0:01 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the most important cities in the history of civilization was founded on Oak Ridge when the World All-Train Manhattan Project made this area its district headquarters. 0:12 [SPEAKER_02]: Alan and Ray take us a little deeper into the science of Oak Ridge. 0:17 [SPEAKER_02]: And I know that you said that in this story, they wanted a location and they wanted to keep at least out of the press. 0:24 [SPEAKER_02]: So the locals immediately know what they were building. 0:28 [SPEAKER_00]: No, I didn't have been out there. 0:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Not only did the locals in the surrounding area, I didn't have a clue what was going on in Oak Ridge. 0:35 [SPEAKER_00]: All I knew was people coming out of Oak Ridge. 0:37 [SPEAKER_00]: had mud on their feet. 0:39 [SPEAKER_00]: That's about it. 0:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And many of them obviously were not from here. 0:43 [SPEAKER_00]: They were a foreigner, see if you will. 0:45 [SPEAKER_00]: They scientists had come in from large universities and large cities coming in to Oak Ridge. 0:52 [SPEAKER_00]: By the way, General Rose knew that he had to do something in this 0:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Small rural area, he was bringing people that were accustomed to having really good educational facilities. 1:03 [SPEAKER_00]: There were accustomed to having cultural activities, music, those kinds of things. 1:08 [SPEAKER_00]: So he hired Alden Blankenship and told him, said, Bill the best school system in the nation, pay the teachers the same salaries they'd get if they were in New York City. 1:18 [SPEAKER_00]: And by October of 1943, they started three schools here, and then eventually there were, I think, about eight or nine, maybe even more. 1:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Build, best school systems you could build, or build right here in Oak Ridge, Oak Ridge, continues to have one of the best school systems in the nation. 1:36 [SPEAKER_01]: And we'll say a lot of folks came from other places, but some folks from around here as well, including the people this out of high school going in and we're in the famous Calutron girls. 1:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The people who were moved out of this area, almost all of them came back to work here, just best paying jobs in South East for sure. 1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And they were, for example, Tennessee Eastman was chosen by General Groves to run the Wild Toyle plant, and just because they managed large operations, and they didn't have a clue what they were doing scientifically, but the scientists knew there. 2:11 [SPEAKER_00]: You said how many people knew, maybe a hundred? 2:13 [SPEAKER_00]: of the chemist would have known that we're working with uranium, a heavy material. 2:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Now remember this never been done before, so they didn't know what they were going to do with it, and it was something for the war. 2:25 [SPEAKER_00]: The people that made the insulators, the electrical insulators, for the CADU trons, that you run high current through those magnets to make that magnetic field, very strong magnetic field. 2:39 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, he talked about the Kia-Tron girls. 2:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Since the Eastman hired young girls out of high school, trained them to operate those Kia-Tron's. 2:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Gladys Owens was one of them. 2:49 [SPEAKER_00]: She was living up in Kentucky. 2:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And her friend in high school center, a letter, and said, gladys, you need to come to Oak Ridge and get a job. 2:57 [SPEAKER_00]: There's me and down here. 2:59 [SPEAKER_00]: There wasn't any young me and up in Kentucky. 3:01 [SPEAKER_00]: They were in the military. 3:02 [SPEAKER_00]: But this was the special engineer detachment was here. 3:05 [SPEAKER_00]: So there were young male soldiers here. 3:07 [SPEAKER_00]: So she came down and got a job, worked from January to August of 1945, then in August after the war ended, the population went down from 75,000 to about 30,000, and by the way a state about that, what grudges about 30,000. 3:26 [SPEAKER_00]: But many of the people were laid off, had to leave. 3:29 [SPEAKER_00]: So glad it's left. 3:30 [SPEAKER_00]: She came back in 2004. 3:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Saw her picture on the wall here at the American Museum of Science and Energy of those Cayetron girls, where they're sitting on stoves. 