Working Conditions

Alexandra Levy: We are here on December 27th in Florida. This is Alexandra Levy. I am with the Atomic Heritage Foundation. And we are here today with Esther Stenstrom. My first question for you is to please say your name and to spell it.  Esther Stenstrom: My name is Esther L. Stenstrom, E-S-T-H-E-R, middle initial […]

Cindy Kelly: I am Cindy Kelly, Atomic Heritage Foundation. I am here today with a special Manhattan Project veteran. My first question is for you to say your name and spell it.  Fred Vaslow: Fred, F – R – E – D, Vaslow, V – A – S – L – O – W. Kelly: The […]

  Cindy Kelly: Okay, my name is Cindy Kelly and I am in south Denver, Colorado. It’s June 25th, 2013. And I’m with Fay Cunningham. But the first thing I’m going to do is ask him to tell us his name and spell it. Cunningham: Fay Cunningham, F-A-Y, C-U-N-N-I-N-G-H-A-M; it’s a good old Scottish name. […]

Cindy Kelly: Okay I am Cindy Kelly, Atomic Heritage Foundation and we are in Mesa, Arizona on June 26, 2013 and with me is Robert or Bob Cantrell. And the first question I have for him is to tell me his name and spell it. Bob Cantrell: My name as I remember it is Robert […]

Gladys Evans: I’m Gladys Ellen Wimberley Evans, G-L-A-D-Y-S E-L-L-E-N W-I-M-B-E-R-L-Y E-V-A-N-S.  Kelly: Terrific. Okay, now if you could start with telling us, you know, where you were born and raised and how you got to Oak Ridge. Evans: All right, well, I was raised in Sweetwater, Tennessee, which is about fifty miles from here, and […]

Cindy Kelly: I am Cindy Kelly, and this is May 9, 2013 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We’re interviewing Lawrence Bartell. Dr. Bartell, can you please say your name and spell it? Lawrence Bartell: My name is Lawrence Sims Bartell, I am the son of Lawrence Sims Bartell, but I’m not “junior” or “the second” or […]

[At top is the edited version of the interview published by S. L. Sanger in Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford, Portland State University, 1995. For the full transcript that matches the audio of the interview, please scroll down.] Book Version: My home was in Kildare, Texas. I grew up there, went […]

[Interviewed by S. L. Sanger, from Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford, Portland State University, 1995] I came to Hanford in March, 1944, as Du Pont’s medical director. When we arrived, we stayed in a hotel, and felt sand in our teeth, sand on the bed. Richland had 200-300 people and […]

[At top is the edited version of the interview published by S. L. Sanger in Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford, Portland State University, 1995. For the full transcript that matches the audio of the interview, please scroll down.] Book Version: The first day of September, ’44, in a nice howling dust […]

W.K. MacCready: One of the challenging things we had, when we started up the separations plant and were running a reasonably complex chemical process, was that we were not able to inform our operators of the identity of any of the chemicals that they used, including the additives that they pumped out of the storage […]