Interview with Robert James Agonia, June 29, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Robert Agonia June 29, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Charlie Deitrich © 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 Robert Agonia June 29, 2005 Conducted by Charlie Deitrich Table of Contents Introduction: birth, education, early life in Garden Grove, CA, participation in Boy Scouts, family background early 1 Early interest in the biological sciences 8 Childhood awareness of legacy of Japanese- American internment 11 Memories of awareness of atomic testing in Nevada 14 Experiences at Long Beach State College, work in soil and plant laboratory 15 First in his family to graduate from college, memories of family’s land in Orange County 20 Hears John F. Kennedy’s speech about the Peace Corp, joins and trains in Puerto Rico and New Mexico 24 To El Salvador to work with Agricultural Extension Service ( Entomology Department) and Department of Education, life in El Salvador 29 Memories of Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy assassination while in El Salvador 35 Alliance for Progress and its work in El Salvador 39 Returns to the United States, graduate school, takes job with IRS and transfers to San Francisco, CA, experiences working in the Bay Area 40 Transfers to Las Vegas, NV for IRS 49 Early impressions of and experiences working for the IRS in Nevada 51 Becomes Affirmative Action Officer for the AEC in Las Vegas, NV, describes job as supervisor of compliance and oversight for contractors at NTS and in the Pacific 56 Recalls work with African- American and female employees of the NTS on job discrimination issues, and personal feelings about employee discrimination 59 Promoted to Branch Chief, Industrial Relations Branch, Human Resources Division at the NTS, talks about work in various labor relations negotiations and union contracts 62 Work for the DOE during the JVE, including personnel procedures for employees working in the Soviet Union 69 Details work in monitoring labor negotiations with DOE contractors, specifically Bechtel Nevada, using interest- based bargaining 71 Visit of President Bill Clinton to the Carpenters’ Union, Las Vegas 79 Influence of interest- based bargaining in negotiations with contractors in Las Vegas and at the NTS 80 Talks about Mighty Derringer security exercise at the NTS 81 Membership on Source Evaluation Board that awards NTS contract to Bechtel Nevada, work on benefits for laid- off and terminated NTS employees, and retirement from the DOE 86 Membership on NTS Historical Foundation board, work with compensation for former NTS employees exposed to hazardous materials 88 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Work with NTS Historical Foundation board and Atomic Testing Museum, approach to exhibits and emphasis on the NTS workers, controversy over the NTS license plate, role of protesters in exhibiting the history of the NTS, visit of Japanese delegation to the Atomic Testing Museum 93 Conclusion: Bringing people to awareness of the NTS through the Atomic Testing Museum 99 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Robert Agonia June 29, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Charlie Deitrich [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 3, Disc 1. Charlie Deitrich: OK, if you could state your full name and place of birth and date of birth? Robert Agonia: Robert James Agonia. My date of birth is August 3, 1938. I was born in Garden Grove, California. Were you raised in Garden Grove? Yes. I spent all of my earlier years there and went to high school there— well, grammar school, high school, and graduated in 1956, and then went on to Orange Coast Community College for two years, and then Long Beach State which now, I think, is California State University, Long Beach. They’ve changed their name. I graduated from there in 1961. What was Garden Grove like back then? It was small— It was strictly agricultural, orange trees, orange groves, eucalyptus trees. It was strictly agricultural, a population probably of 30,000. Very small. One elementary school, one junior high school, a high school. By the time I graduated, there was another high school that was built. But that’s, you know, about the time that it started growing. Yeah. What was it like growing up in a small town surrounded by a fairly, you know, metropolitan area? Well, Orange County at that time, you know, was not a metropolitan area. Santa Ana was the county seat and maybe had a population of 100,000. Anaheim, you know, this was before Disneyland, Anaheim was the same thing. It was an agricultural area for the orange groves and the citrus. Garden Grove was the strawberry capital of California for a number of years, and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 there was a strawberry festival that they started there and that still continues, but there’s probably not more than twenty acres of strawberries grown in the city limits of Garden Grove anymore. The land became more valuable as residential— Oh, clearly, yes. My dad farmed, and slowly but surely