Interview with Harrie Fox Hess, March 5, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Harrie F. Hess March 5, 2005 Mesquite, 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 Harrie F. Hess March 5, 2005 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: birth ( 1929), family background, childhood in Indiana during the Depression, move to Las Vegas, NV ( 1946), education at University of Nevada Reno ( graduated 1952), marriage to Beverly Rose Jones ( 1950), military service ( discharged 1955) 1 Continues education at University of Colorado ( Ph. D., Psychology, 1959), postgraduate work in clinical psychology, work at University of Oregon 10 Takes job as psychologist with Nevada State Department of Health ( 1960- 1964), then moves back to Oregon as Chief Psychologist 13 Relocates to Las Vegas ( 1965) as associate professor of psychology at UNLV and works in part- time private practice doing psychological assessments 14 Talks about psychological assessment work with Nevada Test Site ( NTS) employees 16 Returns to time in the military and memories of early above- ground testing, details assessment instruments used in work with various types of NTS employees 17 Discusses response of workers when psychological testing was instituted at NTS 25 Talks about various factors that would disqualify employees from test site work 26 Discusses screening of Wackenhut Security, Inc. employees and differences between security and technical workers 28 Talks about design of Personnel Assurance Program certification and implementation of program by EG& G 31 Psychological testing interviews, security classification, and family adjustments to classified aspects of work at NTS 34 Talks about other consulting work done in Las Vegas, NV and teaching at UNLV 37 Advent of licensure for psychologists in Nevada ( 1964), and membership in professional organizations 38 Conclusion: memories of William and Adelaide Deutsch and their contributions to Las Vegas 39 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Harrie F. Hess March 5, 2005 in Mesquite, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: Mr. Hess, thank you for speaking with me this morning. I thought we could begin by having you tell me a little bit of your background: your full name, place of birth, date of birth, and something about your upbringing and your education. Harrie F. Hess: I was born in Hammond, Indiana. My name is Harrie Fox Hess. And I was born March 1, 1929. I— [ 00: 00: 41] End Track 2, Disc 1. [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 3, Disc 1. OK, so you were saying you were born in 1929. Yes, in Hammond, Indiana, which is up in the northwest corner of Indiana. I was the second of three boys in the “ sibship” at that time. Later, a couple more came along by second marriage of each of my parents. In Hammond, I attended elementary school, junior high school, and the first three years of high school. And I moved to Las Vegas [ Nevada] when I was seventeen years old and had finished my junior year of high school, then I graduated from Las Vegas High School in the spring of 1947. Now what brought your family to Las Vegas? Well, I’m glad to go back a little bit to the Hammond experience. I lived with my Grandfather Fox and my mother and brothers. My mother was divorced from my father, Louis C. Hess, who was an architect, when I was seven years old; we had to live with my grandfather in Hammond. He was a physician and had a nice big home, so we grew up in very nice circumstances, except that we were in the middle of the Great Depression. It was an interesting situation because UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Grandfather often had to take barter for his services because people didn’t have money. And so he received usually agricultural products and things like that, although Hammond was a city and not a rural area. Whatever people could barter, he would take, and of course he also was paid cash in some cases. My grandfather was one of the biggest influences upon me because he became a father figure since I lost to divorce my father so early. About six years later, however, my mother remarried to Bill Deutsch, who actually is M. William Deutsch, and he became a prominent figure in Las Vegas, as my mother did. He was the Vegas Bill who wrote a column for the Las Vegas Sun and he had an insurance business. And Mother was prominent in Las Vegas later because she was the president of everything, all the women’s organizations. She was a delightful person with a great sense of humor, often laughing. You see her photograph on the wall. Yes. Beautiful. And she was a beautiful woman, too. Now what was her name? Adelaide Estelle Fox was her maiden name, and of course that’s where I get the Fox for my middle name, from the maternal side of the family. And she went by the name of Adelaide. Then when I was a young child, it was Adelaide Fox Hess. Then it became Adelaide Fox Deutsch. We moved to Las Vegas because Bill was of a Jewish family and his parents had a hard time accepting the marriage between Adelaide and Bill. And they owned the hotel in