight miles.
Bauman: Pretty good ride.
Collins: Oh, yeah. Then after the government took over, then my mother would haul us. The government hired her to haul us. Because it was just us three kids and Jackie Potter. Four of us. And she would haul us in that old '36 Ford. Haul us to school every day, and two round trips a day, every day.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: So it was cheaper than them owning a bus and stuff. So they didn't get a lot out of it, but it was better for us.
Bauman: So by the time you and your family left, pretty much everyone else was gone, all the other residents of White Bluffs. Had the government already torn down a lot of the buildings at the other farms and places by the time you left?
Collins: Oh, yeah, they just went in and wiped the place out. They didn't give a darn about anything that was in there. And then after we moved out and I got older, my brother and I went in and bought a lot of that stuff. We bought all the poles and the powerline between the Coyote pumping plant and Priest Rapids. We bought all those there around Sunnyside. And then the racetrack, we got most of those poles for the lighting and everything there—the poles around the racetrack. And then we bought a lot of those Quonset huts in there. Tore down a lot of those Quonsets. I saw pictures of them on some of your stuff, you know, the fish hatchery and stuff?
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Collins: We tore that old fish hatchery down, my brother and I did.
Bauman: Really?
Collins: And hauled that all out of there and sold them to farmers in the valley for shelters for their pigs and cattle and stuff. And we bought a lot of stuff in Hanford there, him and I did. I worked for him, and we hauled a lot of stuff out of Hanford when they were tearing it down.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Collins: And that was kinda interesting. One time we were in tearing the fish hatchery down, and he picked up a bucket and said it was radioactive. And we mentioned it to the guard there, and I didn't see him all day. They took him and he was gone. And boy, he said they run him through any test you can imagine. Because we didn't work for the government, we were bidding on stuff and buying stuff in there. But that was quite an interesting experience, too. We got to see all those fish hatcheries, those big fish in those tanks that they were testing radioactivity on. And then I had a lot of friends that worked out there, like Jack Potter. I don't know whether you ever—his dad was the mayor of Hanford at one time.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: And he's told me stories about running dozers in those pits out there. And how dangerous it was, him and some other people were telling me about it. How they saw people get sickened out there. They're all gone now. They were a lot older than I was. But friends of my family.
Bauman: I was going to ask you, the pumping station that your dad operated, how big of an area did that serve?
Collins: That served everything from Coyote down to Hanford and all the Hanford area.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: White Bluffs, Hanford, about—I don't know—16 or 20 miles of canal that it served. It was a big area.
Bauman: Yeah, it is.
Collins: All those farms that it pumped. And a few farms pumped out of the river. They had pumps on the river. Now my grandfather run a farm for an outfit there. And they had a pump. It was just right below the black sandbar—or above the black sandbar, I mean, on the river. And my grandfather run that for a few years. And they pumped out of the river for that. A few people did. But most of them were from the Coyote pumping plant for water.
Bauman: Yeah, that's a lot of farms that it served.
Collins: Hundreds of acres.
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Beautiful farms. Everything there was two weeks ahead of everywhere else in the country. So the fruit all got on the fresh fruit market. And it was—they got really a high premium price out of it. And they had their own packing houses there. There's a railroad that come in, they trucked stuff out of there. And a lot of stuff went on there.
Bauman: Yeah, yeah.
Collins: But we used to go down—I used to lid and make boxes and stuff in those warehouses for Alex Parks. We worked for him all summer long. Just when we were little kids! But all the kids there worked. Every kid that lived there worked. They aren't like today. [LAUGHTER] We were busy! [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Right, yeah. So you were, what, about fifth grade when people started leaving?
Collins: I started first grade at White Bluffs—
Bauman: When you first came, yeah, but--
Collins: And I went to the fifth grade there, no, sixth and seventh at Hanford.
Bauman: But when people started having to leave because the Federal government was coming in, do you remember your, or your family's reaction to that? As people were leaving, and what you thought about that?
Collins: It was complete shock to everybody when that happened. A car drove up to your house with guys in it, and they told you your property was condemned, you'd have to leave within two weeks, I think it was. You know, how shocked would you be if they'd do something like that to you?
Bauman: Yeah.
Collins: Or, if you didn't leave, they'd bring in military people with trucks, and they'd haul you out of the area. And I was just a young kid then, but I can remember that, you know.
Bauman: Sure.
Collins: And it wasn't good.
Bauman: Right. Yeah, do you remember seeing the trucks come into the area?
Collins: Never saw that, no.
Bauman: No?
Collins: Most of them got out. It's all they could do.
Bauman: So what would you like people to know about White Bluffs—because it's not there anymore and hasn't been for a long time—what should people--
Collins: It was a beautiful area. It was a great place for kids to grow up. Because we learned how to work. Practically everyone that came out of there was successful. My brother Ted was a car dealer, now he's a farmer. Ray is—I gave you the information on him—is very successful. He was an officer in the military and flew training planes for the, where they shot at him with those big howitzers and stuff. Yeah, it was his job flying those planes off from the ground. He's got bad hearing now from those howitzers going off behind him. Wrecked his hearing. Anyway, he went and got a lot of training from the military in radio. And then he got into it, and now he's—from the letter I gave you there—he's very influential in the electronics industry. He's getting a very large award, he'll be in the history books with Edison and all those people for his contribution to the electrical—you know, the radio industry. He's invented a lot of radio stuff. I was in construction. I was construction superintendent, worked my way up to an engineer in construction. We're all non-college-graduated. We all learned it on our own. And in the service, I had a lot of electronics school in the service, too. I went through all that in the Airforce. And got out and started studying. And I did go to college some after I was older and working. But I built a lot of projects. I built projects here, which I was telling you about. I was in charge of all of them. My area at that time was eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana for the telephone company, over all their construction projects and building construction. So we all—
Bauman: Are there any other memories about White Bluffs, or stories that you remember well that we haven't talked about yet or you haven't shared yet?
Collins: [LAUGHTER] There's so many—
Bauman: That you can—
Collins: --things that I can just go on. It was just a very great community, as far as we were concerned. They moved a bunch of—the Mormons came in, they shipped a lot of them up here. They were on—the Mormon Church was supporting them in Utah, was my understanding. So they bought these farms for them. Boy, they were ornery kids. [LAUGHTER] We used to fight with them all the time.
Bauman: Oh, you know, you mentioned—I was going to ask you—you mentioned, your grandfather, the place he bought was one that had been for World War I initially, is that right?
Collins: That was the one my father bought.
Bauman: Oh, the one your father—okay.
Collins: Yeah, the ten acres. There's a lot of those war veterans—I don't know what happened to it. There's a lot of that property available. And you have the listing of what they were talking about, on how you could buy cheap property? And my folks got in there and they was able to buy a little ten acre farm.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: I don't know how much Dad paid for it, but it wasn't a lot at the time. And they house hadn't been lived in for a long time. And we fixed that up to live in. He had a barn on the place. And we lived there and worked and folks worked on the house. It was a small house. But we were close to the school, we walked to school, there was no school buses then.
Bauman: Right.
Collins: So we all walked to school. And then he got the chance to go up to Coyote pumping plant. And that's the first time we was able to have—my folks went to town and they bought an electric stove and a refrigerator. And that was a big deal! We'd never had that before. We were not a wealthy family. We were lucky to have an icebox. And a wood stove, and all of this stuff. And we didn't even have running water in the house when we bought it. We had a pump on a well out the back door. And that was even big time to us, them days. It was better than what we had before. And then when we got up to Coyote, up there, then we had all the conveniences. We had electricity, and we had—
Bauman: Running water?
Collins: --hot water in the house—
Bauman: Did you have a telephone?
Collins: Huh?
Bauman: Was there a telephone?
Collins: Telephone.
Bauman: Wow.
Collins: Crank telephone. And everybody listened in. He'd crank it and everybody else's phone would ring, and you knew what was going on in the whole neighborhood. Because everybody was on the phone, the whole neighborhood. Because they could hear you. And if you wanted to go long distance, the drug store downtown, they had some equipment down there where they could—if you wanted to make a long distance call, you had to ring the operator down there and have her connect you with where you were going at that time.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: If you wanted to call out of the area. And it was one of these old ones where they had it on fence posts or whatever they could anchor the wire to, you know. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty crude, boxes with the telephone equipment in it. Wooden boxes. [LAUGHTER] It wasn't—but people did it. They survived. And we had an icehouse there in town—I can't remember the name of the people. They made ice for the railroad. And you'd get ice there for your iceboxes. They were friends of my folks, but I can't remember their name. And they had a son that lived down here. I knew him quite well, but I can't remember him now.
Bauman: Yeah, the other thing I meant to ask you was, where did you move from? Where did your family come from before they came to White Bluffs?
Collins: Well, I was born in Zillah.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Collins: And then we—it was during the Depression—I was born in 1930, and those were tough times. I don't remember much about it, but I remember my folks telling me about it. We moved around in the valley doing different work where my dad could find work. He would get maybe a dollar and a half a day. That was wages then. If you was lucky! And then when he found out we could get work in Hanford—or in White Bluffs, we moved there. Because you could work for farmers and stuff, and you could get all of your stuff, you know, all your fruit. We canned all of our own fruit. We canned everything. Asparagus. We had—Mom canned everything. We lived on that. [LAUGHTER] And we probably lived better than a lot of other people. Because we were resourceful. We had a big garden. We raised a lot of stuff. We even raised peanuts here one year!
Bauman: Really?
Collins: Yeah!
Bauman: Huh.
Collins: The ground was that good. It was sandy and hot. And raised hay and started getting cattle—cows. Had milk cows, and we had all of that stuff. We had all of our meat. During rationing times, we butchered all of our own meat. We didn't have to worry about rationing, because we had it. [LAUGHTER] So we lived pretty good. We didn't have any money. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Yeah. But you had the farm and resources.
Collins: We had the farm, and we had food. And that was a big thing during Depression, if you had that—
Bauman: Right. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you very much for coming today, all the way out here. [LAUGHTER]
Collins: Well, I hope I've done you some good, I don't know—
Bauman: Oh, this is really interesting stuff. I haven't been able to interview very many people who lived out at White Bluffs, so—
Collins: Oh, well, I'm 84 years old, and I was just a little kid! [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Collins: But I do remember a lot of that stuff. And I talked to both of my brothers. And Ray wanted me to show you that, to show how some of the people came out of there successfully, you know?
Bauman: Sure, right, right.
Collins: And I'm sure there's a lot of others. I'm sure we weren't alone.
Bauman: Now where were you age-wise among the brothers?
Collins: I'm the middle one.
Bauman: You're the middle one. Okay.
Collins: I'm the middle one, yeah.
Bauman: Okay.
Collins: Ted is older and Ray is younger.
Bauman: Okay. All right. And so after you moved to Zillah, what did you do from there?
Collins: From Zillah?
Bauman: Yeah, after you left White Bluffs and you—
Collins: Went back to Zillah?
Bauman: You went back to Zillah and—
Collins: We went to school there, finished school there. And then I worked some for the telephone company. I worked around different jobs, farm jobs and stuff like that. And then I married my wife. And we couldn't—I worked for Western Electric then, putting in the new telephones off of Yakima. And they laid all of us off, they laid I think 1,200 or 1,500 people off in one shot. So I had an electronics background and everything, but they only kept very, very selected few. I wasn't one of them. And I didn't have a job and I—doing some other stuff around there. And I wasn't making any money, so I moved to the coast. I went to work at Boeing. [LAUGHTER] And I didn't like Boeing. It was known as the Lazy B, and that's what it was at that time. The people just—they didn't know how to work. They drove me crazy. I didn't have enough work to do, I couldn't find enough work to do. We had one guy in our area that was supposed to be the biggest producer. He'd come in and we had to stamp our work. I was in quality control there and we had to stamp our work when we inspected things. I inspected on Airforce One, on the wings of that. And this guy, he would come in and check in, and the mail girl was his girlfriend. And they'd check in, he'd give his stamp to one of the mechanics, and the two of them would leave for the day. Come and check out at night. They were high producers because their stuff was just getting shoved through. And he was a buddy of our supervisor, so me and the supervisor didn't get along. And then when he asked me to come and mow his lawn on the weekend, and I—I explained to him I didn't do things like that. I had a family, I had four children at the time. And I wasn't about to mow somebody's lawn on the weekend and take care of them rather than take care of my family. I don't care if he was my supervisor. I didn't like him. So that was my, about the end of my job at Boeing. Then I went into construction work.
Bauman: Right.
Collins: Where I did well.
Bauman: Well, again, I want to thank you very much for coming today and sharing stories about White Bluffs and your father's work at the pumping plant and all that. It's really interesting.
Collins: We were supposed to someday—I was supposed to get that land back. But I don't think that will ever happen.
Bauman: Mm, mm-hm.
Collins: I would love to have our property on the Columbia River. God, it was a beautiful piece of property.
Bauman: Oh, yeah, I bet.
Collins: All that, Coyote Rapids there. And we were going to buy Delia Allard's place, down the river—Sam Allard's first wife. He was married twice. I don't know what the reasoning was. She lived down there with her son-in-law, I think it was her son-in-law. And I don't know the whole deal there. And we were buying their farm, too, which they had a beautiful home that they built down there. Rock home, and we wanted that. But Dad was negotiating for that when the government took our land away from us, so that was gone. So—[LAUGHTER] Anyway.
Bauman: Well, thank you very much, I really appreciate it.
Collins: Yeah.
Bauman: This has been really interesting and very helpful. Thank you.
Collins: Well, I hope I don't get myself in any trouble with some of this stuff I talked about.
Bauman: Oh, not too much.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Barnett on July 13th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Daniel Barnett about his experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford site. So the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. So why don't you tell me where you were born and what year.
Daniel Barnett: I was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1938—August 13th.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And when the war started, my dad was working for the Harbor Patrol in Seattle as a patrolman. He heard that they were hiring over here, so he came over here and they hired him almost instantly because he already had the security clearance and everything.
Franklin: Ah.
Barnett: So he called my mom and told her that he had a job over here and to get herself packed, because he was gonna get her. But when she moved here, she couldn't move to Richland. It wasn't even on the map at that time. They took it off the map and everything. She had to move to Prosser.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And later on when they finally got a prefab built, we moved into a prefab at 1011 Sanford.
Franklin: Where was your father from? Was he from Washington?
Barnett: He was from Oregon. All my family is from Oregon except for me. My dad said he couldn't get across the border fast enough.
Franklin: So being from—what drew him to Hanford? Was it the pay?
Barnett: I think so. Well, he was originally—he worked at a plywood plant, then he went to work for Harbor Patrol. He had asthma, which the wet climate apparently irritated. So he had a chance to get over here, so he moved over here.
Franklin: Okay. So the climate played a—
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --big factor and wanted the dry and the sunshine.
Barnett: Well, probably the pay, too, because the pay was good for those times.
Franklin: Right. And how long did your family live in Prosser before you moved?
Barnett: We were there about a year, I think. I don't remember truthfully—I was only about five when we moved there. And I was there probably about a year. I just vaguely remember moving to Prosser.
Franklin: Right. Okay. And you moved—so you came over in 1944—
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --right? And so you would have moved to Richland in 1944? About there?
Barnett: Oh—I think we actually—Dad came over, I think in '43. A year later, in '44 we moved over.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: Because I remember '45 when they announced the war—dropping the bomb on Japan, and Mom told Dad when he come home, I know what you've been guarding! [LAUGHTER] Because he didn't even know what he was guarding at the time.
Franklin: Right. Wow. Did your dad talk about his work much? Or maybe [INAUDIBLE]
Barnett: He worked as a patrolman until they sold the town and then he became a painter.
Franklin: A painter?
Barnett: Yeah, he was an artist so then he became a painter and painted the houses and the buildings in Richland. Because when the government owned Richland, if you had a paint job needed done on the house, you called them and they come in and painted it. You didn't hire somebody from a company to paint it. The government did it.
Franklin: And was he a patrolman onsite the entire time until they sold the town?
Barnett: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. Was he assigned to a specific area, or--?
Barnett: No, just general patrol. He talked about patrolling the fences, taking their Jeeps and going down the length of the fences and checking them out, and all that sort of stuff. But just a general patrolman, not any special area.
Franklin: Okay. And you said that your—what did your mother do when she first got here?
Barnett: Oh, she was just a housewife. She eventually went to work as a waitress. And then finally she got on to work at Hanford. She worked with Battelle for about 29 years as a lab tech.
Franklin: Oh, wow. Do you know which lab she worked in?
Barnett: Well, she did—where they did testing on the animals. Though at that time they were testing marijuana on chimpanzees and different types of animals. She did the test work on the meat from the animals.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Barnett: So I don't know exactly—it was—again, probably wasn't supposed to be told, so she didn't say much about it.
Franklin: Did she have any schooling beyond—
Barnett: Just high school.
Franklin: Just high school. And what about your father, did he--?
Barnett: He was just high school.
Franklin: Just high school as well. Where did your mother waitress at?
Barnett: Well, the first place she had was O'Malley's Drug Store which now is a—what do you call it? A Tojo Gym? Where they teach different martial arts?
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: It's down on Williams, right off of Williams. That's what it is now.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: O'Malley's Drug Store eventually closed, moved up to Kadlec. And a lady bought it from him, and now she's down there on George Washington Way.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: And right by O'Malley's Drug Store used to be a Mayfair market. So I sold newspapers out at the lunch halls at Hanford. Sold—well, I don't remember—but I think it was the Columbia Basin News to start out, because that was the first newspaper of the Tri-Cities, was the Columbia Basin News. Then they bought them out and became the Tri-City Herald. But I remember selling—give you an idea, you can figure out how much time, because I remember one of the headlines was—one of the union leaders had been arrested by the government. And I don't even remember who it was, it's been so long ago. But I remember that was one of the headlines of one of the newspapers.
Franklin: What about—do you remember the Richland Villager at all? That was a local paper.
Barnett: Yeah, but it wasn't very much. It was very small.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I delivered the Seattle P-I.
Franklin: Seattle P-I?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay. And you said your mother started waitressing at Malley? At O'Malley's or Malley's?
Barnett: At O'Malley's.
Franklin: O'Malley's. And then did she waitress anywhere else in Richland?
Barnett: Not that I know of. From there she went out to Hanford.
Franklin: And that was when pharmacies or drug stores as we know them now, they used to have lunch counters.
Barnett: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Right. And so they would go there and they were more of like a café-slash-pharmacy.
Barnett: Yeah. The one up on Thayer, I think it was Densow's at that time. That had a heyday lunch counter in it, coffee shop. It closed up and now I think it's just pharmacy.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Barnett: But where the south end—what do you call it? You know when you get down here, you sit and try to remember things and you get kind of jumbled up—Salvation Army building is now on Thayer was originally the Mayfair Market.
Franklin: Okay. And what did they sell there?
Barnett: Well, that was the grocery store.
Franklin: Grocery store, okay. Do you remember—so you said you moved into—what was the address on Sanford?
Barnett: 1011 Sanford.
Franklin: And do you remember what kind of prefabricated house it was?
Barnett: It was three-bedroom.
Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab, okay.
Barnett: No, I think it was two-bedroom, because my sister was just a little baby then.
Franklin: Okay. And did you share a room with your sister?
Barnett: Probably with my brother.
Franklin: Oh, so how many siblings—
Barnett: Had three kids. I had an older brother. We were about five years apart.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So an older brother, you, and then a younger sister.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And then how long did you live at 1011 Sanford?
Barnett: I don't really remember, but it must have been three or four years, because as soon as they got the A houses built, we had a chance to move into one. And we moved immediately to one. Because we had three kids, and a prefab's kind of tight for three kids.
Franklin: Yeah, yeah. I live in a two-bedroom prefab. And it's—with just my wife, and it's pretty—
Barnett: Well you know why they're called prefabs.
Franklin: Tell me.
Barnett: They were built by a company, brought in in two sections and then put together. They were prefabricated.
Franklin: Yeah, the prefabricated engineering company out of Portland.
Barnett: And nobody could figure out why they put that little square door in the back other than to throw the garbage out it. I don't know—have you ever heard of Dupus Boomer?
Franklin: Yes.
Barnett: He made some cartoons about that backdoor.
Franklin: Right, and that the rooves had a tendency to fly away.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And they had to put—
Barnett: Well, in 1955, they did. They had two of them blow off.
Franklin: Yeah, those are great cartoons.
Barnett: Like "Pa wants a bathtub." [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So tell me a little more about growing up in Richland. Which schools did you go to?
Barnett: Well, the first school I went was Carmichael. And that was probably a mile-and-a-half away. We walked to school. Nobody thought anything about it. There wasn't any buses. There was a bus system in Richland, but it was run by the government. It was a little old bus that you could pick up in two places in Richland to go downtown and go to a movie and come back. But no buses hauled you to school. There was high school buses that hauled people. They picked them up in the Horse Heaven Hills on farms and brought them to Hanford—I mean to Col High—it's Hanford now. But, no, I walked to school real regular, didn't think about it, nobody had any panic about walking to school. Everybody did it because it's normal.
Franklin: And do you remember—so you would have been going to—was it Carmichael—growing up right in the early Cold War. What do you remember about civil defense? Duck-and-cover, air raids.
Barnett: I don't remember doing that.
Franklin: Really?
Barnett: I don't know whether we did or not, but I don't remember doing that.
Franklin: Do you remember knowing what was being made at Hanford? Did you ever have any fear—how real did the Cold War seem to you?
Barnett: Well, the Cold War affected me quite a bit because I was in eight years during the Cold War—in the Air Force.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: The security was a lot tighter. I mean, there was—you couldn't go out to Hanford without having your security badge checked. Now you can drive clear to the Area and before you go in the Area have your badge checked.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But then, there was a badge check when you got on the buses, the badge check, when you got out to your area, and then again they checked your badges when you left the area.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So it was—the security was real tight.
Franklin: Mm-hmm. But what about when you were growing up, when you were a kid in school? Did you ever have any special fear or pride in what was being made at Hanford?
Barnett: Nope. It was—like I said, nobody knew what they were doing out there until they dropped the bomb. Then they found out they'd been protecting part of the atomic bomb.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But I had no fears about it. I went down the irrigation ditch—there used to be an irrigation ditch that ran through town that started—it had two, three ponds on Wellsian Way that were the settling ponds for Richland's water system. And we used to go there and swim in them. One of the ponds they eventually made a juvenile fishing pond. And the irrigation ditch runs from there, clear down to where the hospital is, down in front of the hospital, several ponds down through the hospital and then under—well, through the Uptown district, one of them went through the Uptown district, and one went to the Columbia River. And wasn't until '48 that they finally put a pump in there, because in '48 when they built the dam—they built the dike, rather—the irrigation ditches plugged up. So they had to put up a pump station in so they could pump the water irrigation ditch up into the river. We used to fish in that. We used to go down there and slide down—slide over where the pump was, because it was all slick and slimy. We'd put on an old pair of jeans and go down there and slide into the water. I mean, that's things kids then. Nowadays they wouldn't even think about it. My mother told me when I could swim 25 feet, I could go in the river by myself. Mainly because you didn't go to the river too often in the winter; you went in the summer. And there's not a place in the Yakima, if you can swim 25 feet, you can't get back to the shore. So I spent all my—most weekends and spare time at the Yakima River playing around.
Franklin: Wow. What about—maybe you could talk a little bit about the growth of Richland and kind of the building of some of the major hallmarks, like the Uptown and the—
Barnett: Well, the Uptown was built—the rest of it closed up, but originally the Uptown—as you come into Uptown off to the left—that was a big theater. And we used to have a big matinee. The Spudnut's shop has always been there. I can remember going to the movie on a Saturday and the lineup for the movie—I think it was 20 cents for a movie then. But it was clear past the Spudnut shop. We used to watch the owner there making the Spudnuts while we were waiting to get into the movies.
Franklin: Has that been in its same location--
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --in the mall?
Barnett: Spudnut's has been there ever since it started. They originally were out there in Kennewick. If you go in there and pick up their menu, they have a little story about where they started. They started out there in the Wye.
Franklin: That's great. And what else about it? Because Richland kind of developed out towards--
Barnett: Well, Newberry's was on the other end of the Uptown district. That was kind of a department store type. I think the only one I saw was about 15 years ago, and that was in the Dalles, Oregon. I don't even know if they exist anymore. The downtown district, every year we had different contests for the kids. They had marble shooting contests and bubblegum blowing contests—all kind of contests to keep the kids' interest.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: At that time, the—what is it? The Allied Arts, or was that in the Atomic Frontier Days?
Franklin: Can you talk maybe a little bit about the Atomic Frontier—do you remember going to the parades?
Barnett: Yeah. They had a lot of the old western movie stars come to the Atomic Frontier Days.
Franklin: Like—do you remember any names in particular?
Barnett: No, I don't. Like I say, a kid doesn't retain names like that. He hears them and doesn't retain them. But my dad, apparently, knew a couple of them, so he visited with them. It started out as just a celebration of Hanford and stuff. And then it worked into the Allied Arts show.
Franklin: Okay. And do you remember any particulars of those celebrations, like the parade—the floats, or—
Barnett: Well, there wasn't any parade. There wasn't any parade, and where Howard Amon Park is, there used to be a swimming pool. You know where it makes a turnaround? Well, there off to the right there used to be a swimming pool. And right now, they still got the old children's swimming pool there, but then there was a regular swimming pool in the water. And in 1948 when the big flood came, it filled up full of water and they ended up breaking it up and burying it and building the Howard Prout pool. But we used to go down there and swim just about every day. And we'd go to the other end of the park and pick peaches, because it used to be a peach orchard. Because there were orchards all over town. Where Jason Lee was—the old Jason Lee—that was a cherry orchard. Where Densow is, that was a cherry orchard. Carmichael had an orchard. There was orchards all over town. Because this was an agriculture district at the time the government bought it and moved in.
Franklin: Were you in any clubs or—
Barnett: I was a boy scouts.
Franklin: --organizations? Boy Scouts?
Barnett: Yeah. We had—one that sticks in my mind the most was we had one of our young scouts drowned at the Uptown. That's the one I mentioned. He went on an inner tube, fell in the water and drowned. That was in '48. And actually, the water where the hospital was, the irrigation ditch you got there, that was 15-foot deep at that time.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: That backed up so much, they—that's when they built what they called the America Mile, the dike. They called all the earthmovers from Hanford out to Richland to build that dike. Because when they started, the water was lapping over the edge to go into the houses. And they poured that thing in about 24 hours.
Franklin: Wow, that's amazing.
Barnett: Now, the George Washington Way was closed to all civilian traffic, and these great big earthmovers were just going down the road, 30, 40 miles an hour.
Franklin: Wow. What other kinds of activities did you do in Boy Scouts?
Barnett: Oh, built models. Car models. You whittle them out, put the wheels on them, all that, have races with them. Went on trips. Just normal Boy Scout stuff. Got a little more sophisticated, but just the normal Boy Scout stuff then.
Franklin: Right. And so after you went to Carmichael, did you then go to Richland High?
Barnett: Col High.
Franklin: Col High?
Barnett: [LAUGHTER] It was Col High then.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: They changed the name because there was a Col High downstream on the Columbia that had had the name before Richland High was called Col High. So they changed it to Richland High instead of Col High.
Franklin: Oh. But was the mascot always still the—
Barnett: All the bomber.
Franklin: --bombers? Okay. So the Col High Bombers?
Barnett: Yup.
Franklin: Okay. And when did you graduate high school?
Barnett: 1957.
Franklin: And then what did you do?
Barnett: I went in the Air Force. I think about two months after I got out and I went in the Air Force. I already spent 27 months in the National Guards. I got in the National Guards when I was 16, and when I went to sign up for the Air Force, the squadron commander of the National Guards was—he got shook up because he enlisted me when I was 16. [LAUGHTER] So they changed the date on my discharge papers from the National Guards. So according to my discharge papers from the National Guards, I'm 78 right now.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: Those days, they did things like that, nobody thought anything about it.
Franklin: Wow, yeah.
Barnett: Because if you were warm they took you into the military then.
Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] And what did you—describe your time in the Air Force.
Barnett: Well, of course there was basic training. The first place I went was Westover, Massachusetts—that's Springfield, Massachusetts. And that was a total culture shock for me, because I grew up in a comparatively small city. And Springfield then had over 100,000 people in it.
Franklin: Right, and I guess, too, at this point you would have completely grown up when Richland was a government—
Barnett: Yup.
Franklin: --still was all government space.
Barnett: Yup, they sold it while I was in the Air Force.
Franklin: Can—actually I guess maybe we can back up a little bit. What strikes you, maybe looking back on that, or—
Barnett: I watched them build the Alphabet Houses. And there wasn't one or two people on the houses; there was five or six building these houses. And they seemed to go up overnight. One of the things that I don't know is fact or not, but knowing the government it probably was—is they were supposed to build half basements for a coal fire furnace, a coal bin, and two tubs, and place for a washing machine. The contractors screwed up on some of them and built a full basement. And the government found out about it and made them go back in and seal half the basement with dirt. [LAUGHTER] Typical government.
Franklin: Were your—granted you were a kid at this point, but was your sense—were people happy—
Barnett: Oh yeah!
Franklin: living in a government-controlled and -owned town?
Barnett: Nobody thought anything about it. There was very little crime. Because at that time, there was only about two, three ways to get out of Richland. So there was nobody causing any big deal. And if you got in a whole bunch of trouble—you didn't live in Richland unless you worked at Hanford. And if your kids got into too much trouble, they told the parents, you calm them down or go find another job. So it was stopped.
Franklin: Right. Did you—was Richland mostly a white community at that time? Right? Were there any other—
Barnett: Yeah, there was—one, I think there was only one black community in Richland—Norris Brown. And I think they lived in Putnam.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I remember we had a basketball game in Sunnyside. And Sunnyside wasn't gonna let them play on their court. And we told them, fine, we'll just get up and leave. So we all started to get up and leave and they finally broke it and gave in and let them play on the basketball court.
Franklin: How did you know this family? Did you go to school together?
Barnett: Yeah, I went to school with them.
Franklin: Oh okay, and did you play basketball?
Barnett: No! I'm not a sports—I had my first surgery on my knee when I was about 13, so—
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Barnett: I've never played any sports. My sporting then was hunting and fishing.
Franklin: But you kind of heard about this story?
Barnett: Oh, yeah. We all know them. Went to basketball games. Then there was sock hops and at noon they taught dancing in the lunchrooms for kids that wanted to learn how to dance.
Franklin: So do you know what the patriarch of that family would have done at Hanford to be able to earn a place at Hanford? Because mostly from what I've heard, mostly African Americans had to live in Pasco.
Barnett: Yeah, because they wouldn't let them live in Richland—I mean Kennewick.
Franklin: Yeah, in Kennewick. So how did—do you know any particulars as to how that family was able to live in Richland?
Barnett: I think it's just that the government—that they had to be equal on them, and they just hired them and they went to work out there. I don't know any particulars on it, but that's basic what it was.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: They were in a government town, and there was no way that anybody could refuse—and there was nobody that complained about it.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: Again, the government controlled it. They said, if you don't like it, goodbye.
Franklin: Right. And they would—they called the government for pretty much anything you needed on the house, right? For coal?
Barnett: Right. Lightbulbs, chains, coal. But coal was delivered once a—I don't know whether it was once a month or once a week. But coal was automatically delivered. And like I say, if there was anything major done, you called the housing department. They came in and fixed it.