the housing developments encroached on farmland and farmland has disappeared. Your dad was a farmer? Yes, he was an immigrant from the Philippines and spent years up in Seattle, worked on agricultural areas, worked in the canneries in Alaska, and then moved to Orange County. So he was born in the Philippines? Yes, he was born in the Philippines. I think he was about eighteen or nineteen years old when he immigrated to the U. S. What was his name? Mariano B. Agonia. And your mom? Rose Garcia. She was born in Colton, California. Her parents, my grandparents, were both immigrants from Mexico. My grandfather came over first and then my grandmother, and they met, as I recall, in Colton, California. Where is Colton? Colton is out by San Bernardino, Riverside, where the Cement Mountain— there’s not much left of Cement Mountain, but there was this huge mountain, pretty- good- sized mountain they called it, and it was where they mined the cement for the— and it’s now Portland Cement, but I forgot what they used to call it. But my grandfather worked on the railroad. And Colton was a very small community primarily of Mexican- American folks who immigrated there and lived there UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 and worked in the cement company. Much like Henderson, attracted an awful lot of laborers from all over the Southwest to work in the plants out there. The same thing in Colton. And Fontana, which was next door. And then Kaiser Steel built the great big plant, and that’s where they got a lot of their labor. So, you know, those factories and plants attracted a lot of immigrants, laborers from all over the place. So did your mom help out on the farm? Is that—? Oh, yes, we all did. In California at the time, I don’t know, they’ve changed it, but you could get a driver’s license at the age of fourteen. Is that right? Yeah, if you in fact worked or you were, you know, for your parents or you lived on a farm, whatever, so I started learning to drive a truck, a ‘ 47 Chevrolet, a stick shift when I was thirteen- and- a- half, fourteen years old. Now, not on the highway, just around the farm. But I had my driver’s license by the time I was fifteen- and- a- half, and so then I started driving all over. I didn’t know that. And so what kind of stuff did you grow? Oh, primarily strawberries in the spring, tomatoes, string beans sometimes, but primarily strawberries and tomatoes. Did you enjoy kind of the farm life, growing up? Oh, it was great. I didn’t have to worry about going to get a summer job like everybody else. All my friends were like, where am I going to work? Hey Bob, can we go to work for your dad? I said, Well, yeah, you know, we pay twenty- five cents an hour. [ 00: 05: 00] That’s great. Did you have a good group of friends, growing up? Oh, yes, absolutely. Garden Grove at the time— it still is— was a very integrated community, small rural community. Because I went to school with, clearly, a lot of Mexican- American kids, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 but a lot of the farms around there were either owned by Filipinos or Japanese, and so I went to school with— some of my best friends were Japanese- Americans. And we all played together, grew up together, and then, you know. So it was a very small community, but it grew so fast and it, you know, obviously it’s changed over the years. What kind of activities and hobbies did you have as a kid? Primarily the Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts was a very important part of my growing up. I Went to the 1952 National Jamboree representing Troop One. We were the host troop for the National Jamboree that took place out on the Irvine Ranch. And it was a good part of— added a lot of positive things in terms of values, and it was sponsored by the Methodist Church. Scoutmasters were terrific fellows. One of the things that we did is that we, the troop itself with the Church’s support, the philosophy is that once a month we would go camping someplace or we would be involved in something. It was not always the best thing to go camping during the winter, although California winters are not that cold. Especially southern California’s, for example. Southern California. But yes, every month we would go someplace. And so sometimes when we would borrow my dad’s truck and he wasn’t using it during the weekend, we’d use the truck. It was a stake bed Chevrolet, so we would put all the camping equipment on there and away we’d go. Fun. And what kind of places did you go? Oh, out to the desert, out to Palm Desert and around Palm Springs, down near the San Diego area, O’Neill Park in Orange County, Irvine area. Primarily out to the desert, and then up, you know, around Big Bear. The camp may still be there. I know it was for up until maybe ten years UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 ago. There was a Boy Scout camp. It was operated by the Orange County council of the Boy Scouts— I don’t remember the name of the camp. That was up in Big Bear they had that camp? Well, up near the Big Bear area, yeah. That’s beautiful up there. Up by