Interview with Gay (Gertrud Anne Yoder) Kauffman, October 11, 2006

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Gay Kauffman October 11, 2006 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 Gay Kauffman October 11, 2006 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: born Denver, CO ( 1914), family background, move to Chicago, IL during WW I, death of brother, education ( University of Chicago) and work as laboratory technician, employment at AMA as editorial assistant [ ca. 1941), marriage and move to Las Vegas, NV ( 1943) 1 Witnesses Trinity while driving to Albuquerque, NM ( 1945) 6 Recalls V- J Day ( 1945) in Denver, CO 8 Husband Lou Kauffman leaves the Army, they move back to the West ( 1945), talks about places lived and jobs held in Colorado and California 9 Move to New Mexico, work as proofreader on journal in Albuquerque and later as assistant woman’s editor for New Mexican in Santa Fe 14 Meets Mr. Reynolds of REECo in New Mexico, move to Las Vegas, NV to take jobs with REECo at NTS ( 1951) 15 Recalls observation of airdrop test at the NTS, parking and riding buses to the NTS 19 Building the infrastructure of the test site ( 1950s) 20 Entertainment on the Las Vegas Strip in the 1950s 23 Work on the NTS Bulletin beginning in the 1960s: details work with NTS photographers, scientists, and printers in connection with producing the Bulletin 25 Thoughts on LRL, Plowshare program, and peaceful uses of atomic energy 30 Recounts unique photographs and stories created at NTS historic sites 31 Conclusion: Photo and document identification 34 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Gay Kauffman October 11, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: Gay Kauffman, thank you so much for meeting with us today. I was so thrilled to meet you a few months ago. It was really hot that day, as I recall. Gay Kauffman: It was hot. It was really bad when we went through a lot of your documents. So now, to start off, if you could just tell me your full name, place and date of birth, and a little bit about your family background, to get us started. Well, I was born in Denver, Colorado on November 2, 1914. And we moved to Chicago. This was at the wartime [ World War I]. We weren’t yet involved but it was— we moved to Chicago and I went to school there; my first job was there. Bad Depression. But I had a good childhood. My brother died— we were very close— in a Fourth of July accident when he was twelve and he’d already completed two years of high school. He was really a brilliant boy. And that was hard. But I got a small scholarship to University of Chicago to some literature classes. And when that ran out, why, I went over to the Billings Hospital, that’s the medical school, and took laboratory courses there in bacteriology and clinical medicine and so forth. I became a laboratory technician, which was interesting but it got very boring. And then I worked at the American Medical Association Journal [ AMA] as an editorial assistant— I always wanted to write. Then the war [ World War II] came along and I married and came to Las Vegas. Well, I’m going to stop you right here for a moment, because I want to pick up a couple of details about your childhood. You told me your first name yesterday on the phone was actually— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 My first name was Gertrude Anne Yoder, the initials spelled G- A- Y, and that’s what I was called all my life. And it didn’t have the present connotation then. It’s sort of amusing now, when I go to an airline office for instance and am asked, Are you Gay? And I have to say, Well, yes and no. That’s how the Gay came about. Now tell me your parents’ names. Your father’s name? My father was Perry Morton Yoder. He came from a Pennsylvania Dutch background. It was several generations before Amish. And my mother was from Tunbridge Wells in England, and had come to America and took nurse’s training at Asbury Park in New Jersey and became a pediatrician nurse. And she traveled all around the country and they met at Glenwood Springs in Colorado. There’s a town outside of Colorado Springs named Yoder. My grandmother and grandfather came there [ 00: 05: 00] in a covered wagon and established the first post office. The town, all that’s left is a building with a big sign with Yoder High School. It wasn’t very prosperous; they went to Oregon. But my father stayed and he became a school teacher; he had two schools near Colorado Springs where he taught. Now what was your mom’s name, your mother’s name? My mother’s name was Helen Atwell and my father was— Perry Morton came from a governor of Indiana whom my grandparents had admired very much. It’s just like my brother’s name was Theodore Roosevelt Yoder and that’s because my father had met Theodore Roosevelt. He was a great admirer of his. Now what took your family to Chicago in that era? Your father was a teacher. It was war. He tried to [ enlist]. He felt very— I mean passions were really raised against the Kaiser [ Wilhelm II] at that time. People were inspired to enlist. But he was