Interview with Bruce Lee Wilhelm, June 22, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Bruce Wilhelm June 22, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Charlie Deitrich © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Bruce Wilhelm June 22, 2005 Conducted by Charlie Deitrich Table of Contents Introduction: born and raised Akron, OH ( 1933), family background, education, work for Firestone accounting department ( ca. 1949- 1951) 1 Recollections of World War II 5 Attends University of Akron and Mount Union College ( 1951), graduates from University of Arizona ( geological engineering) 6 Married ( 1957), goes to work for Duval Corp. ( open pit mining) in Exploration Department 7 Discusses details of mining operations and different aspects of his work 9 Accepts employment in Toronto, Canada before coming to Nevada 12 Hired as tunnel engineer with REECo at NTS ( 1968), first impressions of Las Vegas and the NTS 13 Recollections of Mike Barr ( administrative assistant to Area 12 department manager) 14 Describes work as tunnel engineer 16 Recollections of Larry Skousen ( Area 12 tunnel superintendent) 18 Knowledge of atmospheric testing prior to coming to NTS 20 Describes work for REECo at the NTS ( 1968- 1993) 21 Effects of work on family life, talks about children 22 Details preparation for a typical event at the NTS 24 Describes various positions held and jobs performed for the NTS 26 Discussion of earlier military service: USMC ( 1953) 32 Experience during Baneberry ( 1970) 33 Discusses various experiments performed at the NTS ( nose cone, submarine, Russian and American tanks) 35 Evolution of safety precautions at the NTS 36 Protesters at the NTS 37 Camaraderie among NTS workers, pranksters, civic involvement ( construction of Boys and Girls Club in Las Vegas) 38 End of testing ( 1992), sense of participation in Cold War, retirement ( 1993) and retirees’ monthly breakfasts 42 Recollections of Rocky Hardcastle ( construction miner) 43 Memories of Manuel Frescas and Henry ( Hank) Peluaga ( tunnel walkers) 44 Health problems and safety precautions in the mining industry 45 Recollections of Robert Banangas and Clawson W. Ruth ( tunnel walkers) 47 Assignment to Materials Department, Yucca Mountain ( ca. 1992- 1993), talks about viability of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository 48 Conclusion: cultural and geographical diversity of NTS miners 50 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Bruce Wilhelm June 22, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Charlie Deitrich [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Charlie Deitrich: OK, and we’re recording. So if you could say your full name, date of birth, and place of birth. Bruce Wilhelm: Bruce Lee Wilhelm. September 13, 1933. Akron, Ohio. Were you raised in Akron? I was raised in Akron, yes. I was eighteen years old before I found out that fresh air didn’t smell like vulcanizing rubber. Akron’s a fairly small town, right? It’s not as large as this town now, but this town was smaller than Akron when I first moved here, but other than that, it’s– They don’t manufacture automotive tires there anymore. When did they stop doing that, do you know? Well, it was an attrition process. You know it was the rubber capital of the world and so forth, and in proximity to Detroit for automobiles and so forth. But little by little, they went to research and development. But it still is the trucking capital of the world. That’s where all their headquarters are, although they don’t have quite the freight. They had a lot of small industries like the Pflueger rod and reels for Enterprise Manufacturing Company. Is that rod and reel like fishing? Yes. Fishing gear, the Pflueger Company, Pflueger brand, which was Enterprise Manufacturing. Can you tell me your parents’ names? My father’s name was Ellard Lee Wilhelm and he was from Alliance, Ohio. And my mother’s, her name was Thelma Catherine Vint, and she was from West Virginia. She was born in a UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 lumber camp called Wheeler which didn’t exist when she grew up. In fact, all of her siblings were born in lumber camps. But my grandfather, although he was an arch Democrat, did not believe in trade unions, and so he would always be one step ahead of the trade unions as they went in and unionized these lumber camps. So all the siblings were born in a different lumber camp, and when they grew up they had trouble proving citizenship with no birth certificate. I’ll bet. So it sounds like a lot of your family has just been from Ohio, right? Yes. My mother’s from West Virginia. What did your dad do for a living? He worked for himself. He was a notary public. He sold real estate. Insurance. What he said he did for a living was anything anybody else was too dumb to do for theirselves. I like that. Brothers and sisters? I have a half- brother, and I have a half- sister, deceased. Did you guys all grow up together? Not really, no. No. So tell me about growing up in Akron. It was uneventful. I went to grade school and high school there. The high school no longer exists. It was the only high school in the state that required Speech as a graduation requirement because Lewis C. Turner was the principal and he was also international president of the Toastmasters. And it was in a very poor area. You know we didn’t even have a yearbook. Was Akron as a whole fairly poor, or was it, you know, solidly middle class—? No, it had all sorts of areas, you know, middle class, lower class, and upper class, and so forth. But where I was primarily raised was midway between the Firestone plants and the Goodrich plants, and a little closer to the Goodrich plants. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Was your family Cleveland Browns fans or—? Like what’s Akron closer to, Cincinnati or—? Cleveland. About forty- five miles from Cleveland. Cleveland Indians fans, the men in the family. But no Browns? I only ask because I’m a Browns fan. [ 00: 05: 00] A little bit. Little bit. Brown was the coach of the Massillon High School football team, which was the football team in Ohio, Massillon. That was Paul Brown that was coach, right? Yes, he was the— Yeah, he was a pretty good coach, that Paul Brown. Yes, but he coached high school. I didn’t know that. And then, of course, Jim Thorpe, the Indian athlete, he and some of his cohorts, they played for the Canton Bulldogs, and also for Canton McKinley High School at the same time. OK. Did you have any hobbies or activities when you were a kid? Play sports or anything like that? No, not in particular, no. Bicycles and kites and, you know. Sure. That’s what you did for fun? Yeah, you know, just normal. You play in the dirt, you know. You play “ kick the can.” I remember “ kick the can.” We would steal ice off the ice truck, and the ice man ran right at us. And I found out years later that he put a block of ice out there for the kids to steal ice off of. And he would just go through the [ motions]— Pretend like he was— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 Because I watched him with the little kids, you know, and then they were stealing ice like I had, and then he ran and he’d get back and he’d be laughing when he— That’s funny. It was a sport with him. High school. Did you have any sense of like what you wanted to be when you grow up, in high school, if you wanted, you know, did you have any kind of goals? No. No. I just went to high school. I started working at Firestone when I was sixteen. Is that right? Yeah. And I worked there till I was eighteen. How was that? It was employment. But I worked in their Accounting Department doing mark sensing using electrographic lead. Instead of punching holes in IBM cards, you’d use electrographic lead and these brushes would come down in a machine and read these. When I was sixteen, I was responsible for the inventory for all the Firestone antique automobile tires, where they were and what they were and how many there were. That sounds pretty fun. Well, that was just one little minor thing. Usually it was invoices that you were working on. Was there any like, you know, a big kind of historical event that happened when you were a kid that kind of sticks out to you? Well, I saw an American dirigible go overhead more than once. And I saw a German zeppelin go over once. You’re kidding? That’s where the dirigibles were manufactured, and later on the blimps. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 Do you have any recollection of World War II? Oh, yes. Mostly the radio. Is that where you got most of the information? Yes, listening to all the news broadcasts. Amazing. Just as somebody that, you know, that’s so interesting to me, what do you recall about it? Like what was your impression at the time of it? Well, you felt like you were threatened, you know. We were continuously threatened. And everything was rationed. You know, you had a little round coupon, I don’t know what the composition of it was, it wasn’t cardboard but if you went to buy meat, you had to have those to accompany your money and so forth. Right. Right. Yes, [ the] same as rationing. They didn’t manufacture automobiles. Everything was just directed towards the war effort. It must’ve been a very kind of unifying time, you know, everybody kind of felt like they were on the same team. It’s the only thing that took us out of the Depression. Yeah. That’s true. Because the government policies weren’t, you know. So you graduated in ’ 51. Fifty- one. Yeah. And at that point, are you going to go to college? Do you have a sense of, you know, what’s next? Well, I went for less than a semester at the University of Akron and got discouraged, so I just quit. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 You went right out of high school to the University of Akron? What discouraged you about it? Well, when I matriculated, they signed me up for courses that were advanced that I should’ve had the preliminary courses and things like this, you know. It was just…. But then in the [ 00: 10: 00] following year after I’d graduated from high school, I started attending Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, which it was a much smaller school. How far from Akron was that? Oh, Alliance is about twenty- eight miles from Akron. That’s not too bad. Did you keep living in Akron, or did you move to Alliance? Well, I lived in Alliance during the week, you know, and I’d go home on the weekends. OK. And this time around, the college experience was better? Yeah. I attended there for a year, and then when I came out of the service, I attended for a half- year plus a summer, and then I transferred to the University of Arizona. Did you have a major? Did you have a—? I graduated from the University of Arizona with a baccalaureate in geological engineering. OK. What led you to the University of Arizona? Climate. Climate and just, you know, just “ ants in the pants,” wanting to go someplace, I guess. But I mean was there— had you ever been to Arizona prior to that? Was it—? No, I wanted to see Arizona. When I got there, it was 103 degrees and I thought I was driving into Hell. I was going to say, what about the desert attracted you? Or did you not know before you got there? Well, I sort of knew, but you had to experience it to really— But it’s a dry heat. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 It’s a dry heat, yeah. But Tucson has a more moderate climate than Las Vegas. It’s a little higher and it doesn’t get quite as hot as– Phoenix has a miserable climate. Similar to Vegas, right? Worse. They have a lot of irrigation along there and so you get the humidity and the smog and everything else there. That’s not good. So overall, your college experience at Arizona was good? Well, it was a college experience. Yeah. But did you make friends that you kept contact with? I mean— Oh, somewhat. Not, you know. Were you the type of student that was really kind of dedicated to your studies, or were you—? Well, the curriculum kept you rather busy, so— And it interested you, I’m assuming. Yeah, it was interesting. Most geologists are in shoe stores selling shoes but that’s— Right along with the historians, right? Yeah. So you graduate. What comes next? Well, I had worked a little bit in various places while I was going to school. I was married in 1957 and after I went to work for Duval Corporation south of Tucson, working in an open- pit mine. They had three ore bodies. They had two ore bodies when I went to work for them, but eventually they had a third which was much larger. There was Esperanza, which means “ hope” in Spanish, the West Esperanza, and then there was a Sierrita, and Serrieta was the much larger one. [ Esperanza and West Esperanza were discovered by Harrison A. Schmitt, the father of the astronaut, moon walker and later U. S. Senator.] UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 And “ ore body,” just as a layman, can you explain what an ore body is? Well, it’s when you have values, you know, in the ground for a certain distance, and so when you explore you drill down holes and you get so much copper in this— these were primarily copper and molybdenum products. Molybdenum was a secondary, but it was an important item, which they use in steel alloys. A lot of it went to Japan. Sometimes it would go to Holland and places like that. What led you into geology? Well, when I went to Mount Union College, I had a course in geography from a fellow named William Abbott Rice. And you would think it would be sort of a dry subject, but he made it very interesting. He was a geologist, a petroleum geologist primarily. And so I just, like throwing darts at a board, I thought well, I’ll just try that. Geological engineering, that sounds good, you know. And I was mistakenly signed up for metallurgical engineering, which I should’ve stayed [ 00: 15: 00] with because that would’ve been more prosperous, you know, as far as employment and so forth. So there wasn’t some great kind of yearning to be a geologist? You just kind of—? No. The Dean of the College of Mines, it’s part of the Engineering Department now, but the Dean of the College of Mines was a fellow named Thomas Chapman and he was a metallurgist. And they had three in that they had geological, metallurgical, and mining. And he was a metallurgist, and he signed me up for this metallurgical on my first— I don’t know whether he was in a hurry or what, or ageing process or what. He’s the fellow that developed the cyanide process for extracting gold. Never patented it but he— Is that heat leach, is that what it’s called, heat leach mining, something like that? No, no, no, no, it’s where you take cyanide to capture the gold. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 I just thought it was called like leach or heat leach mining. Or is that a different thing altogether? That’s done with water, and we did that also, but that’s where you’re depending on bacteria to do the mining for you. OK. And so with the cyanide, the cyanide is doing the mining. It’s a metallurgical process for extracting gold. I wonder how you come up with, you know, using something so toxic to— Well, it’s still used today. Yeah. No, you’re right. Isn’t that the most used right now, considering the big commercial mining and stuff? Yes, they use cyanide. They’ve never gotten away from it. So you worked at— what was the name of the company, Duval? Duval Corporation, which was a subsidiary of United Gas, and Pennzoil Corporation took control of United Gas. Pennzoil was one- tenth the size of United Gas, but they took control of United Gas, which is sort of fascinating. And, you know, Pennzoil was Zapata. George Herbert Walker Bush, you know, [ was] involved with Zapata, Pennzoil and so forth. And two brothers, I don’t remember their names, but United Gas never knew what hit them. It was all done in secret. You know they woke up with their mouths open one morning. They’d been absorbed. And you woke up working for a subsidiary of now Pennzoil. Yeah. Which means when I came to town, I had a little bit of Pennzoil stock. And so, I’m sorry, where in Arizona were you working with the mine? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 It was south of Tucson in the Pima mining district. And this Duval and their successor Pennzoil, they had the three ore bodies. The larger ore body is where all the copper on your coins comes from, you know, the clad coins and the pennies comes from that mine. So how long did you do that? About eight- and- a- half years. Oh, so you were there for a good chunk of time. Yes. Did you do the same thing for eight- and- a- half years or did you kind of move around? Oh, different things. What was some of the more interesting stuff, looking back? Oh, I don’t know. I went to West Texas for a while surveying for sulphur claims, you know, like that, and on occasion I’d be sent someplace in the state or, you know, or have to— sometimes I’d go out and evaluate a prospect somebody had. You’d always tell them it was interesting because you were always in their vehicle and you didn’t want to walk back, and they’d ask you what you thought about it and you’d say it’s interesting, you know. Right. Because I’m imagining you’re going out to some pretty isolated places and that would be a long walk back. And I did a lot of drafting initially with India ink on linen, you know, then eventually— That’s not very forgiving. No. Eventually we went to a DuPont plastic called Mylar. This was for permanency, you know, the reason they were using these, and that would just wear out your drafting instruments. It was so abrasive, this plastic, you know. It wasn’t as forgiving as the linen was. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Is drafting kind of a natural outgrowth of geology, or is that just something you kind of learned as you went? Yes, kind of, yes, you have to do a lot of descriptive geometry. You draw a lot of sections, you know, with your— you have drill holes and so forth and sometimes you have inclined drill holes and sometimes you have to rotate these drill holes so they’re in the same plane so you see what value they have. OK. Sounds complicated. [ 00: 20: 00] Yeah, descriptive geometry is using drafting to work mathematical problems instead of, you know, working them out with a formula thing like they do. You rotate things to show them in their true size and so forth. It’s called the Busk method. There was an English geologist who worked in Africa that developed this. OK. And you did this for eight- and- a- half years. Did you enjoy it or was it—? Oh, plus there’s also a course called Descriptive Geometry that you take in an engineering curriculum. So you say, I wonder what good this is? Then you find out. So every now and then, you take a class in college and it actually applies to real life. So you did this for eight- and- a- half years. Was it enjoyable? Did you like it? Was it just a job? Oh, it was just a job. Didn’t pay well, you know, but I was— It didn’t pay well? Not really. Not in southern Arizona, you know. You could make a living at it, but you’re not going to get wealthy or anything like that. But in the meantime, I had three children, three boys. Well, when I started for Duval, they didn’t have any place for me in their Exploration Department or the mine geology right there, so I started working in the mill, and I worked there UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 for about three or four months, and then I transferred into their Exploration Department. So I was hired as an hourly worker initially. Right. Did you travel a lot? Not a whole lot. To Texas once and within the State of Arizona a little bit, you know. I was just wondering. Because you had three kids, I wonder if you got to be home a lot with them or— Well, when I came to work up here [ Nevada Test Site], I had been looking for something else, other employment, and I submitted an application and they were very slow about replying to my application. I thought I wouldn’t even hear from them, you know. And in the meantime, I had quit my employment and accepted employment in Toronto, Canada. Oh, so you’d quit Duval—? I quit Duval and I accepted employment in Canada. Well, talk about an extreme of climate. Yeah, it was interesting because in Canada I would’ve gone to work for McPhar Geophysics. I would’ve been number five on the payroll. And when I went to work out here for REECo, Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company, I was number 100,769 on the payroll. Now, I mean this is— they give everybody a number. There weren’t that many people working there at one time. I’m kind of curious, how did you find out about the job in Toronto? A fellow named Jack Frost had been the chief geologist at Duval, and he went to work for— he was in charge of all the non- petroleum exploration at Exxon. And I called him up just to see if he had anything, and he recommended me to this fellow that had this— McPhar, I guess was his name. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 And so you were ready to go. You accepted the job. You were ready to move to Canada? Yes, yes but then when I interviewed up here, I accepted a job for less money, but even though it was remote, at least I would be home on the weekends, if nothing else, and I had those three boys, so that entered into the calculation. And so I had to decline this job that I had already accepted at McPhar. But what did your family think of the prospect? Was the plan at first, when you accepted the job in Toronto, for everybody to go up there? No, I would’ve gone up initially myself and then— but the thing is, my first assignment would’ve been in Australia. So, you know, that’s when I thought, well, with those three boys— Yeah, the test site [ NTS] might be remote but, you know, it’s less remote that Australia. Yeah. Most of the time, I came home at night, you know, most times. Sometimes I’d be out there awake for three days and three nights, you know. So you accepted the job in Toronto and then in the interim, before you had applied to the Toronto job, you’d applied to REECo, is that right? [ 00: 25: 00] Yes, I sent off a lot of [ letters]— never got a reply, but they were rather tardy with their [ replies]— they invited me to come up and look at the test site and so forth and interviewed me. Do you remember in general terms when this was? Like the first time you went out and saw the test site? This was in October of 1968. And I accepted the job and moved the family to Las Vegas. Lived on the Strip for a while before I bought a house. They put me up on the Strip, and then when they were no longer putting me up on the Strip, then I got a reduced rate. It was free for a while. I’d come home and eat dinner every night in a casino. This was different. The kids enjoyed UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Halloween, so in lieu of Halloween, Circus Circus had just opened, so I took them to Circus Circus, which was something then when it first opened, you know. It had trapeze artists and clowns and a circus band marching all over the place playing music. It was— That was before they had the second floor. Yes, because it was really— it opened in ’ 68, right? Yes. It was, what’s his name, Jay Sarno. He built Caesars Palace and then he built Circus Circus. Yeah, and that was before they— because now it’s the first and second floor, but that was when it was all just one— it was just a big top, right? Yes. That’s cool. When you first went to the test site that very first time, what was your impression of it? Was there anything that kind of struck you about it? The first time, I was put on a bus and then picked up in Mercury. And Mercury’s about sixty miles from here, you know, from where I was. I bought a house about seven- and- a- half miles from here. And I was picked up at Mercury and then transported to Area 12 where the work was, and that was another forty- five miles. And I was picked up by a fellow named Mike Barr who was administrative assistant to the department manager in Area 12. Mike Barr died on a barstool, Pogo’s Tavern on Decatur. Died on a barstool? The guy that owns that, he just died last week. The owner did? The owner did, yes. And I remember being in there and he’s pointing right at the very barstool that Mike died on. He said, That’s where Mikey died, he said. He was a large man. He’d been a football player par excellence. He was from Brownsville, Texas and he went to one of the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Texas universities. I can’t remember. But he was a classical practical joker. He didn’t harm anybody but just— Like what kind of stuff would he do? We had an electrical superintendent named Maxwell Nakamura, and he had been talking for days, maybe weeks, about a trip he was making to California when the weekend came. And it snowed in Area 12. So Mike called up Maxie and told him he’d been appointed the snow control officer for the weekend and he was to measure the snow and report in all weekend. And he had this trip planned. So Maxie starts trying to get other people to take this assignment, and he finally he calls up the division manager, Hack Runnels, in Mercury, and Hack says, What the hell are you talking about? But that was one. Then Mike lived in the Mountain