San Gorgonio. Yeah. Because that was one of the things when you were there for the week, if you wanted to— it became an option. I know when my younger brother went, it was an option to climb San Gorgonio. It wasn’t an option for us. Thank goodness it was a two- dayer thing. We would hike up to I think they call it Lost Lake, and we’d camp there for the night, and then early in the morning you’d walk up to the top of the mountain, and I know as we were going up there, we hadn’t had breakfast and they’d say yeah, we got a box of prunes. You get up to the top and there’s a malt shop up there. When you get to the top, you can have a malt. As ten- and- twelve- and- thirteen- year- olds, I think we believed them. But we got there. You just wanted to believe them, I think. Yes. But one of the things that I do remember when we climbed up to San Gorgonio is that we would hear these airplanes, and of course you looked up in the air, in the sky, naturally you would. Nope, they were below you. They were coming through the canyon. Whether they were coming from Las Vegas or not, I don’t know if they’d be coming through the canyon. This is late forties, early fifties, somewhere in there? Yeah, it would’ve been the early fifties. Late forties, early fifties. Because we lived out, well, it was about two miles out of Garden Grove, then we moved into Garden Grove in 1949. But we lived out in the rural area part of town. Sounds like a pretty fun childhood. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 Oh, yeah, it was a lot of fun. And when you were in high school, did you have any kind of— I’m sorry, did you have brothers and sisters? Yes. I had two brothers and a sister. Can you tell me anything about them? Henry was the next brother; he was two years younger than I was— excuse me, four years. He lives in Sacramento. You know, we all kind of went through the same pattern: Garden Grove High School, Orange Coast College, and then he went to Orange Coast for a couple of years, then he went to Cal Poly [ California Polytechnic State University], got a degree in parks and landscape and went into— [ 00: 10: 00] Is that Cal Poly Pomona? Yes. And eventually, you know, got into the park administration, got his master’s degree from Pepperdine University. That’s a good job, in Parks, yeah. Yes, good job. He did very well for himself. Sounds like it. Yeah. Eventually I think maybe probably about late eighties, early nineties, he became the Director of Parks for the State of California. Wow. That’s an impressive gig. Oh, yeah, it was impressive. A political appointee by Governor [ George] Deukmejian, you know. I think he had been a Democrat up till then, but he quickly became a Republican, and still is. Well, yeah, you know, you got to know which side your bread is buttered on, I suppose. Right, yeah. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 And your other brother and sister? Younger brother Marion, same thing, same pattern, went to Orange Coast. He’s a great tennis player. Is that right? Yeah. We keep telling him, Hank and I keep telling him that yeah, you learned from what we taught you and that’s why you became better than we did. Did he play tennis in college? Yes, at Orange Coast. We all played tennis in college. But he did a lot better than we did. He ended up playing— by that time, the tennis team at Orange Coast, you know, tennis became one of their, not a major sport but they had some great teams and they ended up playing teams like UCLA [ University of California, Los Angeles] and USC [ University of Southern California], which clearly we never did when we were playing tennis there. But I know he played one of the top USC players, you know, when you go to USC on a tennis scholarship, you’re a pretty good player. And as I understand it from what he told me, and I saw it in a write- up in the paper, that he gave that young fellow a run for his money. Well, good. And then what eventually did he do? Well, he kind of followed in the same footsteps that Hank did, and he ended up in the landscaping business, and he and his wife have a landscape maintenance company down in San Diego. And he got into the nursery business, growing for retail, and in wholesale down in the San Marcos area. San Diego’s beautiful. It’s a good place to have a business. Oh, yeah, it really is, yeah. And my younger sister, she went to, same thing, Garden Grove High School, Orange Coast. Worked in the mortgage industry business for a long time, and for the last UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 eight years, I think, she’s worked for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. She is a community liaison, I think is her title, and she works out of a substation down in Laguna Niguel. OK. And then when you were in high school, did you have a sense of, you know, for lack of a better question, what you wanted to be when you grew up? Oh, really, I wanted to go into teaching. Oh, is that right? Yeah. What subject? In the biology, in the science area. So I majored in biology and zoology at Orange Coast, then transferred to Long Beach. Same major. When