coroh.oakridgetn.govcoroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/Transcripts_and_photos/… · Web viewORAL HISTORY OF STEVE GOODPASTURE. Interviewed by Keith McDaniel. October 20, 2018 MR

ORAL HISTORY OF STEVE GOODPASTURE

Interviewed by Keith McDaniel

October 20, 2018

MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is October 20, 2018, and I am at

my studio here in Oak Ridge with Steve Goodpasture. Steve, thank you for taking time

to come over. You have been very involved in all kinds of things over the years in Oak

Ridge, so let's start at the beginning. Tell me where were you born and raised?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, I was born in Akron, Ohio. Then a few months later dad

got a job, he was working for one of the tire companies up in Akron and he got a call

from, he put in down here at Union Carbide, and he got a call and he left. He came

down here took the job, looked around, and Mom and I followed a couple months later.

MR. MCDANIEL: What year was that?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was, I was born in '53, and we moved down here, I

believe it was April of '54.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay, so you were just a baby?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, oh, I was very young.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, so what did your dad, what did he do down here? What kind

of job did he have?

MR. GOODPASTURE: He worked in the laboratories at Y-12.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh did he?

MR. GOODPASTURE: He was in spectrometry. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: All right, what does that mean?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, one of the things was he analyzed uranium that was over

there, so he would give the proper assay and everything of uranium.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, so you all moved in '54. So you grew up in Oak Ridge, didn't

you?

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MR. GOODPASTURE: Yep, we moved into an E2 over on Pennsylvania Avenue.

MR. MCDANIEL: What was an E2?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was the large apartment, well, a four-apartment building

that had E1s on each end, which was a one bedroom, and then the middle two were

E2s, and they had two bedrooms upstairs.

MR. MCDANIEL: And they were upstairs and downstairs-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: Where the E1s were just one floor, right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's correct.

MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was thinking. There were a lot of those in Oak Ridge,

weren't there?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh yes, a lot of them, and there still are quite a few. They're

slowly disappearing, but.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, so how long did you live there?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well I went to Pine Valley to school, which was just top of the

hill, and from there I stayed there until third grade. Then we moved up on West Outer

and I started going to Willow Brook and went there from fourth through sixth. Then Dad

decided we needed to live in the country, so we moved outside of Oliver Springs and

we lived there for a while. I went to Norwood and then onto Clinton High School.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh did you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: Huh. So when you were outside of Oliver Springs, why didn't you go

to Oliver Springs High School?

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MR. GOODPASTURE: We were in Anderson County.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, were you in Anderson County? Okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: I went to Norwood, which at the time, an elementary school, it

went through eighth grade. Then when I finished eighth grade they finished the middle

school. Well, when I finished ninth grade, they finished the middle school because I

went on to Clinton nine through twleve, and that's when they built a new Norwood

School and a new Clinton. So I was in the class that went through the first three years

full time at the new Clinton High School.

MR. MCDANIEL: At the new Clinton High School?


MR. MCDANIEL: So this was-

MR. GOODPASTURE: I graduated in '71.

MR. MCDANIEL: ‘71, okay. All right. ‘71. So they had built a new different high school

from the one that had been bombed in ‘58?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Right, when I was in ninth grade I went to that school.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh did you, okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's when they completed the new one, and went ten

through twelve at the new school that became the Clinton Middle School.

MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was about to say, the old high school became the

Clinton Middle School.

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's correct. And speaking of the bombing, I was in the band

and we had Mr. Anderson as our band leader. He had mentioned that during the

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bombing, it had destroyed the school, but in the band room it didn't, when they blew it

up, it didn't bust a drum head.

MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: The band room was still intact.

MR. MCDANIEL: Huh. Well, it must've been close to the gymnasium. I bet it was,

wasn't it, because the gymnasium wasn't damaged.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, it was on the far corner of the school from back side of-

MR. MCDANIEL: Back side of the school, okay. All right, well good. Well so you grow

up in Oak Ridge, and Clinton and the area in the '60s basically?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes.

MR. MCDANIEL: What was like life for you then? Did you have brothers or sisters?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, I had one of each, a younger sister and a younger

brother.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, one of the things that stands out is when we were going

to Willow Brook, that was in the early '60s, the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was

something that was, for Oak Ridge, was I remember us putting food in the car for

evacuation. They had evacuation routes, because apparently we were a primary

target, and all the kids at school, we got dog tags. One of the days they let school out

early and everybody was supposed to walk home by a prescribed route, so that if we

did evacuate, that's the buses wouldn't run, and that way they would know where we

were and how we were getting home.


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MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, so it was a pretty ... Well, for kids it was kind of exciting.

We had dog tags and we had air raid drills instead of fire drills. We'd go down to the

lower hall, sit down, and put our head between our knees and stuff like that.

MR. MCDANIEL: Kiss yourself goodbye basically.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Right, and then I remember while we were at Willow Brook,

that's when [John F.] Kennedy was assassinated. They let school out early-

MR. MCDANIEL: Did they?

MR. GOODPASTURE: And we walked home. I remember walking through some

people's yard and they had the TV on and you could hear the news talking about

Kennedy had been shot.

MR. MCDANIEL: Really, really? Man.

MR. GOODPASTURE: So those were some of the memories.

MR. MCDANIEL: I guess so. So by the time you got to high school, we were in the, the

country was in full-fledged hippie-dom and riots, and the Vietnam War was starting,

and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King was assassinated, so it

was a tumultuous time in our country. Was it that way here?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well as far as I, life just went on. I was in Boy Scouts and

involved at church with a teen group, just things were going on around us. You knew

about it by watching the news, but it never affected us or me personally that much,

except when I got to college my freshman year, the day they pulled the lottery. That

was a day that we all remembered. There was a couple of guys stayed in the dorm and

watched and wrote down everybody's number. There was one guy that he got pulled

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number one, and they said he packed up and left by the end of the day because he

figured he'd be drafted.


MR. GOODPASTURE: My number I can still remember, 107, so it didn't affect me.

MR. MCDANIEL: Really?


MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. So tell me, for people who don't know, tell me what the lottery

was for the service.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well the lottery was to be drafted into the Army. That's the way

they kept the numbers in the Army up. It wasn't a volunteer Army at the time. All the

boys when you turned 18, you signed up with the Selective Service and you had a

Selective Service card which you were supposed to have with you, and then when you

turned ... Well, when you turned 18, I believe it was 18 when you signed up, but they

had a draft once a year. They just pulled every date out of a big pot and put it on and

gave a number. I don't remember what number one was that year, but.

