Robert Thornton's Interview
Groueff: Hello? Hello? Recording, San Francisco, Berkeley, February 9, 1965.
Groueff: Hello? Hello? Recording, San Francisco, Berkeley, February 9, 1965.
Stephane Groueff: Mr. James Stowers.
James Stowers: We had a responsibility of procurement, which was not generally—it was not generally known. Going into this job, the Kellogg Company wanted to be well protected. They didn’t want to lose any money, it’s understandable. And they did not want to get entangled in having to defend a lot of actions, which they knew would have to be taken fast and furiously during this period.
Stephane Groueff: Berkeley, California. Recording, 1, 2, 3.
Stephane Groueff: You were the secretary for Dr. [Ernest] Lawrence since—
Eleanor Irvine: I came to work in October 1945. I was with him until his death. Then I stayed right along with Dr. [Edwin] McMillan.
Groueff: I see. What was your name then?
Irvine: Eleanor Irvine, I-R-V-I-N-E.
Groueff: I see. How did you meet him?
Gilbert Church: During the construction period there were several fellows that I could suggest you see. One of them would be Phil Gardner, for example. He was a recruiter on the road, and that was one of the biggest problems that we had, was getting manpower. He would know all the detail of that. So would Buster Harris, Bill Taylor—they were associated with the operation of the camp on Burton on a day-in day-out basis.
Stephane Groueff: Is there a movie about Hanford?
Stephane Groueff: So Mr. Friel, you were with the optical side in Chicago project?
Dan Friel: Yes. My interest and activity was in the optical end. The job was to make it possible to see through walls and to see into equipment where otherwise the radioactive level was too high to operator or to work. We knew, of course, that we had to be able to see behind these walls, and we knew in many cases that we would not know what we would be looking at, because there were new and strange phenomena going on. This indeed turned out to be the case.
Sir Hugh Taylor: I had been requested by the British Government to find out certain things. They wanted, for example, to know whether they could use this thing and the General Electric Company made it available to them on the condition that their affiliate in England was entrusted with the responsibility of supplying it. It was the British Thomson-Houston Company [in] Rugby.
Then another job that I did for them, I got the Shell Oil Company in California to give me—
Stephane Groueff: Shell Oil.
Groueff: And so you have the tank. You have all these military things. And then you finally got the atomic bomb.
Keller: Yes.
Groueff: What date did [General Leslie] Groves come to you?
Keller: That is all in the book.
Groueff: That was in ’43.
Keller: You will get that all out of the book.
Stephane Groueff: Hello, recording January 19, 1965, Florida, Coral Gables. Mr. Hobbs, H-O-B-B-S.
J.C. Hobbs: I was born in West Virginia, just west of Pittsburgh up in the panhandle. My father and mother were both educators and in 1893 I was five years old, we came to Florida. He was an educator and also an Evangelist. We stopped in Northern Florida around Umatilla and Mt. Dora and Orlando, that area, for three years and then in ’96 we came into Miami.
Groueff: He was a school teacher?
[We would like to thank Robert S. Norris, author of the definitive biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man, for taking the time to read over these transcripts for misspellings and other errors.]