Franklin: I think sometimes for outsiders looking in, it's kind of striking to hear about the government completely owning this town and controlling the lives of the people and having that much control on people's freedoms and responsibility. But from the people I've talked to who grow up in Richland, they have very fond memories of it.
Barnett: Yeah, there was no restrictions on the normal freedoms. There was restriction on if your kids got into trouble, because, like I said, the patrol would go up to the person that had the kids that were causing the problem and said you either straighten your kids out or you go and find another job. Which, to me, made common sense. And so it was actually pretty decent.
Franklin: Did you ever get any sense from your parents that they felt, maybe, restricted, not being able to own their own home or do any of their own repairs, or did they just—
Barnett: No, not then. I think—that was just after the Depression—I think they were just happy to be able to get a home.
Franklin: Right. Interesting. Because, you know, for some people looking outside, you could look at that level of government control—because we have these big debates about the role of the government in society today, and it's kind of interesting to hear about it.
Barnett: Well, there was no control where the government come in and said, you do this and you do that and you do this. As long as you didn't get into trouble and you did your job, and were a normal person, there was nobody ever complained about it. I remember I was back behind where the Racquet Club is. I was hunting ground squirrels with a .22 one day. And at that time, nobody had any problems with it. And one of the Richland patrol people came and picked me up and brought me back to the patrol station. And he called my dad. My dad come in and he says, what's wrong? He says, we caught your boy shooting .22s at such-and-such area. He said, well, is he aiming at the road? Said, no. Said, did he shoot it at anybody? Said, no. Then what the hell are you bothering me about? I mean, that's just how it was in those times. It wasn't any of this, oh my god, he's got a gun. It just was normal. Because I had my first rifle when I was about—I must have been about eight years old. And we used to go out and go rabbit hunting.
Franklin: Did you ever spend much time in Kennewick or Pasco—in either of those--?
Barnett: Not really. My wife was born in Pasco.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I never spent much time in it because I had no reason to. I mean, it wasn't the case of I was afraid to or wary about it—just I had no reason to. All, everything I needed was in Richland or around the Richland area.
Franklin: Why did you first have to get surgery on your knee at 13?
Barnett: Well, my knee locked. I didn't find out until about 25 years later that the doctor had actually not fixed it. Because what they found out was there was a meniscus cartilage—you know in your knee? And mine was oblong and it had broke in half. And it had slipped between the joint and it had locked my knee so I couldn't straighten it out. So I'd have to pick it up, lay it across the other leg, and pull it and pop it back out. But that was the first—I was accident prone. I had a radical mastoid when I was about 15. By the time I got out of high school, I probably had 100 stitches in me. I mean, if it happened, I did it and got it happened to me. I was playing baseball, jumped over a fence, and landed on a guard rake with the thongs up—four thongs in one of my foot.
Franklin: Ouch.
Barnett: Weird things like that are always happening to me. One time, when I was in school, I reached up to open a door and a kid slammed it and put my hand through the window, sliced across this way. And I looked at it, bleeding, and I closed it up and went to the nurse's office. The nurse got all panicky. She called my mom, and I could hear my mom say over the phone real loud, again?! And the nurse must've thought she was the hard-heartest old lady there ever was, but my mother was just used to it.
Franklin: Yeah, right.
Barnett: And I didn't do things out of the way to have it happen, just—if it's gonna be an odd thing, it happened.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So I kind of, like I say, with all this mess I got with my knee now, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome, a lot of it. I don't—I get frustrated with it, because I love to garden and I can't garden anymore. But I don't get worried or depressed about it, because it's there and nothing I can do about it, so just live with it.
Franklin: Right. So jump back ahead now. So you said you moved to Springfield in the Air Force for basic training, and that was—
Barnett: No, I was—San Antonio for basic training, and then to Springfield.
Franklin: And that was a big culture shock.
Barnett: Oh, yeah. I mean, I drove a vehicle and drove into town to haul officers into town. And here is a town with 100,000 people and I'd never been in anything bigger than Richland, Washington. So you can imagine the shock it was, being in that kind of traffic.
Franklin: Right. And then where did you go after that?
Barnett: Well, I was there for about a year-and-a-half, two years. Then I went to Thule, Greenland.
Franklin: Interesting.
Barnett: Top of the world.
Franklin: Yeah. And what were you—was that for the—weren't there bombers stationed—
Barnett: No, they had the fueling planes there. Yes, they had SAC planes all over the world at that time. But at Thule they had the KC-135s and the KC-97s that were fueling planes.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So we were there to support them.
Franklin: And those were there to refuel the—
Barnett: The B-52s.
Franklin: --the B-52s that were carrying weapons in case of--
Barnett: Yup, because there was one from every base in the world in the air 24 hours a day.
Franklin: Right. And can you talk—what was that like, to be in—and was the base separated from any other communities in Greenland, or did you--
Barnett: It was a base of its own. There were no other communities besides Thule, that's it.
Franklin: And how long were you there?
Barnett: Year.
Franklin: And what was that like?
Barnett: Well, it's an interesting place to visit, but you don't want to live there permanently. [LAUGHTER] Let's put it that way. They have permafrost which is—oh, I guess about two foot down. So in the spring there are all these little beautiful tundra flowers—yellows and whites and all that. And then when they're gone it's just green grass and that's it. And when they went to put a pole in the ground, they put a can—a barrel of oil in the ground, and light the oil, and then dig around that barrel. Because that's the only way to get down past the permafrost. Because permafrost is almost like concrete.
Franklin: Yes, yeah. I'm from Alaska originally, and so I'm very familiar with permafrost. So after Greenland, where did you go?
Barnett: Went to Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Franklin: And where is that?
Barnett: Idaho, Washington.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So kind of close to--
Barnett: Yeah, out in Mountain Home. They had B-47s then at Mountain Home.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: I figured out that they actually phased out B-47s because they were built before the B-52s and they figured the B-47s weren't worth keeping around.
Franklin: And what did you do in the Air Force?
Barnett: I drove. I drove every kind of vehicle you can think of.
Franklin: Oh, really?
Barnett: Yeah. When I moved to Fairchild from Mountain Home, I was trained to tow B-52s in the back, in the hangars.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: With a five-ton Yuke. Four-wheel drive, five ton, and you had wing walkers on the outside that would guide you, and you would back this thing up, this big B-52 into a hangar.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: They would pull it down to a fueling station or whatever.
Franklin: Cool. And then when did you come back to Richland?
Barnett: 1965. I got out to Richland and we moved to--I can't remember the address, but it was on Marshall. We moved to a house on Marshall.
Franklin: Was it an Alphabet House, or was it a--
Barnett: Yeah, it was an Alphabet House. I remember it most because the neighbors had a monkey. And the monkey kept stealing my daughter's candy from her. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: So you said--wait, so by this point you had a family?
Barnett: Yeah, I had--I adopted my oldest boy and I had two children.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: They were all born at Fairchild.
Franklin: Okay. And a wife, I presume?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: And what did your wife do in Richland?
Barnett: She was just a mother. But we divorced in about '70. And then I remarried.
Franklin: Okay. And what did you do when you came back to Richland?
Barnett: Anything I could. I worked at O'Malley's Drug Store for a while. I worked at his house--O'Malley's house, leveled his backyard. I worked at Walter's Grape Juice, I worked at Bell Furniture, I worked at—at that time, it was originally called the Mart, at that big building right next to the Federal Building. At one time, that was a big--what would you call it? They had a cafeteria and a grocery store and all the other—kind of like Walmart.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: It was called the Mart at that time. And I worked there in the clippers that they washed the dishes with. And then I went to work for the bowling alley, Atomic Lanes, which was right there where the Jacks and Sons Tavern is. That was a community center and a bowling alley there. And I worked there for about a month, and then they went automatic. So, about that time, I was just about ready to get out—finish high school. And I don't think I had any other job after that, and I went in the Air Force.
Franklin: Oh, so--I'm sorry. When you came back to Richland, what did you do? So in 1965.
Barnett: Oh, I did everything then. You name it, I took a job. Before—I'm sorry, I got it backwards. Before I went in the Air Force, there wasn't many jobs for people in the—who were kids in Richland. And I worked the bowling alley and I worked down at a dry cleaning outfit. But when I come back to Richland, that's when I had all these other jobs. I worked all these other jobs to keep supplied for the family.
Franklin: How had Richland changed in the eight years since you had been gone?
Barnett: Well, the Uptown district had--the Newberry's had left. And there was a Safeway store right next to the theater. Right now I think it's a—I don't know, some kind of a multi shop deal. And both of the stores that were there originally are gone. They're now all antique stores.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: So it was—when it was built, it was the first big complex for going shopping in Tri-Cities.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And after they built that, they built Highlands. And that was another big complex for shopping. So I worked everything I could, and 19--oh, what was it? [SIGH] About '67 or '68, I went to work at Hanford. I finally got on with them. Because I'd been applying at Hanford for three years. And I finally got to work with them. I won't mention how I got to work for them, because to me, it's kind of a ridiculous deal, and I don't know whether it was prejudice or not. Well, I'll go ahead.
Franklin: I was gonna say, now you've got my interest.
Barnett: I was--how I'd shop for a job, I'd go out and fill out an employment application, and I'd just distribute--go out all over town and fill out employment applications. And every week, I'd go back and check them. Well, one time, I was filling out an appointment application, and one of the guys I knew, I met him, and he said, hey, there's a new employment office over there at the new Whitaker School. And you might check it out. So I went over there and checked it out and signed up. And three days later, Hanford called me for a job. And I found out that that originally was a minority employment office.
Franklin: Oh.
Barnett: So I've always had the feeling that somebody didn't look at the records right. They didn't see the C. [LAUGHTER] Because I didn't get hired until I went to there and did an application. Because the government was required to hire a certain number of minority--
Franklin: Right. Well, but you did get hired.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: So what did you do at Hanford?
Barnett: Well, I can say as little as possible, like everybody else. [LAUGHTER] That's a common joke. Of course, it took me about--I couldn't understand it. It took me about three months to get a security clearance. When I was in SAC, I had a Secret clearance. Both my folks worked at Hanford, they had Secret clearance. But it still took me about three months to get a security clearance. And all the time, since I've been on the Air Force, I've lived in Richland, I never could understand the government—why they wasted so much money on a security clearance for me. But when I got out there, I started as a process operator. And started at B Plant. And there was no training at that time. I mean, when you went into a radiation zone, one of the guys that was experienced took you with him. And you dressed like he did, hoping he knew what he was doing, because that's how you dressed. And that's how you learned to dress right. So I started out going into the canyon--I don't know if you knew what the canyons were—okay? We went into the canyons and I helped mixed chemicals in the chemical gallery. And that's where I think I really screwed up my knees, because I can remember—remember, I call it Young Stupid Male Syndrome--I remember throwing a hundred-pound sack of chemicals on my shoulder and going up three flights of stairs with them, rather than wait for the elevator. Young and dumb, indestructible. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Actually, maybe for those who might be watching this who might not be as familiar with some of this stuff as I am, can you describe the canyon?
Barnett: Well, the canyon was—well, like I say, the building was about 150-foot wide and about 800-foot long. And it was four stories deep and there was just one--the reason they call it canyon was because it was a gigantic canyon. It went the full length of the building, and they had huge cranes that moved different stuff so they could process the atomic waste. Because in B Plant, they process the nuclear waste. They ship it down to B Plant and we go through chemical stuff to separate the strontium and cesium from it. And that would be sent to the encapsulation plant. That was built about—oh, six years after I went to work at B Plant. They closed up after I'd been there for ten years, and I went to work for Encapsulation Building. But the canyon is an immensely big, empty storage building, really what it is. And I don't know how—or what they're gonna do with them now, because there is some radiation there that you wouldn't believe how hot it was. We took samples of radiation behind lead shields, and then they were so hot that they ended up having the crane pick up the samples and dispose of them, because we couldn't move them.
Franklin: Wow. Did you—and so when you came back, your father was no longer working at Hanford, right?
Barnett: Yeah, he was still working at Hanford.
Franklin: Oh, was he still working—so you guys worked at Hanford at the same time.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Oh, wow, that's really interesting. So can you tell me a little bit more about what a—describe in a little more detail the job of a process operator?
Barnett: Well, real basically, we were what you might call nuclear janitors.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We clean up the messes that pipe fitters or millwrights or electricians made. We process all the chemical--mixed all the chemicals and processed—did all the processing of separating the strontium and cesium from the nuclear waste and ship them to tank farms. And that was basically what our main job was. We had a few major accidents. Now it'd be all over the world, about how bad it was and all that. But we just went about our business cleaning it up and went on our job. None of us got an overdose of radiation. We relied on our radiation monitors and they were good radiation monitors. If we were getting too much, they yanked us out of there real quick. So we didn't even think about it. It wasn't the case of being scared of it or anything else. It's like your hazardous wastes that they got, like coming from the hospital, where they work in an x-ray lab, they throw all the gloves and stuff and that. That's called mixed hazardous waste. Well, you could take a bath in that and not get any radiation on you. But according to what the public knew, those things are really highly radioactive boxes. And I think the biggest problem the government had is they didn't tell the people enough about what was really going on after the war was over.
Franklin: Oh. Really?
Barnett: Yeah, because there would have been less worry about things that were going on then, if they would have known. Because if you don't know anything about radiation, and you hear somebody mentions something is irradiated, you get all panicky about it. The expression for radiation out there was, you get a crap up. You get a crap up, you scrub it off and go about your business. Now, they panic and take you to town and do all that sort of stuff. There, we just scrubbed it off and went about our business.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And I never worried about it.
Franklin: Okay. So you said you were a process separator at B Plant. And then you went to the Canyon, and what did you do--
Barnett: Well, I didn't go to the Canyon, I went to 225-B, the Encapsulation Building.
Franklin; 225-B, the Encapsulation Building.
Barnett: That's where they encapsulated the strontium and cesium.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We all did a multitude of jobs. We worked on the cells, processing the strontium and cesium. And we worked behind the cells in mixing chemicals and we worked from when they loaded the chemicals for shipment for a long period of time when they were shipping cesium to the radiation plant for irradiating medical waste. And that ended when the guy was what they called recycling the cesium capsules too much. They get real hot. I mean, temperature-wise. And he was setting it in the water for a period of time and taking it out of water and cooling them off and stashing them back in the water. Well, one of them leaked.
Franklin: Ooh.
Barnett: And so they ended up, the whole place had to have all those capsules moved back. So that was a big fiasco. And again, it wasn't our fault. It was the guy doing the work was stupid enough to not check and see what he was doing.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And that's usually what happens with most—any of the radiation. And if you work with radiation, it's not the guy doing the work, it's somebody that's stupid and doesn't check what he's doing, doesn't follow regulations that causes the problem.
Franklin: So did you have any other jobs at Hanford? Or what--
Barnett: I don't know, you ever heard of McCluskey?
Franklin: Yeah.
Barnett: Well, I was over there when we cleaned—for five weeks cleaning up that building.
Franklin: Really?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Were you there at the time of the accident--
Barnett: No, no.
Franklin: --or part of the cleanup for that?
Barnett: Afterwards. They were trying to clean up the rooms so they could go in there and get things squared away. And we spent five weeks there. And to tell you how screwball the government can be, the last week-and-a-half we were there, we finally told our supervisor, look, all of worked on this radiation for 15, 20 years. We know how to clean it up. Quit telling us what to do. Let us go in there and clean it up and we'll get it cleaned up for you in no time at all. So they took a chance. And what they did is we ragged all along the bottom of the building, and we took water fire extinguishers. Because it's americium, and americium is a powder substance, it floats real easy. But it's water soluble--it'll run down with water. So we went in there and sprayed the walls with it real heavy. Then wiped everything down, moved everything that was movable, bagged it up in plastic bags and moved it out. And inside of a week, we had it down to mask only. Before then, we were wearing three pairs of plastic and cooling air and fresh air.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: And we cleaned it up in a week-and-a-half because they didn't want the people that knew what they were doing doing it. And that's the biggest problem with the government: they've always got the bureaucracy up here that knows what's going on, but they never ask the poor guy that's doing all the work what's going on. I think you've seen that numerous times. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I think so. [LAUGHTER] Wow, that's really fascinating. So how long total did you work at Hanford?
Barnett: 30 years.
Franklin: 30 years.
Barnett: I had to take a medical retirement in '98.
Franklin: '98. So then you were there, then, kind of from the shift from production to cleanup. Right? The production and shutdown.
Barnett: No, when I left they were just getting ready to start cleaning things up.
Franklin: Okay, so can you maybe talk about the shift from production to shutdown? How did that affect your job?
Barnett: Well, I really didn't get in on any of the cleanup, because I left before they did. But I talked to a number of the guys out there that I worked with that were in the cleanup. The biggest problem they had is they put such a limit on chemicals they could use to do cleanup that they had to use things that they claim were not environmentally safe. They had to void all that--like Tide. They wouldn't even let us use Tide to wash the walls down. Now, you use Tide in washing machines. [LAUGHTER] Come on, give me a break. That's a hazardous chemical? And I guess it took them quite a while to get the thing cleaned up. Because, like I say, they didn't start cleaning it up until after I left.
Franklin: Right. So what did you do in the shutdown era? Like after '87, from '87 to '98? What was your job primarily?
Barnett: They didn't shut down--they shut B Plant down, but they didn't shut 2-and-a-quarter down. 2-and-a-quarter was still processing strontium and cesium.
Franklin: Oh, okay, so then you kept in the waste encapsulation.
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Can you describe a little bit more the process of waste encapsulation?
Barnett: Well, strontium is not soluble--not water soluble. And strontium is. And what they had--they had a special process--I don't know exactly the process. I just know what we did. You would take a mixed chemicals with the cesium and you would dissolve it and then you would heat it up to--I think--800 degrees into a liquid. And then you had a machine we called a tilt-pour which would pour seven capsules at a time full of cesium. And then you'd take these capsules and you'd put a sensoring disc in them to make them airtight. And then you'd weld a cap onto that. That'd be welded by a machine. And most then it was computerized. Then that was decontaminated until it was clean. And then it was put into another capsule, and that capsule was also—put a lid on it, but it was soldered on—welded on. And that was moved into the pool cells. Pool cells are 13-foot deep. What you had is a special hole built into the wall with water that you would shove that capsule through. And then the guy on the other side in the pool cell would grab the capsule and pull it out. And he would go to the pool cell that he's designated to go to, and he would shove it through a hole in the wall. And somebody on the other side would grab it and pull it and then you'd put it into its spot. So it was quite a process. And the fear was--you couldn't get that capsule within five feet of the top. Because if you did, you'd get a high radiation alarm. They'd read millions of rads on those capsules. They were hot, no two ways about it. And one thing I've always wondered is why does cesium glow blue when you turn the lights out?
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: You turn the lights out in the pool cell, and all these cesium capsules will glow blue. And I've never--I've had somebody say it's something about the speed of light and all that. But I'd like to know the real reason it does that.
Franklin: That sounds kind of strangely beautiful.
Barnett: It was. It's a blue glow all along the bottom. The strontium doesn't. Strontium is not water soluble and it doesn't glow at all. In fact, I got some strontium in me one time when I had a tape when one of the manipulators--I don't know if I didn't mention--all the work was done from the outside with the manipulators. You know what manipulators are.
Franklin: Right, yeah.
Barnett: Okay, and all the capsulation, all of the work was done with manipulators from the outside. And it was amazing what some of those guys could do. They could take a little bottle about so big with a little bitty top and they could pick up that bottle, hold it here, and took up the other--the cap with the lid and put it on it.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: I was never that good with it, but there some guys out there who got real expertise with that. It just takes a lot of work to learn to use those things.
Franklin: I bet.
Barnett: That's one reason my hand's tore up--my hand just didn't take it so much.
Franklin: And you said you got strontium on your hand?
Barnett: Yeah, I got--I couldn't handle manipulators good because my hand was falling apart on me. So I took all the decontamination of the manipulator. Because that's--a manipulator has to be pulled after so many--I think it's so many weeks, the Mylar coating on it starts deteriorating. So it has to be pulled, decontaminated, and new Mylar sheath put on it. And I was in there decontaminating one of the manipulators, and one of the—well, they were trying new bands that controlled the grips. And one of them broke and sliced my hand. And I got some strontium in my finger. It was about 700 counts. I wasn't too worried about it. But they took me to town and went on all government roads, documented and everything and brought me back. I couldn't work with radiation for about three months until that thing finally deteriorated--worked out of the body.
Franklin: Wow.
Barnett: But I didn't worry about it. It wasn't enough to do any harm.
Franklin: Wow, that's really--
Barnett: See, that's the difference between working with the stuff and knowing what it does, and not working with the stuff.
Franklin: Right. Right, I've heard a lot of similar things about--
Barnett: It's like chemicals. I'd rather work at a radiation plant than at a chemical plant. Because if you have good radiation monitors, you're not gonna get an overdose of radiation. But with a chemical plant, look what they have out there now. A guy gets a whiff of chemicals, they all go panic about it.
Franklin: Yeah, I see where you're--I see your point. So you said--earlier when you said you would put the cesium in the pools—cesium cans, you couldn't get them too close to something, because they'd get too hot. Sorry--can you--
Barnett: No, it wasn't too close--they're in--oh, it probably was a--well, what would you call it? It was like a cabinet with holes in it. You would drop these in there. And they're spaced out. You couldn't pull them too high.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: If you pulled them sometimes when you're getting ready to transfer them to the pool cell, they would hydroplane and come up. And if you pulled them too fast, they would come up and you'd get a high radiation alarm. You'd just drop it back down and it'd go off.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Barnett: That's what it was.
Franklin: I got--okay. I gotcha. So--
Barnett: It only takes one time, you remember not to do that anymore. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I bet. So even though your area—your work didn't change much when most of the plans ordered to shut down. You still probably worked with a lot of people whose jobs might have changed--
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: --during shutdown. Can you talk about that transition between process--?
Barnett: Well, I talked with some of the guys and they were talking about how much work it took to get things cleaned up. Like the area behind the pool cells, that had to be completely decontaminated. And we finally got it down to where it was just one pair and no masks. That took a lot of work. Decontaminating just takes a lot of hand-scrubbing. I mean, it's not a case of, you can put something there and pick it up and get rid of it. You got a scrub a lot of places until it's gone. It takes a lot of work. And I talked to one fella, and he said that they had all the cells that were down to clean—and what they consider clean is no radiation in them. And it is hard for me to believe, because some of those cells were really hot. But I never got a chance on the cleanup.
Franklin: How was--so when Hanford was shifting over, how was this change explained by management, or some of the--how was it conveyed, or how did the community take it?
Barnett: Management never explained anything to anybody. [LAUGHTER] I don't remember hearing the community complaining about anything, because most of the guys worked out there, and they knew what was going on. So there was no big panic about it. It wasn't the case where some guys didn't work here, they were told this was going on and got all excited because they didn't know what was going on. Most people knew what was going on. So there was no big panic that I remember.
Franklin: Okay.
Barnett: We didn't panic with radiation, because we had good radiation monitors.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: And that makes a big difference when you're working around radiation.
Franklin: So being in waste encapsulation, how did other events--other nuclear accidents around the country or around the world, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, kind of affect how your job or how--
Barnett: It made us see how ridiculous--because Three Mile Island actually worked. It was [UNKNOWN] what it was built for. And the moderation they got--radiation they got was not as much as you get flying from here to Denver City. Because you get more radiation from the sun than you do from—what the people at Three Mile Island got. But they blew it up so big, because so many years the government kept radiation such a secret. And that's the reason there's so much panic whenever they say radiation. Of course, there's been some real bad accidents. That one in Japan—that was a horrible thing. But as far as Hanford goes, most of the people that worked at Hanford don't—I guess they're not working around radiation anymore; it's all chemicals. Because they're getting—they get the chemicals and to me, that's the management's problem. Because they're doing something wrong in taking care of the people. The people are doing what they're told to do. If management is telling them, hey, you got to wear this, and they're not wearing it, then that's their problem—that's the worker's problem. But when the management doesn't do anything about it, that's their problem—that's management's problem. And I think from what I've heard and read, most of this is a managerial problem. It's not a case that the worker is going out of his way to ignore any safety concerns.
Franklin: Right. What about the accident in Chernobyl? How did that--did that affect your job, or--
Barnett: Yeah, it affected it because they shut down N Reactor. And N Reactor, up until then, was as safe as any reactor in the country. It had so many safety pieces on it that you could darn near slam a door and make it shut down. But they shut it down because it was something like Chernobyl. And that's where the big effect was.
Franklin: How did--oh, how did security policies change over time? Did they change with the different contractors or in response to different events?
Barnett: No, the security's main thing was basically the same. You had the security guards at like 200 East—well, they left the security guards that you couldn't get out to Hanford without a security clearance. But that quit because they had the buses, and that stopped. And they had the security guards checking the buses and stuff as you went through. And then typical government, they started screaming about, oh, we're burning too much gas. We can't afford gas! So we'll shut the buses down. [LAUGHTER] So everybody had to drive out. But the guards at the gate checked your badges, checked your cars. If there was anything in it--you couldn't take cameras or anything like that out there. If the guard knew you, he checked you out whether he knew you or not, because he had to make sure your wife didn't leave a camera sitting in your backseat you didn't know about.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: Which happened on occasion.
Franklin: Right, I bet. How did your job change with the different contractors coming in? Did it change much, or did you--
Barnett: Well, every contractor that came in, the engineers thought they were gonna remake the world. They would come up with some plan that they saw on a schematic and say, this is the way we want to do it. And we'd tell them point blank, it won't work. We've tried it that way. And they say, oh yes, it will! So we'd spend $50,000 in parts and stuff to put this together, and then it didn't work. And then they went around, well, why didn't it work? Well. The only one I ever saw that was a decent engineer is when he'd draw up a plan to do something, he would go to the millwrights, he would go to the operators, he'd go to the instrument techs and ask them to look at it and see if there's anything that needs done on it. And he had never had any problems. But these that come straight out of school and thought they could reinvent the world were a pain in the butt to us because they cost money and time.
Franklin: Do you remember who that good engineer was?
Barnett: He left. I don't remember who he was. But he left and went to work for a big company some place.
Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you remember President Nixon's visit in--I think it was 1970 or 1971?
Barnett: I might have. I didn't see him. I don't worry about politics.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Barnett: He didn't do our place any good or any bad. Just a big political statement.
Franklin: How did the Tri-Cities change from when you came back in 1968 until today? What kind of strikes you as major changes?
Barnett: Well, there seem to be more, you might say, petty crimes. There wasn't as much as there was before--there was more than there was before, I should say. But the city maintained its equilibrium about the same, because the people have been here for 20 years, and then they sold the city to the town. There was no big change in the government. The police stayed the same. The biggest change was you had to call a painter if you wanted your house painted. And they sold the houses to the people, and that was the biggest change.
Franklin: How about, though, since—from when you came back in 1968 until today? Has there been any--has the community changed at all?
Barnett: Well, a lot of the businesses have left Richland. They moved out Columbia Center area, or up there in that area. We don't have--you got to go to Columbia Center to find a business. There's a few still there. There's Home Depot and stuff like that down there, Big Lots. But there's not as many as there used to be. And mostly antique shops or stereo shops.
Franklin: Right.
Barnett: But there's always the Spudnut. It's always been there.
Franklin: There is always the Spudnuts, yeah. They're good too. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about?
Barnett: Well, us kids had different ways of playing that nowadays they would just panic about it. We used to have BB gun fights. We'd put on leather jackets and extra pair of Levi's and a hat and go into these orchards like where Densow's was and we'd have BB gun fights. And you haven't really lived until you've had your butt shot by a BB. [LAUGHTER] But nowadays there'd be some big panic about it that you're gonna shoot an eye out. Well, nobody ever shot an eye out because we made sure that we didn't shoot towards the head. [LAUGHTER] When they were building the houses, that's what was amazing, how fast they put these houses up. It wasn't a week or so to get a house started--it was almost a week and they had the thing almost done. And we used to go to different houses and have clod fights. Things like that that you don't dare do nowadays.
Franklin: When you had what kind of fights?
Barnett: Clod fights. Clodded earth. We'd get behind stuff and throw clods at each other. And the snow then was two, three foot deep. Because I remember building snow forts in my yard three foot high and never have to go to the yard to get snow. So there has been a big change in the weather. And the shelterbelt, that made a big difference, because I remember when we had sandstorms--not dust storms, sandstorms. And my dad would pull his car up in front of the house to keep the sand from blasting the side of the car off--the paint. So there's been big changes. The shelterbelt was one thing the government put in that actually worked. It's kind of surprising. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That's great. Is there anything else? Anything else you'd like to talk about?
Barnett: Well, not really. Just that the area behind--you know, in West Richland at that time used to be Heminger City and Enterprise. They were two cities then.
Franklin: Okay, tell me, were those cities that predated the Hanford Project?
Barnett: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay, and how big were there?
Barnett: Oh, they were just little communities. It was just one run into the other. There was one called Enterprise, one was called--what did I just say?
Franklin: Something city.
Barnett: Heminger City.
Franklin: Heminger City.
Barnett: One of the elections went out for voting, they had one of the places that you went to was called Enterprise.
Franklin: And how long did those communities last after Hanford came?
Barnett: Not very long. I can remember Dad going out to the first town—first little town was Heminger City. And that was right where Cline's computer shop is, it was automobile shop there. And those were all owned by one group--one person. I think it was--Herricks was the name. And she had a little taco stand in one of the places. And OK Tire Shop had part of the one building that they sold tires and did car repair out of. So it was a slow change in West Richland. We had a feed store for a while. But Hanford went on strike and our feed store went down the tubes. They used to have what they called parking lot critter sells. People would bring all their animals, little animals that they wanted to sell in cages. And we would sell them for them and get 10% of the interest. It was a pretty good deal, because a lot of people had pet rabbits and stuff like that and they wanted to get rid of them. Usually had them at the un-boat races. You heard of the un-boat races?
Franklin: Why don't you tell me?
Barnett: The un-boat races? You ever heard of them?
Franklin: Why don't you tell me?
Barnett: Well, the un-boat race was you went up to the Horn Rapids Dam, and you put something in. It could not be a boat. It could be a bath tub, it could be inner tubes--it could be anything that you could see above that would float and it could not be called--it was called un-boat race. And there was a prize that they got down towards the bridge that crosses the Yakima there on George Washington Way. Got down about that far, there was a prize who got there first. But they ended up cutting that out because people left too much stuff—garbage alongside the road. They wouldn't pick it up and take it with them when they were done with it. But that was a lot of fun. We used to stand up on the ridge. Always started about May. And we'd stand there and watch people come down the river on these un-boats. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That sounds really fun. Anyone else have anything? Okay, well, Dan, thank you so much for talking to us today. I learned a lot of great stuff about Richland and waste encapsulation. I really appreciate it.
Barnett: Okay.
Northwest Public Television | Reid_Leatris
Reid: My name is Leatris Faye Boehmer Reid. B-O-E-H-M-E-R. It's pronounced "bay--" "bay-mer." And I was born in North Dakota in 1930.
Bauman: Just before we get started on that, I just need to get the date on here, make sure we have everything. And so we're recording this on August 27, 2013.
Reid: Okay, August 27.
Bauman: And we're recording it in your home in Walla Walla.
Reid: Okay.