which we lived after they got married. It was an apartment hotel. We had two suites in the apartment hotel. The boys had one, the parents had the other. Then along came another brother and so then at that point there were four of us boys, the brother being Marshall William Deutsch, who is in the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 [ 00: 05: 00] insurance business, too. In fact, he sort of inherited it and then continued to develop Bill’s business. So the Deutsches owned a hotel in Las Vegas. No, in Hammond. In Hammond. Yes. And Bill was, oh, bookkeeper- manager of the hotel. And after Mother married Bill, she was executive housekeeper for the hotel and she managed the maids and the services there. Bill chafed at the parental domination and knew that there was no real future there at the hotel, so he left his job to his younger brother, Jules, who also married a Shiksa, much to the dismay of his parents. Now what about your grandfather? Did he have any negative feelings about the marriage? He never revealed any if he had any. I was actually brought up in an extremely tolerant environment. Grandfather Fox had a little problem pronouncing the name Deutsch because it looked to him like Dutch, but other than that, he never showed any problem at all. And what was your family’s religious faith? Protestant. Actually Presbyterian, specifically. But I rebelled against that very early. I simply at that stage of my life was not interested in religion and I didn’t want to be forced to go to church. And Mother, quite dramatically at one time said that I must go and I responded no, I can’t. So that was never brought up again after that. It was OK. But I got a real lesson in tolerance, living with Bill Deutsch. He was such a fine fellow. And he was several years younger than my mother. He bought the hull of a sailboat and he asked my brother and me to recondition it, my older brother, Lou. Brother wasn’t much interested in the work, so I did a lot of the work on it. But eventually it turned out that the hull was not really UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 reconditionable. We worked on it a long time. And then Bill’s application for membership at the marina was denied on the basis that he was a Jew. And that was my first, say, direct involvement with any prejudice. I was amazed and I was dismayed. And I adopted Bill’s attitude, and I thank him for this. Incidentally, he was a genius. He graduated from the University of Michigan, age 19 and Phi Beta Kappa. He wrote very well, and he had written a few short stories. He had hoped maybe to make a career in writing, but he did not. He worked as bookkeeper and manager, got some motels when we moved to Vegas. That is, he managed the motels but he didn’t own them. He had very little capital, although he had some capital which he earned by working two jobs. During the Second World War, he worked at the Pullman Standard Corporation. They made the Pullman cars. However, they transferred to building tanks, and so it became a war plant. And he made very good wages at the war factory because for one thing, his brilliance; he was [ 00: 10: 00] quickly moved into a responsible position on the production line, operating one of these aerial cranes which moved the tanks from one place to another. And where was that factory? Pullman Standard Factory in Hammond, Indiana. Hammond was an industrial town right at the south shore of Lake Michigan. It bordered on Illinois and on Lake Michigan, and its northern border on the west side was with the city of Chicago. It’s just adjacent to Chicago. Up there is where this Wolf Lake was, a very popular place for sailing. It was south of Lake Michigan but sort of in the marsh lands, and that’s where we were denied membership because he was a Jew. Anyway, that ended our sailing plans. When we got to Las Vegas, several years later, we acquired boats and we sailed. The folks acquired a houseboat. I acquired a sailboat. And so we got that taken care of. And of course Bill loved to go out sailing. And that’s a picture of him? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 Here we have Bill at the helm, and this is just a photograph. Let me get a better look at that. That’s a great boating picture. Now what specifically brought the family here? I understand getting away from the— That’s very easy to answer because after my Grandma Cassie’s death— that’s Adelaide’s mother— about a year later, Grandfather Fox married a nurse at one of the hospitals, and her name was Hazel. At the moment, I can’t remember her last name. That’s OK. And Hazel and he moved out here to Las Vegas, about 1942. Now that begs the question, why did they choose Las Vegas? Here’s Las Vegas, a dusty little desert town at that time, with eighteen thousand people or fewer at that time. Well, he moved here because his sister, Stella Fox, after whom my mother got her middle name, married Frank Beam. And you know Frank and Estella Beam were donors of some of the buildings on the UNLV [ University of Nevada, Las Vegas] campus. Well, actually Tom Beam, their son, was the donor but one