Before her time at Oak Ridge, Alice Stein was a stenographer. With a lack of need for stenographers, Alice began working in production for war planes until she asked to operate cyclotrons at the Y-12 plant. This is where she had met the man she would later marry, Ray Stein.
Manhattan Project Locations: Oak Ridge, TN, Y-12 Plant
Alice Stein in her own words regarding her experience at the Y-12 Plant at the WWII Round Table Table
Date of Event: 01/18/07
Transcript:
Stein: I’m really not supposed to be making a speech, I’m just an exhibition. But anyway, I did the Oak Ridge work on war planes. [unintelligible] warplane, that’s all I was told, and a stenographer. That’s what I’ve been in the business calling [unintelligible]. Well, they didn’t need me any more stenographers, so they put me in production. Soon to be fine because I made 76 cents an hour, and I’m sure stenographers didn’t make that much. I was getting top pay. So, the first day we were going to orientation. It was up in [unintelligible] and then across the road to a big building holding the orientation. Then I walked down the sidewalk to the road, wasn’t a street it was a road and there was about this much mud. I had to get across [unintelligible]…man came and said, “just take your shoes off and walk across”. I go up to the building and there was a hose there [laughing]. We get there on Monday, it’s the first day and all we got to know in orientation, what it was, was don’t talk. Whatever you hear you haven’t heard anything. You don’t talk to your friends, you don’t talk to your family, you don’t talk. The next day we went back for more information, through the mud again. Three days! And finally, they said the building you are going to work in is not ready yet. So, we want you to go to University of Tennessee in Knoxville at the um, electrical engineering department. Now most of the group I was with was with a man. We were all [unintelligible] This is the room I was working in and all us girls looked about the same age, same hairdo [unintelligible]. My supervisor stayed in the [unintelligible]. That’s where we worked. We went in the uh, electrical engineering department and not that I learned anything in engineering, but I learned a few words like ammeter, voltmeter, and things like that. And once a week we would go to the lab and the uh, professor would do the experiment. They didn’t let us go in. We couldn’t, we’d take too long, we’d be clumsy, we wouldn’t [unintelligible]. But one they showed us, the one that I remember most, was the one with the light beam going so far. The next light beam went farther. I remember that. I mean that’s what they told us to remember that. We didn’t know [unintelligible] the hookups to the electricity or something. The light beam would go so far. But now I know what that was. That was the Uranium 235 and 238. We didn’t, none of these girls knew. Anyway, after our time was over at the university, we went back to Oak Ridge and there is really a town site. There are some dormitories and a big parking lot and some cafeterias. But to get to your work, you had to ride a bus. And we were going to work at Y-12. You get on the Y-12 bus and you go down mountains and forests and all around no telling how far way out. That is where we went to work. [unintelligible] the Big buildings around there. [To Joe Pugh] You said [unintelligible] was 292 was the number of our building. I didn’t know that. [laughing]. I was in building 9201-2. So, we go up, go in there, a whole group of us and this is what we see it on that page [showing photo]. They even called it cubicles, which were about three or five times as big as a refrigerator. They had knobs and meters. And we have many names. we had to learn this is “K slot” and this was “Z”. I finally learned what a “Z” was. That was that [unintelligible] electric magnet [unintelligible], we didn’t know that. It was a Z but I didn’t know that then. At uh, certain times we would check the meters, we would plot graphs, read the meters, try to get in certain [unintelligible]. And this operation was continuous. We had three shifts. We had to change shifts every week. Daytime and the Afternoon shift we could do okay, but the nightshift was something else. And will say, I don’t know what army mess was but there were cafeterias at Y-12 where we were, if you were on the nightshift, about 2 or three o’clock in the morning, you might like some breakfast food [unintelligible] go to the cafeteria, it’s your time to go you go. You go down and see greasy fried eggs, greasy fried [unintelligible], greasy fried whatever. [laughing] and you didn’t have to pay and you could have anything on your tray. [unintelligible] got to get something. So maybe you get a bowl of oatmeal. I didn’t see much grits there, I can’t remember grits. But I knew oatmeal. You had to have something. [unintelligible] the morning. Anyway, we managed to do all that. And they um, work week was six days a week. We only had one day off. And at the end of three shifts, after you’ve done three shifts, we had an accumulation of three days. So, we could go to Gatlinburg. We didn’t go often but we went two or three times I’ll say. And um, everything at this time was rationed. I mean cigarettes, cameras, movies, uh films for cameras. And one time I was in uh, Gatlinburg and I saw a lot of family stores with a lot of films. So, I brought all the money I had and spent it on films because I knew a lot of my friends needed or wanted them. But when I got back to work that day at Oak Ridge, I didn’t have time to go by the dormitory to [unintelligible] and uh, left it with my pocketbook and all that. Got home that night and all my films have been confiscated. All my money. But that’s the way they played it. We weren’t supposed to have any films I suppose. And the pocketbook at Y-12 [unintelligible]. That was just something. Then um, let’s see what else can I think to tell about .
Joe Pugh: [unintelligible]
Stein: No. I’d to say that uh [unintelligible] was there. And every once and a while he would come up and walk through [unintelligible] and these girls, I’m sure their husband or boyfriends were all in the service. And one of them had enough nerve to ask me, “How come your boyfriend’s not in the service?” And I said “He has bad knees he told me” [laughing].