rejected. He’d had rheumatic fever when he was young and did not have a good heart. But anyway, we got into UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Chicago, and I had a very good childhood with good parents. I can’t remember being struck. [ It was] part of his background, nonviolence. That’s why this present war makes me so anxious. But I waited till I was ninety years old to be struck. A man broke in the door here and threw me and injured me. I mean that’s really the first time that I was ever struck in my life and I was hospitalized. Sounds awful. The Chicago years were difficult in many ways. I had good friends there. Our car was struck in a hit- and- run, injuring father’s hand. Now your brother who was killed, that was Theodore Roosevelt Yoder? Yes. Was he your only sibling? Yes. And then I— well, the time in Chicago, it was good. Many museums and go to the opera, go to good plays, and it was good. You wouldn’t do this now, I don’t think. I rode all over and I mean you weren’t afraid. So I imagine what you said, the impact of losing your brother, do you mind telling me the circumstances of that? He had a blank cartridge gun and it exploded in the palm of his hand here. My mother sent him to the doctor, and the doctor put healing powder on it or something or other. She [ 00: 10: 00] kept looking and said it doesn’t look good, you know, in a couple of days, this is not good, and sent him to another doctor who didn’t exactly tend the wound but he gave him a shot of tetanus, a big shot of tetanus. And Teddy came home and within half an hour he was in anaphylactic shock. The tetanus serum had activated everything, and they rushed him to the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 hospital, of course, but he died. And at the hospital they operated on the hand and the wad from the gun was still in there. None of these doctors had tended it. And it was a very shocking thing. Yes. Yes. Well, I’m sorry. Yes. And then when I was at the Journal of the American Medical Association, I traveled quite a little. I went to various conventions in New York, in Atlantic City [ New Jersey], and so forth. And it was interesting and I certainly met some very fine doctors, which makes me a little bit hard to get along with, with some of this present HMO [ Health Maintenance Organization] business where all they want to do is get you out of the room. Now remind me of what year this was, then, you’re doing this work. I’m bad on dates. Approximately. I was married in 1943 and this was, like I went to the AMA, I think it was probably ’ 41 and ’ 43 and ’ 43. So the war is on. But I had worked in hospitals doing routine lab work, blood counts and typings and so forth. So when did you meet your husband, and what was his name? Oh, my husband was from northern Indiana. This Kauffman is a Pennsylvania Dutch name. And we met when we were very young. And my father and Milton, Lew’s father, were very good boyhood friends, and I used to go to the farm where they lived, and Lew and I were really very good friends. And then, of course, he was drafted. He was one of the first draftees out of Indiana. He was in college then. And he began writing me. And I had a pretty good retinue of beaus in Chicago. Lew wrote beautiful letters, and I went down to his graduation as a pilot in Marfa, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 Texas. He was first in artillery, and then he got into the Air Corps and took all the flight training, and he was graduated at Marfa, Texas. And he wrote and wanted me to come. I didn’t know at the time he was engaged. I knew nothing about that. But anyway, he just begged me to come to Marfa, so I went down and saw all the graduation and it was really [ pretty] in spring. Marfa is a lovely little Texas town, first time I was ever in a place like that, and I felt so good. It was about 5000 feet above sea level. I mean it was up. And I really, I just felt wonderful there. Anyway, we saw the graduation and came home, and he went to B- 17 training at [ 00: 15: 00] Roswell, New Mexico. And at Roswell, he wrote again and begged me to come, and I went down to Roswell. Roswell was a very nice little western town. And we got married there in the Episcopal church. I continued my job at the AMA. And then he was stationed in Las Vegas, where he was a B- 17 pilot training gunners, and all the 17s were up at Indian Springs Air Base. Indian Springs Air Base was an offshoot of the Las Vegas Army Air Base. It was named Nellis after the war. I came out for Christmas and stayed. There isn’t a Nevada Biltmore Hotel anymore, but then it was on the corner of Bonanza and Las Vegas Boulevard. The Biltmore Hotel had a pool. Lana Turner stayed there getting her divorce from Stephen Crane. We had a room and went and bought an electric plate and used to cook Kraft dinner, which only cost eleven cents then. Now this is still the wartime? Is this still wartime? Oh yes, I came in the Christmas of 1943. He got paid during the time I was here and I was amazed. I thought everybody in the Army got $ 21.00 a month. I mean that