Bauman: Yeah, let's have you talk about your family and how your family came to White Bluffs.
Reid: First?
Bauman: Yeah.
Reid: Okay.
Reid: I came here in June to White Bluffs, Washington in 1935 or '36. I'm pretty sure it was '36 because I had my sixth birthday there.
Bauman: So you said you were born in North Dakota and moved to White Bluffs in 1936. Why did your family leave North Dakota and head to White Bluffs?
Reid: Well, we had a terrible Depression, as you know. And I was a Depression baby, and we just simply weren't—there was no work, there was no money. We just simply had to get out of there. We lost a little boy at two and a half with what they call membranous croup at the time. But it was actually, what it was was that awful--oh, kids have it. It's asthma, terrible asthma. And he just couldn't make it. And I think it just broke my mother's heart. She had just lost a baby. So then I became the baby. But I think I was almost six, so--She had written all over Washington, Oregon, because she knew that there was fruit there. And there was food, and the temperature was reasonable. And so she wrote all the little towns that she could find in Washington and Oregon to find out what they did there, what they grew, and what the chances were of people surviving. And she got one for Mr. Reierson that owned the grocery store in White Bluffs, and one from the man who had the bank. And I can't remember his name. But she got glowing letters about the fruit. She got glowing things about that there was work. There was packing sheds, there were alfalfa fields to take care of. And there certainly were. They didn't stint on it and it was not exaggerated. So that's how we came to be there, and find it we did. It was exactly like they described it. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to us, because we would have starved. We had no money even to pay for that little boy's doctor bill that we left. So then I was the littlest one, and we had six left.
Bauman: And so talk a little bit about your parents and your siblings, what your parents' names and your siblings' names--
Reid: Well, my oldest sister--who I dearly love and still is alive and I'm glad--is 10 years older than me. And her name is Dorothy Lorraine Boehmer-- "bay-mer"--Foyer. And she lives in Everett, Washington, and she will also probably make a statement to you. But she's my oldest. And then I had a sister LaVonne. I had a sister named Helen and a brother named Virgil, all of them the same name, Boehmer. And I had a little brother. I had a sister named Darlene also. And she didn't live at White Bluffs. She stayed with my great-aunt and uncle in Minnesota because they had no children and they wanted to educate her. She was very smart. And she had been treated badly at school in North Dakota, and she didn't want to go back. And they were visiting us. So my mother said, well, you could have her for a year. And of course she--they became so attached to her. And she loved them dearly, and they were good to her. And they did visit us at White Bluffs. And they liked White Bluffs when they came. But it was the best thing that ever happened to us to move to White Bluffs. They had work in packing sheds, like I say. They had--the kids were very receptive to us. And everybody there just opened their arms.
Bauman: I wonder if you could describe the place you lived in White Bluffs.
Reid: Well, we lived at Lulubelle Johnson's house, and we were buying it from her. But we never realized any money out of when it sold to the government. But Lulubelle Johnson had a son named Ford Johnson because Lulubelle Johnson was a niece of Henry Ford, made the automobiles. And we stayed there at that house and it was just—it was wonderful. We had good neighbors, fruit orchards all over. All over. When they said that you will find all the fruit you want, they really meant it.
Bauman: And so what sort of fruit was on the farm you grew up on?
Reid: Oh, we had--we grew alfalfa. If you didn't grow alfalfa, you grew fruit. But we had a good well on our land, and alfalfa was a good-paying crop. And of course, we had a cow. And if we had too much alfalfa, we could sell it. So it wasn't something that went bad. And the fruit--every kind of fruit. First time I ever tasted cherries or even seen a cherry tree was there. Or ever ate an apricot or seen an apricot. Or even apples--we had apples there—wonderful. And the whole valley was full of that. It wasn't just one little orchard, it was lots of orchards. It was covered with orchards and alfalfa fields. Yeah.
Bauman: Did you have electricity?
Reid: We did! First time we had electricity. We had electricity shortly before we moved from North Dakota because I remember my mother had a Maytag washing machine that she had just bought and paid $2 a month for. [LAUGHTER] So we had that all packed up and ready to go and our tickets--the government gave us tickets to get out of a depressed area. And we took the Empire Builder--brand new--to Spokane, and came into White Bluffs on a fruit train with our little parcel of stuff. And they welcomed us with open arms. And they were [AUDIO OUT]
Bauman: So you mentioned that there was a well. Is that--how were your crops irrigated with it?
Reid: Oh, well, we had sprinkler systems. They weren't like they are now. But what we had, you dug the ditch across the field. And then you made little rows out of that on both sides. And you would run it from the well pipe into that big main ditch. And then you would take the little ditches and close them up. When you've got enough irrigation water, you'd close them back up. And that's what we did. That's how we did it. And that's how they water the orchards.
Bauman: And how about running water? Did you have--
Reid: We didn't have running water in the house. We went out and got it by the bucketful off of the well. There was a little faucet and you could either pull it up with a bucket or you could turn the faucet on. There was a pump. [LAUGHTER] It's the same one you watered the yard with. But it was grand to have all the fresh water you needed because we paid $0.25 a barrel in North Dakota for drinking water because it was a rancid and acrid. $0.25 then was a lot of money. We washed clothes with it. My mother would take it after she washed clothes and scrub her floors. And they were white from the lye in the soap. And then she would put it on her garden. But we never had bugs on the garden. [LAUGHTER].
Bauman: So I was gonna ask you--who were some of your neighbors?
Reid: Let me see, Beldins. Beldins were one of our neighbors. Summers were some of our neighbors. And I can't even remember what--his kid's name was--oh, I can't say his name. He kind of talked with a nasal. And my dad called him Snazzy Summers. [LAUGHTER] I don't know where that came from. But anyways, he was--he had a crush on my sister Helen. And Helen didn't like him. Of course, she was only about 12 or 13. I don't think she had boys in mind. She was kind of a tomboy, too. They were some of our neighbors. And we lived-- the Abercrombie place was north of us. And down below us was an abandoned place. And they must have made wine of some kind, because they grew grapes and the grapes were still there. They grew right down to the water. We would go down and get these great big, beautiful Tokay red grapes. And they were right there by the river so they had enough water. But then the whole farm was completely abandoned, probably because of the Depression. I really don't know. But they were the neighboring ones. And the Grewells lived up above us. Helen and Gerald Grewell was their name. And Helen Grewell was my sister Helen's very favorite girl. They'd run around all the time.
Bauman: And how about you? Who were some of your best friends--
Reid: Oh, Patsy Borden was my best friend for a while. She was probably my best friend, yes. And she was the granddaughter of the Saths, who were related to the Wiehls who run the ferry. And Ida Mae probably was another little friend. She was a nice little girl. I liked them all. We actually--there wasn't a whole lot of--kids had to go home and go do things. It wasn't--I remember the Kilian children because they were German. And they came there, I want to say about '37, '38. Hitler was already busy in Germany. And they came home. And they Mrs. Supple used to raise sheep. Her and husband--they were German also, very, very German. Nice people, but she thought Hitler was doing such great things over there for the German people. And so Mr. Kilian went over and had a long talk with her and said, you know, you are putting yourself in a dangerous position, because this is not going well in Germany. He might be doing things for the German people, but he has things in mind for the world. And I thought, how kind. How provocative and kind that was. It wasn't necessary for him to do that. He really didn't know them. But he had heard things. And in a little community, things like that get around. It isn't gossip, it's just fear. But I thought that was very kind. I was only about 7, 8 years old.
Bauman: I was going to ask you about-- did you have certain chores or responsibilities--
Reid: Always.
Bauman: --that you had to do on the farm?
Reid: Everybody did. Everybody did. Mine was feeding the chickens and gathering the eggs. And we had a little hen named Grandma that mother picked out of the shell, and Billy Rooster, who I guess was named after me. He turned out beautiful. But little Grandma Hen was sterile, so she must have been too weak. But she kept her in the warming oven for an extra couple hours, and she picked her out of the shell. She was sterile. And she would run around stealing everybody else's chicks. She would have a couple of Rhode Island Reds, and she would have a couple of little Leghorns, and maybe a little Barred Rock or two. And she'd huddle them up and boy, she'd fight them off--she's going to keep these kids. Well, Mrs. Sath was such a sweetheart. They lived in the--next to us. And she brought my mother some duck eggs-- white Peking duck eggs. And she said, why don't you just set her. She's dying to and she doesn't know--she'd fight them off. And so they set about 10 eggs under her because duck eggs are pretty good sized. And she hatched out every one, and she was so proud of them. Oh, boy, she'd just stomp around that farmyard like she really knew what she was doing. And she just took them down to the horse trough one time. And they found the horse trough, and they jumped in. And she just went berserk--"come back, come back." And so it got to be a morning thing. Every morning she'd take them to the horse trough because they had to have their swim. But she raised them. [LAUGHTER] Those things were fun things. We didn't have TV. We had a little, tiny radio that we could listen to for the news. But it wasn't a thing you had on all day. But Billy Rooster used to hear the music and he would try to keep up with it. And my sister Dorothy would always do the lunch dishes. She'd say, Billy Rooster, are you out there singing to this music?
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Reid: It was very wholesome.
Bauman: Mm-hm. What other sorts of things did you do for fun?
Reid: The river. Oh, the river. The river was a godsend. We learned to swim the first year, the first summer we were there. And we had a raft. The dads had got together and built this big raft. And if you could swim out to the raft—I was not supposed to, but I did. And the little Lowe boy wasn't supposed to, either. He was just learning to swim. And he went under. And my sister Dorothy was a really good swimmer. And he went under for the third time. And she went down and got him, got him out on that--pulled him up. And there was a couple of guys up there pulled him up on that raft and they turned them over on his stomach. And the water just poured. And he lived. But he wouldn't have lived. And every one of those kids at White Bluffs were just as devoted as that to the river. That was our playground. We had to do our work in the morning because it was cool enough. And the summers over there were--boy, they were hot. But we could go in and get in the swimming pool then, our swimming pool.
Bauman: You mentioned a little bit ago having a radio. Did you have a telephone also?
Reid: We finally did have a telephone. And it was only a dollar a month. That was right uptown. We'd never had one of those before. It was a party line, so if there was an emergency, you had to give up the line. If there was an emergency--if you didn't, they would take your telephone out and you'd never get a telephone again. So that was good and responsible. And I think Mrs. Westling was the telephone--she had it in her home. She and her daughter, I believe, operated it, I'm pretty sure. They lived up by the bank, I remember that. But I can't tell you--we didn't have names on the streets that I know of.
Bauman: And so did you get your news mostly on the radio? Was there a newspaper also?
Reid: There was. There was a little newspaper there. And I believe it was for Hanford and White Bluffs. And my brother actually worked for that newspaperman. First you start out just because he thought it would be fun. Phil asked him, he said, would you like to know something about publishing a newspaper? And so Dutch went and worked for him. That's what we called him--we didn't call him Virgil. And he went and worked for him. And they did publish a little newspaper. It was a weekly, just once a week. And, of course, they had all the Ladies Aid tea parties, things like that, things at the church. Everything was in there. Yeah, a little gossipy paper. It wasn't malicious. It was just who had a luncheon at their place or whatever. And so, when he got older and came out of the Army, he went and took formal newspapering, went to college and took it. And he became a newspaperman. Boise Statesman was one of them. And he went down to California. And he worked down there for a while, about 10 years there. So that was good for him.
Bauman: He got started in--
Reid: Yeah, yeah.
Bauman: What businesses do you remember being in White Bluffs?
Reid: Well, I remember Reierson's Grocery. And I remember around the back of it was a little creamery where you could--in fact, they picked up a can of cream at our back porch every morning, because we had, by then, two cows. And one was a Guernsey and one was a Jersey, and they both had lots of cream. So we couldn't use all the cream, even for six kids. [LAUGHTER] So they would come and pick that up. And my sister, Helen, always did the ironing. She liked to iron. That was her job. And so he would come, and here she'd be on that back porch, early in the morning, starting the ironing. [LAUGHTER] And he says, I don't think you've gone to bed. He was a kidder. But that was what she did, and she was excellent at it.
Bauman: So there was Reierson's and--
Reid: And the creamery. And there was a little garage back there, and I can't remember the name of it because we didn't have a car. But there was a little garage back there. And there was Pop English's drugstore. Everybody knew where that was. Pop English and his wife had no children. But they owned this little drugstore. And they made the best ice cream in the world, and he sold it there. And you could have an ice cream cone for a nickel. I mean it was an ice cream cone. And a dime was a double dipper, and it had two shelves and then one cone—it went down to one cone. And that was a dime. And it was hard, if you had a dime, to decide whether you wanted to do that or not. I remember my mother used to give us two pennies for Jesus to take to Sunday school. And I always put one in. I figured Jesus wouldn't care if I have a rope licorice from Pop English's. And years later, I told her, I said, Mama, if I would have known that Jesus didn't want my money like I do now--he wants our love, has nothing to do with my two cents--I would have brought you home one. She says, your Sunday school dress was the messiest thing ever. She says it was always was covered in black. And, she says, the rest of the girls I could just press the back of that little white dress with some water and make it good for next Sunday. And she says, they could wear a Sunday school dress for all month [AUDIO OUT] but you. But she says, I never knew that. And I said, well, I says, if I would've known better, which I know now, you'd have had one, too. [LAUGHTER] By then I was about 47 years old. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Oh, talking about the school in White Bluffs, how large was it, how many students do you think there were, and maybe the teachers that you remember particularly--
Reid: I would say that, in my first and second grade class, there was 18 that I can name off, that I can remember. We had a little boy come there named Carter House. And I think his father was something to do with engineering. Allard, Sam Allard kept the irrigation system and the electric thing, and I think Mr. House had something to do with it. But we had never seen a child look like this before. He looked like he stepped out of a catalog. He had this blonde-- beautiful boy-- had this little blonde hair all cut so nice. And he wore little argyle knee socks and little suit pants and a little white shirt and little slaps on his shoes. And I thought, my gosh, that's the cutest little boy I've ever seen. And, of course, he didn't know how to share. And one day I was swinging on the swing, and Alice Moody looked out the window. And here was this little boy grabbing that swing and taking it away from me. And she says, we don't do that here. She says, you have to wait your turn. She says, when Leatris is done with it, she says, you can have it. It'll be your turn. [LAUGHTER] But they were probably nice people, it's just that they weren't White Bluffs-oriented.
Bauman: And so you want to talk about Alice Moody a little bit? She was your first--
Reid: Ah, she was a wonderful teacher.
Bauman: --grade teacher, is that right?
Reid: Wonderful lady. She taught first, second, and, I believe, possibly third. And there was probably, I would suppose, 18 in the first grade, and probably close to that in second. And then there was the third grade. And we had—we did not have separate rooms, but we had little partitions that she would put up so that we would keep our attention. And we did have monitors. Everybody helped everybody. If there was a little boy that needed help with numbers and somebody was good with it, she would assign them to help that child. It wasn't--it was probably the most together community. If something was unfair on the playground, it was put a stop to right away, sometimes by the children. And teachers, if they were in their room, they kept a window open in good weather because if there was anything wrong in the playground, it was either reported or taken care of. And I can't remember fights on school. I can't remember that, ever. It would never have been tolerated.
Bauman: How did you get to school, did you walk--
Reid: Oh, yes.
Bauman: --or did you ride the bus?
Reid: Everybody walked. The only children I remember that came in on a bus--oh, what was his name—Mr. Fisher's school bus. Mr. Fisher, I believe. And he came in on a little bus--with a little bus. And I think they were probably from out toward Saddle Mountain and farms like that because they had to go to school. But I do remember a little bus. And I don't even remember that it was painted yellow or anything. I think it kind of reminded me of maybe a van. But it had windows in it and it was kind of squared. It seems like it was dark gray.
Bauman: Mm-hm. And so far was the school from your home?
Reid: Oh, I, let me see. We had to pass Saths' orchard, the whole length of their orchard, and then Beldins'. And then we had to walk across the front of Beldins' and their [AUDIO OUT] was pretty good sized. And then we had to walk up past Summers' up the hill to our house. So I would suppose it was probably a mile. And some of them walked a lot more than that. And Mrs. Moody used to bring kids in with her when she came to school because she drove to school. And she was around the Reach, around the--it was last reactor. And Old Town used to be there. The whole town used to be on the river at one time. But they moved it away because I think they were progressing. People were moving in, spreading out. Orchards were filling in. And I think that's why they probably moved the town. But we had a movie theater. We had a movie theater. And somebody from the Tri-Cities came over with a movie. In the summertime, we had a movie once a week, probably in the evening early, about seven. And then, in the wintertime, it was kind of hit and miss whenever they could get over or whatever, I don't know. I can't remember. But we did have movies there.
Bauman: Do you remember any movies that you saw over there?
Reid: No, I wouldn't remember that. I probably wouldn't even have understood it. But it wasn't anything that was offensive because they didn't do that.
Bauman: Where was the movie theater in relationship to some of the other businesses--
Reid: Okay, across the street from Reierson's Grocery, and also across the cross street where the railroad came to fill the cars, that was right across the street from Reierson's Grocery as you come in to White Bluffs. Then there was a main drag. And there was a railroad hotel there, because they had railroad workers that, when they went out to do things to the railroad--the rails out there--they had to have people. And then they also rented to other people if they came in and there was a room empty. And it was right across the street from Reierson's Grocery from this one that's burned off. And behind there was a building. And that's where they had the movie theater. And it was just an old building, I don't know. It had seats in it--not wonderful, but seats. And then they had a balcony on it, too, so that was good. Kids would go up there and of course, you know. One time we had some holy rollers in there that rented it. [LAUGHTER] And they were rolling around on the floor. And my brother and his buddies were up there taking toilet paper, throwing rolls down there. They were all in little--I don't know, rolling around. [LAUGHTER] The Spirit moved them, I guess. Boy, they got in trouble for that. [LAUGHTER] But it was used for a lot of things. If they had a community meeting or something, they'd either use it, the high school or that little building, depending on what it was about. Sometimes it was a farm meeting, or a new spray that was coming out, or what they should do and shouldn't do.
Bauman: Mm-hm. I was going to ask you about any community events that you remember, either picnics, or Fourth of July things, or boat races--
Reid: Boat races we had right there. They did not start in Tri-Cities. They started at White Bluffs. It was wonderful. Mr. Kilian used to slice his big watermelons and sell them for $0.05. [LAUGHTER] Pop English used to sell his ice cream cones. Oh, and the Ladies Aid always had something going--cookies or something or a bake sale. And it was just a fun time. And we had a band. We used to gather up a band and have music there. It was pretty good. And in the spring, we always had a little May Day thing. And we had a maypole. And they would twine the strings around it like they do. And we had a program--quite a program--at the high school. And we had one that we were in that was the doll dance. And Alice Beyers was supposed to be the French lady who had the dolls. And so we had these cute little dresses on, little ballerina-type dresses. And she would come around and wind us up. That was the first start of it, and we danced to the tune, the doll dance. [AUDIO OUT] old, old, tune. And each one of us she wound up. And we started dancing. And we would dance around this maypole. And that was part of the program. And we had--oh, I remember my sister had a reading. "I want to live in the house by the side of the road, and be a friend of man," is the way it goes. And each stanza ends with that. And every single--my mother tutored her, her teacher tutored her--and at the end of every one of those stanzas when she got up there, "I want to live in the house by the side of the road and be friendly with men." It brought down the house, of course. Oh, my mother was so embarrassed. She was so embarrassed. [LAUGHTER] So when she-later in life--when she had a beautiful garden and a family of her own, I found that on a plaque that you put out in your garden, an open book with this on it in a plaque form. And it said, "I want to live in the house by the side of the road and be a friend to man." [LAUGHTER] I said, this is for old memories, Helen, and she laughed. She had a good laugh out of that.
Bauman: You mentioned earlier your Sunday school dress. What church did you go to?
Reid: Well, I think at that--first, we went to the Presbyterian, but then they closed that. But then we went to the little Lutheran church I think was up in back of the bank. And we went there for a while. But my dress was always a mess. I come home with licorice all over it because, of course, I had to stop and take one of those pennies, buy a licorice at Pop English's drugstore.
Bauman: Do you remember any other churches in the community?
Reid: I do not. I don't remember that there was Catholic church there. I don't remember that there was.
Bauman: I wonder—I know that the Wanapum people were in the area. I wonder if you have any memories of the Wanapum Indians, or--
Reid: Oh, yes. We had--I don't know that they--they were Johnny Buck's Indian tribe. My brother knew Frank Buck. He had two wives. One was old and had white hair, and her name was Deloria. And I don't remember the other one. But they were fine people. They came in and they would gather fruit off the ground because it was ready to dry. They would catch fish out of that river and smoke it and just grab your nose and want you to go down there and have some. And they were just fine people. They came in usually before cherries--you would see them before cherries--and then you would see them every day out in the orchards. And nobody ever charged anybody for that. They could have all they wanted. And my mother actually learned to dry fruit. And oh, that smelled good, just waft up and grab you by the nose. And they put it in little, thin sheets like cheesecloth. They'd make a rack with willows--make a rack, weave it, and put it between maybe stumps of willows, little tiny seedling willows that were coming up. And they would make these racks. And they would put this cheesecloth over it to keep the flies away. And they would dry it. And they would dry fruit all summer long--peaches, cherries, apricot, apples, everything. And they taught my mother that if you soak them just a few minutes in saltwater, they will not turn brown. And they won't salt the fruit. And so she learned how to do that. And the fish—oh! When they smoked that fish, you wanted to go down there and just have some. It just smelled delicious. They had a mixture they mixed up to put on it so it wouldn't dry it out. And they would take the whole bone out of it. They'd slice it. They take the scale off, the skin off, and the ribs out. And they would place that between these same little cloths and dry it. And they would smoke it from beneath and they'd keep that just really low. Oh, you could smell it all over the valley. You'd just--oh! And it was delicious. They did a good job. And they were interesting. Interesting, interesting people. And you know it was a good [AUDIO OUT] for kids. I remember my brother used go up, 14 or 15 years old, he and his two buddies Leo and Louie Russo--Leo Goodner and Louie Russo- and they'd go up to Saddle Mountain, take a little flour and little baking powder and maybe some salt and some lard. And they'd go up there and stay for a couple days. Nobody thought anything of it. There was a little spring up there and it was always green. And they'd just camp out and snare a rabbit or whatever. They just couldn't--they just loved it. Usually he went in good weather, yes. But we didn't have bad weather in summertime. But you wouldn't let a 14-year-old kid out now, three of them all by themselves? [LAUGHTER] But they had wonderful times. And it was a good place to raise kids, and it was good place to be raised, too. Really good.
Bauman: I want to ask you about the sheriff.
Reid: Oh, Roy Bean was a fine man. I think I told you about him coming to get the boys to take the--
Bauman: You did before we started recording on the film--
Reid: Well, he was a deputy sheriff out of the Tri-Cities. And I think the main thing--the office was up in probably Yakima, I'm not sure. But he had two little girls. And Roberta went to school with me. And Loretta came along later. She was younger by a couple of years. But he came to our house one morning, and he--we were just up. Dutch wasn't up yet, my brother. But he said, I wonder, is Virgil up yet? And he said, no, he said, but I'll go get him. He said, what's he done now? And he says, he's sure going to get it if he's gotten into trouble. And he says, now I want you to understand. He says, there's nothing going to be trouble about this, Joe. He says, I want you to go get him up. He says, his two buddies are in my car. And, he says, we're going to do a little favor for some people. And he said, I don't want any repercussions about this. I don't want any questions about it. If I hear of any beatings about this, he says, I will deal with it. And my dad went in and got Dutch up. And he came out and got in the car. He was dressed. And they went up to the packing house, which is right across from Reierson's Grocery. And he says, now, we're going to go get that car, which you pushed down this incline last night and released the brake. And he says, we're going to push it back up that slight hill. It was probably down there about seven, eight blocks. Well, it was uphill, now. It wasn't so easy. But, he says, I'll help you with the brake here. And he said, we'll keep this released. And he said, we'll push this back up. So he got those three boys--probably 14, 15 years old--to push that car about seven or eight blocks up to be iced. And he came home. He was pretty sweaty and he was pretty tired. And he wanted some breakfast. [LAUGHTER] But nothing was ever mentioned about it. And he was a fine man. He knew how to handle people. And he wasn't out there to bully anybody or--and later, he came to a family reunion. We called him up and invited him, because we knew he'd lived in Milton-Freewater, him and his wife. And, of course, Roberta-I kept track of Roberta because she moved here. That was his oldest daughter. And so I was glad to meet them. And we invited him to the get-together. And he mentioned that. And he laughed about it to Dutch. Dutch was a little uneasy when he thought we were going to invite the Beans. [LAUGHTER] And I said, he made a good joke out of it. He says, I've used that a lot of times, he said, on how to and how not to. And he said, you turned out pretty good. He says, turned out pretty good.
Bauman: Someone else I wanted to ask you about-- when we were talking earlier, you were mentioning a man named Ellis John--
Reid: Oh, Ellis John was an interesting person. He lived down in old town in just one of the abandoned buildings. He had been on some kind of a merchant ship. And somebody on that ship that worked with him attacked him. And he was beating on him, and he killed him. And so they sent him to a penitentiary. It was a kind of an accidental killing. He didn't mean to but he was really--that's what I got out of it. But he lived there. He came to White Bluffs because it was such a nice little town. He came through there and he liked it. And he was an artist, a real artist. He did pictures of people. And he would make a few bucks, did paintings of them. And when I had my 10th birthday--my mother used to leave vegetables and fruit on his porch because she knew he didn't have a garden. And she always left vegetables and fruit if we had extra--because we always had extra--on his porch because he was kind of a recluse. But he would come out and talk to you. He was pleasant. And when I had my 10th birthday, my folks bought Muriel Beldin's girl's bike for me to ride. And it was a smaller bike. And he painted roses on the fenders of that blue and white bike. And I had the prettiest bike in town when I moved to Walla Walla. [LAUGHTER] So I always remembered him because I was fascinated with--in fact, I took art in school because I was so fascinated with him. He would sit there and sketch somebody and--right in front of your eyes-- and make it live. And you wondered how he did that. He used charcoal a lot, and pen and ink, and paint. Just-- and I always felt bad because his life was kind of wasted there. He could've been--I mean he could make a likeness of anybody perfectly. But he chose to be there because we accepted him, and we respected his privacy. He had been through a lot. And I don't think he was a murderous person. I think it was something that happened.
Bauman: So when and why did your family leave White Bluffs?
Reid: Well, in 1937, Hitler was very busy. And by 1941, he was even busier. And in June--in April of 1941, we moved to Walla Walla. My dad says, there's going to be some military. He says, you can bet your sweet life. He says, it's big enough to have some military. And he said, I want to be where there's some jobs. And so we moved to Walla Walla. And there was a veterans' hospital here and he was a veteran. And he said, I just think it'd be better, because they had surveyed our area in 1937, '36 or '37, I'm not sure which. But we kept surveyors at our house, so we knew they were surveying for something. And it took them, oh, a couple years to survey all that area that they were looking at.
Bauman: But you didn't know what they were--
Reid: They didn't even know what they were surveying for. They were hired by the United States government. And they were employees of the United States government. So we kept Mama and Daddy Redd, we called them. And they were nice people. They had no children, and they just loved us. They just--she taught us really good things, things that we hadn't learned from our mom. Mama didn't know how to make fudge. She'd never had that much sugar to spare in her life. [LAUGHTER] So we all learned how to make fudge and penuche and good stuff from Ma Redd.
Bauman: So you knew they were working for the government, but you didn't know--
Reid: We didn't know. They didn't know. But they were there about, I would say, two years. So I associate it with the Manhattan Project because it's a logical. Hitler was busy. Oh boy, was he busy. So I don't know. It might have been, it might not have been. We thought it was an irrigation project. We were so excited, because an irrigation project [AUDIO OUT] would have given us more, see, I mean, you could have irrigated more land. But--
Bauman: So how were you when you left White Bluffs and you moved--
Reid: I had my 11th birthday here. It was in the spring of 1941. And we didn't have war until 1941, December 7.
Bauman: So as a 10- and 11-year-old girl, what did you think of leaving White Bluffs and moving to Walla Walla?
Reid: Oh, I thought I was going to die. For one thing, they had a Holstein cow over at Margaret Stearns's where we lived in her little house when we came here. And my father took care of her yard and milked her cow and separated the milk. It was a Holstein cow. That's like skim milk. I didn't drink milk for a year. I couldn't handle it. I mean, we were used to--we had cream on top of the milk. And then we sold half of it to the little dairy. And, I says, this is what we slop the pigs with. I'm not drinking this. And they worried about me--I wasn't drinking milk. But it was probably better for me, but I wasn't used to it. I wasn't used to it. The Scandinavian blood in me calls for that milk with the fat in it. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Did you keep in contact with the people from White Bluffs after you moved here to Walla Walla?
Reid: I knew Bonnie Morris was here, and her sister, Ruth--her sister-in-law, Ruth. They were both Morris girls. And I don't think they were sisters. I think they were cousins because we had two Morris families there. But Ruth went to school with my sister Dorothy at White Bluffs High School. And I went to school with Bonnie Morris, who went to White Bluffs Grade School. And I'll tell you what, I was sure jealous of that girl. She could do handstands and cartwheels all around the White Bluffs Grade School and not stop. She could do a flip over and throw herself up and come down on her feet. And I just--I was just amazed. She was a couple years older than me, or I thought she was. But I don't think so. I think she was probably close to my age. She probably--maybe it was one year. But she was a fantastic athlete. Even the boys envied her. I mean, she could just flip around like a circus performer. And here I was, a tomboy, but not delightful with things like gymnastics. There was always somebody we envy when we were kids.
Bauman: So in 1943, a couple years after you moved away, the federal government came in and--
Reid: Cleaned out everything.
Bauman: --everybody had to leave. Did you hear about that from people you used--
Reid: My sister was living there.
Bauman: Oh, she was, okay.
Reid: She was living in the Johnson place. She said nobody ever came and got the beautiful antiques she had upstairs. She had a teapot that came over on the Mayflower. The legs were--it was a silver teapot, and the legs were actually worn completely off. And it had the Ford name on it.
Bauman: So which sister was this, then, who had--
Reid: That was Dorothy, my oldest sister that I love so much.
Bauman: And why had she stayed there?
Reid: She stayed there because she had husband who was a truck driver. And she was expecting her first baby and didn't really know what else to do. And he was gone.
Bauman: Was this someone she had met in White Bluffs, then, or--
Reid: She met him in Kennewick. She was working at Kennewick General Hospital at the time. And she met Vern Fouracre. And they got married at our house. In fact, we chivareed them at our house. And that was probably when--I was 13 when I was an aunt, so Colleen was born in '43. And she wasn't born there. She was born—she was pregnant when she was there but she was born after that. And that's when they moved them out. They had to move everybody out. And I always wondered whatever became of Mrs. Johnson's beautiful things, because they were museum things. They should've been in a museum. They shouldn't have been in an attic.
Bauman: Right. Where did your sister and her husband go, then, when they had to leave?
Reid: Well, they went back to Kennewick. And Colleen was born in Kennewick. Was born in--[AUDIO OUT] Then she came to Walla Walla. And she had a little boy a year or two later. She had four.