MR. MCDANIEL: So if you were born on a certain day, that's what they did, is they

pulled the numbers from-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, and it would give ... You'd get a, number one is, and

they'd pull it out, write the date down. Mine was 107. It was far down the list.

MR. MCDANIEL: It was far down the list. It probably wouldn't get to you.

MR. GOODPASTURE: No, because the war was beginning to wind down in ‘71, and

so it wasn't as bad.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure. Sure. So you ended up not serving in the military?

7

MR. GOODPASTURE: No.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: No, I did not. I went on to college and got my degree in

chemistry from David Lipscomb College which is now David Lipscomb University-

MR. MCDANIEL: University, right.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Or Lipscomb University in Nashville.

MR. MCDANIEL: Lipscomb University, yeah right. In Nashville. Why'd you go to

Lipscomb?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, it's a church school, and I kind of wanted to go that way.

It turned out to be a good decision.

MR. MCDANIEL: Was it, they're a Church of Christ?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Church of Christ, yes.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, were you Church of Christ, did you grow up-


MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Went to Highland View [Church of Christ] here in Oak Ridge

from the time we got here. Well, matter of fact, I don't remember it, but I believe we

went to the Highland View School where they met, and then they built the church down

where the building where it is now.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Right. And you were involved, like you said, you were

involved in Boy Scouts?

8

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, when I was at Willow Brook I had a good friend, and he

was a scout. He talked me into going, so I went with him. That was in December after

I'd turned 11. I stayed in it for the next 45 years.

MR. MCDANIEL: I was about to say, you're probably still in it, aren't you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well I finally dropped out a couple of years ago.

MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, although my dad who's 86, he's still working with the

troop here in Oak Ridge.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So what troop were you with?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, I started in 327, which met over across from Willow

Brook at Trinity Methodist, and I stayed there for a year and a half. Then Dad and a

bunch of other men from Highland View and New York Avenue Church of Christ, they

decided we wanted to start our own troop. So they got together and we started a troop,

troop 220. We lasted for 40 years I guess, something like that. We had a great time.

We did a lot of things.

MR. MCDANIEL: Well, tell me some of the things that you did, because I know a

couple or three years ago I interviewed your dad, Tom, right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, uh-huh.

MR. MCDANIEL: He talked a lot about the scouts.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We did a lot of, outdoors is where we stayed. We've hiked, at

the time you could hike the Smokies, Appalachian Trail in the Smokies. They

encouraged scout groups to do that, and I believe we did that about three different

times. We did a lot of backpacking, a lot of camping. We went to Philmont Scout

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Ranch in, let's see, I guess my senior year in high school after I graduated in 1971,

which is in New Mexico-

MR. MCDANIEL: New Mexico, that's what I was thinking.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We walked about 70 miles out there, spent a week and a half

out there. That was a great time. That was an adventure in itself.

MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?

MR. GOODPASTURE: But we did a lot of things here. My brother and I became eagle

scouts. We had a lot of brothers in the troop and most of them went on to become

eagle scouts, so we had quite a few eagles from the troop.

MR. MCDANIEL: Then, so after you got old enough, after you went to college and you

came back, you continued scouting, is that correct?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, when I came back, I was figuring on picking up with the

troop and being an assistant scout master in the troop. But that summer, the summer

before I graduated, I had worked at Buck Tom's, and while I was there, since I was

already 18, I was matter of fact 22, they said, "Why don't you go ahead and take the

wood badge course? It's a week long." So I did. You have a ticket that you work and

everything, but when we got out, they had started the Cub Scout pack, pack 220. So

they said why don't you just work with them? So Ray Smith was the cub master and I

started out with him.

MR. MCDANIEL: Is that at Highland View?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was at Highland View School. That's where we met. We

met up there, and oh goodness, we went on for quite a few years. Ray finally dropped

10

out and I became the cub master. We had a great time. We took the boys and did

everything.

MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, we did caving and hiking. We didn't stick around and do

much indoor stuff.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure. Can you do that kind of thing anymore hardly?

MR. GOODPASTURE: They've gotten pretty strict. For cub scouts, you can go caving

if it's a commercial cave. But back then-

MR. MCDANIEL: You'd find a hole on the ground, wouldn't you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: We had several caves that we'd go. We'd take them canoeing

and we'd go down the Clinch. That's moving water. That was one of our favorites. We

did do the little Tennessee until they dammed it up with Tellico. So that limited us

basically to the Clinch River. You're not supposed to do that with cub scouts anymore

either, because it's moving water.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Now is, I don't recall, your dad told me about, and I don't

know if this is when you were a scout or after you were a leader. Something about a

big canoe trip in Canada or something like that. What was-

MR. GOODPASTURE: I was, I think I may have still been in college. I missed that one,

but that was-

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, you did?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was a big summer trip that they went up and canoed in

the boundary waters of Canada. Yeah, for some reason I missed that one, but the

stories were, yeah, a very interesting trip. I hate that I missed it.

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MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. So Oak Ridge has a real history in Boy Scouting?


MR. MCDANIEL: I mean you know.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oak Ridge has several very strong troops, 129 was one of

them. It had been here for years, even before 220 was formed. They have a very

strong history of it, and very active. Then there's 224 which is very active. They do a lot

of stuff. they go out to the Colorado mountains and rock climb and stuff like that.


MR. GOODPASTURE: They're a very active troop.

MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh. There used to be a camp site on the west end of Oak

Ridge.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Camp Kromer.

MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about that.

MR. GOODPASTURE: I've been ... I guess it's where the city facilities are,

maintenance, or it's over there. They have some ball fields.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, back over there where the Central-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Central, yeah that's it.

MR. MCDANIEL: Central whatever the city building is.

MR. GOODPASTURE: I can't remember what they call it. It was up in the woods. We'd

have camporees and camp there. I remember having volunteering ... Well, our troop

sponsored a cub scout day that we went out and set up all kinds of stuff for all the cub

scouts in the area to come and that was a very ... We'd have camporees, that'd be

where all the troops in the Pellissippi district would show up. So we'd fill the woods with

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scouts and have great campfires, singing, and skits, and everything. That was a good

time.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Good. I'm going to make a real quick change on something.

Sit there.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Okay.