View Apartments on the northeast corner of Cheyenne and Michael Way. And another miner and his wife moved in right across from him. And these apartments had like a picture window, then they had a little strip of earth between the sidewalk [ 00: 30: 00] and the picture window next to the house. And this fellow and his wife had planted some vegetables in this little tiny plot. So Mike, he’s at the supermarket and he sees these humongous zucchinis, so he buys these zucchinis and he brings them home and he sticks them in their garden. And the fellow comes out and sees them and he’s waving for his wife to come out. All the time, Mike is looking from behind the curtain of his [ window]. He was just a master at the practical joke. Yeah. Well, you probably, I mean, you know, it’s kind of a stressful job, I would imagine, and that stuff probably helps. Yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 So when you first go out there, you know what they do, you know what they’re doing, right? Did you have any—? Yeah. Well, I was hired and initially they said they’d give the title of civil engineer. And then they called me up in Tucson and they said, You’re not a civil engineer, so we can’t give you the title of civil engineer. So they said, How about if we call you a tunneling engineer? I says, Well, OK, there’s no such thing but…. So when I got here, I was not a tunneling engineer; I was classified as a tunnel engineer. There’s no such thing as a tunnel engineer, either. Which later on they hired a fellow named Kenneth Larkin as a senior tunnel engineer. He was a mining engineer by education and experience. So I was relieved to find out there were two of us in the world, you know. But you were the first. I was the first. And these excavations in Rainier Mesa in Area 12 were referred to as tunnels, which they weren’t. They were half- a- tunnel, which is called an “ adit,” A- D- I- T. So I was a tunnel engineer— What does “ half- a- tunnel” mean? Well, they’re open at one end. When you mine and you start in from one direction, it’s an adit. OK. And to be a tunnel, it needs a— It has to exit. It has to have two entrances instead of one. But all these places only had one. I never knew that. Because, see, I would look at something like that and think it was a tunnel, but I didn’t know that the definition of a tunnel means you need to have an exit. I never knew that. But I guess what I’m getting at is— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 17 And then if you mine off to the sides, then it’s called a drift. And if you connect a drift with another drift, or with the adit, it’s called a cross cut. And if you mine down, it’s called a winze. If you mine up, it’s called a raise. What’s the down one? Winze? Winze. And from the surface, if you mine down, it’s a shaft. You have either a vertical or an inclined shaft. And so that’s the other thing. I went there once and I saw a winze and they were calling it a shaft. I says, Well, first of all, it’s not a tunnel. And they’re calling it a shaft but, you know, it’s a winze. But those were initial things. Plus I had been used to seeing tenor where you could see rock, you could see some reason you were mining the rock, you know. But this construction mining they were doing, they didn’t have anything of value there. Oh, right, that would be a different— Once in a while, they would cross something a little bit but not often. Yeah, because your experience up to this point is that you’re digging a hole because of what you’re going to pull out of it, right? Yes, there you’re just excavating for the experiment, you know. They would excavate and then they would put a pipe in with experiment stations in it, chambers, and they would backfill, would stem it, you know, with grouts and concretes and so forth, and then they would evacuate the air from this line- of- sight pipe and create a vacuum. They were simulating outer space, you know. And then they would shoot a nuclear device off. The nuclear device had already been tested. They weren’t testing the nuclear device. They were testing the effect of the nuclear device on models, full- scale items, you know. There might be a nose cone for a reentry vehicle or— a myriad of experiments. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 18 [ 00: 35: 00] I guess from my perspective, I mean when you get there in ’ 68, does it strike you that you’re part of atomic testing? What kind of impact does that have on you? Or is it just a job? Well, you know, you’re involved with the actual physical job. You have to excavate and you have various drill holes that are looking for, you know, seeing what the rock is and so forth and seeing where to put an experiment. Because we’d go in with what they called a tunnel but it was really an adit, and then they would drift off and have the various experiments, and initially they would have one experiment at the end of this adit. So the bigger picture never really kind of—? Well, it’s there. Yeah, it’s there. You know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. But you��