Interview with Wayne Albert Violette, January 12, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Wayne Violette January 12 and February 3, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Suzanne Becker © 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 Wayne Violette January 12 and February 3, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Suzanne Becker Table of Contents Birth, background, early memories of hearing about test site, education 1 Interview with EG& G, coming to Las Vegas, bus ride to NTS 3 Anecdotal experiences of first arriving at NTS and first impressions of NTS 4 Memories of Little Feller I, last atmospheric test at NTS 5 Working on Rover 6 Discussion of weapons testing 7 Explanation of cratering, Recovery, experience of being in tunnel when shot cratered 9 Amchitka: Discussions of setting up shots, life on the island, social activities 13 Clean up of Amchitka, removal of sea otters 19 Experiences while living at NTS 22 Discussion of views on radiation and exposure 24 Experiences with draft board ( during Vietnam War) 27 Clearance, background checks, patriotism, secrecy 31 Reflections on historical role of test site, growing up in the atomic age; working at NTS during 1960s culture and political events 33 Reminisces about camaraderie with coworkers, practical jokes played on one another and other bonds formed between coworkers 41 Discusses impressions of Las Vegas when first moved here in 1960s 44 First impressions of NTS 46 Discusses his sympathy for Downwinders; thoughts on use of bomb to end WWII, protests at NTS 48 Views on use of nuclear energy, 49 Views of Cold War, nuclear weapons, atomic testing 50 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Wayne Violette January 12 and February 3, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Suzanne Becker [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Suzanne Becker: OK, so if you just want to start out with some background about yourself, where you’re from. Wayne Violette: I’m sixty- three, born in 1941, May of ’ 41. I was born in Montana. We moved from Montana to Idaho when I was three years old. I grew up in southeastern Idaho. One of my earlier memories of the test site and atomic testing, it was probably my first introduction to it, was when I was in my preteens and we would hear the countdown on the radio, and they would have it on TV, too. In Montana? No, this is in Idaho, southeast Idaho, by Idaho Falls a ways. And my dad was interested in the testing and quite a few different things. So we would hear the countdown early in the morning and get up, oh, five a. m. or so and look toward the south and we could see the glow in the sky in the fifties when they were doing the atmospheric testing here. And we lived close to the test site, the NRDS, National Reactor Development Site, in Idaho [ Idaho National Laboratory and different from NRDS, Nuclear Rocket Development Station at the NTS]. When I was younger, a lot of people out there worked at the AEC out there, Atomic Energy Commission, and that was where they had the reactors, near Arco. So I always would say when I was younger, Yes, I’m going to work for the AEC when I grow up, you know. But I never thought I really [ would]— that was when I was much younger. And then I went to school. My dad was taking a course in electronics, so when I got out of high school, I had a choice whether I could either go in the military or go to school, so I Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 thought, Well, I better go to school. That was one of the more sane things I did is I thought, I’d better go to school rather go in the military because I can do that later. While the opportunity is there, I’ll go to school. Am I going into too much personal stuff here? No. I didn’t like the courses when I was going to high school. I didn’t like English and some of those things, and maybe you can tell by my speech I didn’t. But anyway, I decided to go to electronics school because my dad was taking the course in TV and it kind of steered me toward that. So I went to Idaho State College in Pocatello, Idaho, which was about a hundred miles south of where we lived. Oh, I’ve actually been through there. Have you been through Pocatello? And I took a three- year course in electronics there, not knowing what I would do when I got out, but at least I would have the education behind me then. So when I completed the course in electronics, EG& G [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier] from the test site here in Las Vegas, or here in Nevada, came up there and were interviewing students. And they had picked students from there a year or two before, too. So we talked to some of them that were working for EG& G down here. And at the time I was making $ 1.35 an hour while I was working after school at Ford Music Company there in Pocatello. Well, I got an offer from EG& G after the interview for $ 2.35 an hour. I thought, wow, that’s a dollar an hour raise. But then we were talking to the guys that worked and they says, It’s a hundred miles to work and it’s a hundred dollars a month for an apartment. I thought, man, that must be a great apartment, because a hundred dollars a month was a lot of money back then. Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 So EG& G interviewed me. I remember one of the questions they asked me was, How would you describe impedance to your little sister? Well, I didn’t have a little sister, but I gave them an explanation of that. They caught me off guard with it. But anyway, I was hired. There were about four or five of us from the school that got out of school and were hired and came down here. I came down with a fellow named Wayne Rose. My name being Wayne Violette, it was kind of ironic that we both had the same first name and both had a color or a flower for a last name. So we drove down here and it was right after the fourth of July in 1962. It must’ve been the eighth or ninth— some days after– it was just right after the fourth. And we met in Wells, Nevada. He came down from Oregon, Wayne Rose did, met in Wells Nevada and we drove down here to Las Vegas. We got an apartment here in Las Vegas and we hired in to EG& G, went in there. And that’s when EG& G was over on Wall Street. Now I worked at Wall Street probably for a couple of weeks till I got my temporary clearance. And I was wiring up things there and everything. And then I got my temporary clearance. And a guy by the name of Duane Knuth [ sp], they called him Drano, I don’t know why they nicknamed him that. He drove me out to the test site and I thought, oh no, what’ve I done. It was so far out there and I thought, every day will I have to go through this to go out here to the test site and back? But it wasn’t driving out every day, it was taking the bus after that, so it wasn’t too bad riding the bus because you could sleep on the way out. I’d usually read on the way back, and a bunch of guys would be playing cards. And we [ 00: 05: 00] didn’t have— I wish we had had, but we didn’t have the portable tape players or the portable DVD players then that would’ve passed time a lot. But I spent a lot of time Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 reading and a lot of guys, like I say, would play cards or they would sleep. I could usually sleep going out. I couldn’t sleep coming in. Am I going into too much detail? No. And that was about an hour ride from here? Yeah, it was probably an hour and a half, depending where we worked, beyond the control point [ CP]. We would be at the control point at eight o’clock and then we would leave the control point, or Mercury, actually. Our time was from Mercury to Mercury, so we would get to Mercury at eight and then we would pull out of the Mercury gate, at five. And depending on how far up we worked was how far it would take us to actually get to work. But my original job was out at Rover. Well, I want to mention one thing. We got per diem, too. It was five dollars a day per diem. Wow! Yeah, for riding out there, and I remember some of the guys didn’t tell their wives they were getting per diem because it came on separate checks, so that was their play money. Twenty- five bucks a week could go quite a ways then. Then they started to combine the checks and a lot of guys had a lot of explaining to do as to where that extra money was coming from, this kind of thing. But my first job was out at Rover. I worked on the Kiwi project out there. I was a technician. I had a lot of interesting experiences out there. It was my first job and I was just twenty- one years old, but it was fun. What kind of interesting experiences? One of the experiences I had— I still had my red badge when I was out there. When they brought the reactor from the MAD building, Material Assembly Disassembly building, they would hook it up to where we did the instrumentation at Test Cell A. Test Cell C was just being constructed Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 then. So they brought it in one time and hooked it up and actually tested it. Well, I still had my temporary clearance. I didn’t have my Q- clearance yet. So me and a couple of other guys had to go over to Test Cell C and we had to stay inside during that time. I guess it was top secret and they didn’t want anybody without a clearance even seeing it. But I can remember the ground shaking and hearing a roaring and that was a good, oh, maybe a mile or so away. The power that it generated was just tremendous. One time when I was working with some other guys in the Test Cell A, the reactor wasn’t there yet. Or maybe it was. It must’ve been. But the bells and whistles started to go off inside the building and somebody opened the hatch and said, Let’s get out of here, so we all crawled down this ladder into this tunnel and started running down the tunnel. I had no idea where I was going, what was going on, whether we’d been radiated or anything. Then we found out there was a test. But I’d have ran right off the edge of a cliff with them if they’d gone over because I was sticking with the