you were in high school, you enjoyed your science classes and that’s— is that where the interest took hold? Yes, that’s where the interest— I had a biology teacher and he was a very— I mean, he had that knack, you know, that some teachers do and some don’t, motivating us. He had only graduated— he was a young teacher but had a lot of drive. And having spent a lot of time down at the beach, of course, you know, Newport Beach and Huntington Beach and whatever, so I did a seashell— a shell collection and labeled it, did the research in finding out— up until then, anybody who went down to the beach [ would say], oh, this is a pretty shell, but you didn’t know what animal may have lived in that shell at one time or another. And that’s where I, you know, it kind of piqued my interest in science and that’s where it took off from there. OK. So basically it starts with this inspirational teacher and it kind of goes on from there? It started with that, yeah, but by the time I got to Long Beach and had to take some of those classes to become a teacher, like audiovisual, how to operate the slide projector and the movie UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 thing, and some of the other theoretical classes in education, I said to myself, I don’t think that’s what I want. So the teaching aspect kind of diminished. The teaching aspect, it went bye- bye. But you still enjoyed biology. Oh, yeah, I still enjoyed science and I was a lab technician. And by the time I got to be a junior I worked in the science lab. I also was an instructor for the undergraduate students in science in the Biology laboratory, I think making seventy- five cents an hour. It was more than your friends were making on the farm. [ 00: 15: 00] Oh, yes, you know, it was quite an increase. I told my dad, hey, I’m making seventy- five cents an hour. You want a raise during the summer. I want a raise, yes. As somebody that has avoided science his whole life, what aspect of biology kind of attracted you? If there is an aspect. I’m not even sure. It was all aspects of it, but primarily the animal life, zoology. At Orange Coast, one of the things that I— a good friend of mine, he lived in Laguna Beach, and he wanted to be an ornithologist. I’m sure he is. I have lost contact with him. But he did some part- time work for a professional bird photographer up in Los Angeles. And since I had an automobile and he didn’t, we’d go out together and he would collect birds using a mist net, a very fine net. And depending upon the bird that this photographer needed we would find out where they were at and he would go out and if we caught one, then there was a special box that he would put them in. We’d go to the nearest Greyhound Bus station or whatever and ship this bird in this box up to L. A. where Don UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Bleitz who was the photographer would photograph. And his technique was— because they were in the box, so they were in the dark. When he’d open up his studio where he photographed them, it was completely in the dark. He knew what kind of bird was being shipped, so he would have the right environment, the right branch or whatever, to put this bird in this natural setting, and then put the bird there, and then take the photo, and then turned the light on before the bird could go haywire or whatever. To this day, I still don’t know— obviously he let the birds go but, you know, some of the birds that we’d caught down at the Salton Sea, which was a couple hundred miles away from L. A., I mean I guess they found their way back to where they were. I don’t know. Did he put them back on the bus and send them home? No, he didn’t put them back on the bus. Gave them a bus ticket and said, you know, have a good life. Yes. He also had a piece of property— well, probably had rights to, so he had some small little cabins, huts out at Twenty- Nine Palms, inside the federal, you know, the park area, the national park. It wasn’t a national park at the time. I don’t know what it was. But it was all federal land. And that’s where we caught most of the birds, strictly during the migratory periods. During the early years of your life, was there a big historical event that you remember, something that really made an impact on you? Well, a couple. As I said earlier, one of them was, you know, I mentioned the strong experiences in the Boy Scouts, and I recall even to this day that one of our scoutmasters, his last— Northcutt. Earl was his son. I can’t even remember what Mr. Northcutt’s first name was. Russ. Yeah, Russ Northcutt. I remember when he passed away. We were all probably, what, fourteen and fifteen years old and went to his funeral and, you know, clearly a sad day, but I recall that Dr. Null, who UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 was the senior scoutmaster, he was a doctor, said to us, Yes, but, you know, this world is a better place because of Mr. Northcutt. And, you know, what he gave back to the community. And that stuck with me, and that’s part of my philosophy and outlook on life, to leave this place as a better