of the buildings was named after the Beams. Well, they had wandered around the West during Tom Beam’s childhood: Seattle [ Washington], California, and they came to Las Vegas— I think it was after Tommy was born. I think he was nine or thirteen years older than I, born in 1918, something like that. And they moved to Las Vegas, probably about 1924. And Frank established the Frank Beam Lumber Company, which was on Main Street. And you will still see pictures of that in the photo histories of Las Vegas. And I have a booklet which was the commemoration of the Frank and Estella Beam Hall there at UNLV, and I will share that with you, or you can find a copy. [ 00: 15: 00] I’ll look at yours and then they’ll probably have it at the library. I think you can probably get it at the library, sure. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 Yes, my office is right near the Frank and Estella Beam area, I think of the [ College of] Hotel Administration. Hotel Administration, yes. Business and Hotel. OK, so they came to Vegas in ’ 24. Stella, well, I guess she had some of Adelaide’s personality. She became a very important woman around town, although she, of course, was an aunt— that was her [ Adelaide’s] Aunt Stella— and she was of the previous generation to my mother. Stella was born in, oh, about 1879, and she graduated from Wellesley College. Can you imagine that? She graduated from Wellesley in 1906, I believe it was. It was three years after my mother was born. Mother was born in ’ 03. I still have Stella’s Wellesley pin because it was given by Tommy’s family to my mother and upon her death I got it. It’s on a charm bracelet that Stella Beam and later my mother used to wear. So upon retirement from medicine, Grandpa Fox came to Las Vegas because his sister and brother- in- law were there and they told him what a nice climate it was; so he came, and in fact, Stella sold him a duplex on South 6th Street, 605 and 607 South 6th Street. It was not long before Grandfather had persuaded Mother and Bill to come out to Las Vegas to join them, and then in 1946 we did. And of course I was all for it. I was sort of popular and successful in my class at Hammond, but I did want some adventure, and my best friend and I had sort of dreamed of going west. That was Gordon Uhle. And we had even designed our Spanish design— what they call now the Santa Fe design— adobe kind of building that we wanted to build. And at that time we had never dreamed of marriage, but we thought that this was where Gordie and Harrie would live. I guess we thought, well, if we had some girlfriends, that’d be all right, too. So I was in favor of the move immediately, in spite of the fact that I would miss my senior year. My brother at that time, Lou, the older brother, was in Germany. He was two years UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 older than I, but the draft caught him for the Second World War and it just missed me. So Lou was not around when we moved west. My next brother, Peter, was at that time thirteen, and he went to Las Vegas Junior High School. He may have started at the elementary school, then went to the junior high school which was on South Las Vegas Boulevard, just about the two hundred south block. They have a government building there now, I think. Some of the old school may still stand. And I, of course, then entered my senior year with Vegas High School. And I made friends. I had good friends right away. I did a lot in school. I was on the track team, things like that, at the school. As I think back on it now, I wish that I had just transferred those credits to [ 00: 20: 00] Hammond High School and graduated from Hammond High, or had diplomas from both schools. The reason being that I found as the years went by, my attachment was much closer to my Hammond friends than to my Las Vegas friends; not so much on my own part— well, yes, as the years went by, it was largely on my part, too— but you know I dearly loved my new Las Vegas friends, but nothing can compare with that cohort with which you grow up. So I started attending high school reunions and I attended Las Vegas High School reunions and I attended Hammond High School reunions. And I found that the people who went to the Las Vegas High School reunions hardly knew me after several years, whereas the people from Hammond High School still remembered and valued me as a friend, even though I didn’t graduate with them. Right. That makes sense. Then I went to the University of Nevada, the only campus of which at that time was in Reno. And Bill, having been in business and having become a role model for me, influenced me to study business, which I did the first couple of years. I took courses in business and economics. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 But I had become exempt from some courses because I had high entrance scores. In my freshman year, I didn’t have to take freshman English. Well, I asked around and I said, What can I take? All these other courses are for sophomores. And there was a psychology course and they said it was for sophomores. And they said, Well, we’ll let you in if you were exempt from English. So I did. I applied to get in that course and I took it and I enjoyed the subject. I hadn’t fallen in love with it. But I took some additional psychology courses later, and I took business and economics, and took Spanish. It ended up I graduated in 1952, which was a year late because I developed mononucleosis from too much romancing with a girlfriend, I think, and I had to miss a semester. And then the girlfriend and I got married and that made us miss another semester where we had to get financially prepared to return. She was a year behind me in school, but by going enough to summer school, she graduated just a few months after I did. And then I was to be drafted into the Army. Now we’re talking about 1952. I was married in 1950. Now what was your wife’s name? Beverly Rose Jones. She was a pretty redheaded girl, the daughter of Pearl and Uther Jones, used to live down on Earl Street in Las Vegas. She was a year behind me in Las Vegas High School. But when she came up to register at the university of course I was the big upperclassman by then. I was a sophomore, was an upperclassman. And she made the mistake of flirting with me a little bit and I thought that was indeed a gift because at that time the ratio of men to women at the University of Nevada was three or four men to every woman. Right after the war, GIs just engorged the universities. So I was happy to have a girlfriend, and it led to marriage. That [ 00: 25: 00] was 1948 by the time she came up on campus, and we went together that year and the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 following year. We got married in ’ 50, went back to school, guess it was ’ 51, and graduated in ’ 52. I graduated at the top of my class, well, top man. One girl, a Las Vegas classmate, had a higher G. P. A. I had a knack for academics. But I missed designation as a graduation speaker because I wasn’t part of that class either, not really part of it, you know, and that would’ve been unfair to the others who went through under different circumstances. So I didn’t earn any honors except they had a Phi Kappa Phi chapter at that time at UN and I won a Phi Kappa Phi key. Had you studied any more psychology after that freshman class? Oh, yes. I took psychology classes regularly and I liked it more and more. I ended up with two majors and two minors at the university. Minored in economics and education, because it became clear pretty early in the game that Beverly and I would be married and there was always the possibility of children and I thought, well, I’ll be ready to teach school. I did teach school. Practiced teaching at Reno High School. I taught English and Spanish. That was my practice teaching in the summer. And your majors were…? Your minors were education and economics. My minors were education and economics. My majors were Spanish and psychology. I loved my Spanish teacher, Mary Ancho, who later married a hero on the football team of UNR. Of course, it was just UN at that time. But she was the most wonderful introduction to Spanish. First of all, she could speak it almost like a native, although I think probably her native background was Basque because they had a lot of Basques. And she came, I believe, from like Elko area or maybe one of those little burgs over on that side. So, of course, that was a great introduction, simply because I would not disappoint that teacher. And another notable teacher I might’ve mentioned was Dr. Melz, M- E- L- Z. He was German, but he taught Spanish. And he was another UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 one of those teachers that you just would not disappoint. He was just too good a person. It was a wonder just to learn. And again, Spanish, I had Mrs. Mabel Brown who was another notable teacher. I had a lot of fun in her class, too. She was a good teacher. I ended up majoring in those things and I decided, well, what if I get out of the Army? I’ll either be a Foreign Service representative, I’ll go to like the Woodrow Wilson Graduate School for Foreign Service, or I will become a psychologist. Those were my career thoughts. And I applied to the Woodrow Wilson School, Foreign Service, and this was after I got out of the Army. I was discharged in Colorado. Colorado had a law which said that if you are discharged from the military service in Colorado, you can go to the state universities tuition- free. Now that was a big boon. I applied to Stanford and I applied to University of Colorado and to [ 00: 30: 00] Woodrow Wilson. I was admitted to Stanford, Colorado, but not to Wilson. Stanford had very high tuition. Colorado had none. So I went to the University of Colorado and took my doctorate. They had a good program at Colorado, too. I was fortunate in that respect. I would imagine they would. And Vic Raimy was the head of that program. And he had gathered a notable faculty. Karl Muenzinger was a professor, past chairman, and Vic took over the chairmanship. But Muenzinger was a big name in psychology in those days. Let me ask you something about what the theories were. Was psychology in those days based primarily on Freudian theory, psychoanalytic kinds of things? Yes. You know there was a greater emphasis on schools; they called them, schools of psychology. That’s what I should be saying rather than theories. Schools. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 And you have the psychoanalytic school of thought, which is more or less the clinical approach, and then there was also the behavioral school in which [ B. F.] Skinner was a big name at that time. And then there were things like the Gestalt group and the Gestalt approach. Fritz Perls right, wasn’t that Gestalt? Was that Fritz Perls? Yes, he was in that group. Of course, the German Gestaltists were Max Wertheimer and his disciples. Wertheimer was something. His son, Mike Wertheimer, was a faculty member at Colorado. But then I was in the clinical program because I had already decided I was going to open up a children’s clinic or something in Las Vegas when I got out. And my emphasis did change somewhat as I went through school. But I got my degree in 1959. I had been in the Army till ’ 55. Then with the Korean War over, they were discharging people right and left. I was a lieutenant at that time. I had gone to OCS [ Officer Candidate School]. After training in Fort Ord [ California], I became an infantry lieutenant, but then I went to what they called Medical Service School, which was medical administration primarily. Essentially I was trained to do the kind of thing the M. A. S. H. [ Mobile Army Surgical Hospital] hospitals [ did] but simply on the administrative end, although they taught me the first aid stuff and that, too. I applied for early release because as an officer I was locked in for another year and a half or so, but they had lots of young lieutenants that they didn’t need anymore, so they were happy to let me out in January of ’ 55. I got up on the University of Colorado campus and I started the second semester in ’ 55. And I graduated in ’ 59. I spent a year [ of] clinical internship on the Denver campus, Colorado Psychopathic Hospital, Colorado General Hospital, in various assignments. Got my degree. Had two job opportunities going out. I had one at Harvard and one out of the University of Oregon UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Medical School, for medical school. I visited both places. The weather was terrible back at Boston [ Massachusetts], [ 00: 35: 00] although my reception was favorable. I went to visit the campus, all at their expense. I graduated at a great time. Ph. D. s were needed everywhere for this influx of students coming along. So they flew me both to Oregon and to Boston. And Oregon, it was sunny and nice, and the chairman diabolically asked me to bring my skis. And so we went skiing up on Mount Hood, and I was hooked, so I went to Oregon. And then I stayed there just one year because I was homesick for Las Vegas. I wanted to get back in proximity to my parents and other family members because the whole family was down there at that time. And moreover, I did not like the authoritarian leadership in our department. The authoritarian leadership. I’m going to pause this for one second. [ 00: 36: 32] End Track 3, Disc 1. [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 4, Disc 1. OK. So you were saying the authoritarian structure at the hospital? I enjoyed many things about working at the University of Oregon, but the authoritarian disregard of democratic rights within a department I did not like. And then there’s this other thing, that I wanted to go to Las Vegas anyway, go back home, because I had immediately adopted Vegas as my home. I loved the Spring Mountain range of Mount Charleston, I’d hiked all over it and somehow— well, I think it has been established that people often tend to sort of become fixated on a geographic location. And so I wanted to go back. And at that time, I was still with Beverly and I had a son who was at that time five years old. So we moved down to Vegas and I took a job with the Nevada State Department of Health as the psychologist for a special children’s clinic. And I worked in the same building on Shadow Lane there where they had the mental health center also. So we were adjacent to each UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 other and I was able to interact with their staff. And that was a good job which I enjoyed for a few years. Paid more than the university job. And then I got a little bit tired of that after three years or four years, and so in 1964 I moved back to Oregon. I got offered a job as Chief Psychologist at their clinic up there. In the interim, Beverly and I had been divorced and she gave me custody of my son. And your son’s name? Bryant, B- R- Y- A- N- T. Bryant is no longer living. He was killed in an automobile accident in the year 2000. He was forty- five years old at that time, I believe. Beverly died in 1973, just about ten years after we were divorced, from cancer. I think I mentioned that she had been a pretty redhead. Well, you can imagine a redhead’s skin and the southwestern United States don’t get along very