Bauman: Have you ever gone back to--
Reid: We went to the Hanford-White Bluffs picnics, I think, four or five times. And then, of course, the people who were doing the arranging for it--Annette Hereford and I can't remember the other boy. I can't remember the boy.
Man off-camera: Bob Grisham, maybe?
Reid: I believe, I believe. They graduated high school with Dorothy. And they just were getting too old to do that. And it was hard thing. And people were dying off. But Alice Moody was at the last one. I was, too. And I loved seeing her. And I knew her immediately. She looked just like herself, just exactly.
Bauman: So when you went to the reunions, it usually was a picnic, right, at the park, Howard Amon Park. Did you also do a tour--
Reid: Mm-hm. We did, we did. We could take our car in. First time, I think they had a bus for people who had no transportation, because the Tri-Cities had--they were old. Some people weren't driving anymore. So they evidently had acquired a bus for some that couldn't. And whoever had room in cars, we took them. But ours was always full because our kids were just fascinated by this. And we went to the dinners, little banquets that we had you. Mr. Reierson was there.
Bauman: What did you think when you had a chance to go back and see the land, the area where--
Reid: Broke my heart. Just broke my heart. We had a hard time finding--we wouldn't have found where our house was, except there was a water tank associated with this pump. And it set out front. It was made--and a lot of the people had them. Some of them had brick with a liner in it. But this one was cement and was kind of cone-shaped, and evidently was a holding tank for the house, or whatever. I don't know, I'm not sure. But it was there. And that was still there. They hadn't knocked that down. That's the only way--and it set up on a hill. It was the first row of hills as you came down toward the river--dropped down the river to Old Town. And so, that was how we found it. But there wasn't any stumps of trees left. There wasn't anything left. They actually had the crew of conscientious objectors at McNeil Island come down and cut the trees and the wood out of there, and took it back for fuel by truckloads. And that was the last, just before they released--they were already starting to build the reactors and things and dig the systems underneath, and storage thing under the--But it was a wonderful place to grow up, and I don't know that they'll ever get it cleaned up.
Bauman: Anything that we haven't talked about yet in terms of White Bluffs, any stories or events that stand out that we haven't had a chance to talk about?
Reid: I just think it was the best place to the world to raise kids because there was a community spirit-- that I never saw favoritism. I never saw belligerence about minding rules. I always saw a humanitarianism. If you knew that your husband or your neighbors or anybody was having a problem, you didn't make it your business. You didn't gossip about it. It wasn't a usual. It was more of any empathy, more of a sympathetic, let's just do what we can for them. I never saw the malice toward anybody because they were poor or maybe did something wrong. If there was a wrong committed, it was straightened out and talked about by the two people that did it. And it was left alone. And they had a tavern there. [AUDIO OUT] And, even there, it was not tolerated for people to act like a bunch of savages or fights or--It was a place to go have a cold beer if you wanted one, but I don't remember a lot of drunkenness or--I don't think he would have--Harry somebody was his name. It ended up two people owned it, but I can't remember what their name was.
Bauman: Oh, the tavern?
Reid: And we were gone, but they told us about it. And I can't remember, but that was the last of it. And it was just a little tavern. I probably, I don't know--it was probably four or five little tables and maybe a row along the bar. I remember standing out there one time because my dad went in to have a beer with a friend. And I said, well I'll wait out here and eat this ice cream cone from Pop English. [LAUGHTER] I knew what to do with it. He was a fine man. He actually organized the White Bluffs band.
Bauman: Oh, right.
Reid: The high school band. And he made room for everybody. Everybody had-- Ola Meeks could do the baton twirl, and she taught two other girls to do that. And they had white pants with a--it's either black or navy blue stripe down the side--and a white shirt, just a plain little white shirt. The girls wore a white blouse. And everybody had a part in high school band. And they went up to Yakima and they took first place. That little-- and competing against Kennewick, Pasco? It was amazing! Somewhere we have a picture, and I don't have the picture. I can't find it. [LAUGHTER] But Dorothy just loved it. She played a drum, and she just loved it. And they did a good job. No, it was a fine place to grow up. And it was sad, because it really was a neighborhood community. And there were people who had plenty, I mean, they had--there were well-to-do people there. But they didn't flaunt it. They were no different when they went to the Grange meeting. Or whether they were entertaining, it was not—there was not any class distinction. And especially at school I noticed it. That's unusual. That's unusual. And we welcomed it.
Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for letting us come here and talk to you today, and for sharing your memories--
Reid: Well, you use what you can. I know you you'll cut, because, of course, you can't. You have to do what you have to do. But I know that people are going to give you some wonderful stories, stories about how they were accepted. And I'm sure every one of those people that you interview will tell you the same thing, that it was a wonderful community.
Bauman: Thanks again very much. I appreciate it.
Reid: I appreciate your coming.
Northwest Public Television | Peters_Leonard
Leonard Peters: Leonard Peters. L-E-O-N-A-R-D P-E-T-E-R-S.
Arata: Thank you. My name's Laura Arata. It's November 19th--already--2013, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start, if you could tell us a little bit about how your family came to Hanford and where you were from.
Peters: I was born in Denver in August of '43. My father came out in June or July of '43 from Denver. And so my mom, myself, and my brother were there in Denver, and when I was two months old we came out with another family, the Carl Eckert family. And it was my mom, Mrs. Eckert, their daughter--who was about my age--and my brothers. So five of us came out in a car in October of '43. And my dad was working out here. And so that's how we came out, was in an old car.
Arata: And what was your father doing at Hanford?
Peters: He was a truck driver. He drove for Remington Arms in Denver, who was DuPont, and he also worked for Bechtel up in Alaska. And he came down and went back to Denver and was driving, heard about this place. And if you'd like a very interesting story--
Arata: Always.
Peters: He was driving for an Army officer. A colonel or something, I'm not sure. Kind of a--I'll say chauffeur, but it wasn't really a chauffeur. But my dad had heard about this place. And he asked his--I'll say colonel--about it. And very few people knew about it. But this colonel says, well, I can't tell you anything about it, but if you've heard of heavy water, it has something to do with heavy water. Of course my dad, heavy water didn't mean anything to him. But you know, hindsight. It's kind of interesting to me this colonel knew a little bit about what was going on here. As big a secret as it was, not that many people knew. But he had some idea of what was going on. I found that very interesting.
Arata: Yeah. And how long did your father work at the Hanford site?
Peters: From '43 until he retired in '73.
Arata: Okay, well, we'll come back to that. I want to ask you just a few questions about the area. Obviously you were very, very young—
Peters: I'm sorry. He passed away in '73. He retired in '67.
Arata: Okay. I'll have more questions for you. [LAUGHTER] Do you remember, growing up, what sort of housing you lived in, what the situation was like?
Peters: My first memory was an A house, 1520 Thayer. We moved in there about 1945. So that's my first memory, though we lived many places before that, as my dad's Q clearance bears out. But my memory goes back to the A house in 1945.
Arata: Did you live there for quite a while?
Peters: Lived there until around '56, '57.
Arata: And could you describe that house a little bit, for anyone who doesn't know what an A house is?
Peters: An A house is a duplex, two-story. You have neighbors literally right next door to you. It was a three-bedroom, all upstairs. And of course back then there was no air conditioning, and it would get hot in the summertime. I can literally remember summers, 109 to 110, 112 degrees. And the only air conditioning was a swamp cooler. So it was pretty miserable, but yet you didn't think about it because that's just the way it was. The government literally furnished everything, from throw rugs to table, chairs. I mean literally everything. Coal. We had a coal-burning furnace, and like once a month or so on, they would deliver coal. And you had to make sure there was a coal bin that had slats in it, and you had to make sure that the slats were in, because if you forgot to put the slats in you'd have coal all over the basement floor. And so that was kind of interesting. My dad, every morning, would have to get up and stoke the fire and get it going in wintertime, because we used to have some pretty bad winters compared to today. And so that was, again, just part of living in this area. Dust storms. You've heard of the termination winds. The wind would blow and the curtains would go back and forth and just wave in the breeze, with all the windows closed. And you'd have a quarter of an inch of dust on the windowsills and everything. But there again, that's just the way it was. I can remember one story--my wife tells that when her mother came out with her and her brother, met at the train station, and the father was there to pick them up. There was a windstorm right then. And her first words were "Sherman, get me a ticket back home." And they ended up dying here, and buried here. And I know my dad, he swore he would never—he wanted to go back to Colorado, but again, he was buried here and lived here all the rest of his life. But what else can I say on the government? Everything—you know, I've heard of people—we never did do it, but people get tired of a chair or something, they'd break it, call housing. They would need another chair, and they'd come out and replace the chair. And if you had—back then they had fuses, as opposed to breakers. Blow a fuse, call housing, they'd send an electrician out to change the fuse for you. I mean, it was pretty amazing, really. And it was good quality furniture.
Arata: Cool. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about growing up in Richland in the '40s and '50s, sort of what the community was like at that time?
Peters: It was a fairly small town, of course. I think--and this is just my memory--it was about probably maybe 23,000 people, was all. Something like that. And it was truly a Leave It to Beaver era. People laugh at that, but that's exactly what it was, because if you stop and think about it--in order to live in Richland, you had to work out in the area. In order to work out in the area, you needed clearance. And it was not unusual to have someone knock at the door and be an FBI agent investigating someone or something. I mean, it was very controlled. And so there was no crime to speak of. Nickel and dime stuff. But there was one murder, in all those years. They never did find the killer. But no, we'd play out all night and folks wouldn't think a thing about it. That's just the way it was. And in the summertime, like I said, as hot as it was, all the windows and doors would be wide open and wouldn't think a thing about it. And people kind of knew one another. Not that you knew everybody, but that small a town and everyone working out there. Everyone rode the bus, so there was a camaraderie with not only where you worked but also on the buses. And people I think really did try and watch out for one another. But no, growing up, it was great. One kind of fun story. We used to hooky-bob. You know what that is?
Arata: I don't.
Peters: Okay, what we'd do in the wintertime when the roads were snowy and icy. You'd hide behind a bush, and as a car went by, you ran out and grabbed the bumper and had them drag you around. And that was a lot of fun. That was one of the winter sports. But it was kind of interesting. I can remember, newspaper front page showed a bus with a glove on it. The story was, it was a hooky-bobber and his hand was wet and it froze to the bumper, and--make a long story short, it was on the dangers of hooky-bobbing. But it just happens that the guy that that glove belonged to graduated a couple years ahead of me. Name was Jim Crum, who is now an attorney for the US government. But no, it was a fun time. I mean, Friday night shows was wall-to-wall kids. Very seldom was there a fight or anything. We'd hang out at the Spudnut Shop, or there was another place called Tim's. Someone that had a car would drive around the Uptown area about 30 times, just looking for gals or whatever. I mean, it was an American Graffiti time. Have you seen American Graffiti?
Arata: Yes, sir.
Peters: You see that, and every person in there--Hey, that was so-and-so; that was so-and-so. I mean, it was so accurate to our high school days. It was a good time to grow up. Wintertime, of course, we had Christmas tree forts, and if there was snow on the ground we'd have snow forts and choose up sides and have snowball fights hiding behind our snow forts. We would, if there was no snow--or even if there was snow after Christmas--build Christmas tree forts. Stack them up and have a roof on it, even sleep out in it. But if a neighbor down the street--you know, if they had a Christmas tree fort, about one or two in the morning we'd sneak down and steal all their trees. And we'd have a bigger fort then. We would sleep out a lot in the summertime, because it was hot. I can remember we would sleep out maybe 10 o'clock at night or so. There were still orchards, cherry orchards in town. Up on Van Giesen. We lived just around the corner on Thayer. We'd get up, go down there and steal cherries. We'd steal quite a few cherries. Then the next day we'd sell them house to house. What else was there? The buses were a big part. The buses were fun, because there was two groups. They were both run by the government, but there was what they called the city local, which took people from point A to point B as far as downtown and uptown, different places. Then there was the outer area buses that took workers to work and brought them home. But there was two different--not bus companies, but groups of drivers that drove for each group. But not only hooky-bobbing, but it was always fun to--as buses passed--snowball them, and throw snowballs at them. Just fun things.
Arata: Some good winter sports.
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: Could you talk a little bit more about these--you mentioned Friday night shows, and also the Spudnut Shop. Could you describe those a little bit?
Peters: I mean, everyone went to them. All the kids went to them. And you know, you're talking the '50s, where rock and roll was just coming in. I wrote a piece one time on--I really think that we were born at a nice time, because we can remember big bands, we can remember that type of music and how rock and roll came in. And of course parents didn't like rock and roll at all. It was evil, and all this. But a lot of the movies, some of the movies, had rock and roll stars. I can remember people dancing in the aisles while the movie was on. Things like that. I can remember one gal was dancing what they used to call a dirty bop. They ended up kicking her out. [LAUGHTER] But no, there was dancing and hooting and hollering. Before the Uptown Theater opened was the Village Theater. And that was when we were younger, but that's when they showed the serials, whether it be Superman or Whip Wilson or whomever. But every Saturday we'd go to the show. There'd be a cartoon as well as one or two double feature. That's back--we were young, but a fun thing then, I guess, was to have your popcorn boxes. They were boxes at the time. You'd flatten them and throw them and make a shadow on the screen. That was the big deal. But the Village Theater was so strange because it was all kids, basically. Because the Richland Theater, which is now The Players, was more the adults. The Village Theater was for little kids. But you would walk down the aisles, and was a kind of carpeting, and you'd stick, stick, stick, stick. I don't think they ever cleaned it. Pop spilled on it, candy bars, and everything else. That was fun. Then they did build the Uptown Theater, and that was more adult movies. But on Friday night, it was lot of science fiction. That's where you saw Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, and all that. Then the midnight shows had really neat--they'd have a midnight show, and we wouldn't get home until three in the morning, but no big deal. You'd walk home. No big deal. I don't know if you can do it today, but there'd be half a dozen of your friends walking home with you, just having a good time. But the Friday night shows--I started smoking quite early. I don't smoke now. But I can remember, for mowing the lawn and peeling the taters and things that, I'd get $1 a week allowance. And with that dollar I could buy a pack of cigarettes, which would last me a week, get into the show, and have like a dime left over. So I mean, a dollar, I was in fat city.
Arata: Do you remember how much a movie cost, about that time?
Peters: First ones I can remember was $0.11 or $0.12, and then it went to $0.20. And I think during my high school days, if I remember right, it was probably $0.35, something like that. I'm not sure.
Arata: All right. I'm fascinated by the Spudnut Shop and Tim's. Can you describe those a little?
Peters: Well, Tim's was where Dr. Chavla placed his--it's kind of caddy-cornered from the graveyard, the old graveyard. And it was a nice place. A fireplace in it and everything. That's where the kids hung out. And it wasn't really a pizza parlor, but it was kind of a pizza parlor sandwich place. It was our high school days, and it closed, I'm not sure exactly when, but became Einan's Funeral Home. It went from the restaurant to Einan's Funeral Home. And then Einan's, of course, moved out on the bypass. But the Spudnut shop, it's bigger now than it was. It used to just be just a few booths. But I can remember Spudnuts were, let's say, $0.10. And for a Spudnut ala mode--that was a Spudnut with soft ice cream on it--that was $0.15. And if you had $0.15 for that, you was in pretty good shape, because we didn't have money like that. And there was another place just two doors down from that that was the Fission Chips. But it was interesting the way they spelled fission. It was fission, like nuclear. It was Fission Chips. You can see some old pictures of the Spudnut shop, and just a couple doors down, you'll see the Fission Chips. But we'd hang out in the Spudnut Shop before the movie, and then maybe go there after the movie. And that's just where everyone hung out. When we had a car later, more in our high school years, we hung out at a place called Skip's. It was where Les Schwab is now. That was kind of the hangout there. I don't know if you want this on there. It's not very nice. But Skip's, there was a young girl worked there with a cleft palate. One the guys that we kind of ran with, he had a cleft palate also. He was about three years older than me. But he pulled in there, him and friends, and she said in her cleft palate way, ,ay I help you? He said yeah, give me a such and such. And she got mad, you don't have to make fun of me! Because she though he was just making fun of her. Kind of a sad story, but kind of humorous also. The movies was a big part of life. Of course, swimming. We used to swim in the Yakima a lot. And the old pool, what we used to call the big pool, down in what's now Howard Amon Park—it used to be Riverside Park--there was a swimming pool there. And the flood of '48, '47-'48, it flooded the park. And so they done away with that pool and built the present one. That flood was quite a deal. I can remember going--the bridge was out--going out of Richland, and they had a pontoon bridge. And that causeway wasn't there then. It was just flat. But I thought that was so neat. We was going across the bridge, and you see pontoons all the way across it with lumber to drive on. And that always impressed me. Down around Gowen and things, I can remember the basements flooded from that flood. And it was quite a flood. That's when they built the dam or dike around Richland and Kennewick and so on. The—I was thinking of something else, and lost it. But no, the flood was quite an event. I worked with a guy named Ralph Schafer, who had a private pilot's license, and they hired him as a bus driver. But they let him go from bus driving long enough, because the only way to the airport at the time was to fly from Richland to Pasco. So they hired him to ferry people to the Pasco airport in his private plane, because basically there was no way out of Richland, until they put that pontoon bridge in.
Arata: I wonder if you could talk about--obviously you went through school here. Do you have any memories--there were also some residents that were here prior to 1943, that were still in school here, that were moved off of their family lands. Did you go to school with anybody who had memories of that, that you recall?
Peters: Not to my knowledge. You hear all kinds of stories and things that I don't know. I know I've heard that one family--or some people, I'll say--when they were, quote, kicked out of White Bluffs Hanford area, they moved to Prosser, Sunnyside, somewhere up there, and swore they'd never set foot in Richland. And whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I know there's hard feelings over it, rightfully so. But no, I don't know of anyone. I know we had a lot of construction workers in trailer parks in north Richland. There was a big trailer park, and they had an elementary school out there, John Ball. And once they got all the houses built that they were going to build, I guess, they closed the trailer park and closed John Ball and had them all into town. But I can remember living on Thayer, going to school at Old Sacky—Sacajawea, the Old Sacky--that for some reason, for two-three days they sent me to Spalding. I had to walk to school, which was maybe three, four blocks, five blocks. I can remember big piles of dirt, having to climb over them to get to school. And the reason for that was they were building the ranch houses at that time. So I was probably first grade, I'm guessing. So they were still building in the late '40s, early '50s. In fact, Bauer Days and the Richland Village came later, after the letter houses. But school--no, I honestly can't remember any kids there.
Arata: No problem. We're here to get your memories, so. A bunch of other things I want to ask you. One thing, you said your father worked in Hanford until '67.
Peters: He retired.
Arata: He retired in '67. So he was working in the area when President Kennedy came, in 1963. Do you have any memories of that event?
Peters: No. I was in the Navy then, so no. I know my wife said that she went out to see him. And there were so many people you could hardly see him, but she went out to it. But no, I got out of the Navy in October, '63. I was on a train back to Denver to visit relatives. It's kind of sad. I was sitting in the club car playing cards with strangers, and the porter came in--a black fella--says, [EMOTIONAL] the President's been shot. And we all--aww, go on, he's pulling our leg, he's joking. Then I says, you don't joke about something like that. We were somewhere around Wyoming on the train, and then they was able to get a radio station over the PA or whatever it was. Sure enough, a little bit later--that he had died. And that's how I learned of it. I'll never forget that train ride. Got to Denver, and it was just strange.
Arata: Of course. And we're right on the anniversary of it now.
Peters: Yeah. Yeah. But my dad, I don't know if he went to see him or not. I mean, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. He came out of the Depression. He was born in '03, so he'd been through a lot. I can remember him saying that he'd vote for a yellow dog before he'd vote for a Republican. He was the old Democrat. But he did vote for one Republican. That was John Dam, who was running for county commissioner. They were personal friends. He said that's the only Republican he'd ever voted for.
Arata: One exception.
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: So did you work at Hanford at all?
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: You did. So could you start filling us in on that a little?
Peters: I worked 40 years out there. Hired on '65. And luckily my dad was still working, so we overlapped. We were both drivers. And I started out as a laborer, though they called them servicemen--basically a laborer. And I got set up to bus driver. And in '61, had a layoff. And I could have stayed, but I thought, man, let's see what else is out there. And I went and worked for Battelle. I was with Battelle for about 13 years in inhalation toxicology. Long-term study. Plutonium, curium, americium studies on dogs. And in about '84 I quit Battelle and went back to transportation, because money. You know that all your college folks know that biology is not real high-paying, unless you're a PhD or something. But a BS in biology's not much. But no, I really enjoyed that. In fact, when McCluskey's glove box blew up, about 200 Areas were exposed to--I forget if it was curium or americium, but there hadn't been a lot of studies on those. And like I said, I was working in inhalation toxicology, and we got two or three big contracts right after that to study the health effects of curium and americium through inhalation. He was an amazing man, because I worked with PhDs. Immunologists, veterinaries, hematologists. You name it, we had the discipline there. Pathologists. And they didn't give him six months to live, with what he got. And he ended up living probably 20 years or better. It is quite an amazing story. You can go on the internet and look up Atomic Man, and his story's in there.
Arata: We actually interviewed the gentleman who was in charge of the cleanup, cleaning up his hospital room.
Peters: Yeah. I don't know if it was this guy I worked with, what we called a radiation monitor. Now they're HPTs or something. But he was with him, scrubbing him and things. His name was Larry Belt. He'd be a good interview for you. I worked with Larry for a number of years. He was our radiation monitor when we exposed dogs and so on. But he said, you can't believe the pain this man was in. He said, we had to literally scrub him with brushes, because he had stuff embedded in his face and so on. Terrible. He says, submerge him and scrub him. No, Larry Belt could tell some stories about it. But back to my job. I quit Battelle for financial reasons and went back to driving. Drove a bus for a lot of years. They shut the bus system down, and I went and worked driving a truck, and drove ERDF trucks hauling the solid waste from out around the river and so on. Did that for a number of years and retired. I taught HAZMAT classes for the last about ten years. But buses were the fun job. A lot of stories there. One of our drivers named Carl Adcock was driving down Delafield, taking the day shift home--so it was about four or five in the afternoon—and a little girl was standing out in the middle of the street playing. About five, six years old. Stopped his bus, pulled the brake, got out and spanked her butt, get out of here! Got back in the bus, and the passengers were just--what are you doing? You could get in trouble for that. And it was his daughter. But no, we've had people have epileptic seizures on the bus. And there's all sorts of things like that. A lot of stories.
Arata: You must see a little bit of everything.
Peters: Oh, yeah. We had poker games, bridge games, on the buses. They had cardboard tables. Four people would sit down, put their table between the aisles and play cards. They had a bridge game going from 100F, which was where the animals were before they built 300—the animal life sciences 300 Area--but they had a bridge game that was going steady for at least 30, 35 years. I mean, it was different people. You know, someone would retire, someone else would take their place. But it started out at 100F at lunch break and then on the bus, and it continued. When we were at 300 they were still playing. Again, it was different players, but it was the same game.
Arata: Wow. There's something I wanted to ask you about. Returning back to when you worked in inhalation toxicology at Battelle, did you work with the smoking beagles?
Peters: Yes. That was my first job, was smoking.
Arata: We just interviewed Vanis Daniels--
Peters: Oh, yeah. I know Vanis.
Arata: --last week, who worked with the smoking beagles. Can you describe for us the process of getting the beagles to smoke two packs a day?
Peters: Well, the hard part's lighting 'em. No, the reason for the study, as I understood it, was uranium miners were dying early, and they wanted to know why. Because it could be cigarette smoke--because most of them were smokers--uranium ore dust or it could be radon daughters. And so we had a group of--I forget now. 70 dogs, 60. Something like that. And 10 of would receive smoke only, cigarette smoke only. They had a table, kind of a horseshoe. The mask fit over their muzzle with a cigarette in there, and like every seventh or tenth breath, a little gadget would open and their breath would suck in the smoke. But then ten of them would receive uranium ore dust and radon daughters. There was a large chamber that held ten dogs around it, and up in the top there was a grinder thing that would grind the ore dust and sprinkle it down in. I mean, it wasn't noticeable, it wasn't thick, but it was in there. And then we had radon. I think it was water bubbled through it that would give the radon gas, and it would get into the chamber. And then we had another ten that would receive cigarette and the radon. And then a control group that didn't receive anything. They were called sham. You'd bring them in, go through all the same routine, but they wouldn't receive anything. And just see what the effects were. And it was a lifespan study, so you'd look at the dosage and how long they lived and what affected them the most. So that's basically what it was. One story I heard--probably true--was that the Russians said that our limits were too high, should be lower. So that maybe prompted it, I don't know. Then after that when we got to 300 Area, 100-F moved into 300 Area, and they closed 100-F down. And then they had a group of just smoking dogs. And it was more difficult in the sense that we had a mask that fit over their muzzle, and they could trick it. They could breathe out of the side of their mouth. When they did it at one area they trached them, and there was no cheating that. It was direct. There was no getting around that. I learned a lot. I mean, that was one of the most exciting jobs. And the learning curve was just like that. I really learned a lot about physiology and biology and chemistry. You work there that long, and you learn a lot. Because part of my job was necropsy--or what they call autopsy, but necropsing the dogs. And we always said we took everything but the bark. I mean we literally disarticulated them and took every piece that they had. Every organ, every bone, separated it. The reason for that—we wanted to know where the plutonium or curium or whatever went to in the body. Where was the body burden? Was it in the lungs, was it in the bones? And interestingly enough, we exposed Pu-238 and 239, and the 238 would be a bone-seeker. The bones would have high doses. But in 239, the bones hardly got anything. It was all soft tissue. So they learned a lot from that, as far as where these elements--what they seek. The target organs, if you will. I don't know if all that should go in this.
Arata: Fascinating. I really love hearing about it. Could you talk a little bit about--obviously, during those times, security and secrecy was still very much a part of working at Hanford. Did that impact your work at all?
Peters: Oh, a lot. You know, being raised--from my oldest memories, it was secure. And I can remember when I was probably about 10, 11, 12 years old I went in for a library card here in Richland. They asked who my dad worked for, and I was scared to tell them. Because the security--my dad never told me what was going on out there. And I knew security was a big deal. And I says, I don't know. I kind of knew, but I--And she says, well, what does he do? And I says, well, he drives. So then she wrote down General Electric. But no, I mean, it was paramount even as a kid. I can remember—and this is kind of funny hindsight--but kind of put yourself in that timeframe--I can remember calling my brother who was seven, eight, nine years old--would have been in the early '50s, McCarthy era--I can remember calling my brother a dirty communist. And my dad just came unglued. He would rather have me call him S.O.B. than that, because that wasn't something you messed with in the early '50s, with the FBI and everything else. But I mean, security was bred into you, I guess. And when I hired on, it was still, but not like it was. But many of us still had that same mentality. I can remember when they started releasing things to the public. That always bothered me, because this is secure, and people don't have the need to know a lot of this stuff. Security was a big deal. I mean, you didn't go anyplace without a security badge. They could stop you, search your car, and everything else. So it was a high priority. There was seclusion areas within the area. You might get out in the area, but you might not be able to get into a certain area. When you got in that area, you couldn't get into another area, like dash-5 or Z-Plant or REDOX or PUREX. You needed extra security on your badge to get in these places. So security was very tough.
Arata: Could you talk a little bit about how Hanford was overall as a place to work? Anything you found particularly challenging or very rewarding about your time in the area?
Peters: I think it was great. You know, let's face it, it was great for a lot of people that worked here. I mean, good pay—relatively good pay, and a lot of people raised their families and sent them to school on this pay out here. And as far as working out there, we really had fun in the early days. And by the early days, I mean when I hired on. Because I felt very lucky that when I hired on, most of the old-timers were still working. And by old-timers I mean them that hired in the '40s. So a lot of the stories, a lot of things that they knew and interesting things that they talked about, I was privy to. And that was great. And it was, to me, really a fun place to work. I really enjoyed it. Later I can remember saying more than once in the '80s or '90s, this isn't fun like it used to be. And it wasn't. But you know, I was younger then, and that made a difference. I was about 21, 22 when I hired on. And so times changed. I think in the early days--by that, my early days--there was what we call maybe some dead wood. And they might have five people to do a job for two people. But I mean, it was good, it was job security. Well, then came the cuts and so on. I think that made it a little different, because one thing that's bothered me over the years, there's been layoffs. But you can check the records. Many times after these layoffs, within six months they're calling them back, because work has to be done. We might cut 500 people, but that job is still there, so they called a portion of them back. Which, to me, doesn't make sense. But I don't think there's the fat out there that there was at one time.
Arata: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about? Any other stories that stand out?
Peters: I think the racial thing was a big story in the early days because there wasn't that many black people working out there. And I can remember us--I mentioned earlier that Richland didn't have hardly any blacks. We had one black I'm aware of. He was a shoeshine guy at the Ganzel's barbershop. His picture is still in there. But I can remember--I must have been six, seven years old--I saw my first black person. I was in a car downtown with my mom. And I saw him, and I just saw his hands and face. And I can remember wondering, I wonder if his whole body is that way—we just didn't see them. We had two black guys in high school. C.W. and Norris Brown, who was terrific basketball players. And the main reason their family moved was because of those two boys. It was a different time then. I don't know it should go on record, because I don't know if it's true or not, but talking about the early people that worked there, one of the stories that I heard--and like I say, whether it's true, I have no idea. But they were out working, and they had a burn barrel. It was very cold. A barrel full of wood and so on, a burn barrel. The construction workers were huddled around it, and this one colored individual this kind of bulled his way in. He wanted to get up to the front. And the story goes--whether, again, true or not, I don't know--a carpenter took his hammer and ended it. And that wouldn't surprise me, though I don't know if it's true or not. Because there was prejudice. A lot of the people that came here were from the South, and it was a different lifestyle. I know that they had separate camps for the blacks and the whites. And it was segregated. So I can remember when I was driving the bus here, we only had--to my recollection—one black in all of transportation. There may have been more, but I think only one. And it wasn't until probably '63 or '64 that they really started recruiting blacks.
Arata: I understand there were labor organizers and people who came in with the NAACP and that sort of thing to sort of assess conditions, which would have been about the time you were working in the 100 and 300 Areas. Do you have any recollections of that?
Peters: Well, the one black that I told you about was a serviceman—labor. Same group I was in. And he was the head of the local NAACP. His name was McGee. And the way you became a driver was seniority. In other words, if this driver retired and you were next in seniority, you'd get that job. Well, he was the next one up, as a laborer, for a driving job. They wouldn't give it to him, for obvious reasons. Well, he fought it through the NAACP and he ended up becoming a driver. But they was not going to give him that job because of his race. Battelle, to their credit, was the first ones to make an overt effort to hire black people. And that's where--gentleman you mentioned earlier. And Battelle had--not overwhelming, but a number of blacks working for them. And in inhalation toxicology we had a number in animal care as well as in the crafts. So I would say from '63 on, it started changing.
Arata: So this is kind of my last question--we'll have students accessing these interviews. Most of my students now are too young to have remembered the Cold War. It's sort of an older--
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: So maybe if you could just talk a little bit about what it was like being part of this Cold War effort, and what you'd like students or future generations to know about contributions to that process.
