Everett Weakley's Interview
Everett Weakley: My name is Everett Weakley. E-v-e-r-e-t-t, W-e-a-k-l-e-y.
Where did you go to school and how did you get to Hanford?
Everett Weakley: My name is Everett Weakley. E-v-e-r-e-t-t, W-e-a-k-l-e-y.
Where did you go to school and how did you get to Hanford?
Stephane Groueff: Recording from Wilmington, Delaware. DuPont Company.
Samuel McNeight: I’ll say the major part of the reason why I ask Dale to come over with me was that Dale’s acquaintanceship and part in the Manhattan Project considerably pre-dates mine. Also, he was a part of the reactor group, which I was not. I had nothing to do with reactors.
Groueff: You had to do with the separations?
McNeight: The separations plants entirely.
Stephane Groueff: Yes, now we’re recording, Dr. Hilberry.
[Interviewed by Cynthia Kelly and Tom Zannes.]
Tell us your name.
Louis Turner: My name is Louis Turner. L-O-U-I-S T-U-R-N-E-R.
Arthur Squires: Keith is a personality.
Stephane Groueff: He is kind of a personality.
Squires: Keith is a personality and I worked with this man seventeen years, shy two weeks.
Groueff: So you know him very well.
Squires: I know him very well.
Groueff: Would you describe him, during the war especially, because he’ll be one of my main heroes and I want to present him as colorful as possible.
Arthur Squires: And I probably did not appreciate, during the war itself, the extent to which this was such a remarkable effort. Kellex – I am sure some of this you have already heard. Kellex was put together by M.W. Kellogg Company pretty much on a command basis. They just went to the top people all over the industry and got the top instrument man, the top man in the power field, and top people in compressors and all the various phases of the project.
Groueff: Hello? Hello? Recording, San Francisco, Berkeley, February 9, 1965.
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?
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.