well, and she did get melanoma and it killed her. So Bryant and I spent a year up in Oregon on Lake Oswego. And I worked for the Community Child Guidance Clinic. But again, I just wasn’t happy up in the Northwest, and so back to Las Vegas. I think I probably forgot, one factor was the climate up there, too. And we had a lovely home. We had a lovely housekeeper, Jean Reynolds. She was a seventy- five- year- old lady when we were up in Oregon. I had hired her shortly after the divorce, and maybe she was, oh, just seventy or seventy- one at the time I hired her. She was a retired [ 00: 05: 00] lady, very gracious, a reader. She always wore a uniform. Didn’t have to request it. She had the house immaculate at all times. She was a great mother figure for Bryant. And she always called me Dr. Hess; it was never Harrie or anything like that. She’d answer the phone, “ Dr. Hess’s residence.” I didn’t even have to teach her. I probably would have taught her some of these things, but I never had to teach her. Anyway, she was great. She remained as long as I was single, and then when I remarried in 1966, she left at the request of my new wife, and that hurt me: I had to decide UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 whether I would go along with the wishes of the new wife, Michelle, or rather defy my new wife and keep Mrs. Reynolds as housekeeper. Bryant and I visited Mrs. Reynolds a few times after that. She moved into a nice place and she bore no animosity toward us for that. So we’re back in Las Vegas now in ’ 65, and this time it was as an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at UNLV. So we took a house out in Royal Crest area, which is near the university, just a couple of blocks, within walking distance. Perhaps you should guide me now as to what we ought to talk about next. OK. So let’s go from you’re hired as an associate professor and teaching. Yes. And this is ’ 66 now. So how does the work with the [ Nevada] test site [ NTS] and when does the work with the test site come about? Well, almost immediately after going to the university, I started a part- time private practice and shared an office with some other psychologists. And what kind of patients would you have in a private practice at that time? Just about anything you can imagine. It was a fairly broad range. It was early in my career as a clinician and I had not specialized, but I did a great deal of psychological assessment and, as a matter of fact, that turned out to be my specialty as the years went by. It appealed to the scientist in me because every case was a new problem to solve. It would appeal to my mercenary side because it paid better than psychotherapy. It also appealed to my scientific side in that they classify psychologists into the hardnosed experimental types and the soft brained clinical types. I was more of the hardnosed type. I worked very well with some types of clients, usually the intellectual type who could maintain objectivity and tolerate my sort of direct interventions in trying to teach them what they were doing wrong. Some patients can’t even accept that they UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 might be doing something wrong. And so anyway, I had a practice and my practice became increasingly doing assessment throughout the years. [ 00: 10: 00] Let me ask you a question about that. Are you using established instruments? Are you developing instruments for assessment? What does that involve? Generally using the established instruments, but I did develop some of my own procedures for the assessment of the Nevada Test Site people, and that started in 1968. George Stobie contacted me. Stobie? Stobie, S- T- O- B- I- E. Because in the meantime, I had earned my diplomate in clinical psychology, and I did that in 1964. And then Stobie’s advisory from Washington about whom he should hire included preferential selection of a diplomate, and I was the only diplomate in Nevada at that time. So he came to me first and I said, Gee, it sounds right down my alley. I’d love to do the work. Now what was his position at the time? He was a manager for EG& G [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier], and EG& G, evidently, was designated to manage this personnel assurance program. Stobie remained my contact with the administration, I would say for at least ten to fifteen years, and then he retired from EG& G. And by that time, the security people outnumbered the technology people: most of my scheduling and dealings with the administration and program were through Virginia Callahan who was in a human relations position for WSI, Wackenhut. Right. So let me understand a couple of things about this. Mr. Stobie’s with EG& G and when he first approaches you about the position, what is the job description, basically? What does a consulting job consist of? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 To set up a testing program for screening for reliability of the men— they were all men at that time— the men who had the capacity to detonate the nuclear devices. That is, they are in proximity with the devices and