MR. MCDANIEL: So like you said, Boy Scouts and church was a big part of your life

growing up.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, we had a real strong youth group and we'd do

everything together. If we weren't scouting, we'd be doing something with the youth

group, which was, like I say, it was a strong youth group. We were very close. We still

are. We still stay in touch.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So what did you do other, I know you're busy with scouting

and church, but I mean you're a teenager, you did other stuff, you had fun. Where

would you all hang out? What would you do? What was life like for high school for

you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well I remember in high school the big thing to do was you

cruised between Shoney's and I forget what the other store on down there, the other

one, but you'd circle Shoney's and drive on down and come back. Shoney's had a

drive-in at that time, kind of like Sonic, on the back side.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, it was a full-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, you could pull in there, sit there for a while, order

something, then cruise on down. I wish I could remember the other restaurant that tied

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it in down there in front of what used to be the old Howard's, the other side of Hardee's

now.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay. All right. So there was something there on the corner?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, there was, and I can't remember what it was. But that's

one of the things I remember. Now when I talk to people that come into Oak Ridge,

folks that we run into, to find out how long they've been in Oak Ridge, if you run into

them you ask them, "Where was Krogers when you got here?" Because Krogers has

moved around so many places.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Sure, sure.

MR. GOODPASTURE: So you can figure it out, or "Do you remember the old A&P

[Atlantic & Pacific] down next to Applebee's?"

MR. MCDANIEL: Isn't that where ... Yeah. What was in where Staples is now?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was a Krogers.

MR. MCDANIEL: That was a Kroger. That's what I was thinking.

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was a Krogers at one time. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: I remember a grocery store being there. You asked them do they

remember the Federal Bakery, everybody-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh yeah, Federal Bakery, Downtown, McCrory's and the

Federal Bakery. Yeah, I remember. We used to go down there. That was one of the

things we'd go in and get a gingerbread boy at the Federal Bakery.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right. I just remember going and standing in front of it and smelling

it.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Or watching them make cakes, because they did that-

14

MR. MCDANIEL: Watching them make, in the window.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah. You could watch them make-

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, you could see them.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Cakes. That was a lot of fun.

MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Some of the other places down there were what?

Loveman’s?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah. It was on the corner. They also had the Sears on the

end...

MR. MCDANIEL: Where the new AMSE [American Museum of Science and Energy]

is. Yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, they put ... That was a Sears at one time, with a

Downtown Hardware down below.

MR. MCDANIEL: That's exactly right, where that lower level side parking area is.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Dad always said if you can't find it going into the other places,

you always go into Downtown Hardware because they'd have it.

MR. MCDANIEL: There used to be a Western Auto in a separate building right over

there to the side.


MR. MCDANIEL: Wasn't there?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Down there where O'Reilly's is. I thought that's where Western

Auto was.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I grew up in Kingston, so we came to Oak

Ridge. That was going to the big city for us.

15

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well now there was a DaWabbit, that was a drive-in. That was

behind where the Wendy's is now.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, it had a big neon rabbit and his ears would go back and

forth.


MR. GOODPASTURE: I've eaten there a couple of times.

MR. MCDANIEL: Now there also used to be a place called, was it the Brown Cow?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, now there was a Snow White restaurant. I don't

remember Brown Cow though. Snow White was down-

MR. MCDANIEL: I think the Brown Cow was about where Zaxby's is now.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh okay, all right. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: It was an ice cream place I think or something.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Okay, probably.

MR. MCDANIEL: Snow White was down about where-

MR. GOODPASTURE: It's across from the Federal Building down there.

MR. MCDANIEL: About where the, it was on the Turnpike, it was about where that

Subway is now, isn't it?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, there's a Subway on the corner.

MR. MCDANIEL: A drive-thru ... Yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: It was right behind it.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. So. So you just cruised around and if you went out on a date,

what would you all do?

16

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well if you didn't go there, there were places ... It was always

the drive-in. We went to the drive-in a number of times. I remember one of the favorites

was about this time of year at Halloween. They'd always have two or three scary

movies that you could go and sit and watch at the drive in.

MR. MCDANIEL: That was a good thing to take a date to, wasn't it?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh yeah.

MR. MCDANIEL: Because they'd get scared and cuddled up to you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, I've seen quite a few movies there.

MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. My goodness. So you graduated from Clinton High School-


MR. MCDANIEL: In ’72, did you say?

MR. GOODPASTURE: ‘71.

MR. MCDANIEL: ‘71. Then you went on to Lipscomb.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Lipscomb, mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: You said you got your degree in chemistry, is that correct?


MR. MCDANIEL: Were you always interested in science and chemistry?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes. Uh-huh. Yeah, my dad was a chemist and I started out in

physics, but then I noticed it was going to take an awful lot of math. I said, ah, let's go

with chemistry, so I shifted over to chemistry. I got my BS [Bachelors of Science] in

actually biochemistry is what it ended up being.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.

17

MR. GOODPASTURE: While I was toward the end of school, I had some people that

were preparing me to come back so I could stay in Oak Ridge. They'd made some,

introduced me to certain people and everything. So when I got back I was waiting for

my clearance, and well, my mom worked at Donovan School in Anderson County.

They'd lost their janitor.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: While I was waiting for my clearance to come through, the

principal asked would I be interested in being the janitor. So I was a janitor for a month

or two for her while she got a new one. One of the things she said, "I don't ever

remember having a janitor with a chemistry degree." But it was an elementary. I think it

went up through third grade, so it was a lot of fun.

MR. MCDANIEL: What school was that?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Donovan. It's closed now. It's out on Dutch Valley Road. Matter

of fact, it's a volunteer fire department now.


MR. GOODPASTURE: The building is, yeah.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay. All right.

MR. GOODPASTURE: But then I got my clearance and I started working down at

OSTI [Office of Science and Technical Information].

MR. MCDANIEL: Which is the, what's it stand for?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's the ... Oops, you got me. Office of Science and

Technical Information. It's DOE [Department of Energy]. If you ever were, the people

that are older will remember the films “A is for Atom,” the 16 millimeter films. That was

18

part of what that was. They had a big film library. We'd send out films to schools all

over the country, get them back in, clean them, prepare them, and send them out to

the next people that had ordered them. It's a big library down there. I worked there for

a couple of months, and then I got my interview and job at K-25.

MR. MCDANIEL: So I wonder if they still have that library or films?

MR. GOODPASTURE: I doubt it because-

MR. MCDANIEL: Wouldn't that be interesting if they did?

MR. GOODPASTURE: I doubt very many schools still have a 16 millimeter projector.

MR. MCDANIEL: Well that's true, but they might have them in the archives

somewhere.

MR. GOODPASTURE: It'd be interesting to find. I've been to OSTI a lot lately, and I

don't know that they've still got them.

MR. MCDANIEL: Ask them next time you go.

MR. GOODPASTURE: I may have to ask what happened to that.

MR. MCDANIEL: I'd like to ... I might like to do something with some of those. That

might be interesting.

MR. GOODPASTURE: It was a great library, I mean you know, archive.

