Interview with Jerry Don Claborn, July 30, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Jerry Claborn July 30, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 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 Jerry Claborn July 30, 2004 Conducted by Shannon Applegate Table of Contents Introduction: birth, family background, education, move to Las Vegas, NV, children and grandchildren 1 Hired by REECo to work at the NTS, job and salary, playing baseball for the REECo teams at the NTS 3 Takes position as operating engineer with Longyear Drilling, working on underground testing at the NTS 4 Professional relationship with William Flangas, tunnel superintendent for REECo at NTS 7 Tells family story of how he got the nickname Bobo 9 Talks about miners and how they get their nicknames 12 Works on NTS medical survey to locate miners injured while working at the NTS 13 Discusses REECo and their safety record while working at the NTS, seasonal employment and layoffs 16 Becomes union business representative at NTS 18 Recalls commuting out to the NTS and the bonds forged among workers, strains on family relationships, benefits of working for REECo 19 Remembers strikes and labor issues at the NTS 21 Details work done for NTS users, including Sedan, and connection to safety, and some of the findings of the NTS medical survey 22 Talks about running a mucking machine during underground testing 28 Becomes business representative, then assistant district representative for Operating Engineers Local Number 12 in Las Vegas, NV 30 Recounts experience dealing with grievances and negotiating contracts as union shop steward and union business manager 32 Talks about secrecy and work at the NTS, and bonds forged by workers because of requirement for confidentiality 38 Recalls impressions of atmospheric tests 42 Recounts fatal mine accidents at NTS 45 NTS as a “ big family” and tangible and intangible benefits of work there 49 Position on Yucca Mountain Project 51 Interaction with protesters at the NTS, and personal position on testing as deterrent and protection for the United States 53 Work as state representative for District 19 and connection with stand on political issues 55 Conclusion: the NTS and future utilization 62 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Jerry Claborn July 30, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Shannon Applegate [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 1, Disk 1. Jerry Claborn: My name is Jerry D. Claborn. I was born in a little town, in Mansfield, Arkansas in 1939. My folks moved from Arkansas during the war to a little place called San Pedro, California. That was during the WPA [ Works Progress Administration] and my dad went to work for an oil company there— I think it was Standard Oil Company— and what they had done [ was] they had confiscated all of these ships and boats, tugboats; they took the screens, and they shut all the harbors off with these screens so the submarines couldn’t come into the harbor. And so after that, the war was over. Then my dad moved up with a company to a little place called Santa Maria, California. That’s where I went to high school— went to grammar school and high school in Santa Maria, California. And I graduated from Santa Maria High School June 15, 1957 and June the 17, I ended up here in Las Vegas, Nevada and I’ve been here ever since. I spent a little time in Bakersfield, California in a different type of job for some water tunneling. But primarily I raised my children here. As a matter of fact, my son went to Eldorado High School, my two granddaughters graduated from Eldorado High School, and one graduated from UNLV [ University of Nevada, Las Vegas], and my other one is going to UNLV; my other granddaughter, and my grandson will be a senior at Eldorado High School, so it’s kind of neat that my son went to Eldorado High School and my grandkids graduated from there. It’s kind of ironic because when I moved to Las Vegas in 1957, there were only three high schools, and the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 third high school had just been built in 1958. It only had one class prior to that, and the class was actually— I don’t think anybody graduated out of that high school the first time. Shannon Applegate: Oh, really? Why? Because they had just started a high school and I think they started out with freshmen. So [ the] high school today, the name is Rancho High School, which is the third, and now we have over something like twenty- nine high schools in the Las Vegas area. And growing. It’s unbelievable. But anyway, getting back to how I come to Las Vegas and whatever, I had a buddy that came with me, and for some reason we had already made our minds up in high school that when we get out of here, we’re headed for Las Vegas and make our fortune. His name is Billy Boone [ sp]. He was a crane operator. He worked out at the Nevada Test Site, started out in 1957 as well, and now he lives in [ Rancho] Cucamonga, California. Actually he lives right out of Cucamonga. And I just seen him the other day, as a matter of fact, and we was reminiscing about the Nevada Test Site and the people that we knew and whatever, you know, and the ones that we worked with when we was younger that became dignitaries. I mean it was really amazing how this thing really progressed. But anyway, what happened is we was walking down the street and I asked a gentleman, I said, Sir, can you tell me where a man could get a job? Well, the fellow looked at me and says, Well, you don’t look like a man to me. You look like a kid. And I said, Sir, let me tell you something. I stuck my finger right up in front of his face and I said, I been doing man’s work since I was fourteen years old. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 And he said, Well, excuse me, you know, like give me kind of that sarcastic, you know. And he said, If you’re really serious, he said, why don’t you go down here on Main Street and Charleston. There’s an outfit called REECo Engineering. And I said, REECo? What do you mean? He says, Reynolds Electric and Engineering. I said, Oh, OK. And we did. We walked down there and sure enough, we went in there and they were hiring. They sent us to the Nevada Test Site the next day, as a matter of fact. Actually, the first thing they asked me, Do you guys know how to play baseball? And we said, Well, sure. Certainly. We was big stars in Little League, Middle League, and all that. And he said, Well, you’re hired. So anyway, what they did, they hired us as what they called a classification as “ flunkies.” And what flunkies did was anything that the kitchen cooks and everything wanted you to do out at the Nevada Test Site. They sent us to work out in the cafeteria, which was really, really unique and it was wonderful, really. We met some wonderful people back in those days. They were really true people, true friends. They’re friends today. Forty- seven years, forty- eight years later [ 00: 05: 00] we’re still friends and stuff. And what was really unique about it is the wage scale was something— I think we started out about two— no, it wasn’t even two dollars. It was a dollar- thirty- or- forty, fifty cents, but we got room and board. They took us out there and took us back or whatever. And we worked just about all the hours we wanted, and then we played softball on the weekends. And they had different types of leagues and they had different ball games or whatever. And back in those days, it was fast pitch, not slow pitch, you know, what they have today. It was fast pitch, just as fast as UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 you could throw the ball underhand. And anyway, I can remember, that was the biggest thing back in ’ 58, ’ 59, and the sixties. When we would have ball games here in town and play against Las Vegas, we’d have five, six thousand people at those ball games and softball games. That was the only game in town besides gaming. So anyway, it was really wonderful. And we had a guy by the name of Bill Durkee, which was our athletic director and handled all of that out there. I think he’s still alive, too, and he’s a great man. Great guy. God, what a wonderful man. But anyway, he was the one that was instrumental in putting all this stuff together, and we had leagues for quite a few years. I can remember one of the miners that was my boss after I went into mining…. But anyway, we played that one season and the season was over, and I decided to come to town one night and got in some trouble with another gentleman messing with my girlfriend. But anyway, he hit me in the back with a chair and injured my back, so I went home to Santa Maria to recup[ erate]. So after about two or three months, I couldn’t wait to get back to Las Vegas. So I did recup and came back. And when I come back this time, the first thing they wanted to do was— REECo was putting me back— hire me, and putting me back on playing ball and so on and et cetera, and I said, Sure. What position did you play? I played third base. I played hot corner. But anyway, when I came back, we finished that season, which is about three or four months of playing softball there. Then one of the guys said, I’d like to have you come to work for Longyear Drilling. I see you’re a hard worker, and I see you play ball and all that. We could use you. And I said, Oh, I’d love to. What do you pay? They said, Well, the scale is about two bucks. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 And I said, Oh man, that’s about seventy or eighty cents for you. Yeah, I’d love that. So anyway, it came to pass. About a couple months later, I got a call to come to Las Vegas and be interviewed with one of our operating engineers’ business representative, and sure enough, they hired me and sent me back out as an operating engineer. They didn’t have an apprenticeship program at the time, so I went back out as a helper. And what they was doing then was drilling what they call line- of- sight holes. Like in these tunnels, there was only E- Tunnel and B- Tunnel, they were driving these tunnels so they knew that the atmospheric test ban was coming, so they said, Well, you know, what we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to shoot everything underground, because they had already talked about that. So they were driving these tunnels, making these tunnels in there, because we knew eventually we was going to do that. But they were trying to find out how in the world can we shoot underground with a shot and see what it contains? Like, you know, when you shoot a shot out on the flats, I’ve seen quite a few of those shots that they shot, that they’d build these towers on and they would put a device on it and explode it. Well, they all had a mushroom cloud. And they would put these ones underground a little bit, and they would drop them from aircraft, and they would put them in balloons and put them up so high and ignite them, and an explosion and so on. And I seen all of this. And anyway, they knew the test ban treaty was coming. And so what they said, Well, how are we going to do that? So really, if you would drill a hole, a straight hole, say a half- a- mile back in the mountain, and what would happen, that explosion is so powerful, it would probably just blow everything out like the barrel of a gun. So what they decided to do was, Let’s go in at different angles. And we would drill at one angle and another angle, another angle, and they would put mirrors so when they looked through this line- of- sight, this mirror here [ demonstrating technique], they would turn it just right so actually what UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 they did after they’d made all of these different zigzags, they had a straight shot to that, and it would never blow up because it had— Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, nobody’s really talked about that. Yeah, it was really ingenious. So our main objective for doing that was to try to drill those so [ 00: 10: 00] straight that, so big of a hole, a twelve- inch hole or whatever, that it would get back a half- a- mile, that you would be able to see completely through that. You know, like if you lost a quarter of an inch off of this one every thirty feet, well then you would never get the full circumference of that hole. And we went out there and we was testing and that’s what I was doing. I was helping them. We went in there with these drill machines, and they had a driller and I was the helper, and what we did was we put all these instruments together and tools together, drill the holes, and then they would pull the instrument out. It had a target on it, with crosshairs in there, and our object was to make sure that the crosshairs would line up so when we got to the end of that mile- and- a- half, whatever was in there, that after we made thirty different holes from different positions, it would all be a full circumference. And it took a long time, but we learned how to master that and we did it. And so I can remember, once we had mastered that, the outfit that did the drilling there was called Longyear Drilling-- I can remember my boss to this day, the last I heard he was still alive and that was years ago, his name was Percy Whickle [ sp]. That’s a great name. Can you believe that? Yeah, a great name, right? Percy Whickle? And so I never forgot that, and that was, oh, 1958, so that’s quite a few many years ago. So anyway, what took place after that— and he turned out to be one of my best friends and you might even know him. Right now, he’s UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 with the Nevada State Ethics Commission. His name is Bill Flangas. You happen to know the name? No, I don’t. Well, he was the one instrumental in taking over all the mining and all that. He was really a hard working man and an intelligent person. And it was kind of ironic, because I didn’t really think he liked me at all or whatever. Well, I was just a young kid and I was wild as a March hare. So anyway, I was in there in the tunnel one day and I was working and he came by and he said, You’re going to go to work for me. And I said, Well, who are you? He said, Well, I’m the superintendent of this tunnel. And I said, Oh, well, I’m sorry. And he said, I’ve been watching you, and he said, I really like the way you work and you’re going to come to work for me. And I said, No, I’m not. I’ve got a good job right here. And he said, That’s what you think. You’re going to go to work for me. And I thought he was kidding and whatever and I said, Who is that guy? And they said, Well, that’s Bill Flangas. He’s the superintendent of all of this drilling. He’s the head guy around here. Don’t give him any trouble. I said, I’m not giving him any trouble. He just says that I’m going to go to work for him. And my boss said, Well, you’re not going to go to work for him. You’re going to stay working for me. I said, Well, that’s what I told him. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 Well, about three weeks later, I’d seen him [ and] every time he would see me, he says, You’re going to go to work for me. And so I said, No, I’m not. So anyway, about three weeks later my boss come up to me and he said, Well, Jerry, we’re going to have to let you go. As a matter of fact, nobody called me Jerry, even in high school. Everybody calls me Bobo to this day. It’s my nickname I’ve had all my life. Where’d you get it? Well, that’s another story. You want to hear that one? Yeah. OK, that story then, and we’ll continue with the one about— let me finish the one about Bill Flangas first. Well anyway, Bill Flangas. My boss told me we were going to have to lay you off. And I said, Lay me off? You’re hiring people. Why are you going to lay me off? What did I do? And he says, Don’t worry about it. You’re not going to get out the gate. They’re going to pick you up. I said, Pick me up? What are you talking about? He said, You’re going to go to work for somebody else. And I said, Another company? He said, Oh, yeah. I said, What company? What are you talking about? He said, You’re going to work for Reynolds Electric and Engineering, and guess who’s going to be your boss? And I said, Who? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 He said, Bill Flangas. And you know what? He did. I went to work for Bill Flangas. I’d just seen him here not too long ago, and you know what? I respect him more than any man that I can ever really— all the values and everything. He’s a real man’s man. And we’ve been friends. I always thought he hated me, but he nurtured my career up until this day. I saw him and he’s a little bit older than I am, and this was just six months ago or whatever, and I couldn’t wait to tell him how much I respected him. If it wasn’t for him, I would never [ have] had a career that I have today and I would never [ have] had the family or anything. I owe everything to him. And I was so happy that I had a chance to tell him that before we get any older. So anyway, I thought he appreciated it, and what a great guy, and he’s got a great wife, too. He’s a nice man. Now why did you think he didn’t like you? [ 00: 15: 00] Well, I don’t know. I really don’t know. Because he was really rough. He wasn’t that big of a guy but he wouldn’t— I don’t think he would ever if— he wasn’t the type of guy to say thank you, he— Real stoic. Yes, he was just tough. I mean he was just mean, ornery, whatever. He was just a tough man. He had a tough life and trying to put up with the bunch of us people. Miners are the greatest people in the world, but they all have a mind of their own. They’re wonderful people. Wonderful families, too. But anyway, let���s get back to the story of how I got my nickname. OK. My mother said, I named you. And my father said, Oh, no, I named you Bobo. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 I have two other brothers, and the oldest one is Joe and the other, my second brother, the second oldest one, his name is Bob. And his nickname is Zeke. And anyway, but my mother said, No, I named you and here’s how it happened. And I said, Well, how? How did it happen? How did I ever get that doggone name? And I can’t ever remember anybody calling me Jerry. It was Bobo. Everybody, even when I was in high school. I can tell you some stories. My wife that I’m married to today, after we was going together for about three months, she said, What’s your real name? I mean that’s how bad it was, or is, or whatever. But anyway, my mother said, No, no, no, no. Here’s how you got named. She said, When you was a little toddler, we lived in Arkansas. And those homes we had in Arkansas, they have a veranda that goes all the way around the house that [ was] screened— to keep all of the mosquitoes and stuff out. So my mother was looking for me one early morning and she couldn’t find me. And so finally she went out the door and out the screen door and here I was, she says I’m down here talking to these, you know, and all I could say was, Bo. Bo. Bo. Bo. So anyway, I was talking, Bo. Bo, to all these guys that was putting a city water line in. So my mother retrieved me and put me back in the house and let me out on the screen porch and she said, You couldn’t believe it, what they’re doing. All you were doing is sticking your little head out there, watching those guys work on that construction project. So finally at lunchtime, they come up and got me out of my screen deal and they was sitting down and they were feeding me candy and cookies from their lunch, and my mother was looking for me again, and they said, Oh, we’ve got Bobo right here. And she said, What? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 They said, We got Bobo right here. Because all I could say was, Bo. Bo. Bo. So it went on like that for about a week. Every time that they would come up and work on the water line, they would bring me a little something to eat or, some cookies and things. How neat? Oh, yeah. And then they would come up to the door and knock on the door and ask my mother, Where’s Bobo? And she said, That’s how you got your name. And my dad says, No, no, no, that’s not the way you got your name. The way you got your name was when I played semipro ball in Mansfield, Arkansas, my favorite catcher, he said, his name was Bo Hamby, and I was the greatest pitcher we ever had. I said, Yeah, that’s right. And he said, But anyway, that was my favorite catcher’s name, was Bo Hamby, and when you was born, you looked so much like Bo Hamby, with no hair and all that stuff, I named you Bo. And Mother said, No, that’s not right. But anyway, it stuck with me and my brothers and that’s all. And even when I went to high school, I only had one— even [ in] grammar school, high school, nobody had ever called me Jerry— but one guy, and I remember his name, and his name is Gary Bookless, and he’s the only one that called me Jerry in all of high school. In our high school we had, oh my God, we had about four thousand students in Santa Maria High School. Our graduating class was 280- something that graduated, so we had a real big school. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 But anyway, I’ve had it all my life, and when I was dating my wife, about three months later she says, What is your real name? I said, Jerry. She said, Jerry? That doesn’t even go. That’s great. I like your mom’s story better. That’s a good story. Yeah, well, that’s the way it is. But I’ve been trying to keep that. When I ran for [ first] office, you notice you don’t see any Bobo in here. It’s all Jerry and, I didn’t want that out. Most of all my people, my friends up there in the legislature now, they don’t call me Bobo— well, some of them do, on the floor. Oh, do they really? Oh, absolutely, you know, and I answer to it. I act like I don’t hear them, but I mean— most of them up there now call me Jerry, but I’ve got all my friends that are Democrats and so on, and my Republican friends call me Bobo, as well. And I never have enticed them to do that. I had never had to say, No, wait a minute. My name’s not Bobo. It’s Jerry. But I can [ 00: 20: 00] remember when I used to walk down the street, if somebody would say, Hey, Jerry, I wouldn’t even turn around and look. I don’t know what they’re talking about. So it’s amazing. Now, you said all the miners had nicknames. Oh, absolutely. Just 99 percent of the miners had nicknames. Let me go through some of these names. Some of these guys that— well, I can remember one time we was working on a compressor and this guy came out, they’d just hired him, and his first name was Bob. And when he came up, he was asking us, Where do we see the superintendent? And, Where do I do this? And where do I do that? And somebody looked in the back of his pickup truck UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 and there were two saddles in it. You know what they named him? Two Saddles. His real name was Bob Nichols [ sp] and he lived in a little town up here in Beatty, but today, if you see him, you call him Two Saddles and he answers to it. Hey, Two Saddles. And oh my gosh, it’s just everybody. Like Sandwich Tom and Water Hose Hank and, oh, Ava. We named Don Owen Ava. He was always— Oh, really? I’ve met Don. Do you know Don Owen? Yeah, his nickname is Ava because he used to act like a girl, like Ava Gardner? Just playing around and whatever, but we named him Ava. But everyone— we named one of the young kids [ who] came out, he was really young and just looked like a little boy, and one of the guys said, Look at that little guy. He looks like a little rosebud. So young and clean and all that, and guess what his nickname is? Rosebud. And he didn’t like it at all, but he answers to Rosebud. Now when he calls and he says, This is Rosebud. His name is Walter Davis. But I mean there’s hundreds of these. I could go on and go on. But just about everybody had a nickname of some sort. And you said that made it difficult to track some of these people now. Yeah, and when we got into the situation where we was doing the Nevada Test Site medical survey, that we had the grant, that they came in with Dr. Lewis Pepper and his crew that came in on a grant for this medical research. Then myself, John Campbell, and a few of these people that were business representatives— which I was at the time with the operating engineers— they put us on this committee as expert— it wasn’t witnesses— expert testimonial people; that [ they] knew had been working at the test site so many years and could answer questions that they didn’t figure anybody else could answer. They said, You guys are experts at this, so we’re going to set a panel up and we want you, you, you, and you, and so on, so we did. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 And so we set this panel, and when it came to try to find out what was going on with those guys, we had such a hard time. At the beginning of this medical research, we couldn’t get anything from the federal government. We couldn’t get anybody’s name who worked at the test site. No, they wouldn’t give us anything. What year was this? This was 19— it had to be in ’ 97, ’ 98, or somewhere in there. And finally, of course, the operating engineers, I couldn’t give them the operating engineers because it’s against the law or whatever to give out the names from union members. And so on. So I knew all of those guys but I couldn’t give them to—. Finally after a couple lawsuits and court suits and whatever that the government was helping us try to do some of this stuff— because they had already put up so many million dollars for a grant to do this— then they did. They made some kind of a concession that the people that worked at the Nevada Test Site, yes, we can go in there and we can find out through the computers who they worked for. Then at the time, the people that worked for Reynolds Electric and Engineering back then, we didn’t have computers then. We had Rolodex cards and so on. So what a mess that was. It would have been great if we’d had computers back in ’ 51. But that’s what we did when we did put the computers together with John Campbell. And John Campbell, myself, and all the ones that knew the people, we would try to put together different categories, like electrician, pipe fitter, operating engineer, carpenter, bull ganger, laborer, whatever it would be. A Teamster. Then we associated those in categories. Once we put them in categories, then what we tried to do, is to find out their names. So anyway, the biggest problem we had was— well let’s say, Let’s start out with the miners. OK. We’re going to concentrate only on the mining today. What was Water Hose Hankin’s name? [ 00: 25: 00] [ And they would say] Well, I don���t know. Was it Bill Hankin? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Nobody knows. We didn’t have any— so someone would say, Well, you try to find that out. What is his name? And all of these guys, it was such a problem because all we knew them was Sandwich Tom or Water Well or Oil Can Harry. We knew a guy named Oil Can Harry. His name was Harry Griffith . And I knew some of these. He lived in Beatty, as well. So I said, I know him. His name is Harry Griffin. [ And they would say] Oh, OK. Then we could get his name and go put that together with the stuff that we had finally got from REECo; some of the names and stuff, to associate these together, and then we’d put them in the computer. Built a database and all that stuff. And once we could do that, after we got them in the database the best we could do, we started trailing them to find out if they were alive. First of all, get their social security number and so on, and then we could contact their wives, their sons, or whatever and ask if they were alive, when they died, and so on, et cetera, and we all put it in the database. And what we was really trying to find out, after about two or three years, after we got— I think we had eleven hundred names in there. Then they busted these down into categories that I was telling you, which was miners, laborers, carpenters, iron workers, bull gangers, and Teamsters. Then after we did that, we find out how many was alive, how many worked there, how many died. And then we had the percentage of how long they lived after working in those hazardous conditions that we have up there. How many wear hearing aids. All of us wear hearing aids that worked under there, underground, because of the whining, and so on. And then REECo’s made restitution to us. They was really a great company. They was a wonderful company. I talked to Frankie Lou Mayer, who worked in workmen’s comp. and she talked about the hearing aids. Oh, is that right? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 And she talked about how that was— she thought REECo was really great with trying to compensate— Well, let me tell you something about REECo. Reynolds Electric and Engineering was one of the best companies. It got many, many awards for the safety of their employees, and I’ll tell you what, there was none better. As a business representative for, well, almost twenty- five years, I handled hundreds and hundreds of different contractors here in the State of Nevada. And none of them had a safety program like they had at Reynolds Electric and Engineering. They were wonderful to their employees. The only problem we had with their employees is sometimes it’s seasonal, and that came about because our seasonals runs from October to October because that’s our fiscal year. You’re well aware of that. But most of the people wouldn’t, so what they’d do, if they had any excess money left over, then from November to December, January, and February, we would work six, seven days a week because they would use the money up, but that’s what it was for. They would kind of hold back. But then there would be a layoff for a month or two because there wasn’t any money in the budget. So once they was rebudgeted again, then [ they’d] hire on again. Some of us were lucky enough, they never got laid off out there. Were you ever laid off? Yes, I got laid off one time when they was hiring people. Oh, that was the time when you were—? No, no, that was a different time. It was very funny, too, because, I don’t know, I was a job steward and so on up there and whatever, and one day one of the walking bosses come up to me and says, Jerry, he says, I’m going to have to let you go. And I said, Let me go? What are you talking abou