group. I had no idea what was going on and I didn’t know I could run that far, that fast. When you don’t know what’s happening, it’s kind of interesting. I saw the last atmospheric that was set off out there, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to see the actual blast. We were sitting in the chow hall and the curtains were open and we were sitting there eating and there was a bright white flash inside the chow hall and somebody said they set off an atmospheric, so we went outside and could see the mushroom cloud rising over the hill. We were looking toward the northeast from where I was at in Area 25. Could you feel it at all when they did it? No, I didn’t feel it a bit because it was atmospheric, so it didn’t shake the ground. But we did see the flash and I thought it was quite impressive. It was in the middle of the day, the bright flash. They say it’s brighter than a hundred suns. Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 First one you saw? Well, other than the ones that I saw when I was in Idaho, looking toward the south, yeah. Right, the flashes. Yeah. But that was the first atmospheric that I had seen, and I think it was Little Feller I or Little Feller II, and it was the last one set off. [ The tests were not in chronological order. Little Feller II was conducted on 07/ 07/ 1962 and Little Feller I, ten days later on 01/ 17/ 1962. Little Feller I was the final atmospheric test conducted at the Nevada Test Site] Then underground testing started to increase, and I forget, it was something to do with either the Russians, or they had signed an agreement to where there would be no more atmospheric testing and they needed people over at the— that was weapons testing. So that was probably in the fall of ’ 62. I didn’t spend a lot of time at Rover project. But in the fall of ’ 62, they took me over there and introduced me to my supervisor and the crew. From then, the rest of the time that I was employed by EG& G and at the test site until 1971, I worked at weapons testing. Can you talk a little bit about working with Rover? Yeah, I’ll come in with some of the guys that worked with me. A gentleman named Ray Wynn who was kind of our group leader there. He was [ a] very brilliant young man. He played classical piano and I was really impressed with his knowledge. Some of the others I worked with there, Jerry Star [ sp], Maro Fardo who was from Sao Paulo, [ 00: 10: 00] Brazil. But what I did was primarily work on instrumentation. Ray Wynn was building some pico meters, pico amp meters which would measure very low currents, and we would have very high resistance resistors. I remember we would have to clean those with alcohol before we would check them because even your handprints on them or your fingerprints could cause the resistance to change. Worked on Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 that. It’s been so many years ago, forty- some years ago, that I don’t remember a lot of the details. Worked on things called NIXIE tubes for readouts because they didn’t have the LEDs [ light emitting diode] and the LCDs [ liquid crystal display] back then. And we would take a nuclear source and it was on a long metal tube, pole, and they’d say, Don’t hold it close to your body, just to carry on out there with you. So we would take that up to the Test Cell A for them to calibrate instruments, things like that. As far as details, mainly I was a technician and I just did what they told me to. It was an interesting job. But going to weapons testing, weapons testing to me was much more interesting. You weren’t sitting doing one thing all the time. It was a lot more variety. I enjoyed the people I worked with there, in particular. In weapons testing, I worked in what’s called the skids. It was the instrumentation portion of it. You’re called an alpha tech. Nuclear instrumentation diagnostic technician was our official title. But to me, that was really interesting because we would set up for a shot. Being set up in the skid, we would get the information as far as how the equipment had to be configured, and there were delay cans and attenuators and oscilloscopes and cameras and everything. We would set that up, depending on what the particular parameters of the particular bomb we were going to be doing the instrumentation on were, and that would come from the physicists at Los Alamos [ National Laboratory]. There was a lot of hard work involved, and most of us were quite young. Most of us were in our twenties. It was a lot of physical work as far as lifting the delay cans and on your feet all day. and we worked hard. We would be setting up the cameras, doing a lot of tests, doing a lot of— our crew was the alpha technicians, the diagnostic crew. There was a high- voltage crew which was called detectors, and they would put the detectors on the canister. This was all underground testing. They would put the detectors on the canister and do the instrumentation on those. We would be taking the signals from those Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 