Peters: Yeah. I know there's different views on this, but I feel very strongly about--because I knew a lot of GIs from that time frame—had two uncles that were in the war. And you know, the atomic bombs, and we made the plutonium here for the bomb, literally ended the war. I am a firm believer--had we had to invade, there'd been hundreds of thousands on both sides killed. And they talk about the badness, rightfully so, of the atomic bomb. But you look at the conventional bombing of Germany, and it was as bad or worse as the atomic bombs. The firebombing of Tokyo. Things like that. So as bad as the atomic bomb was, it did end the war. You'd had to live through it. Now, as far as the Cold War goes, you know, the place wasn't supposed to last much more than ten years. And that's what everyone thought. Well, then the Russians got the bomb. That changed things a little bit. And it was scary. I mean, like I said earlier, me calling my brother communist. I wasn't old enough to really realize what was going on, but I can remember--would've been during the Korean War--my dad came to my brother and I and said, I want to know where you guys are all the time, because we might have to leave town in a hurry. That was the mentality of that time. We had air-raid sirens throughout the town. I can remember every--I believe it was Monday at ten o'clock, they would go off to test. But there was one right behind Jason Lee, where I was going at the time, and it was loud. Every--I think it was Monday or Tuesday, at ten o'clock they'd go off. Because we literally were on standby. We didn't know what was going to happen. And the Korean War and then the McCarthy era, it was a scary time for adults. You know, as a kid, you didn't notice it, other than watching others. But I think Hanford had a lot to do with ending the war. Which ushered in the Cold War, because of the proliferation of the weapons. And you have to give credit to whomever for tearing down the wall, for bringing somewhat of a peace in the world—I say somewhat. I think it was our spending billions of dollars building up our—you know the old saying, peace through strength. That's what Reagan did. He was a big spender, but he got the job done. But Hanford was unique, because I can still remember there was anti-aircraft placements out there. When I hired on, all the old track houses were still there. I worked on a fuel truck, and we would fuel here and there and then we'd go out into the desert area, if you will, and look at these old houses that were still standing. And the old icehouse was still there. And a lot of these buildings were still there in the '60s. And why they had the need to tear them all down, I don't know. I think it was a shame. But they tore them all down other than the bank and the school. I believe about all that's left. No, it was a different time. Like I say, I can still remember my dad telling us both, I want to know where you are in case we have to leave town. I mentioned earlier, the FBI--it was not unusual to have an FBI agent knock at the door and talk to my folks about so-and-so. We had neighbors that lived in the same house—in our A house, our neighbors there was there one day and gone the next. It wasn't unusual to--you're out of here.
Arata: Certainly a different time. I want to thank you so much for coming in and sharing your memories with us. I really appreciate it. We'll film all these goodies you brought us, if that's okay--
Peters: Yep.
Arata: --before we have to go.
Northwest Public Television | Gladden_Elizabeth
Gladden: Elizabeth Gladden. Capital E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H. Gladden. G-L-A-D-D-E-N.
Bauman: Great. Thank you.
Gladden: The first year I was there, I was a Feemster. I was unmarried. And then we got married this second year. So my maiden name was Feemster. So the Social Security people told me to keep the F. Originally my middle initial was an E. But to keep the F of the maiden name to keep their records straight.
Bauman: Sure. Right. And how did you spell your maiden name?
Gladden: F-E-E-M-S-T-E-R.
Bauman: Okay. Great. Thank you. All right. And my name is Robert Bauman. And we're conducting this oral history interview on July 7, 2014, on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I guess let's start with maybe how you found out about—what were you doing before the war, maybe? And how you found out about an opportunity to teach at Heart Mountain.
Gladden: Okay. As I said, Pearl Harbor is the one that started it all. And from there, the Army thought that the Japanese on the west coast would be a danger. And they wanted them moved. And we found out later that that wasn't true, that they really weren't a danger, that California just wanted the Japanese out, and this was a good opportunity to get them out. And I was teaching in Nebraska when Pearl Harbor came along. And then I finished that year, and the next year I moved to a town called Osceola in Nebraska, which was a little better opportunity. And I taught one week when I got a call from the Davis teachers' agency, telling me that they had a good job for me in Wyoming. And it sounded very good because I was getting $1,000 there, and out in Wyoming, I would be getting $2,000. So I just doubled the pay for a couple months' more work. My father thought I was going to the end of the world. But I resigned then at Osceola. I don't think the school board was very happy with me. And I packed up and came out to Heart Mountain. And it was, I think, the second week in September when I got out there. Some of the teachers had gotten there already. The principal and school superintendent had been on the job for several months. And they had tried to get everything organized so that we could be an accredited high school. And then we started school I think the first week in October. Several weeks I was there beforehand, we sorted books and got assigned to our classrooms and got things set out.
Bauman: Do you remember what your first impressions were when you arrived in Heart Mountain?
Gladden: What? What?
Bauman: Your first impressions of the place.
Gladden. Oh. [LAUGHTER] I remember writing the folks and saying that it was all right if you looked up. The sky was pretty and blue, but not if you looked around. No, it was very, very bleak. It was hot. And all you saw were these black tar paper barracks. And you just saw the trainloads of evacuees coming in, and you felt sorry for them.
Bauman: What sort of housing did you have there?
Gladden: Well, the first year we lived in Cody, Wyoming. There was no gas, so people weren't traveling. So we lived in a—what do you call it? It was a motel. A little motel. And a lot of the faculty lived there. There wasn't enough room at Heart Mountain yet. They had built dorms out there, and some of the single people were out there in dorms. But there were no apartments for the married people at all. And then in the next year, we had a fairly nice apartment, except ours also was not dust-proof. We had lots and lots of dust. But we did have electricity and water and a refrigerator. And all the evacuees had when they arrived was a big room. The rooms varied in size, depending on the size of the family. Some of the rooms were 20 feet long, and some were much smaller. Families varied from six on down to single. They had one lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling, no running water. The latrines and the showers were all outside. There was one for each block. And there were 20 blocks. So it was pretty cold. They said some of the mothers didn't get anything done but bundling up their children and taking them out to the bathroom and back in again. It was pretty, pretty sad.
Bauman: And for the single people, were there separate dorms for the single people?
Gladden: No, the evacuees were in the same ones, but they had a smaller apartment.
Bauman: Oh, okay, I see.
Gladden: They say the women went to work immediately, getting sheets and so forth, dividing up the space so they'd have a little privacy. And I guess the latrines at first were just wide open. There was no privacy in them at all. But the Japanese were quite ingenious. They began to do things. They said Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck got a lot of money from tools that the internees had ordered. Some of them were trying to patch up the leaky holes in the barracks and so forth. They had one pot-bellied stove in each room. They didn't do adequate heating jobs, of course. Of course, that's what we had too, up on the hill. We had a pot-bellied stove.
Bauman: And so what did you teach then?
Gladden: I taught English, and I also had a math class. I taught freshman and sophomore English and Algebra.
Bauman: And about how many students did you have in a class?
Gladden: Well, several of the classes were quite small. But they never got over 25 or so. They were pretty good. And I would say that the discipline was heaven. We had none of the discipline problems that I had when I got back to Pasco. [LAUGHTER] I think they were all kind of beaten down at that point. They seemed cheerful, but I don't know. They must have thought they couldn't get by with anything, because they very good. And of course the original schools were in the barracks. And there were no desks. They had the long benches that the kids sat in, and they had to do their writing on their lap. And I had an assistant to help me grade papers, which was nice, because I'd never had that before.
Bauman: So the whole time you were there, there were no desks?
Gladden: Well, just in the barracks. In '43, then, the high school was built. And it was heaven compared to what we had. It went up within a year. But it had a big administrative building--section in the middle. And then it had two big wings on it. And they had a Home Ec department in one section. They had a shop. They had a science department. They had a big gymnasium and auditorium combined. And we had enough textbooks finally. So it was very, very much improved over the first year.
Bauman: What about eating facilities? Were there cafeterias, mess halls?
Gladden: No, the kids always ate in the mess hall. You see, each block had its own mess hall where they would go, along with their bath facilities. And they would go to the mess hall to eat. I might say that at first there was a little unrest. They claimed they weren't getting the proper food and so forth. But they kind of worked with the administration. And later they didn't seem to complain so much about the food. Then we had a separate cafeteria up on the hill where we ate at noon. And we complained, because the meat was always lamb. I was so tired of lamb when we got through.
Bauman: I guess that's what was available in Wyoming.
Gladden: Right. Yeah. Well, another thing that's of interest when we're talking about food is that they had their own chicken ranch down at the bottom they put in. And they also had a bunch of pigs down there. And the second year, the late summer, 1945, they took over the land across the street--across the highway—and they put in a huge garden. And they had every kind of vegetable imaginable down there. And the people around Cody said that it wouldn't grow. It wouldn't grow there at all. But we had an abundance of fresh things then. And it was in the fall of 1945—1944, rather—when it got really cold, and they were afraid the potatoes were all going to freeze. So they dismissed school. And they plowed up all the potatoes. And the kids went out and picked up potatoes. The faculty, too. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So about how many internees were there?
Gladden: We had 10,000 in the camp. And there were times when we had about 10,700. There were 120,000 Japanese that were evacuated. If you had a sixth of a Japanese blood in you, you were evacuated.
Bauman: And obviously all the internees were from the west coast. Were they mostly from California?
Gladden: All along the coast. They were sent from Washington, along the coast. It went down that were also taken. There is this movie—maybe you've seen it--that is very, very good, number of years ago. And I can't remember the name of it. It's based on a family that was evacuated from over on the coast.
Bauman: And so there were some residents there from the Tri-Cities area, right?
Gladden: Well, yes. My understanding is that the Columbia River was the dividing line. Everybody west of the Columbia River went. But some people east—and I know there were a couple families in Pasco went, because they were afraid. Sentiment against the Japanese was very, very bad, and they were afraid to stay. And they came back.
Bauman: Now did you know these people at all when you were there? Or were these people that you heard about later?
Gladden: No, once the war was over, it was over, yeah.
Bauman: So for students who were in the high school when they first came to Heart Mountain, but finished high school during the war, were they able go to college somewhere?
Gladden: Well, while they were in camp those three years, if they had the resources and they found a school that would accept them, college students could go out, as long as they went east. And we had a number who went out. And also there were a few of the laborers who went out to get better jobs that were allowed to go.
Bauman: So you went there in the fall of--
Gladden: In the fall of '42, and left in the late summer of '45. Was there five years--or three years.
Bauman: Overall, how would you describe your experience teaching there?
Gladden: Well, I would say it's very good. We had a nice social background with other Caucasians. And we knew a few of the Japanese. But somehow we didn't get very—there wasn't an opportunity, really, to get very close to them. I might say that the administration did a great job in trying to get things organized, along with the help of the outstanding leaders in the Japanese community. And they had Boy Scout groups and Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scout groups. And they had dance clubs and everything that would keep the kids busy. And when it got really hot, they dug a great big swimming pool. And the kids went swimming. And then in the winter, they skated there. Some of them had never seen an ice skate before. And they had great fun ice skating. They couldn't get out on the hills, though, to go sledding. They had to stay in camp. Oh, I might say there were about 19, I think, guard stations around the camp. And they were up high, with very powerful searchlights. And nobody could get out without being caught. And as we went in and out the gate, we had to have badges on. And the Army was stationed down at the base.
Bauman: You mentioned, when I talking to you earlier, that you had teaching assistants or assistants that helped you, grading?
Gladden: Yes, I had two students. They were kids who were already through high school. And they would help grade English papers and math papers. Sakiko Yoshimura and Metsu--Metsuku--Mets--suku—what's her name now? I've forgotten. I saw it in the book. Yeah. Yeah. And we kept track of--one of them went back to Japan the minute the camp closed down. And the other one was a seamstress. And she went to California. And when my daughter and I were traveling one day, we stopped to see her. But we lost track of her later. We don't know what happened.
Bauman: Did you ever get a sense, or any of the internees ever say anything? They expressed any sort of disappointment or anger or anything about being in the camp? Or did they not really talk about it?
Gladden: No, we were told when we went that you'll never get a job in a private school again. If you go teach those Japs. You're through. And they were crying for teachers when we got out. There's no problem.
Bauman: So once the camp closed, then, what happened to you? What did you do?
Gladden: Well, when the camp closed--well, school was over in 1945 in the last of May. And all teachers were through. But if you wanted to stay on, and they needed you in some other department, you could go. And I was always interested in hospital work. In fact, that's what I thought I wanted to be when I was growing up, was a nurse. So I went to the hospital. And my husband went to the housing area where they were boxing up the household goods that the Japanese acquired and put them on the train. Incidentally, each one was given $25 a ticket to where they wanted to go, and that was it. But I had a lot of experiences in the high school—in the hospital. And I was so grateful for the opportunity. Being a Caucasian, I got to do things--administer medicine and do things—that otherwise the Japanese didn't get to do. And I remember so well. One of the doctors came in and grabbed me one day. And he said, come here, I need you quickly. Lady's going to have a baby. So I was there and he put out his gloves for me to hold to put them on. I was only woman in the room besides the doctor. And I got to see a baby born. And that was before I had any children. And it was really, really interesting. And another experience, there was a time, there was one of the fellows dying, an older man. And she got me and said, I think you need to see this. So she took me in, and we watched his last breaths. And when he was gone, she says, now we have to take out his false teeth and take him to the morgue. They had a morgue in the hospital. So she says, I want you to go down with me. And so I did. And shoved him in the freezer there. Then we came back to the room to clean it up. And she says, oh, I forgot to put his false teeth in. But she says, you don't have to go with me this time. I'll go down and do it. She was a graduate nurse, of course. And the salary scale, I don't think we've talked about, was very interesting. There were three scales. I was making over $200 a month. And the highest any Japanese internee could get was $19 a month. And some of the nurses got a little upset at one time. But they wouldn't do anything about it. They had set the scale for $19 for professional. And then I think it was $16 for in between. And the laborers got only $12 an hour. They said they couldn't pay the laborers more than the Army--an Army private got. And that was $20 a day, not an hour. $20 a day. So they didn't make much money. That was one reason they liked the work outside, if they could. Get a job on the outside. Because the administration demanded that they be paid the same way as a Caucasian on the outside. The governor of Wyoming wasn't very helpful. He wanted them to be slave laborers, practically, and work for $12 an hour. And the WRA--that's the War Relocation Authority--said no. You have to pay them same as you pay Caucasians. So some of them got some extra money that way, if they could be cleared. I mentioned to you the newspaper. We had a fellow who was trained in journalism. And he immediately started a newspaper. It started within a week I think from the time he got there. He got his staff together. It was an eight page newsletter--or newspaper, rather--that came out once every Saturday. And that kind of kept the evacuees in touch with what's going on in the outside world, as long as rules and so forth in the camp. And he had some pretty good editorials, where he was questioning things. And I do have some copies of those that I'll give you, if you want them.
Bauman: Now did those newspapers have to go through--
Gladden: I don't know how much censoring they did. I wouldn't be surprised, but what they had some though.
Bauman: Were there radios allowed in the camp to listen to?
Gladden: Yeah.
Bauman: Get updates on was happening in the world?
Gladden: There were always rumors, always rumors. [LAUGHTER] We had a fellow up in the dorm area that got the greatest delight out of starting a rumor and seeing how long it took to get around. Oh, there were rumors about how there were Japanese on the coast, and they were going to invade. There was balloons that were going to be coming over, and so forth and so on. But nothing ever happened. There was never any incident at all.
Bauman: Do you have any idea how large the staff was that worked at the camp?
Gladden: Oh, dear. I think there were 200 in the administrative area. And teachers--I don't know for a school that size—it was a big high school. We had the eighth grade in the high school, too. So it was a pretty big school. And our classes weren't big. I remember one summer, I taught solid geometry, and I only had about eight students in there.
Bauman: And was there a graduation ceremony?
Gladden: Oh, yes, yes. When they graduated, there was a big ceremony. We had a big auditorium, as I said, which was also a gym. And it was well used here.
Bauman: Was there a church or churches in the camp?
Gladden: Oh, yes. The WRA started out with two churches, a Catholic and a Protestant. And the Buddhists wanted their church. And two-thirds of the group were Buddhists. And the WRA refused, but eventually gave in. So eventually there was a Buddhist church, and the Catholic and the Protestant. We went to the Protestant church and got very well acquainted with the minister and his wife and had them over for dinner. Nice couple.
Bauman: Do you remember when you heard about the war ending? Or any of that?
Gladden: Oh, yes. We were eating lunch in--oh, no, no. When we were eating lunch, it was when Roosevelt was pronounced dead.
Bauman: Oh.
Gladden: And my husband was down in the lab, because he was always fooling with radios. He was building his own radio. And he came rushing up and said that Roosevelt had died. And this was during the lunch hour. I forget the date. But the war--well, it's an interesting story about how we heard about the war. We were married in '43. My sister was married in '45. And her husband was working at the University of Chicago. And the department--what do they call it? The one where they were--
Bauman: The Manhattan Project, or-?
Gladden: Yeah. Well, it's part of the Manhattan Project. And he knew what we were doing out at Hanford, but we didn't know what was going on out here. And so the fellas were in the living room--I remember--and we were out in the breakfast nook at York, Nebraska, at my parents' home. And Stanley--my brother-in-law--came running out to the kitchen and grabbed my sister by the arm and said, come in and listen to this. He said, I want you to hear it. And you tell me what you heard. And she did. And then he said, well, that's what I've been doing. So that was how we know the war had ended. They'd dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. They always said Hiroshima, not "Hiro-SHEE-ma."
Bauman: So now did you and your husband meet at Heart Mountain? Or, how did you meet?
Gladden: I met my husband at the University of Chicago. I was there one summer. And we got acquainted. And we corresponded. And he'd come to Nebraska and so forth. Then he ran out of money. He was working on his Ph.D. So he took a job at Whitehall, Montana. And he was there the year that I was at Heart Mountain, the first year. And then he wanted to come down. And of course they gave him a job. And we were married then.
Bauman: And so after the war ended, how did you end up in Pasco then? How did that happen?
Gladden: Oh, that was when--we stayed in Heart Mountain until almost the end of the summer. And then my husband was interested in getting a teaching job in Washington. So he started applying for jobs along the Columbia River, any big town. And Pasco was the first one that answered his letter and said, we have a science job.
Bauman: What were your first impressions of Pasco?
Gladden: Terrible. [LAUGHTER] Terrible. It was the last day in August. Very, very hot. We were in what they call the Riverside homes, down the river. Big room. We must have had a refrigerator. I don't remember it. But the cupboards were open. No doors on the cupboards or anything. And of course there was no electricity. I mean, you couldn't buy any electric gadgets. You did your cooking on a range. And if you can imagine that, on the last day of August--then it was then that C.L. Booth, the superintendent, asked me if--or I said, do I have to stay here? And he asked me what I did. And I said, oh, I've been teaching school. And he said, come on up and we'll you a job. So then I taught a year. And then we quit to have our family. And then I went back later.
Bauman: And so you already knew about Hanford before you came here, though.
Gladden: Yeah, we found out. The end of August, I guess, or in August, whenever that was, when my sister and her husband were there, because they'd just gotten married.
Bauman: So what was Pasco like as a community in the 1940s, 1950s?
Gladden: Well, we stayed the first night at the new Pasco hotel on Lewis Street. And before we got our Riverside apartment. And it was pretty hot. I wasn't much impressed. My husband always wanted to go to Hawai'i. And he thought, well, we would be on our way to Hawai'i, then. He thought it would be nice to teach over there.
Bauman: And so you stayed.
Gladden: So we stayed.
Bauman: So that would be 70--almost 70 years?
Gladden: Yeah, well, it was 70--I figured it was 72 years since I'd been at Heart Mountain. We came to Pasco in '45.
Bauman: '45? 69 years, I guess.
Gladden: About 20 years.
Bauman: '45 to now.
Gladden: Yeah.
Bauman: So if there anything I haven't asked you about--
Gladden: Well I think we've-
Bauman: --Heart Mountain?
Gladden: Well, there was one thing that--the Nisei were subject to draft. And they had to fill out a big form. And they had a couple questions on there that a few of them wouldn't sign. One of them, are willing to withdraw all allegiance to the Japanese emperor? And the other one, are you loyal to the United States? Would you be serving the Army? And there was a committee that formed. And some of them thought their constitutional rights had definitely been tramped on. And that they wouldn't sign, they said, until they were given their freedom back. But the 442nd contingent that you know about, that was so very, very famous, they were all made up of Japanese. And a lot of Japanese took part there. But because of the questionnaire and so forth, and some of them got a little belligerent, they were arrested. And there was one fellow who really wouldn't give in. And he was put in jail for three years I know of.
Bauman: So you knew about that, about the questionnaire.
Gladden: Uh-huh, yeah. That happened while we were there.
Bauman: Were there a number of young men from Heart Mountain who did end up going to the military, joining the Army?
Gladden: Oh, yes, yes, a lot of them. Which I think was pretty wonderful. The way they've been treated, that they would actually go. But they were showing their loyalty to the US. They claimed they were still US citizens.
Bauman: Well, this has been very interesting for me.
Gladden: Well, it's fun to review it. I hadn't thought about it for so long. But it's interesting.
Bauman: At some point, when you were here in Pasco, did you ever get to know any of the Japanese-Americans who lived here who had been in Heart Mountain?
Gladden: Well, my husband had Jerry Minatoya I think, in class in Heart Mountain. And when he got here, he had him in class in high school.
Bauman: Wow.
Gladden: There were a number of Japanese families living in Pasco, though.
Bauman: Well, I want to thank you for coming in and sharing your experiences and your photos.
Gladden: Well it's been—I'm sorry my voice is so cracky.
Bauman: No, it's wonderful. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Gladden: You're welcome.
Northwest Public Television | Gilles_Madeleine
Robert Bauman: My name's Robert Bauman, and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Madeleine Gilles. And this is July 2nd of 2013. The interview's being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking with Madeleine Gilles about her family's history, her years growing up in Richland. So let's start with that, if we could. If you could tell me about how and when, why your family came to Richland. Anything about when and why they came here.
Madeleine Gilles: Well, they came from Montana--Butte. I was about a year and a half old I think. And I guess they wanted to change from a miner to a farmer. And he was from--
Bauman: Croatia it looked like.
Gilles: Croatia, yes. And my mother was American.
Bauman: What were your parents' names?
Gilles: What?
Bauman: What were your parents' names?
Gilles: Mr. Patricia and John Serdar.
Bauman: Okay.
Gilles: S-E-R-D-A-R.
Bauman: And did you have any brothers or sisters?
Gilles: I had two sisters which are a year and eight or nine months between the three of, you know.
Bauman: Mm-hm, okay. And so when you came to Richland, did you have a farm?
Gilles: I don't know how he came by a farm, but I know that he had 10 acres on a flat. And my mother's father, my grandfather, lived up on a little hill above us. It's now out at, behind that Richland airport.
Bauman: Okay. That's where the land was?
Gilles: Yes. It's still fenced off. There's nothing on it. [LAUGHTER] And it was by the irrigation ditch where we lived on the hill part. And the irrigation ditch had that flume across the little bitty gully onto downtown Richland.
Bauman: And you used irrigation water on farm?
Gilles: From that. Yes. They had weirs that went out to the fields and filled up. And you could water from there. They built little wooden waterways to where they wanted it, and then they'd have rails. And they'd flood the rails and then move it on to the next part of the field until they got it watered. And the ditch riders came by and kept watch on wherever it come out from the irrigation ditch. I forgot what they called those. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: What kind of crops did you have?
Gilles: We had alfalfa and a big garden and strawberries and grapes and raspberries. So we were busy. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And did you have any animals on the farm?
Gilles: Oh, yes. We had about ten cows. And they pastured over where the golf course is now. Oh, I forget the name of it. It's a pony. [LAUTHER]
Bauman: [INAUDIBLE]
Gilles: Horse name. Anyway there's a golf course down there now.
Bauman: Where the pastures were?
Gilles: Where the pastures were, yeah.
Bauman: And so, the alfalfa, was that a crop you grew and sold? Or was that used for your animals?
Gilles: Oh, it's to feed the animals in the winter. You cut it and stacked it and put it on a wagon and hauled it over and threw it up on a haystack. [LAUGHTER] One way or another, in the barns, they used to take the horses and somehow off of the hay wagon. They wrapped it up, and then the horses went ahead and drew it up into the loft. That way.
Bauman: And so, what other buildings were on your property besides the house itself?
Gilles: The barn. And we had a cellar, a ground cellar, and it was covered with dirt and had to open up.
Bauman: What was stored in there?
Gilles: Oh, canned fruit and things that--sauerkraut in the barrel and anything like that. And then we had where we kept the potatoes and the turnips and all that stuff in another building. And we had chickens. Of course, they harvested the turkeys in the fall. I don't know where they sold them, down to the butcher or somebody. And then we had the barn down the hill farther in front of the haystack, and that was--and there was a barnyard of course.
Bauman: Growing up, did you have jobs that were yours on the farm?
Gilles: Oh, yes. Worked all day outside and in the sun. [LAUGHTER] Hoeing weeds and picking strawberries early in the morning. We worked for people who had lots of asparagus. We cut asparagus early in the morning. In the spring, you know? And my mother worked in the packing shed, and they packed the asparagus ready for market.
Bauman: Was this someone else in Richland?
Gilles: I don't know. I think they shipped it. They shipped it in wooden crates. Not too big because they'd get smashed. And the strawberries, the same way. We picked strawberries. We picked apples. We picked pears. We did those kind of things for other people, plus we picked our own fruit so our mother could can them. And we was busy. We had to bring the cows from the pasture home in the morning after cutting asparagus—about 3:00 in the morning, you get up, cut asparagus, bring the cows home and milk them and take them back. Get ready for school. It was busy.
Bauman: That's a lot of work.
Gilles: Yeah, but it didn't hurt me.
Bauman: Did you have time to do fun things--swimming or--
Gilles: Oh, yeah. We went down the irrigation ditch down to where it kind of stops down at where there's land and it kind of opened up a little space where kids could come. And we'd go swimming and take a bath [LAUGHTER] with soap. Didn't do much good because you had to run back up the flume home.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
Gilles: But anyway it was--and well, at school, we did our sports, softball and basketball and went to different little towns for competition games. And see who'd go to Spokane. We went one year, but we lost by--for basketball--lost by one point.
Bauman: Yeah. I saw a picture of a basketball team--
Gilles: Yeah, I was in it.
Bauman: In the picture, right.
Gilles: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
Bauman: What position did you play on the basketball team?
Gilles: Pardon?
Bauman: What position did you play on the basketball team?
Gilles: Guard.
Bauman: Do you remember any of the other young women who were on the team?
Gilles: John Dam's daughter was. She was forward. And I forget her name, but Margaret somebody was center. And I don't remember them all.
Bauman: You must've been a good athlete then.
Gilles: Well, I guess I was. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Well, there's also in that book, a note that you had won a race.
Gilles: A race. Yes.
Bauman: At a picnic?
Gilles: Yeah. At the end of the year, they'd have school competition between the grades and stuff. And that was for my running. Because we did a lot of running in soft sand. So when you go on hard surface, you could really go. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: How did you get to school? Did you walk to school? A bus?
Gilles: No, no. A bus came, and we could see it when we lived on the little hill above the flat surface where we were at first. We could see it. Then we'd take off and run down to the corner and catch the bus. And then he'd pick up all the rest of the kids and go down to Richland. The school was behind John Day and Nelson's mercantile store there. There was a gas station there and a church where we had baccalaureate and all that stuff there from the grade school. And the high school was down the road from the grade school. Richland High.
Bauman: Right. Do you remember any of your teachers from?
Gilles: Oh, Carmichael and—oh, I don't remember.
Bauman: Any idea how big, how many--
Gilles: Kids?
Bauman: Kids there were. Yeah.
Gilles: Well, I think there was about 500 people. So they must have had at least three or four kids. So multiply that. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Right.
Gilles: We had a lot of kids.
Bauman: I want go back. You mentioned your parents earlier. And your father was an immigrant from Croatia. Did he speak English?
Gilles: Not very well. There was nobody for me to talk to but the animals. [LAUGHTER] Because my mother didn't converse with him. Because she didn't know his language.
Bauman: And how had they met?
Gilles: Oh, at a dance in Montana--Butte. And he knew her father in the mines.
Bauman: I see. And they got married and moved out--
Gilles: Yeah. However, they were advertising at that time for homesteading in the '20s, you know. I was born in 1920.
Bauman: Yeah.
Gilles: How they got there, I don't know. Because they never talked, and I didn't know what to ask them anyway. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Now, did you have electricity at all in your home?
Gilles: No. Kerosene light, lamp, and lantern to go to the barn and milk in the winter and stuff like that. Had kerosene.
Bauman: And did you have--how did you get from--did you have a car at any time, or was it horse and wagon?
Gilles: First of all, it was a wagon with a bed in it. We rode it in the back, and they rode in the front of course. And took a long time to get there, [LAUGHTER] wherever we was going. They belonged to the grange. And we'd go there for their meetings and dances. And my mother played piano, and she played for the drill team and for the dances along with other musicians. And they used to have house parties in the wintertime. They'd clear the floor, and whoever could come to play--and if there was a piano there, my mother played. And they danced or they played cards or--that was their entertainment, so to speak. Go from house to house to play cards.
Bauman: Do you remember any other events? Were there 4th of July--
Gilles: Oh, yes. We'd go to the park. What is that park called? Where the golf course is--on the river.
Bauman: Howard Amon Park?
Gilles: No, no. It's a golf course on the river.
Bauman: Columbia Park?
Gilles: Yeah. They'd go along there, and people would come. And they'd make homemade ice cream, and they'd do their wieners or whatever—chicken, it usually was--a lot of fried chicken and pies and cakes, and they had a good time. And then, as I remembered, they used to shoot firecrackers off of the old green bridge and do their fireworks there. So everybody'd go down by the river there and watch them.
Bauman: The fireworks there. There was a ferry that would take people across the river.
Gilles: Yes.
Bauman: Did you do that very often? Take the ferry across the river?
Gilles: No, we didn't. But we did go down to the Columbia, down to the boom where they caught wood and trees and stuff and get our wood for the winter, or if you happened to be lucky, get a part of a tree or something. They'd saw it up and have some wood to build something.
Bauman: Did you interact with any Native Americans in the area very often?
Gilles: Oh, yes. When the fishing season was on, they used to go up to the Yakima someplace where there was a little dam. But they put their tents out across the ditch from us, and they'd have little tents. And then they'd have a three-sided tent where they'd have their fires out there and cook their fish and dry it and stuff like that. We had to drive the cows by the trail, went right by their camping site. [LAUGHTER] And my mother used to say to my little sister, "Rosie, if you don't be good, I'm going to give you to the Indians." [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: What about any neighbors or were there children from other families--
Gilles: Oh, yes.
Bauman: --there a lot?
Gilles: Yeah, Arstolds and-- they didn't live close. They had their own acreage and stuff. And we used to go to their house a lot. And Bumgarnters and--gee, I can't think of their names now.
Bauman: That's okay. So in terms of the weather here--it can get pretty darn hot as we know today—
Gilles: Yeah!
Bauman: --in the summer and pretty cold at times in the winter with no electricity. What was that like? Do you have any memories of the heat or the wind or the winter weather?
Gilles: Well, we just made do. We had wood for fire. In the cook stove was the heater of the room. We only had two rooms on the hill, and the one house we lived on in the flat was a big one room thing.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Gilles: And my grandfather, after he died, we moved up there. And the cook stove kept us warm, but it didn't go all night. [LAUGHTER] You had to get up in the morning and put the kindling in and light it and get it going. And in the summer, you just stopped. And again, in the shade, that's all you could do. And it got really hot because there was no trees. No trees. And now you have green and trees. It makes it cooler.