MR. MCDANIEL: Have them digitized.


MR. MCDANIEL: Put them together-

MR. GOODPASTURE: I don't know if they ever did that or not.

MR. MCDANIEL: Huh. So you went to work at K-25?

19

MR. GOODPASTURE: I went to work out there January of 1977, and I went into gas

centrifuge. I went into materials chemistry group. We worked with the materials they

built the rotors out of, the centrifuge rotors.

MR. MCDANIEL: How long had the centrifuge program been started?

MR. GOODPASTURE: It started 1960.


MR. GOODPASTURE: They picked it back up because during the Manhattan Project

they had looked at centrifuge, and they decided the technology wasn't there for it to be

of any help. So then they’re looked at it in 1960 and they brought it to K-25. It started in

the old 1004-J Radiological Chemistry Lab. They converted it over and from there it

grew. If you go to K-25, the big white buildings, that's-

MR. MCDANIEL: The big tall building.

MR. GOODPASTURE: The tall white buildings. It just kept getting bigger and bigger.

But the time I got there, they had finished a lot of those and were building 1220.

MR. MCDANIEL: These were what, 60 foot?

MR. GOODPASTURE: They were roughly about 50 foot tall.

MR. MCDANIEL: 50 foot.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, 40, 50 foot tall.

MR. MCDANIEL: How big a round were they?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Roughly two feet.

MR. MCDANIEL: In diameter?

MR. GOODPASTURE: In diameter.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right.

20

MR. GOODPASTURE: The rotor was in a steel casing and it spun at a high rate of

speed.

MR. MCDANIEL: So the rotor would spin around is what-

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's right, and due to that centrifugal force, you'd have the

heavier U-238 would go to the outside wall, and the U-235 which is what we wanted,

that isotope, it would stay near the center-

MR. MCDANIEL: Center, yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: And so they were separated that way.

MR. MCDANIEL: Now, if I ask something I'm not supposed to ask, you tell me of

course.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh, I will.

MR. MCDANIEL: But it may just be my ignorance. How fast would those things spin?

MR. GOODPASTURE: All I can say is they've de-classified a lot of it, but that's one

that's still-

MR. MCDANIEL: But that's still-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Classified.



MR. MCDANIEL: Still classified.

MR. GOODPASTURE: But I can say real fast.

MR. MCDANIEL: Real fast.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Real fast, yeah.

21

MR. MCDANIEL: And they spun so fast that they had to be in some kind of case in

case they blew apart, didn't they?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, to spin that fast they had to be in a vacuum, so they were

in a steel casing.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that's right. Right.

MR. GOODPASTURE: It had a vacuum on it. Of course the gas was inside the rotor.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure.

MR. GOODPASTURE: So yeah, it spun at a high rate of speed and you'd pull it off.

MR. MCDANIEL: I know they were also going to, they were building a facility in

Portsmouth for that too, but-

MR. GOODPASTURE: They were building the plant. They had decided to put the plant

up there, but-

MR. MCDANIEL: But they pulled that project once the plant was built.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, but they had. They had a lot of the buildings and were

putting, as my understanding, they were putting machines in there. Of course there

were a number of companies building centrifuges, making the rotors, and one was

Boeing here in town. Then we were just research. We didn't build rotors on a

production scale. Then there was Air Research in Torrance or Los Angeles, so they

were out there. I believe it was Goodyear, Goodyear in Ohio.


MR. GOODPASTURE: I got to go up there one time, and into Ohio, back to Akron. I

visited with my great aunt and uncle who I lived with when I was born, I was born in

their home so-

22


MR. GOODPASTURE: I get to visit with them on company business.

MR. MCDANIEL: There you go. That works. Tell me about the whole centrifuge

project, where did it go and how did it end and all that kind of stuff.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, when I got in in 1977, we had 19 inch diameter rotors

and 24. Air Research was working on the 19 inch. We were, Union Carbide was doing

the 24 inch. They had built a building and had put them on and were testing them, long

range tests. At that point, that's just as I got in. They were making the decisions which

one to go with and they went with the 24 inch, the Union Carbide. So from then on, all

centrifuges were going to be 24 inches in diameter.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right. How long did the project last?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well in 1985, they were trying to make two decisions, whether

they're going to continue gaseous diffusion enrichment in the United States, and/or

they going to continue with gas centrifuge. Of course we were only interested in

centrifuge because that's what we were working on. We had all kinds of budgets where

they cut back the budget, 75%, 50%, 25%, but nobody really envisioned 0%, so in

June of 1985, they came over the PA and said that they were looking to shut down one

of the gaseous diffusion plants at that time.

MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh, because the other one was in Paducah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Paducah and Portsmouth.

MR. MCDANIEL: And Portsmouth, okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: So they came on the PA and announced that they were

shutting down K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. By the way, we were also shutting down

23

gas centrifuge all together. There won't be any more gas centrifuge. So it was kind of

like a tomb out there.

MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.

MR. GOODPASTURE: It was quiet. Everybody was going, "Well, now what do we

do?" We had moved on from Carbide. It was Lockheed Martin at the time. They

started, they created resumes. They started a resume school and everything, and they

were sending out resumes to everybody, all the companies, going out and visiting

companies with people and all. I got an interview at ORNL [Oak Ridge National

Laboratory] in the laboratories over there, and also an interview in environmental

compliance at K-25.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: So I took that one. They offered me the job. That was in 1986,

and I've been in environmental compliance since at K-25.



MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. So what is environmental compliance? Is that

cleanup?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, it moves into cleanup, but one of the things is any time

you have processes going on and stuff, a company, you've got chemicals and so on,

and there's a lot of governmental laws out there, environmental laws that you've got to

follow so that you don't get in trouble. Protection of the environment and the humans in

the area.

MR. MCDANIEL: So you just make sure everybody follows the laws?

24


MR. MCDANIEL: That's what you're responsible for.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Of course, then that moved into, after they shut everything

down, we went into environmental registration because back in the '40s there weren't

any environmental laws. They just did stuff that they shouldn't be doing.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. So in ‘85 they shut the centrifuge and gaseous

diffusion down at K-25?


MR. MCDANIEL: So start there. What happened after that? What happened out at the

K-25 site?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, our mission moved from processing uranium enrichment,

and we went into environmental restoration. As I said, there were lots of areas out

there that were contaminated, and so we started doing characterization. Where is the

contamination and what's it going to take to clean it up? So since the mid '80s that's

what we've been doing out there.

MR. MCDANIEL: So for the last 30 years that's what's been happening out there?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: It's still not done?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, we're getting pretty close.

MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. GOODPASTURE: Of course, as you know, all the buildings, all the major process

buildings are gone, and the majority of the buildings, too. We've only got, well 1037

was one, that's the barrier plant, which moved here in 1947, ‘48 timeframe. All the

25

barrier that went into the gaseous diffusion plant was made at K-25. That building is

being gutted right now, and it'll come down probably this year or next year.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Then the centrifuge buildings, they're on the schedule to come

down this year or next year.


MR. GOODPASTURE: To start, yeah. They're starting that demolition on the interior.

MR. MCDANIEL: What's the building that you're in?

MR. GOODPASTURE: I'm in 1007.

MR. MCDANIEL: It was an administration building, is that correct?

MR. GOODPASTURE: It was the computer building. That's where when they were

running the gaseous diffusion, we had big, the reel to reel computers, big machine

rooms down there. They kept up with the inventory of the uranium on site.


MR. GOODPASTURE: Now it's just a large office building. We've just moved

everybody in there. We're down to just a couple, well, two office buildings down there.

They're putting more trailers up because we're running out of building space. Those

will be the last ones to go.

MR. MCDANIEL: What's the building of, it's a fairly new building, it's that concrete

building with the funky looking windows that you can see from-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh, that's 1580 and it was built in the '80s.

MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was thinking.


26

MR. MCDANIEL: Is it an office building?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, it's an office building, yes.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.

MR. GOODPASTURE: It'll be there for a while, but it's supposedly in the way of the

new airport they're going to be putting out, so it'll come down as well.

MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? It'll come down?


MR. MCDANIEL: Talk about some of the big challenges for the cleanup of the K-25

site, the whole park.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well one of the things is when we shut down the gaseous

diffusion buildings, they generated their own heat from the process, and we found out

that when you shut them off, the heat goes away. All the fire lines would freeze in the

winter. Yeah, we had a couple of breaks, so we had to go to a dry system. That was

one. Then putting all these large buildings, K-33 was a 32 acre building and K-31 was

around 17 acres, so these were huge buildings. They just went into-

MR. MCDANIEL: Dormancy, yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Standby. They finally, they put them in standby, and then they

put them in shut down. So they were just sitting there. You tried to keep the leaks. K-

25 building was still standing. It had been really shut down since 1964. We were using

it for storage. We'd even used the vaults downstairs. We prepared them for storing

hazardous waste that was generated at the site, so those vaults were ... That building

was still used, but not for uranium enrichment.


27

MR. GOODPASTURE: Then we've got our burial grounds. We had buried stuff up

there that shouldn't have been buried up there. You know, it was beginning to show up

in the ground water, and so we've got ground water plumes that, they're not as bad as

a lot of other areas, but it's something we've got to deal with. We've got

trichloroethylene in some of them. That's part of the process we're working on now,

putting in ground waters and finding out exactly where the plumes are on the ground

water. Then there are plans to clean that up.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I can remember driving out Blair Road on the back side

and seeing big old 55 gallon drums just, I mean hundreds of them.

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was thousands-

MR. MCDANIEL: Thousands of them.

MR. GOODPASTURE: There was ... The valley of the drums. That was from cleaning

out, we had two ponds that they collected a lot of carbon, let's see, potassium

hydroxide was one of them. That was a medium that part of the process through

gaseous diffusion process, and so when it would get old, we'd take it and put it in those

ponds. One pond was all the acids and bases went into a neutralization pit, and then

they were put into the B-pond to settle out participants and everything.


MR. GOODPASTURE: They were polluted.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right, sure.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We'd clean those up. That's what was in that valley of the

drums.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right.

28

MR. GOODPASTURE: We finally got those taken care of and shipped off-site. They're

buried somewhere.

MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was about to say. They went off some place to be

buried, right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's correct, probably Nevada or something like that.

MR. MCDANIEL: Probably. Yeah, yeah. One of those big underground things that they

build out there probably.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Right.

MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, you know the U, it came down.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Right.

MR. MCDANIEL: It was a huge, huge project.

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was. It started-

MR. MCDANIEL: Because you had all that stuff in it that you had to get out, right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, there was still uranium in the process. Of course you

had a lot of asbestos that had to come off. The entire building was covered with

asbestos. The outside covering was trans-side, which was a-

MR. MCDANIEL: Asbestos?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Asbestos containing siding, so all of that had to be pulled off by

asbestos workers. Then all the building inside, there were hundreds of miles of piping

that had to be, you had to decide where the contamination was and everything.

Everything had to be handled because it still had uranium in it.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure, and other stuff like technetium, isn't that right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, technetium came from-

29

MR. MCDANIEL: Technetium.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, technetium 99. It was one of the side products from

Hanford for making plutonium. We would bring the uranium back where they made the

plutonium out there and try to pull off, there was still U-235 in those.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Along with it came the other side products, neptunium and stuff

like that. They would end up on the lower end of the U, which we had a lot of

technetium and we were having a deal with that because it's in the ground there and

since the building is gone, we're digging all that dirt up and replacing it with clean dirt.


MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, since the footprint is going to be part of the museum

that's out there. It was saved, the footprint, as part of the memorandum of agreement

that it would be delineated. Here's how big the building was and here's where it set, for

history.

MR. MCDANIEL: You say you're digging up the dirt, how far down do you have to go?

MR. GOODPASTURE: I'm not sure. It's-

MR. MCDANIEL: A few feet?

MR. GOODPASTURE: A lot of sampling, yeah it would be a couple of feet probably.

MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh, yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: That will be removed. It's being removed and replaced with

clean dirt. That's being drummed up and sent off-site as well.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. And also in the U, you had what were the big-

MR. GOODPASTURE: The converters?

30

MR. MCDANIEL: The converters, there you go.

MR. GOODPASTURE: There were close to 3000 converters, and that's where the

enrichment took place. The uranium, the UF-6 uranium hexafluoride, your uranium ore,

through a process that where it ended up being uranium hexafluoride and at the

temperatures we operated, a little over 100 degrees, it was a gas and it would move

from converter to converter through the barrier. The barrier was a very special. It's still

classified. We can tell you that's it's made of nickel and that's about it. But it was full of

holes. The way it was made, it was full of holes where-

MR. MCDANIEL: As Bill Wilcox says, "200 million holes," or something like that.

MR. GOODPASTURE: About the size of your thumb nail, there would be over a billion

holes. They had to be precise. They were all the same size because if they were too

big, all the gas would pass through and there's no separation. If they were too small,

there would be no separation. So it was an interesting process. It took over 3000 of

those converters with the gas running through it for it to reach weapons grade material

on the far end of the building.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. It was a constant thing, because I asked a question from

somebody once. I said, "Well, how long would it take to get from where you started to

where you had weapons grade?" They really didn't know because they said it was a

constant thing.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah. You had a feed point and you put it in. That's where you

fed the-

MR. MCDANIEL: And the feed point was kind of in the middle of the cascade.

