Donald Ross: My name is Donald Ross, and I am about to begin my eightieth year on this planet. I was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and I left there with my parents at an early age. We moved to the southern tip of Texas, and had a little farm not too far from Edinburg, Texas, where I grew up.
Gerhart Friedlander: My name is Gerhart Friedlander.
Interviewer: What was your role in the Manhattan Project?
Friedlander: I got into the Manhattan Project very early; in fact, before there was an official Manhattan Project. I was a graduate student at Berkeley at the University of California. My thesis advisor was Glenn Seaborg, who later on got a Nobel Prize and became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, but at that time he was just a new instructor and I was his first graduate student.
Cindy Kelly: My name is Cindy Kelly with the Atomic Heritage Foundation. It is January 8, 2016, and I am in New York City with Peter Lax. My first question for him is to say his name and spell it.
Peter Lax: Peter Lax, spelled L-A-X.
Kelly: Great, thank you. So I would love to have you talk, just a little bit anyway, about your childhood and your parents.
Martin Sherwin: This is Martin Sherwin. I am on my way to interview Professor Robert Christy in his office at 423 Downs on the Caltech Campus in Pasadena, California, March 30th, 1983.
You were a student of his?
Robert Christy: I was a graduate student of [J. Robert] Oppenheimer’s from the fall of 1937 until the spring of 1941 when I got my degree, my PhD degree in theoretical physics in Berkeley.
Sherwin: What did you do your dissertation on?
Martin Sherwin: Today is March 30, 1983. I am at the CalTech campus and I am going to interview President Emeritus Lee DuBridge at his home in Pasadena.
Lee DuBridge: But we were on many things together and so we saw a good deal of each other. I visited him [J. Robert Oppenheimer] at his home in Princeton a number of times. We had meetings there and we would drop in for social visits and so on.
Sherwin: I would like to sort of try to bore in on some of the points.
Russ Fabre: Tell us a little bit about your family history, from where and when did you come to Washington State, and why settle here in White Bluffs?
Robert S. Norris: The first thing we should do is to identify yourself.
Mary Rockwell: My name is Mary Rockwell. Spell it? M-a-r-y R-o-c-k-w-e-l-l.
Cindy Kelly: Very good. What was your maiden name?
Rockwell: Compton.
Kelly: And how is that spelled?
Rockwell: C-o-m-p-t-o-n.
Kelly: Okay. Is there a funny story attached with that?
Richard Rhodes: Would you say your name and then spell it to start with?
Jane Yantis: It’s Jane Yantis, J-A-N-E, Y-A-N-T-I-S.
Rhodes: Good, thank you. Where were you born and when, if you want to tell me?
Yantis: I was born in Center, Texas.
Rhodes: When?
Yantis: In 1920.
Rhodes: Good.
Yantis: March the 23rd, 1920.
Kai Bird: Let us begin at the beginning and I think the viewers of this will want to know first about your own background. What year were you born?
Bob Carter: I was born in 1920 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Bird: On what day?
Carter: February 3, 1920.
Bird: 1920.
Carter: Yes.
Bird: Okay, 1920, what was sort of before modern physics, quantum physics was invented as such.