Bauman: Did you get many dust storms? Do you remember many dust storms?
Gilles: Oh, yes. Lots of hard sand would blow against your legs when you was going back and forth to the pasture. Ooh. That really stung.
Bauman: How about any wild animals? Were there coyotes?
Gilles: Oh, coyotes, and rabbits. They used to have rabbit drives. A lot of men would get together so far apart and they'd drive the rabbits in front of them and then shoot them. Because they were a real menace. They get into your garden and eat everything up.
Bauman: Yeah, I've heard about those before. Eating the crops were the problem, or the gardens, yeah. So I understand that you had a little bit of an accident.
Gilles: Yes, I found a blasting cap that my dad had brought from Butte to blow up the sagebrush. It was big and tough to make more land, you know. And so I found an old one, and I thought it was full of dirt, picked at it and it blew up. Took my fingers off. But I made it.
Bauman: How old were you?
Gilles: I was 16 and very upset about it. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And so did you have to go to a doctor or a hospital?
Gilles: Oh, went to Lourdes, and Dr. Spalding took care of my hand.
Bauman: And was that the only hospital?
Gilles: Only one. And it was 13 miles, and the neighbors that had bought the flat--one room shack--took me over there. It was 13 miles or something. And I had to wait for a baby to be born before they could take care of me.
Bauman: Wow.
Gilles: But they decided to keep my hand and not cut it off because it looked so bad. So I have a hand, just not the digits. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: How long did you have to stay at the hospital? How long did it take to recover?
Gilles: Well, I stayed there longer than I need to do because I didn't have any place to go. My mother and father got a divorce, and she was very ill with arthritis. It's the kind that just comes overnight, and I forget the name of it. But it's a bad one. And so she and I were in the hospital the same time.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Gilles: So they kept me there, and then I went to work--for three months they kept me, and I worked folding bandages and stuff before they autoclaved them or sterilized them. And then I worked at the doctor's home for his son--to take care of his baby son. Then I got to go down and eat at their restaurant in the evening. So I was just the daytime stuff, and I stayed there. And I was there till I decided that I needed to go to school and learn to work over. So I went to the Catholic school in Spokane--the House of Good Shepherd it was at that time. And they took wayward girls, but they decided my sisters and I would be a help at the place to do other things. But to mind the rules the same as they had to, which was okay with me.
Bauman: So how long were there?
Gilles: Oh about two and a half years. My sister Mary was there 13 years, and Rosie was there 10 or so. But they did like Mary. She run the movie machine and helped the nuns. And I worked in the kitchen, and of course I learned to work. And worked in the where we ate in the cafeteria. And I got to go with the nuns when they went soliciting.
Bauman: So did you grow up Catholic then?
Gilles: Yes.
Bauman: Was there a Catholic church in the area anywhere?
Gilles: No, we had to come to Kennewick.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Gilles: My mother brought a few children, and my sisters over in the summer for us to take our catechism.
Bauman: So Kennewick was the place to go?
Gilles: Yeah. So we got our proper papers to be a Catholic.
Bauman: Do you remember what the name of the church was in Kennewick?
Gilles: St. Joseph's as far as I know. That was the first church, and I think it was on—I don't know--down by the canal. Now I don't know where it is for sure.
Bauman: Yeah. I think it's on Clearwater now, but it used to be on--
Gilles: Oh.
Bauman: And now I think it's on--
Gilles: Oh, yes. I know where that one is now, but I don't know where they moved the old church. Yeah, it's on Garfield--the new church, St. Joseph.
Bauman: So after you were in Spokane for about two and half years. What happened to you at that point? Where did you go from there?
Gilles: Pardon?
Bauman: Where did you go after you were in Spokane?
Gilles: Oh, I worked at a home and took care of invalid fellow and his baby when the family was gone. And I worked in the kitchen and fed the baby and all this. And they rang a bell for me [LAUGHTER] to come and wait on the table and stuff. And then they split up the families. The mother and father and the husband and wife moved out. So then I came out to--where did I go? Oh. I have to think. Where did I go? Oh, I went back to Richland, and I lived with a family that--he worked on the freeways and highways building, and she was home with two or three kids. And so I stayed there.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Gilles: And in the summertime, we'd get to go to up in the mountains where they built highways. I forget the name of the one we was that one summer. Anyway.
Bauman: Remember the name of the family that you were--
Gilles: Yeah, Drieslers. Jack Driesler, and Nellie.
Bauman: And then you said your parents got a divorce around the time you were 16, also. Is that right?
Gilles: Yeah.
Bauman: And so what happened to the family farm when your parents got divorced?
Gilles: The government bought it.
Bauman: And so did that happen when you were in Spokane that the government bought--
Gilles: No.
Bauman: Or later?
Gilles: No. I was at 16, and I was born in 1920. So that was what?
Bauman: That was 1936.
Gilles: Yeah.
Bauman: And the government came in '43. So it would've been later. So did both your parents stay in Richland after they got divorced?
Gilles: No. He went back to mining up in Metaline Falls where his brother lived.
Bauman: And how about your mother?
Gilles: She stayed here and married a guy that he lived out there by our school teacher. But when Hanford bought them out, they moved to Prosser and had a mint farm. And then my mother, she died young. She was 53. She died in '55. She had like emphysema and kidney problems.
Bauman: You mentioned that your grandfather had some land them on the hill above you.
Gilles: Yeah.
Bauman: Now, did he stay there until '43?
Gilles: No. He passed away before we moved up there. So that's how come we moved up there. Some of this is mixed up, I know. But I think it's off. [LAUGHTER] Been a long time ago.
Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about, any--either events that really stand out in your mind or really special memories or anything like that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about?
Gilles: Not that I can think of at the moment.
Off-camera man: There was a continual--
Gilles: Speak up. I can't--
Off-camera man: --relationship between Rosie who was the youngest girl and--
Gilles: We were raised together.
Off-camera man: --Mary. And they ganged up against Mary and pulled all kind of pranks like—
Gilles: [LAUGHTER]
Off-camera man: --chucking cow patties at her and stuff like that.
Bauman: So a little sibling rivalry?
Gilles: Oh, she wanted to boss everything. [LAUGHTER] When she hears that, she'll--she's still alive. And Rosie wasn't going to have that.
Bauman: And Rosie was the youngest.
Gilles: Yeah. She was feisty. She passed away.
Bauman: And all three of you were in Spokane for a while.
Gilles: Yeah.
Bauman: So what happened--your sisters, when they left Spokane, where did they go?
Gilles: Rosie went with my cousin Tony to Waukegan, Illinois and got a job there where they made pills-- filled pills. I don't know what you call it. But anyway, she got a job there and lived there about five years and came back out and met her husband out at the area. He was a--he drew--what do you call it?
Bauman: Draftsman.
Gilles: Draftsman. And she was a secretary. And they met and married and moved back to Wenatchee where he was from, up there. And lived till they both passed away. Mary is still here with her husband Jim.
Bauman: And then how about yourself? When the war came, did you move out of the area? Where else did you live besides--
Gilles: Oh, I was up in Seattle working at the Swedish hospital. And for a while, I worked at the Bon Marche, downtown Seattle and helped the baker in the morning and cleaned the steam table. They had a little restaurant at that time, the Bon Marche did. I helped the baker make pies and cakes and stuff.
Bauman: And when did you come back to Richland or to the Tri-Cities?
Gilles: 1986. 50 years later.
Bauman: Changed quite a bit probably since you've been last living there. [LAUGHTER]
Gilles: Yeah, I'm lost yet! [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: I was wondering what you would think would be important for people to understand about the community of Richland that you grew up in? To understand sort of what it was like to grow up there.
Gilles: I think it was a great life. And children worked and there wasn't so much vandalism. And of course, there wasn't that many people, but they were good people. I can't really think of anything.
Bauman: Well, thank you very much for coming in here.
Gilles: Yeah.
Bauman: This was terrific. Some really good stories and memories, and I really appreciate you being willing to come and talk with us.
Gilles: There's probably a lot more, but I'm sorry I don't remember it all.
Bauman: Well, what you remembered is great. Thank you very much.
Gilles: Okay. You're welcome.
Bauman: It wasn't too bad, was it?
Gilles: No, I just wish I knew more.
Bauman: No, well, what you remembered is really—
Man: You did a terrific job, I'm proud of you. You obviously knew a ton of it.
Bauman: Good, good, good. As I said, some of those memories are great—
Camera man: Can I take a picture before you go?
Gilles: Yeah.
Bauman: --because people now don't know—
Man: They had no electricity, they had no water, I mean you had to pump it out—
Bauman: It'll go along with your information.
Man: When we put together all the stuff.
Gilles: I hope it's a good one! I don't take good pictures anymore.
Man: Oh, well, we all say that.
Gilles: All right.
Man: [LAUGHTER]
Northwest Public Television | Fletcher_Robert
Fletcher: I'm Robert Fletcher. R-O-B-E-R-T F-L-E-T-C-H-E-R.
Bauman: Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and today is August 20th of 2013. And this interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start, if we could, by maybe having you talk about your family and how they came to this area, what brought them here, when they came-- that sort of thing.
Fletcher: My folks--my mother and father--grew up in Wisconsin. They knew each other in high school, and my father came out west, because my mother had relatives in Idaho, and after she graduated she came out here to stay with them and go to business college in Spokane. So my dad was fond of her and he followed her by working his way west. He was an expert milker, and he could always get a job in a dairy. Because when you worked in a dairy milking cows you had to get up at 3:00 in the morning. And so when he'd work his way from Wisconsin to maybe South Dakota, and he would see--in the depot, in the train depot--he would look on the bulletin board for openings for milkers and he always found work. And he could stay there for several weeks till he got enough money to move on. So he wound up in Lewiston, Idaho, I believe it was. And eventually he and my mother got together and they got married in Coeur d'Alene, 1912. And I had a sister born in 1915 in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Francille. And another sister was born in 1918. In the meantime, during World War I, my dad had been working in a, what's called electrical substation in Coeur d'Alene. And during the war then he went over to Bremerton and worked in the shipyards at Bremerton, wiring electrical wiring on the ships. And my mother eventually followed. My mother became a secretary and could do the office work. But after kids were born, she didn't do much of that. And then after the war was over, Bremerton jobs closed up and he went to the back to work at another electric substation down by Walla Walla, Milton-Freewater. And he had been raised on a farm and he had a desire to be independent. So at that time there were developments in Kennewick and then whole Tri-City area. They were developed because irrigation water was being made available from the rivers. And in Richland, there were private developers and they would get bonds that were backed by just state. The state government wanted to support the development to get started, and that was in late 1918s, '20s. And I'm sure my dad--well, my dad told me that there were brochures that these companies would advertise that, come to Kennewick or Richland, that water was available, the climate was ideal, and there soil was great, and you could make a living on just a few acres if you knew how to farm. So my dad travelled out here. His name was Francis, and C. F. Fletcher was his-- And he bought 20 acres of sagebrush. It was what is now on--what did I say?
Bauman: Spangler?
Fletcher: Spangler Road. He bought 20 acres there out there at the top of the hill. It was all sagebrush. And then later he bought 10 acres down below the hill where there now is a trailer park or mobile homes. He had to arrange to get the teams of horses to pull out the sagebrush and level the ground. My mother and—I believe that she had two children then, Francille, and Medo is my other sister's name, born in 1918. They came out by train from Walla Walla to Kennewick. And Morton Hess met them at-- Morton Hess had a improvised old pickup that dad said that they met them at the depot in Kennewick, and he brought them out to the farmhouse he'd rented. Before that, my dad had a team of horses, and he brought all his possessions in a wagon from Milton-Freewater to Richland that took him three days, he said, to make that trip with the team of horses. And so after he got the house rented, then he sent for my mother, had my mother come out with the children. And they lived in this rented farmhouse about a quarter of a mile away. And there were a few other houses, a few other farms being developed at the same time. So that took a lot of effort. It was 1920, and he told me that he had to put in the irrigation. The company brought water to the edge of your property and then you had to put in the pipe yourself. They were cement pipes, about three feet long, 40 pounds, eight inches in diameter. And he said he put in several hundred feet of this pipe and he thought he'd done a pretty good job. He worked hard. Turned the water on and it just leaked all over, so he had to do it all over again. He was pretty persistent. And then they had a hard time the first few years because he was small, a small person, and a greenhorn. About the only income work you could get then was to work for the irrigation company if you wanted to earn some money. And usually that was when the water was shut off and they had to clean and repair the ditches, open ditches. And he said they wouldn't hire him for a year or two because they thought well, he was a greenhorn. He wouldn't last anyway, and he was kind of small. But he stuck it out. And what happened was they had to put in some new pumps for the irrigation system, and these were larger pumps. They were three-phase motors, and there wasn't anybody immediately around that knew how to fix them, how to hook them up. Excuse me, I get very emotional. So he told them he thought he thought he could do it. He wasn't too sure. He said he could do it. He told them he could do it. He said he, personally, he said he wasn't too sure. But anyway, he went ahead with it and they worked fine. And after that, he said he didn't have any trouble getting a job for the irrigation district. And later on, several years after he got the farm started and everything, he did become manager of the irrigation district. When I talk about the irrigation district, it wasn't a huge one, but there was about 5,000 acres under water. And most of the farms were like ours, 20, 30 acres. And because you had to have a team of horses. You couldn't farm like you can nowadays with everything mechanized like it is. Lots of hand labor. So I was born in 1922, and I believe that they were still in this rented house. But in the meantime, they'd begun work on a basement, which was about half underground and half above ground with concrete side walls. And so it was above the ground enough, it had had fairly good sized windows. And there were just two rooms. The total probably wasn't more than 40 feet long and 20 feet wide. And above that they put a temporary sort of a shelter that was more of a tent house with a wooden roof and canvas with a wooden frame with canvas around it. And that was our bedroom. That was where we had our bedrooms. And it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but in the summertime you could roll the canvas up and the evening breeze would cool it off. In the wintertime we had feather beds and my mother would warm up hot irons on the cook stove, and we'd wrap them in towels and put in our beds. And we managed, thought we were living all right. There wasn't any bathroom--there was no indoor bathroom, no indoor water supply. He dug a well down below the hill. Had to do it by hand, about 20 feet deep. And the way to get water up to the house, he had a, we called it a stone boat, it was a sled. He hooked the horses to it, the sled, and to pretty good sized barrels, I suppose 40 gallon barrels or something. He'd fill them with water from the hand pump down below the hill. And he'd circle around it, bring that sled up. That was the water supply for a few days. But of course, it didn't always last long enough. And I can remember my mother carrying two buckets [EMOTIONAL] of water up the hill. Excuse me. It was a hard life for women, especially, carrying water up the hill, and all the other work they had to do then. She was in charge of the garden. Of course, we had our weekly bath by a copper tub on a cook stove. And the tub, and that's where we took our weekly bath, and shared the affair. The two rooms in the house were the kitchen and then where we ate. The other room was the living quarters and where somebody might sleep if they were not feeling well, otherwise we slept upstairs in the tent house. So those were the early days. It took them quite a little while for my dad to get established, and also get some crops down that they could pay for their living expenses. And they had Fresnos then that the team of horses would pull, and they'd scoop the dirt and dump it in the low places and level it out. And farmers worked together on that. I can remember our neighbors--as I said, most people lived within a quarter or a half mile of each other. The Barnetts and the Nickolauses lived close to us and we shared--when it was time to put in some of the crops, the Barnetts would come with their mowing machine and there would be two or three mowing machines and everything going on, and we'd go back and forth and get the job done.
Bauman: So what sorts of crops did you grow then?
Fletcher: We--it was truck farming. We had to raise--we had to have cows. Truck farming was not too reliable. You had to, to fall back on, you had a herd of cow--most all farmers had a herd of cattle which they had milk cows and some beef cows. And you milked the cow--you had your own milking and made your own cheese, but you could sell to the creamery in Kennewick. And we had a milk house where we'd separate the cream from the milk. And we had the Twin City Dairy, I think it was, would come by once a week and collect the milk. We'd keep the milk in a cool water place or something. I don't remember now in details. We didn't have refrigeration. Maybe they came back twice a week. I'm not sure. So we had a herd of cattle, and of course you always had a team of work horses. And I had a pony when I got old enough, about third grade I think. In school I got a pony that had been tamed--he had been one of the wild horses from Horse Heaven Hills. And a bunch of horses had been caught. And we bought it from another fella, and he as a real-- Shorty was his name, and I thought he was the greatest horse, because he could outrun any horse. We had horse races. And a lot of the kids, the only horse they had to ride was a work horse. So I was very fortunate. Anyway, we raised alfalfa for the cattle and the animals. Alfalfa and clover, and of course you had to mow the hay in the summertime and let it dry and put it up in wagons and carry it and take it into the hay stack for the winter. We also raised some acres of corn, of field corn, although we could eat some of the corn when it was quite young, but it was mostly raised for the cattle. And we had an in-ground silo where we had a—we'd bring in, when the corn was mature we'd cut it down with machetes and bring the corn stocks and ears and all and run it through the chopper and made silage out of it. It would ferment in this silo, which was about 20 feet deep and it was dug out near the barnyard. And about I guess 12 feet wide or so. As a kid it looked bigger, probably, than it actually was. But anyway, that was part of the barnyard. And with the silage and the haystack, we kept the cattle going through the winter. Because you had to have enough hay to get through and that took quite a load. And then for field crops, we had a cherry orchard of three or four acres. We raised asparagus three or four acres. And that was a job that--that was a cash crop that game on early in the year in March. And the whole family pitched in. We got up early, almost daybreak to cut the asparagus. Before school you had to have it cut. And then they'd go ahead and you had to pack it in crates to get it ready to market. So we had the asparagus, and then we had, between the trees in the orchard-- one time my dad experimented with peanuts. And I don't think they turned out too well because I don't remember him having them very long. We planted strawberries. We had strawberries that we picked after the asparagus was done, the strawberries would be get ripe. And then the cherries would get ripe in June usually. And so it was staggered out. And then we always had a field of potatoes that you'd dig with a team or horses and a digger. But before you did that, you had to get seed potatoes, and they came whole. The family would--we had a cellar in our house. We'd cut those potatoes into quarters, so there's an eye on each one and that would sprout into a potato plant. And we spent probably a couple weeks, maybe not that long, cutting the seed potatoes into where they could be planted in the field. And I'm trying to think of other crops that we had. I know he tried different ones. We had peas--peas in a pod. And I don't think that paid off too well because I don't remember it lasting too long. Oh, we had some peaches. Not a big orchard, but we had some peaches and apricot trees. Those were sort of under my mother's domain, the garden and the apricots. And she made sure that we all pitched in and helped do the weeding and planting and picking. And all of that had to be picked and canned for the winter. I can remember my mother and sisters working hard--doing a lot of work canning. And the cellar was just full of--they were quite proud to display, in those days, to display their glass jars of fruit, peaches and everything. And took it to the fair to see if they could win some blue ribbons. So we didn't buy too much from the local grocery store, except cooking oil and bananas--fruit that wouldn't grow here. Orange. Those were a treat. Just a few times during the year bananas and oranges we got at Christmastime or your birthday or something. And the store was John Dam's, John Dam Plazas down here, named after the Dam Grocery Store. And there were two men, John Dam and Victor Nelson. They ran the grocery store. And you didn't go looking for your things. You handed them a list. You wanted two gallons of kerosene for your lamps and lanterns that you needed. No electric lights. And as I said, cooking oil, and flour and sugar in bulk. And once in a while you'd get a treat of candy or something such as that. So I think that covers pretty much what the farm was like.
Bauman: The crops that you grew, the cherries, strawberries, did you sell those somewhere?
Fletcher: Yeah. We picked and put them in crates. There was what they called the Big Y--it was in Kennewick. And it stood for Yakima I think. Yakima--there was a branch of Yakima Produce Company. And later on I worked there nailing, making boxes for different kinds of fruit when I was in high school.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Fletcher: In fact, most kids did extra jobs like that. Excuse me. I've got to take a drink.
Bauman: Sure.
Fletcher: All right.
Bauman: I was going to ask you about your farm. You mentioned some underground silo. Were there any other buildings on your farm? Any warehouse or barn or any of that sort of thing?
Fletcher: Yeah. There was a barn from the cows, of course. And there are pictures in my booklet of some of these chicken houses in the yard, a couple of chicken houses. And a milk house. We had pigs. The pigs consumed a lot of the excess milk. You could--they'd eat most anything you had that was extra. And that was another thing we shared was when it came time to butcher a cow or a calf or a pig for meat, there was a man that was sort of a local veterinarian--I don't think he had a degree--Sam Supplee. If your horse got sick, he knew what--or an animal got his foot caught in the barbed wire, he knew how to treat it. And he'd come by. And he also knew how to butcher animals quite well. And he would come out. And I can remember that we had a hole, a pit dug out where we could put a fire in there, and it was covered with some kind of bars or metal affair. And a vat of water would be put in that over the fire at ground level. And adjacent to that would be a platform where the pig was killed. And after it had been killed and the organs taken out, they'd roll it into that vat of boiling water and then pull it back out again after a few minutes. Then you could scrape the bristles off of the pig. And Sam Supplee then would do the rest of the butchering. They'd hang it up to cure overnight, and then to cut it up. And for his efforts, he'd get part of the meat, or other people that had helped out, and that's the way that they operated. And he was a local person they turned to. There were other veterinarians in Pasco or Kennewick, but he was the one that they mainly relied on. Our horses, we had two work horses, Star and Monte. I can remember them well, and that was one of my jobs when I got home from school, after, was usually to rub them down after a day's work in the field, because they'd be all sweaty. Or on days when I wasn't at school, too, in the summertime, too take them down to the ditch where they'd drink a lot of water. They got real hot and sweaty. And then take the harnesses off. And there's lots of preparation before you could do too much. And so those were some of my jobs was to take in--you got home from school, the first thing to do was take in the firewood for the wood stove or the heating stove. And there were plenty of other things to do around the barnyard, to clean out the stall, or clean out the barn and see that horses were fed and such things as that.
Bauman: Mm-hm.
Fletcher: The thing was, I think that maybe a little different than nowadays, kids knew that they were part of the family and that they were an important part of the family. And that they had jobs to do. And just it was the thing that made families close.
Bauman: Sure.
Fletcher: I wanted to mention, too, that we did have special family friends. I mentioned the Barnetts. And they had kids that were--Dan Barnett was about my age. And my sisters had--they had daughters. Anyway, they had kids about our same age. The Hackneys were another family that lived not very far away and had a farm. And there was Richard Hackney and Dan Barnett and I were always good friends for a long time. And some other kids in that area, the Supplees. So I guess I forgot where I was here. The Hackneys and the Fletcher families and the Carlsons were particularly close. The Carlsons also had children that were our ages. And we would get together for family picnics, and especially Fourth of July we'd make our homemade ice cream and take to Pasco Park where there'd be fireworks. And then in the summertime, we always had a break in the farm work of about four or five days where we could get away from the farm. Usually it was around the Fourth of July or a little bit after. And we would get away because the irrigation ditches were shut down for a few days, about four or five days in order for the ditches to dry out and the weeds could be cleaned out. Because they clogged up with moss and other stuff. So that they would dry out the ditches and we could get away from the farm, as long as we had a neighbor to take care of the animals that we had. And there were enough other people that would do that. We'd trade off. So we would manage to get away for about three or four days and go up to above Yakima, Naches and up into the woods. And we we'd take our tents. One of the, the Hackneys, Art Hackney was a school bus driver, and school bus driver had to have their own buses. They'd own their own buses. So he could do with the bus whatever he wanted during the summertime. So he would be the one that we would load up the bus--he took a few of the seats out that could be taken out-with our camping gear in it, and some of the rest of the people would ride in that bus and others would go in their car. We'd invite some of our friends to go along too. So we'd have quite a group and several tents set up there around the lake up at Naches, Rimrock and up in that area. We had a wonderful time up in there with all our friends, and sitting around the campfire at night and hearing the stories that the older folks had to tell. So that's--
Bauman: Mm-hm. A real sense of community there, yeah.
Fletcher: Yeah. Part of the community. It was a close-knit community for sure. And naturally, you had more close friends with some of the people than you did with others. But as I said in my book that there was no--when you were gone, nobody as I knew, locked their houses or worried about any of that sort of thing.
Bauman: Mm-hm. You mentioned earlier that the house you lived in there was no running water, right?
Fletcher: Right.
Bauman: No electricity. Did you ever have a telephone?
Fletcher: That's another little story. My mother, her relatives lived in Wallace, Idaho, and her uncle, aunt and uncle, her uncle was a master carpenter. And they were very close and would come down to visit us and they were very helpful. When we were, when my folks were just starting out, they were a backbone to help them out as much as they could. They bought eggs from them and they'd ship them. I have some letters that my mother saved of that period in time. You may be interested in some of those. Anyway, they would come down, and after my dad--after he had this basement house built, they was able to save up enough in about 10 years to--Josh Pentabaker was my uncle's granduncle's name--was the main carpenter. And they arranged to buy a load of lumber from a lumber yard or a sawmill up in Bickleton, and they rented a truck or got somebody to haul this load of lumber down. And this Josh Pentabaker and my dad, and I think he got some local help, to get started on building a house above to replace that tent--actually a tent house that we had above the basement house. And then they enlarged it also. They made the basement twice as large to accommodate a more modern house. And that was in 1933 or 1934. And I think it was 1934 before we occupied it. And that included indoor bathroom and running water. In the meantime, before my dad was able to build a dig a new well up on top of the hill, he had to go down 60 feet for groundwater. And so that was quite a project. But he finally got it done. And he got an electric motor then. By that time, see, there was no electricity until during Roosevelt got the REA started, rural electricity or whatever the word is, REA. And you got an electric pump to pump the water up into a tank. And then you had pressure to run the water from the tank into the house--had water pressure. And so we had running water, we had an indoor bathroom, and those were quite appreciated. I think we got electric stove--that was one of the first thing. And that was quite an improvement over a wood stove. Oh, and then there was. And he didn't have enough money, I don't believe—oh, let me tell you, or let me go back just a bit.
Bauman: Sure.
Fletcher: Josh Pentabaker got this house pretty well built, but he had to go back and do his own work back in Wallace, Idaho. And my dad negotiated with a carpenter here, a local carpenter, Vandersant-- he was a Dutchman. And my dad traded a cow, a milk cow for this fella to put in a--he was a master carpenter, too. He put in the kitchen cabinets, is what I'm trying to say, and some of the other cabinets in the bathroom and things like that in exchange for this cow. Now, there may have been other things involved, but that was the main thing. He told about that in later years, and I can vaguely remember. In addition to the basement then, we got a root cellar where we kept most of our things cold. But anyway, before he could get a refrigerator, he cut a hole in the wall of the kitchen and he made a cabinet inside, and hung outside a metal tank or a metal thing that held water. And then he ran down some gunnysack fabric and that wetted enough to evaporate and cool the cabinet inside. It was quite a contraption. But it worked enough that it probably wasn't much cooler than the basement, but anyway, it was up and it was handy. So that was when we--in 1934 I think that we occupied the house that's there now.
Bauman: Did you ever have a telephone during the time you were there?
Fletcher: Yeah, we had a phone. You cranked it. I'm trying to think whether we had it when we lived in the basement, whether we had it there or not. It was a party line, and there would be three or four people on the same line. And you answered according to how many rings. If it was two rings it was yours, or a short and a long or something like that. And of course people listened in on what was going on. We had a crank--it was, you cranked it up in order to make the signal. And there was a main station downtown. We were three miles from the downtown area up on what is now George Washington Way. And what's the name of that street? I can't remember all those--the house was on--
Bauman: Spangler?
Fletcher: Spangler, yeah. Spangler Road. We had to--you kept up--Dad kept up with what was available.
Bauman: Mm-hm. How about news? Was there a newspaper, or how did you learn about--
Fletcher: There was. There was the Benton County Advocate came out once a week. In fact, I think I still have some copies of that somewhere. It was mostly local, of course. Somebody was entertaining a company from Wallace, Idaho or somewhere, or somebody was sick in the hospital. Ed Peddicord was the--as I remember, he was older than myself but younger than my parents, and he became the first postmaster when the Hanford project took over, and he was the postmaster for quite a few years before he retired from the Richmond Post Office.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you about the school that you went to. Where was the school? Any memories you have?
Fletcher: Okay, there were, in the downtown area of Richland, the--I'm trying to relate it to--the grade school went from grade one through grade eight. And it was two story with four classrooms on the bottom and four on the upper level. I think they had electric lights, as I remember. The floors were wood floors, and they treated them with oil before school was started and at Christmas vacation. So when you came back from school--they'd wipe them up, the oil--they'd treat the wood floors. They'd wipe up the oil before classes started, but there would still be all these spots left on it. And so we had to take our shoes off when we came home at night because we would track oil, that oil. That was just for a few weeks or for a week or two. And the stoves had a jacket around. Of course they were--I believe they were coal stove--they that coal. And there would be a jacket around, a metal jacket around the outside to it, a couple of feet from the stove itself so the kids couldn't get up and get burned. But the jacket that surrounded them was probably three or four feet high, metal jacket. And we would—I remember hanging our white gloves things on that metal jacket to dry them out. And that was in the back of the room of course. That was your heat in the classroom. As I said, the bathrooms for boys and girls, most of them separate of course, were outside where you went out to the bathroom. And I don't recall any running water or anything in the—The other, the high school was, it wasn't torn down when the project started, Hanford project, right away. And it was built more--it had indoor bathrooms, was more up-to-date, more than the grade school, four levels. There are pictures of it in my booklet. So that was quite a step up.
Bauman: Do you remember any of the teachers from either school, or do you have any favorite teachers from that time?
Fletcher: Oh yeah. I remember most of my teachers. My first grade teacher, Ms. Randolph, older lady. And she was very good. I can remember putting our mittens up around that canopy around the stove in the wintertime, put your mittens up to dry. And I can't offhand remember, but I can visualize most of my teachers. There was Mrs.--Miss Mallory--she was single then. Taught me in fourth grade. And there was Bill Rader, our eighth grade teacher. Kind of he was a pretty good disciplinarian. If people got out of line, he had a paddle that he didn't mind using. There was--I can't think of the names, really, offhand. And then of course, in the high school I remember more of the teachers that I had. The superintendent, he also taught a few classes in, because the grade school had one class of every grade level. I started in the first grade, I was five years old, and I became six in November. And the kids that I started with, about half of the 20--I think there were 20 in my graduating class--about half of them were the ones I started in first grade with. That's how permanent the group was. There was a lot of permanency. And we moved onto this--where each grade you had the same ones, you knew the people. There would be two or three changes each year. And like I said, of those 20 or so that started, probably about half of those in my high school class were the ones I started first grade with. And so we knew each other very well. And the others I'd known quite well, too. My wife, she came later and joined when she was in about seventh or eighth grade I think, and she graduated two--I graduated in 1940 and she graduated in 1942. And in my graduating class there was 20, and hers there was only 12. I don't know why particularly. The high school, it was in freshman year you usually took Typing and it pretty well diversified. History classes, English classes. I can remember the teachers, Mrs. Deighton and Mrs. Carmichael. She's the one that got very emotional when the kids acted up and would carry on. Mr. Carmichael was the superintendent, and Mr. Whitehead, rather. We had basketball teams. We played against--Kennewick and Pasco were out of our league. They were from too big a town. So we played Benton City. I played--even though I'm pretty short, I was on the basketball team. We didn't have a football team. We weren't big enough. [LAUGHTER] The high school was only--with four classes, probably only 80 students altogether. And so I was on the basketball team the last couple years anyway. And we would go up to--Hanford was about 20 miles upriver, and White Bluffs. They were a comparative size. And to Benton City, and also to Finley. We used to call it Riverview then. It was a comparative size to what we were in Richland at that time. So we had a group that we played softball league and basketball. No football that I can remember. We weren't big enough to be in that.