31

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, it was really toward the end because you have, let's see,

U-235 is only .7%.

MR. MCDANIEL: That's true.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Of the whole thing, and so it's down on the lower end. As it

goes around the building it gets up to 95%. U-235, and the tails, which is mostly U-238

with the U-235 removed. It's on the lower end, and so that's separation. Once you put

it in, you just continuously fed it, and as it came around you took it out at the product

removal, put it in cylinders and sent it off for it to be processed into metal.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay. All right.

MR. GOODPASTURE: The tails came off and we'd just put those in cylinders and had-

MR. MCDANIEL: Stored them?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh yeah, we had cylinders, thousands of cylinders on site.

MR. MCDANIEL: How big were those cylinders?

MR. GOODPASTURE: 14 ton, some of them, the larger ones. Yeah, they were huge.

They were pretty good size.

MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We had special equipment. One of them was straddle buggy,

you could pull up over them, and it was adapted from what I've been told, from the

lumber company where they would move big trees. So we would, ours it was a four

wheel chain driven vehicle that would pull up, straddle it, reach down, pick it up, and

move it to wherever we needed to move it.

MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.

32

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's one of the things I wish we had. There used to be a sign

down by 1423 that said, "Warning, straddle buggies in the area."


MR. GOODPASTURE: Straddle buggy area, because you didn't want to get run over

by a straddle buggy.

MR. MCDANIEL: Well I guess not. I guess not. My goodness. In its heyday, how many

people worked out at K-25?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, when they were building the building, there were 25,000

construction workers. One of the things that I found out later was, there were 11,000

operators. As the building came online, they belonged to Union Carbide, or well, the

CC and C [Carbide Carbon and Chemical], the predecessor to Union Carbide. So you

had 25,000 people building the building and 11,000 people that were there to operate

the building as it came online.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure.

MR. GOODPASTURE: So there was actually 36,000 people at K-25 in the late '40s.

MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Then after that of course, the numbers dropped off. The

construction workers left and we were down in just a couple of thousand. But then

when I got there in ‘77 they had started on what they call the sip cup, it was the

cascade improvement program, cascade update program. We-

MR. MCDANIEL: That was a billion dollar project back then?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, it was.

MR. MCDANIEL: It was Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth, wasn't it?

33

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's right, and at K-25 we had close to 7000 people working

there at that point.

MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was thinking. I was thinking it was about 7000 as the

hey day.

MR. GOODPASTURE: You got all the big parking lots out there and there's just a few

cars in them and everything. You go, "Why all these big parking lots?" Well back then

those parking lots were full and overflowing. If you got there late, you walked a long

way just to get to the plant. Then inside the plant you might have another quarter of a

mile to hike, walk to where you were working inside the fence.

MR. MCDANIEL: Now in that time, was it kind of like a little community? I mean did

you have cafeterias and did you have any kind of stores? What was out there at the

time?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, we had cafeterias during that point, and there were

canteens in some of the larger buildings like 1401, the maintenance building, it had a

canteen where you'd go and get burgers and sandwiches and stuff.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Those were scattered around the plant, but the main cafeteria

was down in the administration area. Of course we had medical. Everybody received

a, you got your annual physical. That was a full physical. A lot of us didn't go to our-

MR. MCDANIEL: Regular doctor.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Regular doctor, because we got it all there. I remember getting

swimmer's ear and going over there and they gave me medicine for my swimmer's ear.


34

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah.

MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember who the doctor was that you used to see out

there?

MR. GOODPASTURE: One of them was Dr. Tarwater. That was a female doctor. But

one of the older ones was Dr. Thomas. He'd been there, he lived in Clinton. I

remember when he retired. He was like a fixture there, so-

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Sure, sure.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We had doctors. We had at least three doctors on payroll when

I was there at one time. Then a lot of nurses and everything. They did a lot of the lab

work there.

MR. MCDANIEL: There, mm-hmm (affirmative).

MR. GOODPASTURE: In the dispensary.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Wow.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Hearing tests, eye tests, blood tests. It was like going to your

regular doctor, it was full physical.

MR. MCDANIEL: Did they do a lot of testing as far as exposure and things such as

that for any kind of chemicals or radiation? I mean was that just part of it?

MR. GOODPASTURE: One of the things was if you worked in certain areas they

would keep an eye on you a little closer. Like on my file, it had a red T because I

worked in T lab, 1004-T. That's where we made centrifuges. We would work with the

materials and all, and so mine had a T on it. Others would have other things. It's

according to where they worked. It's if you were in one of the administration buildings it

wasn't a big deal, but if you worked over in the process, they kept up with you.

35

MR. MCDANIEL: Did you all have to wear the little things like they have to wear at Y-

12?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Dosimeters.

MR. MCDANIEL: Dosimeters, yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yeah, we wore those. Now, now that we're shut down and all

that's gone, we don't have to wear dosimeters anymore except in one or two places at

K-25.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.

MR. GOODPASTURE: They're still required at Y-12 and ORNL and places.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly, exactly.

MR. GOODPASTURE: But they had programs. I mean we had hearing, protection of

hearing. If you went in areas with airborne possible, you'd wear your respirator. We

had respirators. Everybody was dressed out if you went into certain areas so that it'd

protect you from the hazards in those areas.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly. So what has happened other than the, what'd

you call it, reclamation of the site, has there been other things that are happening

maybe outside people that have come in that have built facilities or used some of the

older facilities, things such as that?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes. That was one of the things after we shut down, and then

they started the re-industrialization of the site. We had all these buildings, particularly

K-1401 which was a maintenance building. It was full of all kinds of, we could build

anything there. If you wanted it, we could do it, and we did. We did a lot of work for

others outside the government if they wanted it, but a lot of government work. Then

36

they started leasing out and CROET came around, that is the Community Reuse

Organization of East Tennessee.

MR. MCDANIEL: Reuse organization. Yeah, sure.

MR. GOODPASTURE: They began working with DOE.

MR. MCDANIEL: They were really a developer for commercial and industrial-

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's right.

MR. MCDANIEL: To kind of re-industrialize that park.

MR. GOODPASTURE: The first thing we did was start, we had all these nice buildings

out there with full facilities, and so people came in. We had quite a few leases on site

that in the 1401 building, 1035, 1036. We had some good open areas that they could

come in and develop on their own.