3:40 [SPEAKER_00]: She said, that's me. 3:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Steve Stowe, who was the director of the museum at the time, called me and said, right, I found you, OK, you're a Tronger. 3:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, that's where that term came from. 3:52 [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't call them, OK, you're Trongerals back in the day. 3:54 [SPEAKER_00]: They called them cubicle operators. 3:57 [SPEAKER_00]: But we coined that term, OK, you're Trongerals, and now it's being used by everybody. 4:02 [SPEAKER_00]: So I took her out to Wattweil. 4:04 [SPEAKER_00]: I was the Wattweil historian before I retired. 4:06 [SPEAKER_00]: I worked at Wattweil for 47 years, and retired in 2017, and I'm continuing to be the historian for the city, but I'm still tired to Wattweil. 4:17 [SPEAKER_00]: But at any rate, I took her out there, set her up on student-mater picture. 4:21 [SPEAKER_00]: At right in the K, your tronsers, they're still out there in two of the buildings at Wild 12. 4:26 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a part of the Manhattan Project National and Historical Park now. 4:31 [SPEAKER_00]: But I took her out there, took her picture, and she said, right, I never did know what I was doing when I was working out here. 4:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Can you show me? 4:38 [SPEAKER_00]: I see, yeah, glad it's I can show you. 4:40 [SPEAKER_00]: I opened up one of the doors of the cabinet, so it's not K, your tron, cubicle. 4:44 [SPEAKER_00]: And I said, Gladys, when you were just in those knobs, and that's what they did eight hours a day, just to just an knob to keep a meter on a certain point. 4:52 [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't know what they were doing. 4:53 [SPEAKER_00]: They were just keeping that meter on that point. 4:56 [SPEAKER_00]: I said, when you were just in that, you were changing the value of a real stat down here. 5:01 [SPEAKER_00]: She reached over and tapped me on there, arms she said, right, I still don't know what I was doing. 5:06 [SPEAKER_00]: But I know if I had any bobby pins in my hair, they just go and go stick to the wall of some work. 5:13 [SPEAKER_00]: largest magnets in the world would literally pull Bobby Pence out of war with Harry. 5:19 [SPEAKER_00]: So they didn't know, almost none of them knew what they were doing. 5:22 [SPEAKER_00]: When they would be asked by people over in Knoxville, what are y'all making out there? 5:27 [SPEAKER_00]: They'd say, oh, about 75 cents now. 5:30 [SPEAKER_00]: What are you doing out there, oh, you know, we're just making... 5:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Horses heads to go with those horses rearers that are up and washing, not just silly things like that, but they didn't know. 5:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Glad to said, if you talked about what you were doing here, you'd be gone the next day. 5:47 [SPEAKER_00]: They started a 43 club after the Manhattan Project was over, several years later, they started a club of the people who were here in 1943 called it to 43 club. 5:59 [SPEAKER_00]: At the second meeting, at the end of the meeting, this man held his hand up and said, I want to ask the question. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: They said, all right, what is he? 6:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Said, if when I was at here during the Manhattan Project, I had to keep a stack of three but five blank cards in my pocket. 6:14 [SPEAKER_00]: And if I heard anybody talking about the project, I had to write down what I heard, who said it, and when it was said and worked. 6:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And I had to put that in an envelope and send it to the Acme Finance Company. 6:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, if I didn't hear anything at the end of the week on Friday, I had to send them a blank card. 6:31 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, I wonder if anybody else had to do that. 6:34 [SPEAKER_00]: About half the people in the room held their hand out. 6:37 [SPEAKER_00]: So they were spying on one another to report. 6:40 [SPEAKER_00]: If anybody was talking about the project. 6:43 [SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned earlier how the people outside of Ooprends knew. 6:47 [SPEAKER_02]: at the locals that are working here would have but on their boots and on their shoes. 6:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Remember, this place was built in some 18 months and there was a huge amount of construction going on here. 7:00 [SPEAKER_00]: They put down wooden plank walks rather than you think the place was growing so rapidly. 