was the thing. And I’d been sending him cigarettes and everything and saw the paycheck for four hundred dollars or something; I wrote back to the AMA and I quit. I stayed here. That was a good time. You were in with a whole bunch of people all in the same circumstances and it was certainly a very UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 different town than it is now. You knew the characters. It was great at that time. The first year that we were here, it began to get hot. Oh, I never felt such heat. It started early, like in May. Then Lew got a leave, and we went back to Chicago and it was late June, I think, and we went to Indiana and Chicago. We stayed at the Palmer House in Chicago and we’d taken a whole bunch of silver dollars, and people there, they didn’t have silver dollars, and we were spreading these silver dollars around. We really had a good time. We were on a train returning to Las Vegas when the news came about President [ Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s death. But we got back to Las Vegas and Lew was transferred to Roswell, back again, to take B- 29 training. Now this was before the B- 29 had dropped the [ atomic] bomb. And so we had to pack up and go to Roswell. We were driving. This was in, I think, early July of ’ 45, and we were driving [ 00: 20: 00] at night across the New Mexico desert into Albuquerque when we saw the whole sky lit up. It was like day, and it was amazing. Everything lighted up, and it lasted for it seemed like quite a long time. We got into Albuquerque and we got into a motel to rest a little bit for the rest of the trip down to Roswell. And boy, I couldn’t wait to get to a newspaper. What happened? What happened? Nothing. Nothing. That was the first bomb, the Los Alamos test down at White Sands [ Trinity tes July 16, 1945]. We saw it. Right. That’s amazing that you saw it. Yes, we were going across the desert and that was quite an experience. So nothing was in the newspaper, you say? Nothing. Oh yes, nothing. Oh no, when I was in Santa Fe, most of the people working on the paper there had been there through the war and Los Alamos was up there; people from Los Alamos would get transported down to Santa Fe once in a while and watched very carefully and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 so forth, and everybody knew something was going on at Los Alamos, but the security was immensely tight and there was nothing about this. I’m just curious, that’s so amazing that you saw it and then nothing was there, did you ask other people? Had other people seen it as well? No, you kept quiet a little. You just didn’t— no, you didn’t talk about— it wasn’t a topic that you brought up much about what was happening. I see. Because of the war. Yes. So in your mind, are you connecting it maybe with the war or you just are mystified? No. I don’t remember that it was— and when Lew got through the B- 29 training and got a crew, he was a captain, what do they call them, an airplane commander. He had his crew, and most of them were Mormon boys from Utah, and a really good crew, he said. And he and his crew had to go to Lincoln, Nebraska where they would deploy out of the country to more in the vicinity of Japan. And we were up there. We’d been up visiting my uncle up at Fairplay, Colorado. After Lew’s training, we were on our way to Lincoln and we were coming down the mountain road into Denver and V- J Day happened. And oh, what a time it was in Denver. Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. You heard it on the radio, am I understanding you correctly? Oh yes, we had the radio on in the car and oh, gee, we got down into town. We had reservations at the Adams Hotel and we couldn’t get anywhere. And we had these friends who were also pilots in Las Vegas here, the Johnsons, and we called them up and Jeff said, Well, I’ll come down and get you and lead you here. So we went and stayed with them. And much celebration, of course. The next day, we got down to the hotel and that night, people just kept UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 coming to our room. These pilots that we had known here and at Roswell, they kept coming up to the room, and a detective would come up and say, You have to quiet down. But I mean it was such a remarkable time. [ 00: 25: 00] And we got to Lincoln, and believe me, it took a day or so for the participants, the pilots, the Army people, to turn from heroes into kind of not very much. Really in Lincoln they didn’t help us get a place to live. They were just very uninterested, and mostly interested in keeping their young women away from these Army service men. And our time at Lincoln was not very enjoyable. That’s interesting. I want to talk about that, but first I want to back you up a little bit to Denver because a lot of the images we see, postwar babies, baby boomers like me, see the streets of New York, Times Square. Was Denver like that? Oh, Denver was clogged! I mean it was clogged! I mean not necessarily cars or anything, just people! Everybody came downtown, it seemed, and it was a remarkable time. And I certainly believe the pictures in New York, the sailor kissing the nurse, and it was very true. Now you had seen the Trinity test, the Alamogordo test, and you know that these bombs have been dropped on Japan. Did you make the connection then or did the papers report it? No, it wasn’t until we came back here [ Las Vegas] for the tests that we began thinking about this. I mean kind of my background, I guess, from the nonviolence and so forth, it just was not a topic that we— and Lew’s— was not a topic that we pursued much. It was not— and when we got back here and there was all this bomb stuff and so forth, why, that’s when [ we] made the tie- in that that’s what we saw. Amazing. So he still had to report to Lincoln. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Oh yes, and we had to stay there. It was late fall. And all we wanted to go— he didn’t take any of the benefits. I mean there were a lot. He should’ve gone back to school and got his degree and so forth. We just wanted to get out of the Army. Just wanted to get out of the Army. And he didn’t want to pursue anything. He was a very good pilot, multi- engine pilot. And he certainly could’ve gone to airlines and so forth, but I mean we just didn’t want to do that. And we went back to Chicago for a little and we went to— Oh, while we were in Las Vegas here [ during WW II], we had a house down here on Vegas Drive— well, it wasn’t really on Vegas Drive. It was up on a hill sort of right down here. And it’s still there. We’d rented it and should’ve bought it. A beautiful little house. And we had all kinds of opportunities, believe me. And the man that lived down the hill used to come up and he’d beg us to buy property. He owned all this stuff here, see. And the golf course was here. This golf course across the street [ Las Vegas Golf Club]. Yes, it was there at the time. And it was desirable. This was very kind of elegant along here. And in fact, when we moved into this house, all that land down here that is now— gee, it was a horse ranch— Where Rancho is there? [ 00: 30: 00] No, Stonehaven. The Collins brothers came in and they started building that, oh, a couple of months after we moved into this house. And they began tearing down things and so forth. But that was a horse ranch down there. We lived farther down. We lived at the Nevada Biltmore. We’ve always just sort of been in this area here. I see. So that house that you rented was during the war. Yes, during the war, and it was a very nice little house. So I’m understanding that your husband left the Army as soon as he could? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Oh yes. And we didn’t want to stay in the Middle West. We wanted to come here. We had liked the West very much. And we went to Colorado because I had relatives there, and we kind of scoured the state. We had a couple hundred dollars and we were going to establish a dude ranch. And we drove around the state and met all kinds of people, and finally wound up down in Durango. And we drove up [ to] this place and here was this beautiful lake, and it was an earthen dam, big, on the Pine River. And the people that we met there told us to go down and talk to Bruce Sullivan. He was a sheriff of the county there. And Bruce had owned the ranch along the Pine River that had been appropriated for this dam and there was a big lake there now. But he had land on both sides, you know, that were up, just bordering it. And his wife, I think they were getting separated or something, she had all the land on that side of the lake and had a dude ranch there, visitors and so forth, very nice, very big. But he had some land on this side. And so we went and looked up Bruce Sullivan. See, the lake was down here and then there was some land that belonged to the [ Bureau of] Reclamation, and then there was a road that was going around it, and up here there was about ten acres of land. It had a spring on it and so forth. And so we talked with him about [ it] and he says, well— he almost gave it to us. It was $ 4,500 for ten acres. But it didn’t have a road into it, it didn’t have anything, it was just a lot of pine trees, lot of aspen. And so we made a deal with him. We gave him a couple hundred dollars and had to pay him every month a little money. And here we were, we were property owners. And we worked. Lew kind of did work around at the dam there, and we worked. And we got a squad tent. He built a platform and we lived in this squad[ tent]— that’s big, you know, and we had a stove. We’d go and buy things. And a bed. And we got very well acquainted with a whole lot of the people that were there. And when they were building the dam, the Reclamation had built these houses [ 00: 35: 00] and cabins for workers and that had been turned into a resort. And you know there UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 was work around, a lot of cabins and so forth. And we built a road. Many of the people who were in these cabins, these little houses, they were nice little houses, were in these houses, were people from Midland, Texas. This is