Bauman: And did you take a school bus to get to and from school then, or how did you--
Fletcher: Yes. We had--as I said, Art Hackney had a school bus that they owned their own school bus. They had a contract with the district. And there's a picture of myself and my two sisters in that booklet I gave you, waiting for the bus and there's a picture of the bus. It was kind of a--it looks kind of obsolete now, but that was the way they did things then.
Bauman: So you graduated high school in 1940.
Fletcher: 1940. Then I went off to Cheney for a year. And decided I wanted to--didn't want to continue there. I wanted to--I thought I wanted to be an engineer, but I didn't have really the background from the school. At least I could blame it on that. So I transferred to Pullman in my sophomore year. And during beginning of my junior year, I was taken in--I was in the ROTC and we signed up for deferment or whatever you call it, but they said we could finish out the year we were in during my sophomore year. No, it must have been my junior year. That's the third year. But it turned out that they couldn't—they took us, they drafted us and I think it was about January of my junior year in Pullman, from WSU. And at that time I was a member of Sigma Chi. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So was that January of 1943 then?
Fletcher: Yeah, it was.
Bauman: At some point that year, of course the Federal government started constructing the Hanford site.
Fletcher: Right. I came home before--they allowed us, when they called up the ROTC, fellas in Pullman, they gave us a couple weeks to come home and see our folks. So I came home, it must have been the end of January of 1943. And saw my folks, and said goodbye to my sweetheart, Betty Kinsey was her name--became my wife. And after I went back then, I went back to Pullman, and they took us shortly by train from Pullman over to Fort Lewis. And it was an old, real old train that I mention in my booklet that looked like it was one from the pioneer days. There was a--I don't need to go into all the detail, but there was a coal-burning stove in the end of this railway car for heat, and we went over there in the first of February to Fort Lewis. We were not in the army until they took us over there and were forced in it at Fort Lewis. And shortly after that, I got word from my folks that the word had come out that Hanford and White Bluffs and even Richland, it was all going to be taken over by the government for this Hanford project. And that was in, I believe they got word in late February. And the people up at Hanford, which is, of course, is where the actual reactors were, were notified and given about 30 days to evacuate. And my folks, of course, we lived--my dad was the manager of the irrigation district at that time, of the Richland irrigation district. And they had more time because that was where the workers were going to live. But in the meantime they built Camp Hanford out here where we are sitting about right now, and maybe just a little further north. And you probably have the history of Camp Hanford and all that. But anyway, they were allowed to stay I think about six months, whereas the others further up where the reactors were being built, they had to get out quick. And so my folks looked around. They bought a place. My dad, by that time, they offered some of the people work. Most of them were farmers and they wanted to continue farming. And that was my dad. He, by that time, the kids were gone. I was the youngest. The other two, my sisters, were married and off and living on their own. So he decided he'd go back to farming, and they offered him a job to see to some of the irrigation, the way it was continued. But he decided he didn't want to do that. And a number of people did take jobs here for temporary. So where was I now? [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So your family had six months you said after they were--
Fletcher: Yeah, about six months. They found a place in Kennewick then, and my dad then bought some place and he put in a fruit orchard over on what became Blossom Hill in Kennewick. And we took over the old house. When I got out of the Army--I told you about that in my booklet here, that we took over their house, the two-story house that was on what's now where Denny's is at the corner of Kennewick Avenue and the Umatilla Highway.
Bauman: Do you know how much money your parents were given for their--
Fletcher: In those days, at that time, the government was not as benevolent in their takeover of land. And they did not really offer what the land was worth. So my folks, my dad was one of the leaders of the group that took them to court over the offer. And this lingered on for quite a while, because my dad was one of the--as a manager of the irrigation district. And John Dam that the park is named after, and two or three others, they figured that they were being offered what the land had sold for in Depression days, which had just been more or less begun to get over in 1943. And my folks and others were beginning to feel established, that here they'd worked most of their working lives for 12, 15 years getting to where they felt like they were established and could make a good living. And now they were being offered this, where they had to leave relatively quickly. And not being offered enough to buy something comparable in other areas, where they found they had to pay more than what they had been offered. So this went to court and drug on for a while. They did get a settlement that my dad was involved in. But it took quite a while and it still did not--they were not too happy about it. I'll put it that way. But anyway, they got over it.
Bauman: And so you heard about this happening when you were at Fort Lewis?
Fletcher: Yeah, I was still in the service. I was sent from there to Camp Roberts for infantry training. And I was there until June. See, this happened--I was taken in up in February I guess it was, and we had 13 weeks, almost four months, I think it was, of infantry training there in Camp Roberts in the desert in California. And then I was sent back to New York City. I had an opportunity--then they took some people to specialized training or a specialized training program called ASTP and I was able to get into that because of my college background and I passed some tests, I guess, and so forth. And so I was back there at the time and at Camp Roberts in California at the time that all this took place in Richland, and their dislocation and--
Bauman: Do you remember what you thought at the time when you found out?
Fletcher: [LAUGHTER] What I thought about that? About all this happening you mean?
Bauman: Yeah.
Fletcher: Well, so much was happening, you didn't have time to think too much about it. Because I was involved in the training and we were kept busy night and day pretty much, and then the infantry training camp and being back there. But I heard about it. They kept me up on it, and there wasn't much you could do about it, and neither could they, because that was it. You could appeal, but that was a long process, the appeal was. So they just took a time to get over it. They got over it eventually.
Bauman: Are there any events or things from your childhood growing up in Richland that sort of stand out? Special memories that we haven't talked about yet?
Fletcher: Probably quite a few things. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Fletcher: A number of things I mention in his booklet that I gave you. One thing I particularly remember as a kid was I had this pony, and my neighbor kids had ponies too, or else work horses that did the job. And so we could roam around quite a bit. We had a lot of freedom. We all had rifles. We went out hunting. And the jackrabbits were quite numerous, I remember. Going just about a mile from where we are now, there was a sand hill over here off of Stevens Drive, which we called Pole Line Drive. Those days there was a sand hill over there. And there was an irrigation ditch that ran along this sand hill. And we'd go in and the boys--take our clothes off and we'd swim in this irrigation canal. There was a flume there, too, and that was kind of an interesting thing to go through. And we would take our rifles, and there was one farm that was close to this sand hill called--I'm trying to remember the name now, Sam's. Anyway, he had a--his farm was right adjacent to the open sagebrush land and sand hill. And if you were there in the evening--he had an alfalfa field right along the edge of this sort of a desert area. At certain times in the dusk, there'd be whole bunches of jackrabbits would come in. I remember we would go there with our rifles, and my friends, Dan Barnett and Richard Hackney and I, and we'd wait for dusk. And you could shoot these rabbits. And of course Mr. Sandberg I think his name- yeah, Sandberg was his name, he welcomed anybody that would get rid of the jackrabbits for him because they were destroying his alfalfa field. And so we'd shoot a bunch of jackrabbits. And they did have jackrabbit drives once in a while, and they had pictures of them. I might have some in some of my folks' stuff. But anyway, we had ponies or horses and we'd go out, and sometimes we'd go up the river from here, Dan Barnett and Richard Hackney and I. And as I said, I had a pony that had been caught on the open range and he could outrun practically any horse around. We would go up there and we'd camp out for a day and we would find some old prospectors up there. They would be panning for gold. And I don't think, from the looks of them that they found very much, but they were interesting characters that'd tell you stories about their life. And we kind of envied them a little bit, but nobody wanted to do what they were doing. Anyway, then we would go up there and we'd camp overnight. Other times, we would go up there--I said that my folks and the Barnetts and the Hackneys had-- we had a boom in the river. We'd catch driftwood coming down for our--did I tell you about this before?
Bauman: No.
Fletcher: No, okay. If I ramble, tell me. We'd go up, my folks or my dad and the other men, we would have wagons--we'd hook the work horses to the wagons. And we'd take enough food to last a couple days. And us boys would go along, and some other boys were old enough to help, and some of us were too young to do much, but to tag along and have a good time. And we'd go up there and we'd set up a camp, and the men would have a log boom up there. They'd attach logs to each other and run them out into the water. And when the water would rise in the spring, it would lift these drift logs from upstream, clear up around where Grand Cooley is now, before Grand Cooley was built and any other dams. And these drift logs would drift down, if you had a log boom out you'd catch them, as the water would--the high water from the snow melt. And if your log boom was out far enough, you'd get a whole bunch of logs in there and that would be--which then we'd go up and the men would take their team of horses and use their chains to pull these logs out of the water that had been caught in the log boom. And then they'd have to cut them up enough to put on their wagons to haul them down home. And this would take two or three days to do. In the meantime, us kids, the younger ones, we'd have a great time with shooting rabbits and doing some fishing off what was left of the log boom. And fixing our hot dogs over the campfire. It was quite an experience. And we all wanted to go. I think the girls envied us. They couldn't go. I don't remember any of the women going. But when they got the wagons loaded, they had them all--I remember they had sideboards on them, so that they would be loaded up to the maximum. And of course the roads weren't too good. The horses would be really worn out by the time we got these loads down to where we lived. And we'd have to wash them off, rinsing the horses off with a hose because they'd be all that, and it would be quite late in the evening before we made it home. So that was quite a big event in our lives, and especially for the young fellas like us, we thought that was great. I'm sure the men folks were glad it was over. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Fletcher: So we had quite a few trips where we went out. I had a friend, Scotty who lived out in Yakima River, and I would go over--he was the one that I think I told you about the time that--maybe it was in my booklet. About the time that our well--the well that we dug up on the top of the hill, the 60 foot well, it had been real cold that winter, and usually the well didn't freeze, but it froze that winter. And so Scotty, my friend, he was the adventurer more so than I was. He said, oh, I can go take a blowtorch down there and thaw it out. Well, he did. My dad led him down this well. The well was hand dug and it was only about so big around. And there were iron steps put in the cement as they went down. As I said, it was 60 feet deep. Of course the water stood up in it about 20 feet or so. It would fluctuate. So Scotty went down with a blowtorch to thaw this pipe out because it had frozen the pump. And he got down there and I guess the confines of the gas or something, it exploded, and he was lucky he wasn't killed. He made it. Somehow it went upward rather than downward and he was able to get out. But his face was black and his eyebrows were singed off. And he was quite a mess from that occasion, but he didn't have to be hospitalized. They put cream on his face and I don't remember whether they got the pipe thawed out or not. I don't think so. I think it took a few days before it got the water up.
Bauman: So if someone was to ask you what it was like to grow up in a community like Richland, how would you respond to that? What would you say?
Fletcher: It was an interesting place to grow up because you were involved in all the activities. You were important as a member of the family. There were chores to do. You also had interesting experiences. You had time to play with your neighbors and develop your own activities and sports to a great extent. I guess probably I look back on it more with rose-colored glasses than it actually was, because I'm sure it was harder for the adults, too. Because it was kind of touch and go for them many times. There was no WPA or relief organizations. People helped their neighbors out when they needed it. I can remember a family that lived not too far from us. The man, the husband died, and they had some fairly young children, the Fraziers. And the wife was left with these--I forgot how young they were--two or three youngsters, and their small farm. And the people of the community just helped out. There was no other organization that they knew of. And later, Bruce Frasier who was in that family, who was about my age. He wasn't a classmate, but he told me years later at the reunions we used to have, he said, did you know-- [EMOTIONAL] did you know how much help your mom and dad did--I'm sorry.
Bauman: It's all right.
Fletcher: How much help your mom and dad gave my folks. And I said I had no idea. He told me that my dad and mother, and others--he said it wasn't just them. But they're the ones that made it possible for him to survive. And this, they didn't talk about it at all. Excuse me, cut it off a minute? Wipe my eyes here. I'm glad to get this opportunity. Don't take me wrong.
Bauman: That's all right.
Fletcher: I am glad to get the opportunity to talk. There's not too many people who want to listen to it.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Fletcher: Can I have a little drink?
Bauman: Sure. I think we're just about finished anyway. I think we've covered a lot of the things that I wanted to cover.
Fletcher: All right.
Bauman: So I guess is there anything else that we haven't covered that would be important to talk about?
Fletcher: I think we've covered everything pretty well. I've probably gone side-tracked a lot. And it was a role in that community, as I said, that they did help each other out in many ways. And that they're very independent, too. And there aren't too many of us left. We still get to have a reunion. We did-- it's getting down to where there aren't very many of us left. Last year we met at the Old Country Buffet and I had a good time. I think there may have been about 20 of us. But about half of them were descendants, children that brought their parents, who needed help to get there.
Bauman: Oh, okay. So this is a reunion of people from Richland?
Fletcher: The old time Richland, yeah, they lived in old time Richland. There's another-- the Deranleau, Ray Deranleau, he was quite a storyteller, he still lives here, and he was just a year or two younger than myself. And Alice Perkins is his wife, Alice Perkins-Deranleau. And I kind of think he'd be in the phone book. If not—
Bauman: Yeah.
Fletcher: And Price Colley. George Colley his name was, but there's a Colley family that he was there last year, and he's quite a storyteller.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] About what time of year do you usually get together?
Fletcher: Usually in the middle of September.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Fletcher: Middle to late September. Edith--I used to be the one that was in charge of getting the literature out and the reunions set up. Anyway, Edith Wiedle-Hansen, H-A-N-S-E-N, is the one that is doing it now. She was in my wife's class two or three years behind me in graduating from high school. And she's still here. I could maybe give you some more information on that later, if you wanted to call me.
Bauman: Yeah.
Fletcher: I don't know, if you have trouble.
Bauman: I just want to thank you very much for coming in today and being willing--
Fletcher: I enjoyed it.
Bauman: --to have me asking questions.
Fletcher: Okay. I hope that some of it's good use.
Bauman: You've been very helpful. Thank you very much.
Northwest Public Television | Wiehl_Dick
Robert Bauman: My name is Robert Bauman. I'm conducting an oral history interview with Dick Wiehl on June 25 of 2013, and we're conducting the interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking to Mr. Wiehl about his family's history, particularly their history in White Bluffs and the area around there. So I'm going to start with maybe talking about your family first, asking about them. Do you know how and when they came to the White Bluffs area?
Dick Wiehl: Well, my grandfather--that's who we're talking about--came in the late 1890s, and it was as a result of advertisement, which was nationwide, I suppose, at the time to get people out here to populate the area. And he came out with the prospect of buying some acreage, which he did, and upon which they established a ranch. And that would have been in the very latest part of the 1890s.
Bauman: And do you know where he came from?
Wiehl: Minnesota.
Bauman: Did he come by himself?
Wiehl: He came with his father, initially. Then his father went back and lived the rest of his life back in Minnesota. He had a good position back there, but this was an opportunity for a young man to strike out on his own and see if the road was, indeed, paved with gold in the West. And that's how the land was sold.
Bauman: Sure. Do you know much about your mother's family? I'm sorry, your grandmother's family, the Craig family, right?
Wiehl: Yeah, and she was Hattie Wright from the Craig family. And she came from Ellensburg, so she was out here even before my grandfather. And how they met, I don't know. But I do know that they were married about 1900, and then moved on together and onto the ranch that my grandfather was then establishing on the banks of the Columbia River.
Bauman: So could you describe the ranch? I know you didn't really live there, but you spent some summers there.
Wiehl: Well, I was born in 1936, and they were out of there in 1943. So those were the years that--obviously, I don't remember much from 1936. But from about 1940 on, I do. I have vivid memories and stories that were told. And so that's really where my relationship started was about that time.
Bauman: Can you describe the ranch?
Wiehl: It was, in my perspective, it was huge. [LAUGHTER] And it was. There were thousands of acres that were leased, and the ranch, kind of the official ranch itself, was several hundred acres. And, of course, to a child at that time, I'd go with my grandfather, and we'd go horseback riding, and he would be checking on various operations on the ranch on a day-to-day basis, and we'd go all day. [LAUGHTER] And have lunch somewhere in saddle bags, and then come back by evening. And we'd be gone from 7 o'clock in the morning until 6 o'clock in the evening, just riding on the ranch. Never left it. So it was a big ranch.
Bauman: Right. So what sort of crops did your grandfather grow?
Wiehl: Well, the crops I remember specifically, because I was out there picking potato bugs, were the potatoes. And so they grew potatoes. They had gardens. They were completely self-sufficient. And I remember my grandmother out there working in a large garden, and the other vegetables that they had I wouldn't recall. But there were lots of them, and the potatoes were where I would come in. And they had cattle, a lot of cattle, which were on the rangeland that they had leased. They had goats. They had chickens. And just had horses, obviously horses. Just about every animal that you would need in an operating ranch. And some of the animals were work animals, and some of them were riding, some of the horses were riding horses. And they had a lot of them. And just the care and maintenance of those animals was a full-time job, which was generally done by the women--meaning my grandmother, or the younger kids when they were there, or then eventually my aunt, who was a teenager when they had to move out of there in 1943. Just took care of the chickens and things like that.
Bauman: Now did you have siblings or cousins who would spend the summer there?
Wiehl: No. I had a younger sister, but she was too young to be involved in that.
Bauman: And now the cattle, did they sell any of the cattle?
Wiehl: Oh, yeah. They were involved in the cattle markets, and I can remember the wailing and moaning over the, this is a Republican cattle market, or this is a Democratic cattle market. [LAUGHTER] Whether things were up or down, that's the way they would talk about it. And they could always blame somebody for the fact that the market was down. So that was important to them.
Bauman: Do you have any idea where they sold the cattle?
Wiehl: No, no, no.
Bauman: So what other buildings were there besides the ranch house itself?
Wiehl: The main ranch house, and then there were a cold room, a big refrigerator, actually, which was an ice room. Several buildings, which were-- The house fronted on a lane. The lane was the highway that actually ran through from Othello and Moses Lake to the Columbia River, where you'd catch it to go over to White Bluffs, which was immediately across the river. And so their front yard was immediately contiguous to that road. Across the road were several buildings. I don't recall how many, but several for machinery. Barns, lean-tos, rather ramshackle but utilitarian structures for the housing machinery. And then they had chicken coops, and they raised goats, and they had goat houses, and so they had a lot of outlying buildings, which were particularized for a certain function on the ranch.
Bauman: And when you spent summers there, was there, for instance, electricity?
Wiehl: No. There was a telephone, and that was- When I was originally there, there wasn't electricity. In fact, I don't know if there ever was electricity. I think that it was coming, and it may have been there in the latter years, but that was relatively new, if there at all. The telephone, I do remember, because that was exciting when anybody on the line got a call, because everybody was included in it. [LAUGHTER] You'd dial an operator, a central operator that was in White Bluffs. I'm sure that must've been where she was. And she was on a first name basis with everybody. It was one ring here and two rings there, and so the telephone was quite an active source of getting the word out in the small community.
Bauman: So how'd that work? So if the phone rang in the house--
Wiehl: It'd be two rings; that meant it was your phone.
Bauman: If it was more than that--
Wiehl: Or less, it was somebody else's phone. It didn't make any difference. Everybody went over and got it. [LAUGHTER] And sometimes they'd even join into the conversation when they weren't supposed to be even on the line.
Bauman: Not a whole lot of privacy.
Wiehl: No.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And then what about irrigation? You must have had some sort of irrigation?
Wiehl: They had irrigation. I can remember wandering through the fields with my grandfather as he--There was blockages that occurred from time to time in the ditches that were coming out from the-- there were outlets for the water. And they had a good irrigation system. They must have taken the water right out of the Columbia, pumped it up there, and distributed it, because the ranch was on a level, probably two or three feet above the Columbia River. So it wouldn't have been difficult to do. Lots of pipe. I remember he had a shipment of pipe come in one time when I was there.
Bauman: What kind of pipe? Like cement?
Wiehl: Yeah. It was, and it was very, very heavy. It'd last forever, I thought, not realizing that the government was going to probably dig it all up in a couple of years.
Bauman: Right. And then what about the house itself? Do you remember how large it was, how many bedrooms, or anything like that?
Wiehl: It had two bedrooms, a master bedroom and a kid's bedroom, because when I was there, my aunt was still—she was just a couple years older than I. And so she had her bedroom, and my grandparents had their bedroom, and then there was a large sleeping porch on one end of the house, where since I was there in the summertime, I would sleep with my grandfather on this sleeping porch. And there were a room for a couple of other people to sleep out there too if we had guests or something like that. And then there was a huge room in the center of the house, where they had community gatherings. I mean, it was that big. So that if the local farmers wanted to get together for a meeting of some kind followed by snacks or even a dance, they would always have it in that what Grandpa called the great hall. And it was large by my estimation. And then they had the other big room in the center of the house was the kitchen and dining area. And those are the rooms I remember. I'm sure there probably were other rooms that I was never even shown to. But those are the rooms I remember.
Bauman: So it was a place where people came.
Wiehl: Oh, yes, oh, yes.
Bauman: Yeah.
Wiehl: Very definitely.
Bauman: Wow. And at the time you were there, it was a larger house that had that?
Wiehl: Yes. They kept adding on until--I think it probably took its final shape in about 1920.
Bauman: Wow. Now, you mentioned your aunt. I wonder if you could just for clarification, state the children, or I guess in your father's generation, who--
Wiehl: Well, all right. Their dad was born in 1909. Wright, the oldest, was born in 1903. And Elroy, the youngest boy, was, I would say, 1920. And my aunt was 1933.
Bauman: Okay.
Wiehl: Quite a range. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Yeah. About 20 years.
Wiehl: Yeah. For that time, it was quite a range.
Bauman: And you were born?
Wiehl: In 1936.
Bauman: 1936. In Yakima?
Wiehl: In Yakima, yeah.
Bauman: And so your family was in Yakima--
Wiehl: Yes.
Bauman: But you would spend summers--
Wiehl: Yes, I couldn't wait for the summers. I had to get over there and spend time with—Well, I was the baby at that point, and so I loved that. And loved to get over there and play with his tractors. And that's what I would do. He had several tractors. The one that I liked was a very nice John Deere big green tractor. But it was a small tractor for those times. And so I could actually sit on the seat, and by the time I was six, I could reach the pedals. Now to guard against anything ever happening, the battery was always taken out when I came over there, so nothing would go awry. [LAUGHTER] One time I came over though, and I think it was either in '41 or '42, because I had to be at least that old. We pulled down into the driveway, and I jumped out of the car and ran over to the tractor, which was sitting out on the road. I mean, this was the highway that it was sitting out on, which, as I explained earlier, just kind of ran right through the property. And I didn't know it, but the tractor had been used that morning, and my grandpa didn't know exactly when we were coming. In any event, he didn't take the battery out of the tractor. So I jumped on and did what I'd always hoped I could do: drive the tractor. It started, and everybody was standing back completely amazed and shocked and dazed, because I roared down the street. [LAUGHTER] And Dad was running after me and Grandfather on the other side. And I basically said, it's under control. Went down about 100 yards, turned around, brought the tractor back, and stopped it. And Grandpa said, well, I guess we don't have to take the battery out anymore. [LAUGHTER] But thinking of that, what really kind of alarmed me was the fact that I was driving the tractor and having things under perfect control, I thought. But I was a little concerned about my dad running alongside on one side and my grandfather on the other. I didn't think they could hold up a lot longer.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] That's a great memory.
Wiehl: Yeah.
Bauman: So when you were there in the summers, you picked a lot of potato bugs, and you would ride out with your grandfather?
Wiehl: Right. And just a lot of times sometimes play with my aunt. We would go exploring, and the property was vast, and there was always something, a place to go, an island to visit, and so we would just do what kids do, and swim in the Columbia River, and she raised a lot of little chickens. And so we would go out and count the chickens and make sure they were fed and play with them. They were very cute little things. And games. I mean, it was a time when kids would play board games. And so we got pretty good at a couple of those.
Bauman: And you mentioned it was right on sort of the main road.
Wiehl: Right. It went right through the ranch.
Bauman: Right. So were there a lot of people driving through?
Wiehl: From time to time. Nothing like today. But no, there would be two or three cars that I would see a day going in both directions. And I don't even know whether they had a ferry schedule, but I know that my grandfather would go down there at a certain time, which was a horse ride, it would have probably been about a three-minute horse ride down to where the ferry was. And so he was committed to be there at certain hours. So from that, I assume there must've been some sort of schedule, but he wasn't there on call.
Bauman: So he would, was operating the ferry, take the ferry--
Wiehl: Back and forth.
Bauman: Back and forth to the car on the other side.
Wiehl: Yeah. And the whole procedure wouldn't take very long after he got the ferry started up.
Bauman: So was he--
Wiehl: And I went down with him a lot of times. And that was a big thrill, because he would, if they were old diesel, it was an old diesel engine, and he would get that. It seemed like it took forever to get that fired up, but when it was, it would go clunk, de-clunk, de-clunk, de-clunk, and then we would go, de-clunk, de-clunk, de-clunk across the load one place or the other. I don't remember, but it was back and forth. And if there were--
Bauman: How long did it take?
Wiehl: Oh, the ferry ride itself, maybe five minutes. The river was pretty big, but still, you made steady progress. I wouldn't say it was very long. But exciting. And you certainly needed the ferry, because there were no bridges in the area.
Bauman: Do you know how long your grandfather had been operating the ferry?
Wiehl: Oh, I think he ran that for, well, 20 years anyhow. Yeah, because he ran it right up until 1943, and certainly, from '23. That would have been 20 years. That much and probably more. Probably more. Probably back to maybe 13.
Bauman: That was probably operating up to 1943.
Wiehl: Oh, yeah. Right up to the time they left, and he took the keys with him. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So did you-- your grandparents' ranch was on one side of the Columbia from White Bluffs.
Wiehl: Mm-hm, was just across the river.
Bauman: Across the river. Did you go over there fairly often?
Wiehl: Oh, yes.
Bauman: And what sorts of things did you do?
Wiehl: I would be there when Grandpa would take the ferry over, and he'd maybe wait for 10 or 15 minutes or maybe sometimes longer. And if he had business-- he was in charge, so he could pretty well decide when the ferry went back. And the ferry dock was right at the edge of town, and so I'd just walk up. There was a little landing. I'd walk up, and I'd be right in the center of town. The center of town-- we're not talking a big town here. But there were stores there, and I was just-- I'd go in and look around. And maybe sometimes I'd have a nickel or something like that, and I could buy something, generally sweet. And that would be a big, big deal. I picked a lot of potato bugs for a nickel.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Do you remember the names of any of the stores?
Wiehl: No, no. I remember a hardware store, though, that, in particular, that was just awesome, because it had things all over the walls, and it always sort of looked like a toy store as far as I was concerned. But it was clearly a hardware store.
Bauman: You mentioned earlier that at your grandparents' ranch, they often had sort of social events there. Do you remember any community or social events in White Bluffs, the town itself for like 4th of July or anything?
Wiehl: No. No, I don't. I don't remember anything like that. I do remember that my grandparents themselves had a couple of 4th of July--
Bauman: Okay.
Wiehl: --picnics or summer picnics. I don't know whether they were specifically 4th of July, when they would have friends and relatives in to share a lunch. And I can remember picnic tables being set out underneath the trees, and a lot of people being there. Everybody having a good time, and I remember that a couple of times. They were very sociable people. And of course, that was one way that people could get together with their neighbors and discuss the issues of the day, which were generally how to get better, get more income. And all the people in that area were really pioneers.
Bauman: Sure. Before we started talking, you showed me a photo of your grandfather in a baseball uniform.
Wiehl: Mm-hm. A White Bluffs baseball team.
Bauman: Right. I don't know, did your grandfather talk about that often? Do you remember your grandfather talking about that?
Wiehl: I have no memories personally of it, except that my father talked about the White Bluffs baseball team and was very proud of this picture of his father in uniform of the White Bluffs baseball team. Which was probably circa 1900 at that point. So clearly that baseball was very much a part of civilized life in the Hanford, Richland White Bluffs area.
Bauman: Did you have any interactions with Native Americans in the area at all yourself?
Wiehl: I would see them. I myself had no interactions at that time. Later, I got to go onto the Priest Rapids reservation and was invited to one of the last-- oh, they have a name for it-- kind of a big celebration potluck that they had before they built the dam. But no, I didn't. I would see them, but I never had any contact. And the other thing, I wasn't afraid of them or anything like that. It was just that they weren't on my agenda for the day.
Bauman: How about neighbors? Were there--
Wiehl: There were virtually no neighbors. The ranch was it. My grandparents knew where their neighbors were, but they had to be a long way away. But they could ride and did ride over to wherever they were. I never saw a neighbor's ranch on our side of the river. So it must've been quite a distance.
Bauman: Right, right. And you mentioned you spent a lot of time playing with your aunt. Were there other children?
Wiehl: No. No, there were no neighbors. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Right. So you spent summers there up until 1943. So you and your family were living in Yakima when the government decided to build the Hanford site.
Wiehl: Short notice.
Bauman: Short notice, yeah.
Wiehl: Very short notice.
Bauman: Do you have any memories of that, or stories that your parents have told you?
Wiehl: Oh, yeah. I have a memory, because I wasn't going there that summer. [LAUGHTER] And it was crisis time, because I'm guessing to a certain extent, but I won't be far off, that they were notified by telephone first and with a letter following. And they had something like 15 to 30 days--very short--in which that they had to get out. And this was the late winter of 1942 or the early part of 1943. Getting out is one thing, but where are you going to go? And so all heck broke loose. I mean, we've got to get out. Where are we going to go? And so the search was undertaken of where, because Grandpa was a rancher. He had all these cattle, horses. And so they eventually found a place near Selah, a ranch near Selah, which they bought. And they moved some of the livestock, which they did take with them. And he started anew in Selah and ran a dairy for probably about seven or eight years until after the war. When at that point, they had to move out. But they didn't have to accept the amount of money that the government gave them, and this was an important point. Some did, but those that didn't still had to move out. But after the war, they could take the government to court and prove that they did not get fair value for their land. And my grandparents did that. Of course, they had their own house attorney, my father. And they got probably in 1946 or 1947 fair value for the acreage that the government had taken. And with that, they then sold the ranch in Selah and bought a huge ranch up by Cle Elum in the Teanaway.
Bauman: Wow.
Wiehl: And moved there. Moved there, and lived-- Grandpa lived a short but happy life in that area.
Bauman: Do you have any idea what the fair value was?
Wiehl: No. But it was substantially more than the government gave. The government wasn't interested in carving up nickels and dimes and half dollars. They wanted the land quickly. They got that, and then they would settle up accounts later. And it was a painful process if you were one of the people that got kicked off your land, but that's the way it worked.