7:08 [SPEAKER_00]: roads were dirt roads and they were paved later but not initially. 7:13 [SPEAKER_00]: So you had a lot of construction activity building the city building three sites, four facilities all going on at once. 7:24 [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah it was mud. 7:27 [SPEAKER_01]: New York, Denise Kirinan, who's on our national advisory board, wrote a book called The Girls of Automatic City, and that she talks a lot about encountering that mud when they first got here and how they learn lessons of what to wear and what not to wear. 7:39 [SPEAKER_01]: As they try to make their way around Oak Ridge. 7:42 [SPEAKER_02]: That's pretty cool. 7:44 [SPEAKER_02]: So when Oakbridge was built and had all the people here, was there like normal things that you would see in a city at back then, maybe a movie theater or... Sure, absolutely, each of them, they didn't have a centralized. 7:57 [SPEAKER_00]: location like a square, and the way Oak Ridge is laid out, outer drive and west outer drive runs up on top of Black Oak Ridge. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: The Oak Ridge's turn part runs down in the middle of East Fort Valley. 8:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Between those two main roads up going up and down the ridge, there are avenues or streets, and there are all name for states. 8:19 [SPEAKER_00]: starting with Arkansas and going to Oklahoma, if you will, and it's alphabetical. 8:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Along each of those streets, if it's New York Avenue, all of the sad streets off of New York, Avenue would start with an Ian. 8:35 [SPEAKER_00]: So you can easily tell where you need to be in Oak Ridge by what's the name of the street is. 8:42 [SPEAKER_00]: If it's in the end, it's likely either on New York Avenue or in Nebraska. 8:46 [SPEAKER_00]: So it's going to be on an end street. 8:48 [SPEAKER_00]: But there are no squares, there are no blocks to circle. 8:53 [SPEAKER_00]: You either got to go to outer drive or to the turn park and go from one street to the next. 8:58 [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the way it's laid out. 9:01 [SPEAKER_00]: It's easy to find a way but not easy to get there. 9:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And they had dances, they had saltball teams, they had dances on the stage, and the striker had tennis courts here. 9:12 [SPEAKER_00]: So they had a civic music association, had a playhouse, theators, and one of the main Jackson Square, which was called Townside, it actually had two theaters, the Center Theatre and the Ridge Theatre. 9:27 [SPEAKER_00]: and they would all have cafeterias and they would have domatories and then the midtown area who had lots of trailers, lots of hutmets, they built everything they could think of to make room for people to stay in and even in the hutmets. 9:46 [SPEAKER_00]: five people could be in a hutman, but you could actually use it for ten people because when five were working, five more could sleep in there. 9:57 [SPEAKER_00]: This was a 24-hour town going all the time and there's even a silo out on the east end of town, out at how a ridge. 10:06 [SPEAKER_00]: If you go out there, it's still standing today. 10:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And what it was built for during the Manhattan Project was a beef cattle farm. 10:13 [SPEAKER_00]: They raised beef there to help provide food. 10:16 [SPEAKER_00]: They had chicken farms around. 10:18 [SPEAKER_00]: They had pig farms. 10:20 [SPEAKER_00]: And think about it, 75,000 people. 10:23 [SPEAKER_00]: And they were all needed to be fed. 10:25 [SPEAKER_00]: They needed to be entertained. 10:26 [SPEAKER_00]: They needed to go to school. 10:28 [SPEAKER_00]: So in 18 months, to two years, all of this came into being. 10:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was muddy. 10:36 [SPEAKER_02]: What did you say the population was not? 10:38 [SPEAKER_02]: 75,000. 10:39 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, now it's 30,000. 10:40 [SPEAKER_02]: OK, so it's more than twice. 10:42 [SPEAKER_02]: Sure. 10:42 [SPEAKER_02]: The size, back then. 10:43 [SPEAKER_02]: So when they started building Oak Ridge, where do they get that workforce? 10:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Any of where they could get them? 10:49 [SPEAKER_00]: They would advertise in high schools and colleges and newspapers, but they would bring in people in from all over the nation to work here. 10:58 [SPEAKER_00]: And again, they were paying them good wages. 11:00 [SPEAKER_00]: So if I sense an hour, 11:04 [SPEAKER_02]: what was the hiring process like because of course they're wanting to keep the secret. 