detectors that were on the canister when the bomb went off. They would travel by cable into our skid. Of course, we wouldn’t be there when the actual bomb went off, but we would set up all the equipment ahead of time. So there was a lot of hard work, but like I say, we were young and we enjoyed it. Long days, it sounds like. Yeah, we’d go out there sometimes— well, it was long days from here. We would leave here like six or six- thirty in the morning, just a normal day, and then get back here around seven at night. There were times in the winter when I never would see my yard or my house in the daylight. So it was long days; that’s one of the main reasons I left after nine years. I loved the work but it was just the long rides and the long days. In later years, a lot more was done in town. But a lot of interesting experiences out there. One time— well, we did testing on Area 3 primarily. It was most of the underground testing. We did some testing up on Rainier Mesa and Pahute Mesa, where the larger tests were done. We did one test— I remember on Rainier Mesa when we were doing that one, we had our instrumentation set up above where the bomb would go off, but the bomb was away back in a tunnel. I had crews working down in the detector shack, or down in detectors below, and I had people working up in the alpha shack. I was a supervisor at that time. I went from a technician to a lead tech to supervisor. So when I was a supervisor on that one, that was twenty- six miles from one crew to the other to drive back and forth, yet it was only probably a few hundred feet between them on the actual Rainier Mesa. We had one that went off on Pahute Mesa one time. What happens on a shot is it— and it digs a big cavity, it burns a big cavity in the hole, and as the top caves in, it gradually works its way to the top and then it craters. I think they call it “ subsidence” or something like that, but we would call it “ cratering.” Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 That’s when the ground caves in after the test. Yes, after. Some would not crater. Some would. We set off one very large one up at Pahute Mesa. I don’t know how large it was. Whenever there was a test in Area 3 or up at Pahute Mesa, we would go back to the control point for the test [ 00: 15: 00] because there was just too much ground movement and dangerous to be near the shot. We set that test off at Pahute Mesa and we watched it. Several hours we watched the cratering. You could watch the seismometer, and you could tell whether it was going to crater or not, because as it worked its way to the top and the earth fell in, you would get some ground movement. Well, finally when the ground movement stopped completely, you’d figure it’s not going to crater. There can be some ground movement when it craters and there can be some radiation released. We watched it. And the roads were out, too, because the test shot had been big; it had wiped out some of the road we had to take to get up there because it was in the mountains. When it went off— the CP, which was several miles from there— the ground shook so much that the lights came down, the power went off in the CP momentarily, and then we heard this boom! boom! boom! Then we stepped outside, and here came a big rock from up on the— it was mountainous back in the Rainier Mesa. And the size of a freight car was coming bouncing down the mountain. Luckily there was a big gully between us and the CP, so it stopped in that gully. Sounds like a strong shot. It was pretty big, yeah. Most of the bigger ones, they were further out there. I don’t know if it’s the ground terrain or not, but it was further from Las Vegas. We would fly back and forth out to there, too, when it was further out like that because it was just too far to go on the bus. Anyway, we thought it was going to stop cratering, so they said, OK, we can go in now. But the roads were out, so we had to take a helicopter. The helicopter took us into the skid Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 where all the instrumentation was, and when you would go in— this was actually done on film. When the bomb would go off, there would be oscilloscope traces recorded and it would record like the alpha growth rate of the bomb. The first few thousandths of a millionth or nanoseconds of the bomb going off is what the critical information was because after that it was all over. And is that what you guys looked at? Yes, the first few nanoseconds. That’s where they would get most of their information as far as the effectiveness of the bomb and the efficiency of it, and I’m not sure what the physicists were really looking at, but the alpha growth rate was primarily what we were looking at, right at the very beginning. Those signals would actually travel up the cables and get to us before the equipment would be in the hole by the bomb. The detectors and everything would be destroyed. So the signals would come up to us, and by the time it got to us, it was destroyed where it came from. But we