Interview with Richard Vaughn Wyman, December 1, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Richard Wyman December 1, 2005 Boulder City, 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 Richard Wyman December 1, 2005 Conducted by Suzanne Becker Table of Contents Introduction: family origins, early life, education, marriage and family. 1 Peru: work for Cerro de Pasco Corporation, travel and adventures. 3 United States: move to New Jersey Zinc Co., Prescott, AZ and later Western Gold and Uranium, Inc., St. George, UT. Richard starts Intermountain Exploration Co. Son Bill is born in Prescott, AZ. 11 Richard and Anne recall experience of atmospheric testing from NTS. Richard works as tunnel superintendent at NTS on Marshmallow, then takes job with Sunshine Mining Co., Kellogg, ID, and finally returns to NTS to work on Pile Driver. 14 Anne Wyman is first woman to teach at UNLV College of Science and Math, initiates geology degree program, wins distinguished teaching awards, studies mineralogy of storage of atomic waste at Yucca Mountain. 16 Extensive travels to South America, Europe, China, Australia, Africa 18 Republic of South Africa: Richard recounts history of country and experiences with apartheid. 19 Kenya: Richard goes on safari in the Serengeti. 23 Norway: Richard and Anne voyage up the coast toward the Arctic. 25 Canada: Richard and Anne travel to Churchill, Manitoba to observe of polar bears and beluga whales. 27 Canada: Richard goes Ellesmere Island ( Nunavut) on Arctic Islands Field Trip for the International Geological Conference and observes musk ox, sees Northwest Territories 29 Antarctica: Richard and Anne see scientific stations and wildlife. 31 Greenland: walk on the glacier. 33 Canada: Newfoundland ( Newfoundland and Labrador), L’Anse aux Meadows. 33 Alaska and western Canada: road trip with son Bill. 35 South America: Consulting job and travels to Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil. 37 Mexico: Yucatán and the Mayan world 39 Chile: Punta Arenas and Patagonia 39 Asia: People’s Republic of China, Thailand, Singapore 40 USSR: Leningrad ( St. Petersburg) under Communism 43 Conclusion: Memories of China 44 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Richard and Anne Wyman December 1, 2005 in Boulder City, NV Conducted by Suzanne Becker [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Richard Wyman: I’m Richard Wyman and Anne is my wife. And we came from northern Ohio. I was from Painesville, Ohio and Anne was from Cleveland [ Ohio], in Edmunds Avenue near Hough Avenue, and I was from Mentor Avenue in Painesville. Anne, do you want to say a little bit about your family? Anne Wyman: No, not really. Richard Wyman: Arthur Fenton was her father and Edna Fenton her mother. Her mother’s family came directly from Scotland. And Arthur, or the father, his family was from Connecticut. Anne worked at Hough Bakery to put herself through college. How long did you work there, Anne? Anne Wyman: I don’t remember. It was— Richard Wyman: About five years, I think. Anne Wyman: Yeah, I think it was five or six years. Richard Wyman: In the Hough Bakeries in Cleveland. I think the bakery chain is still there. And then she went to Western Reserve University and was able to walk to it. It was in the area of Cleveland where the art museum is. It was all within walking distance of where she lived. I lived in Painesville, which is a rural town about thirty miles east of there. I was in the [ United States] Navy and the Navy unit at Case Western Reserve for a while, and after the war [ World War II] I went there to get my bachelor’s degree. Anne already had her bachelor’s degree in geology. She was the first woman graduate in geology. At the university? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 At that university, yes. She was a lab assistant in mineralogy, so that’s where I met her. She taught me mineralogy. And we were married there in December 1947. So you also majored in geology? There. I started in civil engineering and I changed over to geology. So I graduated there in geology, and Anne was headed for the University of Michigan to graduate school. We both went to the University of Michigan to graduate school. We got married and went up there. What was that like? Anne Wyman: It was wonderful. Richard Wyman: It was a wonderful place to go, yes. Ann Arbor? Yes. And we lived at Willow Run, which is the housing for the old bomber plant. We lived in first a zero- bedroom, they called it. It had a room and the kitchen and a very small bathroom with a shower. And we heated and cooked and all with a coal stove. It was amazing that Anne, she did such a good job with a coal stove. You don’t set the timer or the temperature on it. You just get your fire going and then you watch to see what you’re cooking, how it behaves. So different way of cooking, and old- fashioned way of cooking. Right. Have to really control the heat. You can’t control the heat. You have to control— with what’s in the pot. And our first child was born there, a baby girl. Her name was Anne. She only lived for one week. This is the most awful thing that can happen to a mother and father. It takes many years to get past this loss—. We stayed at Michigan for a while, but we had a bigger apartment then, what they called a one- bedroom. It had a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and the bathroom. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Moving up. Yes. And there we had a coal stove to cook with but I put in a roaster oven and a hot plate so we didn’t have to depend so much on the coal. And we heated with a round coal- burning stove [ 00: 05: 00] which was called a Dixie No- Smoke. It smoked terribly. You had to lift up the lid to put the fuel in and then the smoke would get out in your living room. So it wasn’t really a no- smoke. No. We got our master’s degree, both of us, at the University of Michigan in 1949. What did you do your work in? We stayed another year. We stayed another year and I got more coursework. I used up the GI Bill. And then we went to Peru. Right after school. Yes. We went to Peru. What drew you to Peru? We wanted to get away from things. Our daughter had died. We wanted to get a good start, and a good professional start it was. I had good recommendations and it’s a very large, complex geology mine [ Cerro de Pasco Corporation] high in the Andes, 14,300 feet. That is high. Anne taught the school for the English- speaking children at that camp. Anne Wyman: It was fun to do it. Richard Wyman: About 3,000 men worked at the mine, but of the professional staff they were Europeans and Americans. Maybe one- third were Americans and the other third were English and other Europeans and some Peruvians, Peruvian professional people. Many of them wanted their children to speak English. She had a school there with about a dozen children UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 usually, in different grades from kindergarten to the eighth grade. They weren’t equally distributed, by any means. They were whoever happened to be there. Now you guys were living at like a base camp? There’s a city there. There’s an old city called Cerro de Pasco and a part of that town was where we lived. We lived in that town. And then you worked in a— The mine was there. The reason for the town was the mine. The mine had been operating for 500 years. What were you mining? Underground mine. Copper, lead, zinc, gold, silver, bismuth, and tin. Quite a bit. Yes. We had lots of adventures there, some of which were not very healthy for us. For one thing, the air is very thin there. Pressure is very thin, so what happens is your blood thickens up, and in order to accommodate that air, your blood becomes very thick and dark, black, extra red corpuscles and things. Were you actually living at 14,000? Yes, that’s where we lived. That’s pretty significant. Yes. And it thickened up. Mine never changed after we left, so I have to have blood taken out here. It’s called polycythemiavera. That’s quite a mouthful. That’s because I make too many red platelets in my blood, and they’ve been taking some out about every month, but it’s quit quite a bit now and I only have to go every two or three months. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 But that’s ever since you returned? Yeah. And that’s a long- term effect of living in the altitude. There was a very bad accident while we were there and I would say this happened— my job as a geologist was to discover ore in the mine and in the near vicinity and also to help the mining people mine in a safe way because of the rock situation— know the strength of the rock and everything. Well, in one stope— a stope is an area where they’ve taken the ore out or are [ 00: 10: 00] taking the ore out; it’s an open area— in one stope they had some trouble and the mine foreman in that area, whose name was Jim Nodder, came to my office in the morning and he said, Dick, I want you to look at the situation we have down there in 8180 number two. He said, I don’t know what to do about it and I want your advice. And he picked the wrong time to come because our staff had been working on our ore estimate, which was a big, big job, and it was due at noon that same day. So I said, Jim, I’ve got to get this ore estimate out this morning. Right after lunch, I’ll meet you in the change room and we’ll go look at it. Well, that stope caved in at eleven o’clock in the morning, with him in it and seven other people. Three of them were staff: [ an] assistant superintendent, another foreman and himself. They were all killed. And when that happened, word came to the geology office and we had to muster to go and see what we could do about rescuing them. So I told the secretary of my department there, whose name was Cornelio Madrano— they didn’t employ women there much; it was just men— I told him to call my wife and tell her there’d been an accident in the mine and that I was going down and I wouldn’t be home for lunch. Well, whatever he told her got garbled up. She thought I was in the accident underground and wouldn’t be home at all. And she and other women came over and there they UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 were worried about us, and up I came right from the mine, up I came. Resurrected. Walking out. You remember that? Anne Wyman: I remember it very well. Richard Wyman: Anyhow, those were very sad days then. Anne Wyman: They sure were. Richard Wyman: We were at the end of the railroad. The railroad went from Lima to La Oroya and there we took a different train, the train to Cerro. The Cerro train, this was a steam locomotive— they were all steam locomotives— and we would sit in the first- class car. The first- class car was something a little bit more primitive than a bus today. They cooked meals in there. Down at the end of the car there was a stove and they cooked meals and could have churrasco and eggs and rice, any combination: churrasco and rice, churrasco and eggs, eggs and rice, or whatever. Churrasco is a tough steak. It’s not tenderloin, it’s a beefsteak. And ride the train to Cerro. We went on vacation one time there and almost got it again. This was see- how- lucky- I- was fate, or God was looking after me not to put me into that accident because if it had been on a different day, I would’ve gone. Or if it had been in the afternoon that it caved in, I’d have been in it. We were going on vacation to Lima one time and we got on the train and we went to La Oroya and in La Oroya you catch a different railroad. It’s called the Ferrocarril Central. Anne Wyman: Yes, I remember that one. Richard Wyman: And we’d catch a train to Lima. The Lima train goes up over 16,000 feet, over the Ticlio Pass, then it goes down through a maze of tunnels and switchbacks and it drops from 16,000 feet to sea level in about sixty miles. So it’s very steep. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Well, we were going along and all of a sudden, a man came through the car and he pulled down shutters on the uphill side to keep rocks from falling through the glass. He pulled down shutters all the way along. And then the train came to a stop and the lights went out because the lights worked off of generators in the wheels. The lights went out. So we’re sitting in the dark on the side of a mountain and we didn’t know what was going on. Well, they told us we’d [ 00: 15: 00] have to get off the train, take our luggage if we wanted to keep it. And it’s raining. We got off the train. We had our city clothes on. We got off the train and walk[ ed] along a path along the railroad track for a ways, I would say quarter of a mile. And then I’m carrying two suitcases and Anne’s with me, in our city clothes, not hiking clothes. We walked a ways and we walked down the hill on a trail to a bridge, so called, that went across the Rimac River. The railroad follows the Rimac River. It’s at the bottom of an 8,000- foot canyon. And in the bottom of the canyon, the river was just white froth because it had been raining. It was flowing pretty high. Coming across that was a suspension bridge that held a pipeline, and there’s a little walkway on top of the pipeline, and no guardrail. This is how we’re going to get from where we are over to the highway on the other side. The highway on the other side isn’t really a highway by our standards. It’s a gravel road, room enough for two cars to pass, but only. And it’s a winding gravel road. Well, they had brought two- and- a- half- ton dump trucks, a number of them, down there. Those are to move us with if we get across. Hopefully we get across. We got across, and this wonderful woman that I have, we decided this is how we’re going to have to cross. We’re not going to stay on the side of this mountain. I walked across with a suitcase in each hand. There’s no guardrail. Anne took a hold of my belt in the back, my belt on my pants, so we must UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 have looked like a big old camel walking across there. She was hanging on to me and I’m holding the suitcases and we walked across that bridge. But you guys made it. To the other side. Yeah. It’s still raining all the time. We got to the other side, and I gave one of the truck drivers over there a little money, some money so that she could ride in the cab with him. The men got up in the backs, and some of the women. They’re Peruvian Indians principally. And I stood in the back with the men. Many of the other men gave money to the truck drivers to put their wives in the seats, too. Then we drove down the road for a long ways, several miles, and we came to another train. They had brought a train up for us. But when we went down the road, we could see why the train had stopped. A landslide just ahead of the train had taken out the railroad and taken it all the way into the river. And had we been a little bit sooner, it would’ve gotten us. You’re lucky. Because it was intact when we left La Oroya, they would’ve not sent the train on that. Anne Wyman: I remember that. Richard Wyman: So we remember that. We got to Lima OK. It sounds quite harrowing. Anne Wyman: It was scary. Richard Wyman: Those are a couple of instances. We had others, but those are some of the ones. How long were you in Peru? Almost three years. Anne taught the school there. She had experiences with that, too. Do you remember going to Goyllarisquisga? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Anne Wyman: Oh, yes. Richard Wyman: See if you can tell her about that. Anne Wyman: Oh, gee, I don’t remember very much about it now. Richard Wyman: They had vehicles— the roads don’t go everyplace and many of the roads are so bad, you don’t want to spend [ time] much driving on them. And Goyllarisquisga is the name of the place. It was a coal- mining town that belonged to the company. But it had an incline through the coal mine and when they came out at the other end, there were gardens down there and lush tropical vegetation. Anne took her school kids over there on a field trip and on a picnic, to Goyllarisquisga. They took them in the automobile with railroad wheels on the railroad to Goyllarisquisga. So it’s called an autovagón. It’s an automobile with railroad wheels, and it took them over to Goyllarisquisga where they got out and [ 00: 20: 00] they went in the mine in a mine car and down through on this incline, through the coal mine, and out at the bottom. They came out at the bottom in the sunlight and had a picnic down there. Anne Wyman: Boy, that was fun. Sounds beautiful. Richard Wyman: It is. We also went other places. When we went on vacation, we went to Machu Picchu. I’m sure you’ve read about that. When we went to Machu Picchu, you took a railroad train from Cuzco to a railroad siding that was on the Urubamba River down below Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu was up high. And then we got in trucks again. The two- and- a- half- ton dump truck was a standard transportation vehicle. It’s small enough to negotiate winding road. And we went up to Machu Picchu. How many tourists were at Machu Picchu that day? Six. Now you have hundreds and hundreds every day. Thousands and thousands every year visit there. And they have regular buses that take people up, and they have a hotel there. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 So did you go up? We didn’t have any hotel there or anything like that. We went in the way tourists did then, yes. We took lots of pictures. Machu Picchu is a very, very worthwhile place to go. We enjoyed that very much. And Cuzco. We visited in Cuzco. That’s the capital of Inca Peru. It��s the old capital. We saw many things there. Fortunately we were able to do these things while we had the chance to do them. What was your favorite part of being there? What stands out most? Well, the work itself was very good. I would have loved to have had that job at a different altitude here in the United States. But it was pretty wild. We have some nice things, like this coffee table, that came from there, and those three nested tables over in the corner are from there. They’re three nested leather tables that you can see. We have a few other things here. Those brass candlesticks up at that end. We had two very ancient pre- Inca pottery jugs, until last year I gave them to a Peruvian young man that we sponsored to go to college here, and they’re his. He’s in Florida with his wife now. They live there. They have two kids. We have friends in Peru that we’ve known now for over fifty years, and we sponsored two of them. There was a man that worked for me at Cerro de Pasco, Oscar Aguilar, and we sponsored him to go to Missouri School of Mines. And his son, we sponsored his son to go to UNLV [ University of Nevada Las Vegas]. I told his son that when he got married, be sure and invite us; we’ll come to the wedding. Well, he did. He married a French girl in France. So we went to France to the wedding just in 1998. That was a real good experience, too. After Peru, we came back to the United States. What made you come back here? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Well, the things that you mentioned, you see. It was a pretty dangerous place and we could do better here. Also the effect of the low pressure and the lack of air caused us to lose weight. Anne got down to eight- five pounds. I got down to 125. Can you imagine me weighing 125? Anne weighs 125 now. So we came back. We wanted to have children and we came back and we had our son Bill in Prescott. I worked in Prescott, Arizona for New Jersey Zinc Company. What year was that that you came back here? [ 00: 25: 00] In ’ 53. And New Jersey Zinc Company, they were exploring for ore bodies in central Arizona. That was a pretty nice job. It paid me about the same as I got at Cerro de Pasco, but Cerro de Pasco was cheaper to live. But while I was working for New Jersey Zinc, I was offered a job at a great big increase in pay to work for a uranium company in Utah, Western Gold and Uranium [ Incorporated]. I worked for Western Gold and Uranium, and its sister company was called Golden Crown Mining Company. They were in Arizona and Utah and it was necessary for us to move to St. George [ Utah]. You mentioned that. [ In an earlier interview conducted 6/ 13/ 2005] But in the meantime, while I was working for New Jersey Zinc, we built a house in Prescott. That was our first house of our own. Beautiful house. Small. Seven hundred square feet, and just so clean and new. That’s where Bill was born. How long did you live out there? We lived there for about a year and a half till we moved to St. George, because I was offered this better job. I never regret taking the better job because it not only gave me the extra pay but much more experience that was valuable all the rest of my life. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 [ In] St. George, we operated a mine at Silver Reef, which is seventeen miles north of there. [ It was] a silver- uranium mine, and also a mine at Grand Canyon [ National Park] called the Orphan. The Orphan was the richest uranium mine in the United States at that time. That’s pretty significant. So you did uranium mining. Tell me about that a little. Yes. Uranium mining there and at Silver Reef. Silver Reef was uranium and silver. The values were about equal. We built a mill there and sunk a shaft, the first time I ever had part in that, sunk a vertical shaft and developed the mine to mine silver and uranium. And at the Orphan Mine, we built a tramway and then sunk a 1,550- foot shaft in order to mine that ore body. So this was the job, mining uranium and mining silver. And what years were these? This was from 1954 to ’ 59. Five years. Were you ever concerned about uranium? No, this was a good job. These were good mines and the ore was rich and it paid off and made us money, made the employees money. Where was it going to, the uranium? All of the uranium was controlled by the United States Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC]. They were the only buyer of uranium. None of it was sold to anybody else. It had to go to the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1958 they quit buying uranium ore from new mines. Only old mines. Well, we were also not able to get any new mines started then for uranium, so that was when I quit them. I wanted to do something else and I started a company called Intermountain Exploration Company, an independent exploration for ore deposits. And that lasted from 1959 to 1993. But we didn’t have good financing and very soon I had to get a job someplace because we have to have money coming in. In the meantime we had a nice house we built in St. George. The UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 house is still there. 248 South 600 East— still there. We know the people living in it. And it looks as good as it ever did. Now you lived in St. George for quite some time. [ 00: 30: 00] Ten years. We moved there in 1954— the first of November ’ 53. November of ’ 53 to May ’ 63. In May ’ 63 we moved away from St. George, but in all that, ten years. Ten years, I operated uranium mines, and our son Bill was brought up there. Anne was bringing him up. She was doing the raising of our great son. Do you remember that? Anne Wyman: You bet I do. Richard Wyman: And that was in St. George. Where does your son live now? He lives up in Washington State, Yelm. And two grandsons. How old are they? Thirteen and sixteen. Teenagers. So St. George. I started the Intermountain Exploration Company and we explored for porphyry copper deposits and gold and silver, not uranium. We weren’t looking for uranium, because you couldn’t sell it. If you got a new uranium mine, you couldn’t sell the ore. That’s all changed now. There’s an international market for uranium. There didn’t used to be. But anyhow, in 1961 the Russians shot ten large atmospheric tests. And there had been a moratorium on testing from 1958. No tests were done in ’ 58 to ’ 61, then the Russians did ten of them in a week or so. And the [ Nevada] test site [ NTS] started up full bore. During the time we had lived in St. George, we heard these tests, we witnessed them. I was going to ask you about that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Yes. It’s described in that other testimony [ Interview conducted June 13, 2005]. Yes, they would tell us when there was going to be a test and what time it was going to be, and we would get up and go up on Red Hill just north of St. George. You could see to the west real good, and at the exact instant, let’s say five a. m., you’d see the light go all the way up across the sky to the zenith, so the sky was completely lit. And we wouldn’t hear anything or feel anything. Then we’d get in the car and drive back down to the apartment where we lived and we’d put on a pot of coffee and after about twenty minutes, along would come the noise. And then you’d feel the shock. Sometimes the shock would be about the same time, that is, coming through the ground. And sometimes the shock would be there ahead and make the window fly open or something. That’s pretty significant. A hundred and twenty- five miles from the test site. Yeah, that’s pretty powerful. So anyhow, when they started up again in 1961, I went over to look about getting a job. That’s where I got a job as tunnel superintendent, first off just an assistant to the manager to do some work for him. But I was in charge of the Marshmallow tunnel, which was a large underground excavation and a large underground construction job. It finished under budget and early, and they were not used to that kind of thing at the test site. They were used to things being just the opposite. So I made a name for myself that way, but I didn’t want to continue at the test site at the time. I wanted to get back into mining, and I took a job with the Sunshine Mining Company [ Kellogg, Idaho] and we went north. That’s up in the panhandle of Idaho. What a wonderful place that was, too. It was a wooded country up there. There were elk, snow, all kinds of nice winter sports and things like that. Fishing. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 How long were you there? [ 00: 35: 00] We were there for a little over a year and we returned here January 1965. Don McGregor wanted me to go back to the test site because I had made a name for myself once, you see, and they were having trouble with Pile Driver, a large underground construction job to test different kinds of structures for what they would do in the case of a direct atomic attack. Two hundred underground structures. The man that was in charge of it was Glenn Clayton and he was a good miner but he wasn’t doing a good job with this because it required some intense planning that he had no idea what to do with. So anyhow, they got me back over there, to the test site, and that’s when we moved to Boulder City. At the test site, I worked with Glenn Clayton and another man, Asa Morrison, who was a computer expert, as expert as they were at that time, with an IBM [ International Business Machines] computer. We worked on scheduling every detail of that job. We worked nights for weeks. At the end of the day, we would go eat our dinner and then we’d set up shop in the Mercury camp, in a room that we had for it, and we’d put all this stuff on the wall and on bulletin boards and lay it all [ out]. We had to schedule every bit of construction because these were 200 different kinds of construction. Each one required different materials. And they had to be done so you don’t interfere with one of them while you’re doing the other, and that was difficult. It took planning. But once we got that thing planned, we never lost another day. They couldn’t catch up the budget that had been lost, but they never lost another [ day] and they never got behind schedule again. It was for that reason they had promoted me to assistant manager of operations. You had a reputation. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 Yes. I jumped up over the people that hired me and everything, over McGregor and other people, and became assistant manager. And I was that until May 1969, when I left to go to UNLV. I taught at UNLV twenty- three years. Now, let’s talk about Anne. Yes. While I was doing this work at the test site, our son Bill, he has now gone into growing up and he is in the upper part of grade school. [ So] Anne, she didn’t need to be home all day, so she was wanting to get a job, and she got hired to teach geology at UNLV. And what year is this? This is 1966. She was the first woman to teach in the College of Science and Math. The first woman to teach at UNLV in the sciences. Do you remember that? Anne Wyman: Yes, I do. Do you remember what that was like? It was wonderful. Richard Wyman: The man that hired her was Herb Wells, who recently retired. She taught geology and geography, two fields, and then later mineralogy. She built the curriculum. She’s a very clever person, very talented person, and she got the programs that other colleges, the best ones in the country, offered. She made a matrix of what courses and what universities did which, so that UNLV would require the same as the best. And those courses then, the program had to go to the [ Board of] Regents and she took care of the whole thing. So they ended up with a geology degree. So you helped to create the program. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 17 She actually created it, yes. And then she taught several of the courses, [ but] mineralogy is her specialty. We have some really nice mineral specimens in the other room which I can show you. She taught there for twenty- eight years. [ 00: 40: 00] That’s amazing. Now being the first woman hired on into the department, were there issues surrounding that or was it pretty smooth? It was pretty smooth, wasn’t it? Anne Wyman: Yes, it was. Richard Wyman: There were a few remarks but I told Anne just don’t worry about them. Let it roll off. When they see that you do a good job, you’ll be fully accepted. And that was the way it was. And in terms of mineralogy, were there outside things that she did? She did some work with another man on the mineralogy of storage of atomic waste at Yucca Mountain. She had a publication with him on that. What year was this? Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe 1988 or so. OK. But she was a teacher. She won teaching awards, some very impressive teaching awards. She was the first winner of the Spanos Award [ for Distinguished Teaching], which is a university- wide teaching award.