11:08 [SPEAKER_02]: So are they just going out and be like hey we want to hire you it's for the war effort. 11:13 [SPEAKER_02]: And thank you. 11:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Sure. 11:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Some would say Bill Wilcox who was a historian here before me and was a chemist who came here during the Manhattan Project. 11:23 [SPEAKER_00]: He went to a job fair after he had finished his college. 11:27 [SPEAKER_00]: He went to a job fair and he would only go to the ones that advertised this is war work. 11:33 [SPEAKER_00]: That's all he wanted to do. 11:34 [SPEAKER_00]: He didn't want anything else. 11:36 [SPEAKER_00]: And when he took the job, they told him go to Knoxville and ask how to get there. 11:42 [SPEAKER_00]: And he came to Oak Ridge, and by way of Knoxville and asking, where is Oak Ridge? 11:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Get on this bus, and go to Oak Ridge. 11:51 [SPEAKER_02]: So they just tell them, you have to keep this quiet, or I just didn't tell them anything. 11:55 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 11:56 [SPEAKER_01]: And then they were told that they spoke, they speculated about what was going on, they usually were gone the next day. 12:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that was common knowledge. 12:04 [SPEAKER_00]: They just didn't tell them, they just told them it's war work and we'll tell you, general girls believed in compartmentalization. 12:11 [SPEAKER_00]: He felt like the people only needed to know what they needed to know to do their job. 12:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Even when they were shipping the uranium to 35 from Oak Ridge to Los Alamos, they put it in small, gold, line, coffee cups, size containers. 12:26 [SPEAKER_00]: put two of them in a briefcase, strapped it to an army lieutenant's arm, sending him on a passenger train up to Chicago. 12:34 [SPEAKER_00]: In Chicago, he transferred that to another army lieutenant, who went to Los Alamos. 12:40 [SPEAKER_00]: So that the lieutenant going to Los Alamos didn't know where it came from. 12:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Except he picked it up in Chicago. 12:45 [SPEAKER_00]: The ones from Oak Ridge didn't know where it went. 12:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Except he took it to Chicago. 12:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Now that was the thinking. 12:51 [SPEAKER_00]: You don't tell anybody anything they don't need to know to do what they have to do. 12:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Los Alamos was different. 12:58 [SPEAKER_00]: The scientists had to talk to one another and often hammered toe grows. 13:02 [SPEAKER_00]: I can't do that. 13:03 [SPEAKER_00]: We've got to let them talk and he said, just keep them up there. 13:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Don't let them out. 13:07 [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't get that. 13:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Generally speaking, he didn't want it told. 13:12 [SPEAKER_01]: General Rose is an interesting guy. 13:14 [SPEAKER_01]: So, Driven, I wouldn't want to cross him in any way. 13:17 [SPEAKER_01]: It was once said his emotional graph was a straight line. 13:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He was very steady. 13:23 [SPEAKER_01]: He had overseen the construction of the Pentagon before this. 13:25 [SPEAKER_01]: So, you could take on massive projects. 13:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Successfully. 13:29 [SPEAKER_00]: The Colonel Nichols, who was second in command to General Groves wrote a book. 13:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Race to Trinity. 13:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And in that book, he commented on general roles. 13:38 [SPEAKER_00]: He said he's the main SSO, but yeah, ever. 13:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Work for him. 13:42 [SPEAKER_00]: He's most driven, quickly makes decisions, has no regard for organizational structures. 13:50 [SPEAKER_00]: But says if I had to do the atomic bomb project over again, had to privilege to pick in my post, I'd pick general roles. 13:58 [SPEAKER_02]: Roach had a lot to do with making it happen. 14:03 [SPEAKER_00]: When the bomb was dropped on August the 6th, one of the Cayetron girls who still alive in a still user to talk to groups today, Ruth Hudelston. 14:15 [SPEAKER_00]: She was there and she says, when they bomb was dropped, her supervisor told the whole group, we made the uranium for that bomb as dropped on Harris Schema. 14:25 [SPEAKER_00]: That was in the newspaper that day. 14:28 [SPEAKER_00]: So she said, I was glad, because that meant we were going to end the war, and likely, and her boyfriend was in Germany, and had already told her that he was going to be sent to Japan to invade Japan. 14:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, they would have been lots and lots alive if it ended up. 14:45 [SPEAKER_00]: But she said, when she got home that night, she heard on the radio and saw in the paper, how many people that she had helped kill, and she became so depressed, she couldn't sleep for a week. 14:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Interestingly enough, she didn't work much longer. 15:00 [SPEAKER_00]: She went and became a counselor in the school systems at Morgan County and went for the rest of her and career never telling anybody that she'd worked at Oak Ridge. 15:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Until her granddaughter had a science project about Oak Ridge, she had to write about it. 15:18 [SPEAKER_00]: One science, it was a written project. 15:20 [SPEAKER_00]: And when she did, she was doing her homework over at Ruth's house. 15:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And Ruth said, what are you working on? 15:27 [SPEAKER_00]: She said, oh, I got to do a project on Oak Ridge. 15:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Ruth said, I can help you with that. 15:31 [SPEAKER_00]: I used to work out there. 15:33 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's first time her family knew that she had worked in Oak Ridge. 15:38 [SPEAKER_02]: When the bomb was finally dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, and the world learned what the gated city of Oak Ridge had been up to. 15:45 [SPEAKER_02]: The headline in the local paper read simply, Oak Ridge attached to Pan. 15:51 [SPEAKER_02]: Just as Hendrix had predicted Black Creek Valley, an Oak Ridge had helped when the greatest war has ever been. 15:58 [SPEAKER_02]: big engines, dug big ditches and thousands of people ran to and fro, building things with great noise and confusion. 16:05 [SPEAKER_02]: The earth's shook, and today a city still sits on block Oak Ridge. 16:10 [SPEAKER_01]: The facility you're seeing in the day, the we moved in here in 2018, the focus of Amsey is still Manhattan Project to begin, but it's now focused more on the science that happens since and now at Oak Ridge National Lab at White 12, and to tell them in 16:27 [SPEAKER_01]: In addition to what we do here, we have the K-25 History Center. 16:31 [SPEAKER_01]: So when you go there, the whole beginning of that is how was Oak Ridge created, how did the Manhattan Project get going, where was it located, that whole story is told there, then you go into the specifics of how K-25 worked. 16:42 [SPEAKER_01]: The science, the people behind it. 16:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Then also in Oak Ridge, we have great partners, great other institutions, the Utilians Museum, Oak Ridge History Museum. 16:50 [SPEAKER_01]: They also tell, in their ways, the store of the Manhattan Project. 16:53 [SPEAKER_00]: And in November of 2015, we established the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. 17:00 [SPEAKER_00]: It has three locations, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, New Mexico and Hanford, Washington. 17:06 [SPEAKER_00]: The park's presence is primarily to focus on that Manhattan Project story. 17:12 [SPEAKER_01]: That's part of the exciting part of this job. 17:14 [SPEAKER_01]: Many exciting parts, but to be able to tell those stories about what's happened since. 17:18 [SPEAKER_01]: So the Manhattan Project and amazing story, we tell that. 17:22 [SPEAKER_01]: what's happened since and what's happening now. 17:24 [SPEAKER_01]: And then to use that as a foundation to teach broader lessons of STEM. 17:28 [SPEAKER_01]: So as they were a big STEM, our steam engine here. 17:30 [SPEAKER_01]: So we can talk about neutron science and nuclear energy, but then we can tackle other science topics using that as a springboard to go even further. 17:39 [SPEAKER_01]: So we do a ton of stuff with the classes here, but now with our online abilities, we're reaching folks around the world with our STEM education. 17:47 [SPEAKER_01]: So a great history to build upon and do really even better things in the future. 17:52 [SPEAKER_02]: I'd like to thank Alan and Ray for joining us, and for being so welcoming on my visit to the American Museum of Science and Energy. 18:00 [SPEAKER_02]: Alan has his own podcast called American Potis, focused on the office of the American Presidency, and I'd encourage you to check that out as well. 18:09 [SPEAKER_02]: In our next episode we'll be speaking with a member of the Cherokee Tribe in the small town of Cherokee, North Carolina.
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