place. Another thing, and it kind of has a tie to this museum, although it’s all clearly accidental, but probably 1946, as I said, we still lived a couple miles out from downtown Garden Grove, and I remember we used to catch the bus right on the corner where we lived, and there was probably seven or eight of us would get on the school bus every morning. And this one morning, we got on the bus. The bus driver drove, because he was kind of parked in the intersection, drove the bus up just a couple of feet and then stopped. He said, OK, all you kids be quiet. I’m going to tell you something. He says, Up here, we’re going to stop at this house and this little boy is going to get on. And this little boy is Japanese- American and he just came from a camp in— I think he said, I thought it was in Arizona [ 00: 20: 00] where he was at. And we kind of looked and didn’t know what he was really talking about. [ And he said], So I want you all to be nice to him because he’s going to be going to school with you. OK. So he drove up maybe another fifty yards or so, and there was this Japanese- American couple standing there with this little boy. The bus driver opened the door and he got out and he talked to Jimmy’s parents for a little while, then he got on the bus. And I happened to have— there was no one sitting next to me, so Jimmy ended up sitting next to me. His name was Jimmy Yoshida. And we became the best of friends. He was a year older than I am. He graduated in ’ 55; I graduated in ’ 56. He ended up in the military, in the Air Force as a career officer. And the last I heard, which was years ago, he was stationed over in England. Did you guys ever talk about his experience being interned? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Yes, we did and, you know, I came to appreciate the issues. He didn’t see it, I don’t think, so much as a negative because he was so young. I had, you know, another very similar experience, the Takahashi family were three brothers. We were basically the same age of my other two brothers. We were all within a year of each other. And they lived a couple of blocks from our [ house]— in Garden Grove. And we all went to the same church, so we walked by and picked them up and walked across the street, go to church every week. But their parents, they were interned in Poston in Arizona. And one of the things that they did, he was a gardener by trade when he was interned, but apparently she learned how to paint. They would go out into the desert and they found some plants, some bushes that had very fine limbs on them. He learned to carve small birds. She learned to paint them. And they made pins, lapel pins for women. And they learned this while they were in the camp. He learned it while they were in camp. So when they came back to Garden Grove, instead of going back into the landscaping and gardening business that he had been before, they started this business, and they made a very comfortable living. I mean she ended up, people would come to the house to buy the birds. I mean, I know my mother has— we’d buy them for everybody, and my mother had them, my aunts, everybody had these. I mean they were exquisite birds that she’d learned how to paint. And it took them a month or two. He would carve them, he would sand them, she would lacquer them, and I forgot how many coats of paint and lacquer on those things. And then she ended up shipping them all over the country. But I remember they used to tell us about growing up in Poston. They clearly, you know, they thought, well, I guess it was OK. I mean, we’ve got this business that we learned. And I know Joe and Jimmy and Tommy, they thought it was fun. They used to laugh, yeah, we used to get to go down to the river, Colorado River and go swimming and that. But I suspect that internally to them it was clearly not the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 greatest experience in the world, despite the fact they liked to remember just the good old times, you know, playing and not having to go to school so much. Because you said there was a fairly large Japanese- American— Community in Orange County. Community in Orange County. So I would imagine you knew quite a few people that had the internment experience, given the time, you know. Oh, we had a large number of them, yeah. Yeah, that I would, you know, there were the Takahashis, Yoshidas, and then the Yoshiyokas was the other family. We were all the same age. And they all had the same experience. Yes. That’s interesting. Any other kind of, you know, seminal historical events you remember, growing up? No, other than obviously graduating from high school and going to college. I think those were probably some of the key events. Well, growing up in a small community like that, we didn’t venture too far, although when we became a little older, during the summer for whatever, the family would go down, you know, we’d go on a vacation for a couple of days. I know we went down to San Diego a couple of times. Down in Ensenada [ Mexico] a couple of times, and [ 00: 25: 00] Tijuana. I remember one trip to Tijuana, in one of the little store areas they were selling puppies, you know, so clearly we had to have a puppy. I know my aunt was with us and so she had the puppy and we were carrying him and, you know, because she obviously spoke Spanish, some guy told her, says, you know, You’re not from here. [ And she says], No, no, we’re from the Orange County area. He said, Well, you know, you can’t take that dog back across the border. And she said, We can’t? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 [ And he said], No, they’re not going to let you. They’re going to take that puppy away. [ And she said], Oh, no, we can’t have that happen. So when we started crossing the border, she put the puppy in her coat pocket. Because they asked us to get out of the car. And the little puppy didn’t make a squeal or nothing. And so we jumped back in the car and we took off. So your aunt smuggled a puppy across the border. Right, yeah, an illegal dog in today’s vernacular. And it turned out to be a female and it started a little family of Mexican dogs in the Agonia household for I don’t know how many years. That’s funny. Oh, man. Just because we’re here at the Atomic Testing Museum, at the time, do you remember the testing? Did you have a sense that the testing was going on in Nevada? Yes. I recall in Santa Ana Register periodically— this would’ve been early fifties— that there would be an article in the paper, there’s going to be a test out at the Nevada desert, you know, and so if you want to get up early in the morning, you may be able to see the light from these tests. And so I remember a couple of times getting up, and I swear that I saw this light. Now, whether it was or not, I don’t know. Well, so it was basically presented as more of a kind of an event to witness. Yes. Right, yeah, it clearly was. I mean I recall a couple of the articles were fairly lengthy articles about what was happening and why they were doing it out in the desert, you know, why the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC] was doing what it was doing. I know you were young at the time, but did you have a sense of the Cold War with the Russians, you know—? No, not really. Did you guys ever have any drills in school or anything like that? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 No, I don’t recall that we had any drills. I’m sure, you know, we were aware of the thing but I don’t recall any drills other than just the fire drills that everybody had—[ that] we had any that had to do with the atomic testing or the Cold War or anything like that. Well, we liked the fire drills because it got us out of class for a while. Well, that’s true. Yeah, it did. It was not unusual for somebody to ring them right before a test. Funny how that always happens. So yes, we have to have the test tomorrow. Oh, good. That was great stuff. So you’re at Cal State Long Beach, or Long Beach State at the time. It became Cal State— Yes. Long Beach State at the time. Right. And do you eventually get your degree in biology? No. Math was never my strength, so I really struggled to get through trig[ onometry]. I said, I’m not ever going to make it through calculus. And so I switched majors in my junior— well, I was almost going in my senior year, and I said, I’ve got to get out of college. I didn’t come here to flunk out. So I switched over to social science because I’d already taken a lot of classes in history and geography and whatever. And so I went to summer school that one summer, switched majors, came back in my senior year in the Social Science Department. And I think the profs, the professors and even the Dean thought that I was a transfer from someplace else and didn’t realize that I had been on campus for over two years. And I ended up taking a lot of the history classes. And I know when I filed my application for graduation that next year, I remember I got this letter from them, come to the Admissions Office, “ we want to talk to you.” So I went to the Admissions Office and they said, We’ve checked your transcripts. You’ve taken all the required classes to get your degree in social science with a history major, and a minor in economics. They said, We don’t know how UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 you did it. And the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts wants to talk to you because some of the professors are saying, oh, wait a minute, he got the grades. I took Russian history, both semesters of Russian history at the same time, which was very unusual, you know, you’re supposed to take one and then you take the second one. [ And they said], Normally needed to have somebody in the department for two years before [ 00: 30: 00] they’ll give you the degree. I said, Well, where does it say in the catalog that you have to have been in the department for two years? You have to take the classes, but it doesn’t say you have to do it for two years. I guess they just finally gave up, and so I got my degree in social science. Was there any sense, because you said you were working in the lab and teaching some undergrads biology, right? Oh, I was