went in. I think it’s all probably digital now, but this is back in the sixties, so it was actually done on recording, traced on these oscilloscopes on the film. What we would have to go in on recovery, we would go in there in the dark and we’d close the shutters on the cameras, we would remove the film, put it in lightproof boxes and then bring it back for it to be developed. So while we were in there, well, what we’d do with the skids were, there was a light lock room where the office was when you would first walk in, and these skids were probably fifty feet long by thirty feet wide by twenty feet high. When you say “ skids,” you’re basically describing a— Instrumentation trailer. It wasn’t a trailer but— Something that was set up for you guys to go into. Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Yes, it’s our instrumentation building. When they would move it from one location to another they would lift it up, put it on tracks, and pull it to the next location. OK. So these were portable. Right. It was portable— Like a portable lab. Yeah. It wasn’t like a trailer. You wouldn’t pull it, it wasn’t on tires. But they would lift it up, put it on these big tracks, and then pull it to the next location. There must’ve been five of them. Well, I don’t know, it was Skid 3, 4, and 5, I recall. I don’t know what happened to 1 and 2. But when we went in, the helicopter took us up to Pahute Mesa after it looked like it wasn’t going to crater. We had to suit up and put on our boots and tape up and everything because it was in a radiation— there was a RADSAFE [ Radiological Safety] person with us. And we went in on recovery. We went into the office part, and I remember that the office was just in disarray. The desk had been driven through the floor and it was just really tore up in there. So we shut that door to get as much lightproof as we [ could], because I remember light was leaking through the door. Then we went back into the actual instrumentation portion. A lot of times, when it’s a really big shot like that, things can be in disarray. You have to look for things because the equipment [ is] shaken off the racks and the delay cans might be coming down. So we got in there, shut the door, it was pitch black, so we were groping around in there, looking for it. We had the RADSAFE guy in there with us. Then we felt the ground shaking. It cratered while we were in there. Well, meanwhile he was checking radiation and I don’t think we got any radiation. We managed to recover all the film and then— the helicopter had lifted off, though just in case it cratered. They didn’t want to have a helicopter put out of commission. He set back down and we took our stuff in and went back to the control [ 00: 20: 00] point again with our film. Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 There was a piece of paper that you would get because they wanted to print out the exact frequency of a particular oscillator at zero time. One of my jobs was to recover that. I had stuck it in the white overalls we were wearing. I forgot all about it, and then I got back and I thought, oh, no, we need that piece of paper. I had to go back and dig through all the overalls. I recall I had a sick feeling in my stomach when I knew that wasn’t there. Some of the shots really tear things up. They drive the desks through the floor and things. Now that I’ve seen some shots at the museum of how much those trailers bounce around on the skids, it gives me a lot more appreciation for what the equipment went through while I was there. I had the opportunity, too, while I was working at Area 3, when I was a supervisor— we’d fly to Albuquerque and then go up to Los Alamos and meet with the physicists. I got to go through the museum, through the Oppenheimer Museum [ the Los Alamos Laboratory Museum was established in 1953 and opened to the public in 1963. It was later renamed the Bradbury Science Museum in honor of laboratory director Robert Oppenheimer’s successor, Norris E. Bradbury]. We would meet with the physicists and get the data that we needed to— how our setup would be for our instrumentation, then we would come back and lay it all out as far as how we wanted to set it up. That was fun. I know the one engineer that I would go back to Los Alamos with, he was Hispanic, Lee Sandoval. I think he still works out there. But we would go back to Albuquerque; his family was from there, so we’d go eat at some interesting Mexican restaurants— they had wooden floors and they were from the 1700s or in that area. Authentic, sounds like. Oh, very. So we’d go back there and get the information and bring it back. I was also sent for two or three weeks to Albuquerque to work on some of the— I think KC- 135s, they’re 707s, I believe— was the civilian name for the planes. We went back and we Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 worked on those for putting equipment in them; they were preparing if they went to atmospheric testing again. These had a big window on one side and the equipment was set