where George Bush is from. And we got a lot acquainted with people from Midland, Texas, all oil people and all with a lot of money. And it was very interesting. But anyway, it was not a living. We did operate the resort one year and that’s when we really got to know them. And I had Ute Indian girls [ who] were maids and boy, that was interesting. These Ute girls, I’d be crossing the road with them, we’d be going somewhere, and they’d say, Ssh. They could hear the mailman way down by the bridge. He was coming. And I mean these girls were— very, very good experience with the Indians there. But anyway, as I say, it was not a living, and we went back. My mother and father had moved to California and they were living in Alameda. And we went to Alameda, and I got a job at the City of Paris in San Francisco. It was getting on to Christmastime and— no, I didn’t, I went to the Emporium first. It was getting on to Christmastime and I got into the toy department and worked for a company that made a number of games and a number of things. And I was on sort of a commission but I was also paid by the store, and I had this counter, and I sold more games than anybody. I mean they were always going over to the City of Paris and getting some of their stock and bringing it over. I really sold a lot of stuff and I got offered a very good job for them, but then that wasn’t anything that was in our plans. And Lew, then the airlift business— the Russian sector and so forth that had cut off supplies to parts of Berlin and we were airlifting stuff over— Yes, the Berlin Airlift, yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 And they were doing all the servicing of the planes out of Oakland there. And Lew got a job on these planes. I don’t know just what he did, but he worked there. We were making our payments to Bruce. Oh, and then Lew got a job managing a nursery out at Niles. Where is Niles? I don’t know where Niles is. You know what happened in Walnut Creek? Yes. Well, Walnut Creek’s up there and you come down a pass and there’s this little town of Niles. And it had a big nursery, a very large nursery. And Lew was there, and he wasn’t getting along [ 00: 40: 00] particularly well with this guy that owned it. And canning time came along and Lew got this job managing all the supplies, the cans were coming in or something or other. He had a crew, all non- English- speaking mostly. And so we got a house there at Niles, a little cabin, and I said, well, I’m going over to the cannery. I can do something there, too. And so I went and I saw this guy and he said, Oh, you do bacteriology? And I said Yes, so anyway he says, Well, you know, now come back in this sort of time and we got a lab here. We need you. And so I went back and went to the employment department, and this man— he was a nice man but he drank quite a little, and he was not cognizant at the moment or something or other. Anyway, they told me to come and I was to get on the peach line. They made me a cannery worker. And so I went. And the peaches were terrible. Fuzz. And then the tomatoes started. And that’s when I was supposed to be in this lab, testing tomatoes. Nothing happened. I was the only blonde in the place. It was Portugee [ Portuguese] people. I got on the line, and the tomatoes would come out of this thing, boiling hot. If you were down at this end of the line, well, you could get these hot tomatoes and just kind of squeeze the— I mean just a couple of— well, you had a knife and get the skin off. But if you were back at this end of the line, the tomatoes got colder and they weren’t as easy, and you changed every day, you kept going like this. And at UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 first I would pick up a tomato and look at it, you know, and so forth. And I worked next to this Olie and she was the chief tomato peeler. She was wonderful. She could do this stuff. And so I kind of observed Olie and I got to be a good tomato peeler. And Olie was the best tomato peeler, but I was second. And they came around in two weeks and anybody that wasn’t— you were putting them in these cans and they’d take the cans away. But if you weren’t meeting production or something, you were gone. I wasn’t gone. And I was standing there. And I was tomato juice from head to toes! And you know, it was fun. And I got very well acquainted with Olie and got to know her whole history and so forth. And I was kind of sorry when tomato season was over. We went to Albuquerque then. We had some money. We made money at that place. We went to Albuquerque. And at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital, the head of the bacteriology lab was Lois Sego, and Lois was then working for the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. And she got us a house and everything. And I started to tell Lois about working in this cannery and she said, Gay, never mention that. She said, That is not a thing to talk about. And you know, it was an adventure. Yes. And what was her point there? She said it’s not proper, nice people don’t go to work in canneries. She said, You’re