Bauman: Yeah. I was wondering, do you remember or heard any stories or heard your grandpa or parents ever talking about their feelings about that, having had started this homestead and having been there for--
Wiehl: I think they looked at it-- yes, I remember. And in particular, my uncle Elroy, who was pictured in some of those pictures that we were reviewing. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1941. And at that time, he was an ROTC cadet at the Reserve Officers Training program. He had been in that, and so he was going in to the Army in that summer. Well, that's perfect timing [LAUGHTER] for seeing a lot of action during the Second World War. And so he was an officer throughout the war, and, of course, was nowhere around in 1943. He was training for the invasion of Europe at that point in Fort Benning, Georgia, if I recall. And he never saw his--he left as a soldier, and at the end of the war, he couldn't go home. [LAUGHTER] I mean, his life had been uprooted. And that's just his personal case. And he was very matter of fact about it, but talked about it. It hurt him. But so what, really? I mean, we had to win the war. And I think that was the way my grandparents-- I never-- they wanted a fair price, because the government could do that, but they never argued or never felt badly about contributing to the quicker end of the war by the building of the atomic bomb. They felt pretty good about it, I think, that they had made a contribution. But then that doesn't entitle the government to steal it either.
Bauman: Sure, right. Let's talk a little bit more then about some of your family members. So you said your uncle Elroy was at University of Washington.
Wiehl: Mm-hm.
Bauman: Your father had already gone there.
Wiehl: Yes. He was a prosecuting attorney in Yakima at that time.
Bauman: And so you and your family were living there. And then your other uncle, Wright?
Wiehl: Yeah, he was the number one son, so he stayed with the ranch.
Bauman: Okay.
Wiehl: And so when they were kicked out of there in 1943, Wright went right along with my grandfather, went to Selah, and they bought a house for him right next door to or across the lane from where my grandparents were. And then when they went up to the Teanaway to Cle Elum, he went right along with them, and he was the foreman of everything.
Bauman: And then your aunt, obviously, would have been still young, so she--
Wiehl: Yeah, she graduated in late, 1950 or something like that from high school and married a man from Yakima.
Bauman: Are there any memories that stand out to you in terms of your times, your summers there that either are something humorous or just something that stands out particularly that we haven't talked about yet?
Wiehl: Well, I had a-- well, I've told you that they had chickens. And so we ate a lot of chicken, and we had a lot of eggs. And my grandmother was very careful in selecting-- we weren't going to eat a good layer. And so if the chicken was really performing out there with the eggs, then that chicken was safe for as long as that happened. [LAUGHTER] And of course, the chickens had to be killed. Well, a lot of times, there was a chopping block out behind the house, and most of the time, my grandmother would go out there and chop the head off. And that was an awesome sight for a little kid, because she would chop the chicken's head off and plop the chicken down. The chicken would run around for a minute or so, until it finally flopped over, and then we had to pull the feathers and get the chicken ready to be put into a pot. Well, handy as my grandfather was, at one point, he went out there to do this trick--chopping the head off—and he took his thumb along with the chicken head. And so he picked his thumb up, and he was way ahead of his time on that, and cauterized the wound, and then drove all the way to Yakima, which was the closest major hospital where he could get aid. And that was a long drive in an old pickup, or new at that time. It was an awesome feat. And he got there, and they said, no, we can't reattach the thumb. Which today they probably could do. Later that year, I had a friend in Yakima, and Grandpa would come up and visit us every once in a while. I had a friend, basically the same age, say, probably seven or eight, who sucked his thumb constantly. Little Ronnie, and he was always sucking his thumb. And Grandfather came out one day. We were playing out near the driveway where the car was. And Ronnie was sucking his thumb, and Grandpa says, you got to be careful about that, kid. You got to be careful. You shouldn't do that. And he says, I did, and look what happened, and he put up his hand, and there was no thumb, just a-- Ronnie took his thumb out of his mouth, and I don't think he ever popped it back in again. That was it.
Bauman: Oh, wow.
Wiehl: That solved the problem. [LAUGHTER] So that was a-- I was startled myself. [LAUGHTER] And that's one of the things that happened there that was kind of funny.
Bauman: Yeah. How would you, from your memories, describe your grandparents?
Wiehl: Very loyal, to start with, and very much involved in one another's lives, because they were in this together. A great feeling being around them. A great feeling. They were involved in everything together, and Grandmother was--Grandpa was smart. Grandmother was just as smart, and the two of them had physical constitutions. We had to be made of steel to live in there, and they were, emotionally and physically. That's a rare thing.
Bauman: Right. Yeah. Like to do what they did at the time they did is, owning that ranch and so forth, yeah. Did you see any other extended family much at all, either on your grandmother's side or your grandfather's die?
Wiehl: Oh, the extended-- Wright was there, the oldest brother, because he was the chief hand. And he would be involved everyday on what needed to be done on the ranch. And one of the reasons my grandpa could slip away and run the ferry, because Wright was tending the ranch. He had a wife that lived there on the premises in another house. So that adds to the houses, which I forgot about.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Wiehl: But they were always close at hand. And then he had a daughter. Wright had a daughter. He had a wife and a daughter, and the daughter then married, and her husband came on as a hand, too. So they had four or five other people that were in the mix all the time, all relatives.
Bauman: What was their last name, Wright's daughters and husbands?
Wiehl: Bobbi was her name, and I can't remember. Gaige. Yeah.
Bauman: Gaige, okay. I'm going to then go back and talk about your grandfather a little bit more. When we were talking earlier, I mentioned looking at census records. In 1940, he was the numerator of the census. I know he was very active in the community in addition to just being very busy with the ranch. Were there other positions, community positions that he held?
Wiehl: Well, he was the deputy sheriff in both counties, and that was important that it be in both counties, because you never knew which way the crooks were going to come, you see. [LAUGHTER] And he had a jail on either side of the river. And he had a photographic memory, which was the reason that he kept active those two jails, because they were all the wanted posters would come to him. They would go up on a bulletin board in the ferry boat or on the ferry boat. So if people were on the ferry, and there was nowhere to go. I mean, once you were on the ferry, you were stuck. You were like in a jail right then and there. If you were so unlucky as to be identified on the ferry, you would be escorted off at the other end to a local jail. And Grandpa picked up a lot of-- I don't know a lot, but enough to talk about-- of people going back and forth over the river there. So he was very much involved in that process.
Bauman: Were there ever any stories? Did he tell you any stories about any particular--
Wiehl: Well, I remember, this had nothing to do with the wanted posters, but it had to do with the jails. Since he was a deputy sheriff in both counties, occasionally, there might be a law enforcement issue. And generally, that involved people going across to White Bluffs, cowboys after a roundup, and having too much alcohol. Then the alcohol would take control of the situation. They'd get noisy, boisterous, maybe unruly, and when they got past the noisy area and into the unruly, then they would call for Grandpa. And that happened a couple of times, and one time, specifically, he went down there, and he would deputize people right on the spot. And they would take the drunken cowboys and throw them into the jail. Well, the one time they did that, two or three of them were thrown into jail, locked up, and Grandpa basically said, well, we'll see you in the morning and let you out then. Well, when he got there in the morning, the jail was gone. Somebody-- his friends, these cowboy friends-- the jail wasn't very big-- they had lassoed the jail, pulled it off its little foundation that it was on, taken it 100 yards down the river and broken them out. [LAUGHTER] And he said, much to their credit, they came back sheepishly a few days later, helped move the jail back to where it was supposed to be, and repaired it so it was as good as new. [LAUGHTER] So the story had a happy ending, but I mean, that was kind of the justice of the old West, I guess.
Bauman: Yeah. So was this jail in the town of White Bluffs itself?
Wiehl: Just on the edge. Closer to the river. He had it on both sides of the river.
Bauman: And then on the Franklin County side, was it right on the river too? Close to it?
Wiehl: Yeah. Both sides were very-- more like a little outhouse.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Wiehl: Which was susceptible to lassoing and moving, apparently.
Bauman: Yeah, right. It's that small. I think I know you were just there in the summers, so you didn't attend school--
Wiehl: No.
Bauman: --in White Bluffs. Churches-- do you remember churches?
Wiehl: No.
Bauman: Did your grandparents go to church over there?
Wiehl: No, no, there probably was one. I'm sure there was one in White Bluffs.
Bauman: But you don't have any memories--
Wiehl: But I have no memory of going there, and I doubt if my grandparents did. They were probably still involved in the workday affairs of the ranch.
Bauman: Sure. And then I guess, any other memories that you have-- you told some great stories. [LAUGHTER] Is there anything else that you remember from your summers there?
Wiehl: No, not specifically.
Bauman: And I guess the other question would be, obviously, the town of White Bluffs then in 1943 essentially ceased to exist.
Wiehl: Yeah, it did.
Bauman: That community. Why do you think it's important for us to remember the town, for future generations maybe to know about White Bluffs and the things that people like your grandparents did there?
Wiehl: Well, right now, it's forgotten. And that doesn't seem to be fair. A town should, once started, should live out its natural life. And this did not happen with White Bluffs. Its natural life was truncated suddenly by Presidential decree. And I think that an effort should be made to still let White Bluffs live out its natural life, and making a history of it may help. It may also help bring closure to a lot of the people that are now content that their story has been told. Here, living in Yakima, we tell our own story. We're there to tell our own story. But the people here didn't have that opportunity. So I think it's important.
Bauman: All right, well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming here and doing the interview--
Wiehl: My pleasure.
Bauman: --and telling the stories. They were terrific. Thank you.
Wiehl: Get myself unhooked there.
Bauman: I'll help you out.
Northwest Public Television | Kleinknecht_Emma
Robert Bauman: I'm conducting an oral history interview with Emma Larson Kleinknecht if I have the name right, correct?
Emma Kleinknecht: Right.
Bauman: And the spelling is K-L-E-I-N-K-N-E-C-H-T?
Kleinknecht: Correct.
Bauman: Excellent All right. Make sure we have the spelling right.
Kleinknecht: Yep.
Bauman: And today's date is June 12, 2013 and we're conducting the interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. And I'll be talking with Ms. Kleinknecht about her family's history, her experiences growing up in Richland, in that community. So let's just start, if I could, by asking you about your family. How, and why, and when did they come to this area? What brought them here, and any information about your family and why they came here would be great.
Kleinknecht: Well, my dad came from Denmark. And he went up to Alaska and worked in the mines. And then he came down to Seattle, and after a while, he got interested in working with the cattle. So somehow or another he came over to Richland and met my mother over there, and she was single. And then he married her, and I was born 1918.
Bauman: And your mother, was your mother born and raised in Richland or--
Kleinknecht: No. She was born and raised on the coast. But she had relatives that lived over that way.
Bauman: Do you know when your parents married?
Kleinknecht: Oh, a couple years before I was born.
Bauman: And how about any siblings? Are there any brothers or sisters?
Kleinknecht: Oh yes. There were six, three girls and three boys. And then when I was eight years old, my dad came in the house, he says, "Emma, you've got to learn to milk cows." Because the girls were first, you know. So I went out and helped milk cows, or learned how. And from then on, I milked cows. But all of us had to go out and pitch hay to make hay for the cattle, and we put it on a big haystack. And there's a picture of that here.
Bauman: So you had a place with lots of cattle? Do you have any idea how many cattle?
Kleinknecht: Yeah, we had eight cows, two horses. Because in them days, you never had tractors, so you had to have horses, to do all the outdoor work like that.
Bauman: And did you grow any crops?
Kleinknecht: Oh yes! We raised everything by hand. We had corn, and tomatoes, and you name it. All the vegetables there were.
Bauman: And were those primarily for your family?
Kleinknecht: Yeah. And then the cream, we separated and sent it down to Kennewick to the creamery where they made butter. And, course you got paid for it. And, let's see, what else--
Bauman: How big was the place that you had--
Kleinknecht: I think we had about 20 acres. We had a lot of asparagus, and us kids had to cut asparagus before the school bus came, or we didn't get to go to school. But we went to an old country school, where was one teacher, five grades. There's a picture of me in one of them pictures.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And was this in Richland or?
Kleinknecht: Old Richland, up north.
Bauman: Okay.
Kleinknecht: We never got downtown for a while. It was really something.
Bauman: So you said five grades and--
Kleinknecht: Five grades and one teacher.
Bauman: And do you have any idea of around how many students that would've been?
Kleinknecht: I used to know, but I forgot. [LAUGHTER] That was back when.
Bauman: Yeah. And how long did you go to school there, then?
Kleinknecht: I think I was in the fifth grade and then, about that time, we had a school bus that would take us downtown to the old schools. I called them old, because they're so different [LAUGHTER] now.
Bauman: You have a photo you wanted me to show?
Kleinknecht: Oh, yeah. This is the country school.
Bauman: Okay, great. So it looks like there's maybe, what, 20 or 30?
Kleinknecht: Could be.
Bauman: Is there something like that?
Kleinknecht: It could be.
Bauman: 1925?
Kleinknecht: That's about right. I wrote it down there.
Bauman: Yeah, 1925. Fruitvale School.
Kleinknecht: And this school was used for a church, and a dance hall, and a grange hall. Because, see, all the farmers were grangers. So that was in the good old days. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And so--that's a great photo--After that, after, say, fifth grade, where did you go to school?
Kleinknecht: Downtown.
Bauman: Okay.
Kleinknecht: There was a grade school and a high school down there.
Bauman: I think you sent us some photos of you playing basketball, maybe?
Kleinknecht: Oh yeah! That was downtown. That was a different kind of basketball. I was a side center. I'm the second one there. The tallest girl was the center, and then I was a side center because I was shortest. Then there were two guards, and two forwards.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Kleinknecht: And now they play just like the boys do. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Yeah, it says champion basketball.
Kleinknecht: Yeah, that one is.
Bauman: Yeah, 1935, '36. That's great. Do you remember how long you played? Did you play throughout high school then?
Kleinknecht: Oh yeah. That's what this is.
Bauman: Do you remember if there were other sports for girls to play in high school besides basketball?
Kleinknecht: That's all we played, anyway.
Bauman: So I assume the schools in downtown Richland were a little bigger?
Kleinknecht: Oh, yeah. There were five grades in one building. Then we went over to the high school. And right by the high school was a Methodist Church and a Seven Day Adventist. Catholics all had to go downtown because there were no church. And so my dad found some building, and had to make a Lutheran church, because all Scandinavians were Lutherans. And that's where he came from. So we all became Lutherans.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So you talked about that early school building, in Fruitvale, being used as a school building, a church, a grange. I was wondering about other social activities, or community activities that you might remember growing up. Were there Fourth of July celebrations, or community picnics or any of those sorts of things?
Kleinknecht: Oh, I've kind of forgot, but I think that it could've been used for anything. But those other things were always the big things.
Bauman: Yeah.
Kleinknecht: Them were the days. And I had to run from our house, across the sagebrush to the school. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So what sorts of things growing up did you do for fun? Did you do fishing, or did you go swimming in the river, or any of those sorts of things?
Kleinknecht: Well, my dad, when we were little, would take us down at the river and get us swimming to get cleaned up, so we could go to church. [LAUGHTER] See, we weren't too far from that Columbia River where we used to live. But that was in the summertime. [LAUGHTER] So we were tickled to death to get to go down there and swim.
Bauman: Did the river ever freeze over when you were--
Kleinknecht: Not when we went down there. This was only in the summer.
Bauman: Yeah, sure. So the place where you grew up, in addition into a house, did you have a barn? Was there other buildings like an outhouse, anything like that?
Kleinknecht: Oh yeah. We had outdoor toilets. Pumped our water out of wells, and when we milked the cow we had a separator, and had to separate the milk and get the cream. Yep, we had all them old things. Had to pump water for washing clothes, taking baths, and put water in big tea kettles so you could wash dishes. It was a different world then.
Bauman: Did you have electricity at all?
Kleinknecht: No. Not for years.
Bauman: How long did you live there in that place?
Kleinknecht: Gosh, I don't remember. It seems like my dad passed away, and my mom sold our house. And we moved over next to that school house. There was an old building there. And she still kept a few cows, and just had a garden, and like an orchard out in the fields. So after that, we were catching school buses.
Bauman: When you were growing up, what might a typical day have been like for you as a young girl?
Kleinknecht: The what?
Bauman: What might a typical day have been for you as a young girl--
Kleinknecht: Oh.
Bauman: The things you might have done on a typical day as a young girl, growing up.
Kleinknecht: Yeah. Well, I joined the 4H group. For one thing, and we really had a lot of fun. Learned how to sew, and cook, that's what 4Hs were in them days. I don't know if they still have them or not.
Bauman: I believe they do, yeah.
Kleinknecht: Do they? Yeah, those were the days. Then there's times we'd, a few of us neighbor kids, get together and walk down the river, and walk back up, and swing on swings. That was about the size of it.
Bauman: I wonder if you remember anything--the Great Depression came along in 1929 or so, and I wonder if you remember, with the Depression, anything specific that had impacted your family, or the community in any way?
Kleinknecht: No. I think because we raised everything we ate, my mom canned everything. And everything we had was from the ground. And none of us suffered from it. Because we had our own milk and those kind of things. Nope, them were the days.
Bauman: And so where were you living in 1943 during World War II, when the federal government came and created the Hanford site? Were you still--
Kleinknecht: Oh, I was married then. I got married in '38.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Kleinknecht: That was a bad thing. The government gave everybody a check. They didn't even know this was coming. And told them to get out, take everything you got and leave. So my mom went to Grandview. Some of them went up there, some went to Prosser, and a couple of them stayed there. But they all had to leave town and they went to Kennewick.
Bauman: So your mother was still living on the same place at that time and she left and to Grandview?
Kleinknecht: Yeah.
Bauman: Were any of your younger siblings still living with her, or--
Kleinknecht: Yeah, I think they were, because I was the oldest one.
Bauman: And so you said you got married in 1938?
Kleinknecht: '38, yeah.
Bauman: And who was your husband? How did you meet?
Kleinknecht: Umm, he was a friend of my sister's boyfriend. [LAUGHTER] That's how I met him. In fact, his folks they didn't live too far from where we built a big house and lived in there, on Westhood Avenue.
Bauman: So you said that you moved to Kennewick, right?
Kleinknecht: Yeah.
Bauman: What was Kennewick like in 1938--
Kleinknecht: It was real small. Just a small town, and it was just groceries and a couple drugstores. It's not pool halls like you go down there now. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And what did your husband do?
Kleinknecht: He was just a--oh, he was a farmer but afterwards, he worked out in Hanford in the fire department.
Bauman: Do you know how long he was there or worked at the fire department?
Kleinknecht: I'm trying to think. They let him go, and then he got sick and passed away. It was probably something from out in that area. But that's been several years ago.
Bauman: Now, you mentioned going back to talking about the place where you grew up, that you had a well for water--
Kleinknecht: Yeah, we pumped our water out of the well. For even the cows and the horses. And we had to bring the horses up to the pump, because that's okay. But he carried the water in a big wheelbarrow, in buckets, to put in a barrel down for the cows. Because he wasn't about to, I'm sure, drag them up there. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And did you have irrigation at all?
Kleinknecht: Oh yes! Oh, yes, not for the house, but for the fields. Oh yeah, we had K.I.D., just like they got now.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Were there any other photos, Gary, that you wanted to talk about, or any other--
Gary: Well sure. We've got her graduating class. Just--I'll hold it.
Kleinknecht: Okay.
Bauman: What year is-- You said you graduated high school in what year is that?
Kleinknecht: '38, or '36.
Bauman: 1936. Graduating class of how many is that?
Kleinknecht: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
Bauman: Graduating class of 15.
Kleinknecht: Yeah.
Bauman: Was that Columbia high school?
Kleinknecht: No. Richland.
Bauman: The old Richland, right, sure. Richland, High. Then it became Columbia, the Columbia High, you're right.
Kleinknecht: Yep. Two, four, five boys, and the rest are girls.
Bauman: Did you stay in contact with a lot of your high school friends after?
Kleinknecht: Oh after I graduated and got married we all kind of--then several years ago we had picnic lunches together, but that's been a while back. But not many of them are here anymore.
Bauman: Do you remember any of your teachers from the high school?
Kleinknecht: Oh, yeah. That basketball player, oh that guy there. In the middle, up there, Mr. Carmichael.
Bauman: Oh, is that Mr. Carmichael?
Kleinknecht: Yeah.
Bauman: Isn't that who the school was named after?
Kleinknecht: Mm-hm.
Bauman: Was he a principal?
Kleinknecht: Yep. He was a good guy. There was a grade school and a high school in downtown Richland. And that was-- I can't see the—193-what?
Gary: Five.
Kleinknecht: Oh.
Bauman: Yeah. Both are in 1935. Do you know where in Richland that would have been?
Kleinknecht: Yeah. You know where John Dam's grocery store used to be?
Bauman: No, is it--
Kleinknecht: On Kennewick Avenue.
Gary: [INAUDIBLE]
Bauman: Yeah.
Kleinknecht: You don't know either, huh?
Bauman: That's all right.
Kleinknecht: I know where to pick them out.
Gary: I know where the Amon Building is.
Kleinknecht: Well, just back there a ways.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Kleinknecht: But see, that's all that was around those buildings, just little--
Bauman: Mm-hm. Yeah, not a whole lot of other buildings there.
Kleinknecht: No. I think there's a toilet in the back out there.
Gary: Yeah, I would hope so.
Bauman: Are there any things that you remember growing up or that really stand out to you that--memories you have, or things that you think would be really important for people to know about this place where you grew up that we haven't talked about yet?
Kleinknecht: Well, they would never have realized how we made our living off the ground. Kids nowadays won't do that. Okay, here is us kids driving the horses. Because we had no tractors.
Bauman: And that's you and a couple of your siblings?
Kleinknecht: Yep, a couple boys. Yep. That's old Prince and Henry. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And did you have the horses then the whole time you were growing up? You never got tractors?
Kleinknecht: Well, when my dad was alive, we never had a tractor. And there's that one with the hay. Okay, that's how—Show them. Show them how the haystacks were.
Bauman: Yeah.
Gary: Can you talk about it?
Kleinknecht: Yeah. I know us kids would get the hay in big stacks. Then we'd throw it up on this wagon. And then tie--they had a rope here and here, and then time we got down to the haystack, they'd tie that rope up above in there, and then pull it over. Roll it, that's how they got the hay in a big stack.
Bauman: Sounds like a lot of work.
Kleinknecht: It was. In the winter time, they'd take a great big canvas and cover the top of the hay, so it wouldn't get wet and ruined. That's how they fed the cattle and the horse.
Bauman: I was going to ask you about any neighbors. Who were your closest neighbors, or did you have any really good friends when you were growing up that you remember?
Kleinknecht: Oh, yeah. These are all--were my neighbors when I grew up. First grade.
Bauman: Oh. Who are they?
Gary: Tell them about them.
Kleinknecht: Oh, okay. That's, the Kaas boy, I can't think of his name right now. He lived right down a ways.
Bauman: Is that Gordon?
Kleinknecht: No.
Bauman: It's at the bottom, Mom.
Kleinknecht: Oh, did I write it there? Oh, Ed Kaas, yeah.
Bauman: Okay.
Kleinknecht: And then Phillip Hempcry, right there and me, oh, and Carol Hansen. He's the little guy. But they're no relation. Yep. They all live not too far apart.
Bauman: Right. In fact, I just talked to Gordon Kaas this morning.
Kleinknecht: Oh did you?
Bauman: Yeah.
Kleinknecht: See, and then there was also another one. Started with an F. Oh, phooey. He lived down the Pole Line Road. There was an irrigation canal between the school and the other families' farms.
Bauman: And so you lived close enough to those families where you could--
Kleinknecht: We played all the time, yeah.
Bauman: That's fun.
Kleinknecht: Gee, I can't think of that name, and I know it like I do even mine. I'll think of it.
Bauman: That's all right.
Kleinknecht: [LAUGHTER] Oh! Yeah, my dad wanted to be baker. This is in Denmark. And his dad didn't want him to be a baker, so he and his cousin jumped something and come to the United States from Denmark. And that's how come he met my mom and that's how come I'm here.
Bauman: So, did he come to the United States-- do you know why the United States, was it just for opportunity?
Kleinknecht: Well, to get a good job. He wanted to maybe get to be a baker here. But he and his cousin, they went to Alaska. Then they come to Seattle and worked on a farm. And that's what got him interested.
Bauman: That's interesting because Gordon Kaas said that--I was just talking to him this morning--his father is from Denmark.
Kleinknecht: Oh.
Bauman: Yeah. So two families from Denmark living very close. [LAUGHTER]
Kleinknecht: Well, I'll be darned! What was his name?
Bauman: Kaas. His first name was--well, Gordon Kaas was the man I talked to this morning, but I think you're talking about his older brother--
Kleinknecht: Harold. I'll be darned.
Bauman: Yeah, their father was from Denmark. Initially, they went to Oregon somewhere--
Kleinknecht: Yeah.
Bauman: So, I'm trying to think of any--I guess one other question to ask you is, So you were married in '38 and moved to Kennewick, and I was just gonna ask you about when--do you remember finding out about, for instance, about World War II? The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, do you remember any of that? Any memories about hearing about that?
Kleinknecht: Pearl Harbor. I knew about it, and forgot about it. Who do I know about it?
Gary: It's what started World War II.
Kleinknecht: Pearl Harbor?
Bauman: That's all right. Another question, Did you have--How did you get news? Was there a newspaper or anything?
Kleinknecht: Oh, yeah. Newspaper. When we were married, we had a little radio for a while, and then we got a TV.
Bauman: But when you were growing up, it was a newspaper?
Kleinknecht: Always. And a radio. Oh when I grew up, you never had televisions. I don't think anybody did.
Gary: Do you wanna tell them about that?
Kleinknecht: Oh. Well, this is my mother, and sisters and brothers, and there's the horse. [LAUGHTER] See, that's how we heated up our house, with wood.
Bauman: Yeah, sure, right.
Kleinknecht: Everybody did.
Bauman: What was the horse's name again?
Kleinknecht: Prince, one was Prince and one was Henry. I think that was probably Henry, because Prince was a little fussier. And I don't think they would carry him out.
Bauman: So the horses were obviously very important.
Kleinknecht: Oh, yes.
Bauman: For doing a lot of the work on your place.
Kleinknecht: Yep. Because we never had tractors. In fact, you couldn't afford to buy one if you did, if you would want one. Nope. Them were the days. Oh, yes, and here's my momma and my papa, and my two sisters. One of them's me.
Bauman: You're the oldest?
Kleinknecht: Second.
Bauman: Oh, you're the second? Okay. That's a great photo.
Kleinknecht: Yeah, my dad--
Bauman: So that would've been some time in the 1920s, huh?
Gary: Early.
Kleinknecht: Yeah. He's from Denmark. And he--
Bauman: Do you know where-- You said she was living in Richland, right?
Kleinknecht: Yeah.
Bauman: Do you know where her family came from?
Kleinknecht: Oh, like, over on the coast. I was trying to think of the little name. Yelm.
Bauman: Oh, Yelm, okay.
Kleinknecht: Yeah.
Bauman: Is that what you said, she had relatives here and that's why--
Kleinknecht: That's why she came over. I think she had a sister or an aunt or something. Nope, but I'll never forget our school days.
Gary: We're getting kinda low on them.
Bauman: That's Okay.
Gary: Do you wanna talk about--well, you've seen--No, that's the little kids.
Kleinknecht: Oh, the grade school.
Gary: Let me hold it, Mom.
Kleinknecht: Just a minute, I gotta look at them. Oh, this is everybody in that school.
Gary: That's your first grade.
Kleinknecht: Yeah. 1925. That's my first grade, yeah, but that's the five grades. They all dressed alike in them days.
Kleinknecht: We were all poor people. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So if someone is to you, like, what sort of place Richland was like to grow up in, what would you--how would you describe it? What would you say to them?
Kleinknecht: In them days?
Bauman: Yeah. When you were growing up.
Kleinknecht: Well, I'd been in that place for so long. I don't know. Because there was an irrigation ditch from the school to—you cross the bridge, then we'd go home. We used to stop and go swimming. Oh, I kinda liked where I lived. And then, of course, after I got married my mom went to Grandview. But that wasn't my cup of tea. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Did your brothers and sisters, stay in the area?
Kleinknecht: I'm trying to think.
Bauman: Or did they move elsewhere?
Kleinknecht: I think they moved elsewhere. I know one went down to Oregon, and the other went up north further. And then my oldest brother was a heavy smoker. And he had to go pass away. I don't know where he ever got money to buy cigarettes, but he did.
Bauman: Anything else about growing up here in Richland that you want to make sure we know about, or?
Kleinknecht: Well, I just like the town, Old Richland. And then where there is a yellow building, like before you go down to the park, brick building, that used to be a two story building. And now it's only one. There was a John Dam store, and a Murray Hardware, and--oh, what do you call them? It'll come to me.
Bauman: That's all right.
Kleinknecht: Name some names, quick.
Gary: Describe, what? Describe it.
Kleinknecht: The store.
Gary: Yeah, describe it. What did they do there?
Kleinknecht: Oh, like the shave and cut your hair.
Gary: Oh--
Kleinknecht: Barbershop.
Bauman: Barbershop? Yeah. Was there a movie theater down at all?
Kleinknecht: Not in Richland.
Bauman: No?
Kleinknecht: You had to come to Kennewick to go to a movie. [LAUGHTER] And they were cheap, ten cents. Cheap now, I don't know if it was cheap then. [LAUGHTER] My dad did take us kids to a movie once for a dime but it had to be a special.
Bauman: Right, sure. Yeah.
Kleinknecht: No, them old days. Right now they're good old days.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] All right, well--
Gary: Would you like me to prompt her?
Bauman: Sure, if there's something that you think--
Gary: I can probably pull a story or two out.
Bauman: Sure, that's fine.
Gary: Okay. Did you guys have dances?
Kleinknecht: Oh yeah.
Gary: Okay. Did--
Kleinknecht: In that school house.
Gary: And did your parents participate?
Kleinknecht: Oh, heavens, yes. This is the grange hall, after the meetings. My dad danced with every lady. But my mom wasn't dancing. So I asked her why? She said, "I'm a Sunday school girl." But she never learned to dance.
Bauman: So she wasn't gonna dance.
Kleinknecht: No. She's a Sunday school girl.
Gary: Did your dad ever help you gals, or your brothers and sisters get out to go to dances?
Kleinknecht: With him.
Gary: Oh, okay.
Kleinknecht: Yeah, we all went to the dances.
Gary: But your mom didn't approve?
Kleinknecht: She went along, but she didn't dance. But I'd learned to dance all kinds of dances.
Gary: Do you remember when the last time you danced was?
Kleinknecht: Oh--
Gary: I do.
Kleinknecht: At your wedding?
Gary: No.
Gary: You did there too.
Kleinknecht: We out danced every--
Gary: It was your 90th birthday.
Kleinknecht: Oh, yeah!
Gary: Yeah. You danced with me.
Kleinknecht: That's a couple years ago.
Gary: It was.
Kleinknecht: [LAUGHTER] I forgot. Yeah, I love to dance.
Bauman: So the dances were in that same building as the school and the church grange meetings, or were they different?
Kleinknecht: As we grew up, they were in there. But as we got older and the bigger schools they didn't do it anymore.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Kleinknecht: We all went downtown to the schools, because they were much better schools. More new, indoor toilets, drinking water, everything.
Gary: Do you remember when your dad got sick eventually and died, do you remember any of the stories that go along with that?
Kleinknecht: No. I know he passed away at home.