to where they could take pictures out of it. I had my particular little thing to do, installing certain equipment, so I wasn’t privy to a lot of the details of what they were doing. But that was very interesting, too, to go back there and just be part of it. Sandia built the bombs, and Sandia Labs was back there. That was a fun time, too. And then I had the opportunity to go to the Aleutian Islands, to Amchitka [ Alaska]. So we set the equipment up. It was like we were setting up a skid, but we set it all up in a warehouse and did all the testing on it. Then it was all numbered, crated up, and shipped on a barge up to Amchitka in the Aleutians. That’s way out at the end of the Aleutian chain, not too far from Russia, as a matter of fact. I was on the one called Milrow, It was an island test more than anything, to see how the island would withstand the larger test, which was Cannikin, I think. That was going to be the second test. Well, I was on the Milrow test, I wasn’t on the second one. But we flew up to Anchorage [ Alaska] and then from Anchorage we flew out to Amchitka. After we shipped the equipment out on the barge, it was probably a couple of weeks before we went up there because it took that long for the equipment to get there. Then we uncrated everything. There was a permanent bunker, like underground bunker, set up to set our instrumentation— I think it was an underground bunker. I could be incorrect on that. But anyway, there was a building set up to put all of our equipment in that we had set up in Las Vegas. So there were several of us technicians went up there, put everything together, and set up for the shot up there. We had to cross- train for different type jobs while we were there, in case somebody didn’t show up or somebody got sick. I was cross- trained to process the photos, mixed up the chemicals and everything. So when I went up there, until the photo techs got up there, I did dual duty. I was a Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 lead technician at the time, so I did dual duty as far as setting up the instrumentation, as well as doing the photography part of it, too. You would set up the cameras and the cameras would be triggered when the—? Yes, the shutters would be opened and the cameras would— When the blast would go? Yes, we’d set them up. There were delay cans to delay the signal to where the scope could be open by the [ time the] signal got there. So before the signal would get to the delay can which would delay it a few nanoseconds, it would be a trigger device that the signal would also go to, and that would open the shutter on the camera and signal the scope to— In the photos, what were some of the things that you were looking for, or do you know? [ 00: 25: 00] Well, the photos weren’t actually photographs of anything but the oscilloscope trace. And there would be an oscillator on the oscilloscope. I think there were 50, 100, 200, and 400 megahertz [ MHz], megacycles we called them, changed to hertz when we were there. They were set up to 400 MHz, the fastest scope, and the trace would be moving back and forth at four hundred million times a second. Then as the signal from the bomb would come in, it would deflect that trace in an upward motion, so we would get a trace that looked sort of like a sine wave that was being stretched toward the top. They could tell the time between the peaks of the signal, and then they could tell the distance versus the time and tell how fast it was growing. Does that make sense to you? Yes. We didn’t process— we came up with negatives. They would look at the negative. It was actually a negative image. It looked like a dark image on a light background, rather than the white image on the dark background. When we would set the equipment up, we would have to get them Violette_ W_ 01122005_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 focused exactly. Very critical on focus and getting the right intensity so they would be the best image possible. We used a lot of Polaroid film doing that. We’d go through boxes and boxes of Polaroid film on the setup of it. The actual photo, though, was then done on an actual negative. So I know Polaroid must’ve made a lot of money off the test site because we used a lot of that, and yellow tape. Anyway, Amchitka was very interesting. What was it like out there? Well, a lot of guys complained all the time they were there. They didn’t like it. It was foggy a lot. They played cards and drank and complained about being there. But me and a few other guys, we decided to make the best of it, so we worked six days a week, ten hours. Eight- or- ten- hour day, I can’t remember now. We worked six days a week to get the most time in, and we had Sundays off. Well, there was so much daylight there that we would have to work. We would go fishing a lot. We’d go down fishing or maybe go exploring. Amchitka Island was one of the ones during the Second World War. I don’t know if there were battles fought there or not like there were in Attu, because Attu was the on