a nice person. That’s not good. And what did you think? [ 00: 45: 00] Well, you don’t say anything. You know, this was Lois. And she was certainly a very good friend and loved both of us. And Lew started a little landscaping business there and was doing pretty well. He met this guy, he had a nursery in Santa Fe, the big nursery there, and he offered Lew a job to come up there. It was a pretty good job, and so Lew went up to Santa Fe. And I was proofreading for the Review Journal down in Albuquerque. And I got pregnant and had some problems and I had to quit and go to bed and so forth. And then I miscarried and it was UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 sad. But anyway, Lew was up there in Santa Fe, and one of the people that he met was Pat Matthews. They had this house— and you don’t call it Ma- DRID, you call it MA- drid— it was this big house on Madrid and it was a beautiful place. And her husband Glenn Matthews had a couple of bank magazines. And they were both out of Missouri. And anyway, Lew got very well acquainted. And Glenn was off on a business trip to New York, and Pat was doing a lot of landscape problems and she was dealing with Lew. Lew was telling her about his wife in Albuquerque and wanted to move her to Santa Fe and so forth. And Pat says she was going to New York to be with Glenn for the winter, and she said, You have your wife come up. And I got on a bus and I went up and we sat there in this gorgeous house on this down couch and everything. And Pat, you know, we talked and everything and were sitting there talking and all of a sudden she said, Well, I’ll show you where the good silver is. And she says, Now, I’ll be leaving next Monday. Here’s the keys. I mean she just went and left her house to us. And Glenn got very ill in New York and it was extended. We were in that house almost a year. And when he came back, I had a job at the New Mexican and I was proofreading. One day I was going to work and went past the Capitol and they were ripping up all the trees. What are you doing? Now the Capitol, it was trees from all these countries that had sent them. They were all special trees and so forth. Here they were. And I got to the office and I was really screaming about they were ripping up all the trees, and the editor said, Gay, go out and get a story on it. And so I did, and I told about ripping up the trees, and it was on the front page, and I got a by- line. And believe me, I wasn’t proofreading anymore. I was assistant woman’s editor. And I worked with Calla Hay. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 I never had any training to do this stuff. When I worked at the JAMA I dealt with the publications of the council. I worked for the Council on Physical Therapy. And believe me, when I had stuff, I loved to get down in the printing plant, the first two, three floors of the building there at 535 North Dearborn. It’s the American Medical Association and it still is. [ 00: 50: 00] And I’d get down into those bowels of that printing thing and I just loved the printers and being down there. And here I was on this paper and the printers were out there. Now this was all hot type. There wasn’t any of this business of— I mean they were sitting out there making the type. And it was great. It was great. And the people on the line- o- type machines. And Lew didn’t last with the nursery. I mean that turned out to not be too good. And he got with the Santa Fe Hay and Grain. And he was dealing with the Pueblos. And you had to be good dealing with the Pueblo Indians. You had to do a lot of standing. It was a lot of silence. And he was good at showing the Indians respect. And he got acquainted with this guy with the logs building, milling the logs. They were doing it up on forest reservation land up near New Mexico, and they were running out of logs and they were looking at Colorado. Up near Gunnison there was a pretty big stand of lodge pole pine up there, and they were looking at that. And this guy that was doing it— anyway, Mr. [ Louis J.] Reynolds from the Reynolds [ Electrical and Engineering] Company [ REECo], was involved with this thing about the logs. He had a ranch and he had built a log house up there. Anyway, Bosley made Lew a proposition to go up to Gunnison and run the logging operation and run the company up there. And so anyway, that’s how we became acquainted with Mr. Reynolds. But in Gunnison, you don’t work much in the winter. And it was getting to be winter and we went down to Mr. Reynolds’s office and he said, Well, [ this is 1951] we’re just starting the operation at the Nevada Test Site. You go to Las Vegas. For the [ Nevada] Test Site? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 And you go to the test site. And I don’t think I was involved in that business. So Lew came home and says, We’re going to Las Vegas. Well, there’s a Las Vegas, New Mexico and Lew thought we were going there. I said, Oh, no, I think the testing is in Las Vegas, Nevada. And so anyway, we lived on Plaza Balentine. Did you know that? It’s a sweet little street there in Sa