MR. MCDANIEL: Big, huge open areas, right?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, uh-huh.

MR. MCDANIEL: So has that continued?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, as we've torn down buildings we've had to move those

leases off site. One of the ones is 1006 was a nice laboratory building, and the people

that worked there, they formed their own company, Materials and Chemistry

Laboratory. They've been out there ever since and using the 1006 building. It has,

they're getting ready to move, because we're going to have to take that building down,

so they're short term right now. But they've been a big presence on site.

MR. MCDANIEL: Now what has that, before you get to K-25, it seems like there's a

turnoff there and there's some newer buildings. Was that part of the original site?

MR. GOODPASTURE: The Horizon Center?

37

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, the Horizon Center.

MR. GOODPASTURE: The Horizon Center was started by DOE as a re-

industrialization area as well, an industrial park. They set it up, I guess it was in

combination with CROET. There's a couple of buildings in there, I think Graphite

Fibers moved in there.

MR. MCDANIEL: In that, the new company for-

MR. GOODPASTURE: For the bike parts?

MR. MCDANIEL: The bike guy. Yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: I can't remember his, Lundy or something like that.

MR. MCDANIEL: I can't remember either.

MR. GOODPASTURE: I can't remember his name, but yeah. He's built a place back in

there where he's using the Graphite Fibers. That's good because ORNL has been a

lot, done a lot of-

MR. MCDANIEL: Work for them-

MR. GOODPASTURE: Exploratory work and developing graphite fibers. Mm-hmm

(affirmative).

MR. MCDANIEL: I know at Y-12 and ORNL there was a, especially I think in the ‘70s

and ‘80s is when technology transfer came to be as far as some technology that was

developed by the plant was able to be licensed by outside companies. Did the same

thing happen at K-25?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well K-25 of course, when it was built, there was a lot of

ingenuity went into that building. A lot of things had to be developed. Once the war was

over they could share it, and pumps, probably the best groups that benefits most was

38

the petroleum because we developed pipes. One of the things was this leak check

system. Before, pipes were, it was a gross leak check, but our system, the gaseous

diffusion system worked under a vacuum. There could be no holes, no pinholes,

nothing. So they developed a leak check system that used helium that could detect the

tiniest of pinholes. That helped the industry. It's used throughout other industries now

too. Of course, we had hundreds of miles of piping. It all had to be vacuum tight like

your vacuum bottle, things like that.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. I remember when I first started producing my very first

Oak Ridge documentary. One of the first people that I ever interviewed was Colleen

Black.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Colleen Black, she was-

MR. MCDANIEL: I'd say, "Well what did you do out there?" And she said, "Well, it's

been 60 years but I guess I can tell you." She said, "I checked pipes for leaks."

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's exactly what it was, talking with Joe Dykstra he had a

couple of teams that he was over. He said they used, for the leak check girls, they

used 18 to 21 year old girls. They were tall, slim, and they could get in amongst the

piping very easily he said.


MR. GOODPASTURE: They'd climb up in there with a hose that had helium and they

would put it around all the well joints. The guys back reading the indicators would say,

"Hey, you got a leak right there." They'd mark it.


MR. GOODPASTURE: Then the welders had to go up in there and-

39

MR. MCDANIEL: And fix it.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Fix those little leaks, yeah.

MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.

MR. GOODPASTURE: They had quite a few teams of young girls that would do that.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.

MR. GOODPASTURE: I wish we had a picture of them.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, I bet.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We've got pictures of the leak detect information and the

equipment. While we were looking for artifacts, I put out the word this, and sent out

pictures to everybody. This is what I'd like to find one, but by then those were old and

outdated. They'd got rid of all of them. We had better equipment up to that point.

MR. MCDANIEL: So let me ask you a question. You may know the answer. You may

not know the answer. How much ... I have two questions and then I want to talk about

the museum and the work you've done with that. One is, how much longer do you think

it's going to take for you to finish your job in reclamation at the K-25 site?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, when UCOR [URS/CH2M Oak Ridge] took over, they

had visions. They had the, one of them was 2016 which we have passed. We got that

vision, having so many buildings down and certain things. Now we're in 2020. They

plan on having all of the buildings on the ground by 2020. Of course, they'll be some,

we need to come back and they'll still be some removing of the slabs.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly.

40

MR. GOODPASTURE: Because we got to make sure that there's no contamination

under the slabs, so that when the site is eventually vacated, there's no contamination

that-

MR. MCDANIEL: Somebody could walk on there and-

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's right, or if I come in and I'm going to put in me a new big

concrete pad for my building, I won't get into anything that's contaminated.

MR. MCDANIEL: So you think five to 10 years probably?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Definitely yes.

MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. You'll be at retirement age by then won't you?

MR. GOODPASTURE: I'm looking forward

MR. MCDANIEL: You're about-

MR. GOODPASTURE: I'm looking forward to 2020.



MR. MCDANIEL: So let's talk, let's finish up. Let's talk a little bit about the museum

that's going to be built out there. Tell me how that came about and what the plans are

and where things are right now in 2018.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well that started all the way back 2002 or better when they

started looking at getting an MOA, a memorandum of agreement, between the state

and the DOE for saving the historic preservation of the K-25 site. Bill Wilcox of course

was heading this up. One of the things that he started was his PKP group, which is

Partnership for K-25 Preservation. I believe you were on that team.

MR. MCDANIEL: I was.

41

MR. GOODPASTURE: We met for, gosh, seems like ten years every Monday night

discussing how to save part of the K-25. Of course Bill was, I guess he worked as hard

as Ed as he did when he worked at K-25.

MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure he did.

MR. GOODPASTURE: He was always talking to the politicians and DOE, and then

with us, getting all the information we needed. As that progressed, we finally got the

memorandum of agreement with DOE that we would save something. That

progressed. We went through two or three of those and finally came up with a final

plan that we would put a history center out there. We didn't get to save part of the

building.

MR. MCDANIEL: Which he really wanted to save just one little slice of it.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We went through several iterations where we saved the north

end, which was, K-25 building was actually 54 buildings, and saving the north end

would've saved three of them. So you would have seen the magnitude of the building

and then got to walk through and see all of the equipment in place. Which, whenever

we took visitors in there, museum people and state people and so on, they'd always

come out and go, "Wow." That's what Bill called “the wow factor”. Everybody thought,

"We've got to save this." But through the years the building was falling in because it

was so old. They would say if it rained outside, three days later it'd still be raining as

the water percolated through the building.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.

42

MR. GOODPASTURE: That caused deterioration. Then of course, we had the

contamination, the radiation, radioactive contamination of the equipment, so that kind

of all eventually went away. We said we would save the footprint.

MR. MCDANIEL: The footprint of the U.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Delineate the footprint because it's 44 acres under one roof. It

was a huge building, the largest in the world when it was built, under one roof. So

we're going to save that and then we're putting up a history center which hopefully will

open next year, 2019. It's under way right now. We're working with the museum

people. The final MOA for ETTP [East Tennessee Technology Park] historic

preservation said that they would get a museum people, professionals, architects;

people that would build a museum. That's all in place. They're doing their job right now.

We're going to have the history center. They put the history center in the old fire hall,

well the fire hall, the Oak Ridge ... It was the fire hall for the plant.

MR. MCDANIEL: And then Oak Ridge city took over?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That was part of the re-industrialization is they took that and

they provide our fire protection out there now.

MR. MCDANIEL: So on the second floor-

MR. GOODPASTURE: On the second floor.

MR. MCDANIEL: On the upstairs of that fire hall is where the history center is going to

be, is that correct?

MR. GOODPASTURE: That's correct. That's where classification and part of the fire

people were, and security. They cleared out and they're putting that in there now. That

should be finished, like I say, next year.

43

MR. MCDANIEL: How many square feet is that?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh goodness. 2700. I'm not sure.

MR. MCDANIEL: It's not huge, but it's-

MR. GOODPASTURE: No, but the way they've got it laid out, it is a bunch of stuff in

there and a lot of information. We've got some nice artifacts that we've saved. Large

artifacts as well as small ones that you'll wander around among and they'll explain

what they were used for and how everything fit together for the history of the K-25 site.

MR. MCDANIEL: You know what we ought to do is we ought to, now that they've got

hologram technology so good that you can create from film, we ought to have a

hologram of Bill Wilcox telling the story.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Telling the story.

MR. MCDANIEL: Because I've got it on film. I mean I've got all his, I've done hours

and hours of interviews with him, and other people has too.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We've got a fellow up at DOE that he's graphics. He has rebuilt

the K-25 building and we have a video tour.


MR. GOODPASTURE: That you can go through. Matter of fact, it's on our Virtual

Museum. I think that started in 2015 when they started the park. They kicked it off. You

can go to K-25 Virtual Museum and go on and learn the history of K-25 and take the

tour.

MR. MCDANIEL: And do a walkthrough of the building.

44

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes. John Shoemaker tells you what you're looking at. He was

one of the process people for gaseous diffusion. He knew a lot about it. He gives you a

walkthrough of that building.


MR. GOODPASTURE: Mm-hmm (affirmative), and it's very well done. I think it was

David Brown that did that. He did a fantastic job of depicting everything in there. You

walk through the floors, climb the steps up onto the top floors. Then come back down.

You go back out in the courtyard and so on. It's very well done.

MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. So it's an animation-


MR. MCDANIEL: It's not like the old, where they went into the building and shot 360

stuff.

MR. GOODPASTURE: No, we have a lot ... There will be a lot of the photographs of

the interior the building there. It turned out we did do that, I-Pics 360, but a lot of those

got shot down by classification.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, I would imagine.

MR. GOODPASTURE: A lot of that is still, it's not classified, but it's what we call export

controlled. It has to do with nuclear proliferation. And so because of that we can't show

some of the things, because we don't want everybody to know, or at least specific

people how it actually looked and worked together.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly. That has been the case a lot in Oak Ridge

history, was once something was done, they released information about it that they

probably wasn't the best idea to do. Because-

45

MR. GOODPASTURE: Sometimes people higher up would speak out of turn and then

they'd have to declassify it. It shouldn't have been. What got me was when they shut

down the centrifuge, up to that point everything you handled, everything you said was

secret. You couldn't talk on the phone about it. You had to have conversations in

special places and so on. But then afterwards they started declassifying it, and I mean

there were things that suddenly one day you couldn't say it, and the next day

everybody… It took a little bit to get used to that.

MR. MCDANIEL: I bet, I bet.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Now you have to know what's still classified and what you can

talk about, so that's, we've run in-

MR. MCDANIEL: There's still quite a few things that are classified.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, there are, and we've run into that with some of our old

histories.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I understand.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Where people were talking and whoever was supposed to be

paying attention to that wasn't aware of what they were ... Oh he said something

maybe he shouldn't have said.

MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Exactly.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We've had to edit some of that.

MR. MCDANIEL: A lot of times it's, a lot of it is at the discretion of the reviewer too

sometimes.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We've run into a little bit of that. One person will say no, like

the export control. Our people didn't see anything wrong with it at K-25, but then we

46

have, DOE has an export control expert, and they said, "We need to be more careful

with this."

MR. MCDANIEL: Now, do you do oral histories too?

MR. GOODPASTURE: We did do those. We did over 60 oral histories for the K-25

site. That included people that lived in Wheat, the community that was moved so they

could put K-25 in that site.

MR. MCDANIEL: And those are now a part of the collection of COROH [Center for

Oak Ridge Oral History].

MR. GOODPASTURE: Yes, they are-

MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, they are.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Those are on the Virtual Museum. You can go on and they

have the picture of them. It tells what they were part of. You just click on that and you

can see their-

MR. MCDANIEL: Their interviews.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Their interviews.

MR. MCDANIEL: And a lot of those people are gone now.


MR. MCDANIEL: A lot of them. That was at least 15 years ago.

MR. GOODPASTURE: We did ours, I think, in 2006. Some of those were.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yep, it was spring of 2006.


MR. MCDANIEL: So 12 years ago.

47

MR. GOODPASTURE: But yes, I'd go back and look through there. There's a lot of

those people missing now.

MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that is true. All right, so that's about your work and your life in

Oak Ridge except you didn't tell me if you ever got married.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Oh yeah.

MR. MCDANIEL: And where did you meet your wife?

MR. GOODPASTURE: Well, I got married in college, just at my last quarter of school.

She was from West Virginia. We had two boys, Clint and Clay. Then we've been

married 17 years and we got a divorce. But then six years later I met this other lady

from out at work, and we've been married now 21 years. She had three kids, so

between the five of them we now have 14 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.


MR. GOODPASTURE: So we've been busy.

MR. MCDANIEL: I bet, I bet. Well my goodness. Well, Steve, thank you. Thank you for

coming and talking to me about this. I appreciate it. It was great.

MR. GOODPASTURE: Thanks for asking me.

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.

[End of Interview]

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Documents

coroh.oakridgetn.govcoroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/Transcripts_and_photos/… · Web viewORAL HISTORY OF STEVE GOODPASTURE. Interviewed by Keith McDaniel. October 20, 2018 MR