Secret City Film Collection

SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION

ORAL HISTORY OF MEYER AND DOROTHY SILVERMAN

Interviewed by Keith McDaniel

February 16, 2005

1

MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me a little bit about how you ended up in Oak Ridge.Go ahead either one of you and you can just look at each other, look at me just, make it very, you know, natural conversional, ok.
MR. SILVERMAN: Shall I start?

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, absolutely.

MR. SILVERMAN: Dorothy and I were married in September of 1940. I was working for a water conditioning firm in New Jersey.I was going to leave the firm and I put an ad in Chem and Engineering News. I received a telegramfrom the personnel director of the Manhattan Project in Chicagoand the telegram said the University of Chicago Metallurgical Project, we're offering you a position at such and such a salary. Well, I wondered what a chem engineer would be doing at a metallurgical laboratory. So I called up, put something like three dollars in quarters into the phone booth, called up the personnel director and he answered,“Don't you worry, you will be working in your field,” and I was hired because of my background in water conditioning and iron exchange. We left for Chicagoin November of 1943. We put our furniture in storage and arrived in Chicago about a week after.

MR. MCDANIEL: And you were married at this time?

MR. SILVERMAN: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Where were you living?
MR. SILVERMAN: We were living in Oaklyn, New Jersey, which is a suburb of Camden. Dot was working as a secretary to two patent attorneys at RCA [Radio Corporation of America] in Philadelphia.

MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second. I want to adjust something real quick, make sure we're in good shape here.

MRS. SILVERMAN: Are you comfortable Keith?
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, go let him in.

MRS. SILVERMAN: Go ahead ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me do something with your microphone.
MRS. SILVERMAN: Well go ahead with your talking.

MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so you moved to Chicago.

MR. SILVERMAN: We arrived in Chicago. I was greeted by the director of the chemistry division, Nobel Prize winning physicist...

MR. MCDANIEL: What was his name?Do you remember his name?
MR. SILVERMAN: I'm trying to remember.Skips my mind. I'll think of it. His words to me were rather startling. He said,“Mr. Silverman, you don't have to go around asking what this project’s all about. We’re out to make an atomic bomb. Now go into the library and bring yourself up in this field by reading Pollard, Davidson and other volumes.”A week later, I was called in and informed that the directors of the project had decided that a portion of the project that I would be associated with, a slurry reactor was to be one of the areas to pursue, would take too long to develop since we knew the Germans were working on atomic energy. I was told I was a free agent, and to talk to the various section heads in chemistry. At that time, I had a bachelor’s degree in Chem engineering plus a master’s degree in chemistry from George Washington University. I spoke to each of the section heads and while I was debating a decision, the director and the research director of Clinton Labs, Dr. Whittaker and Dr. Richard Donn, who was director of research, interviewed me in Chicago.As they were finishing the interview, one of them turned to the other and said,“By the way, we noticed that you're married but you have no family yet. What does Mrs. Silverman do?” I said,“Well most recently she was a secretary to two patent attorneys at RCA.”One turns to the other and says,“Grab them.” Of course, there was a scarcity of gals who had good backgrounds to do secretarial work and so we agreed to come down to Oak Ridge. We left a month later and arrived, I believe it was December 17th, 1943. That's when Dot, you describe what you encountered.
MRS. SILVERMAN: Well I went into the... “This is where you are going to work,” and I looked and there was no one there, nobody,and I walked down. “This is your desk.”Fine. I'm sitting at the desk, and this went on for, I don't know, a day or two and finally it kept filling up:young men walking in and knowing where to go and when, etcetera. The building filled up with young, smart, young boys and that was the beginning, I guess, of the Chemistry Division. I worked for Pearlman,Isaac Pearlman.

MR. SILVERMAN: Dr. Isador Pearlman ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: Isador Pearlman ...

MR. SILVERMAN: Who is ... ?

MRS. SILVERMAN: Swafford English and Harrison Brown and I was busy typing reports and doing shorthand, my own shorthand. I never had a business course. I majored in French and Spanish in college, and so I made up my own shorthand of technical terms. I was a smart girl though, wasn't I? I could do anything, right?You told me that. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: So was this at Y-12?
MR. SILVERMAN: No, at X-10.

MRS. SILVERMAN: At X-10.

MR. MCDANIEL: X-10 ok ...
MR. SILVERMAN: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.

MRS. SILVERMAN: So I worked at the 706A building all during the war. That was it and what else do you want me to say?

MR. SILVERMAN: Dr. Isador Pearlman was Seaborg's right hand man. He was the associate director.He and Dr. Seaborg started the Chemistry Division on the metallurgical project and in his volume called the Plutonium Years, Seaborg describes how he and Pearlman left Berkeley to start the division in Chicago.It's a 1,000 page volume which details everything that took place in Chicago, interviews, descriptions among the leading physicists as to which course to pursue [inaudible]. And Dorothy was called by Seaborg to obtain her bio since she was instrumental in working on the project. Now I might add, one of the things that influenced my decision to go to Oak Ridge from ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second ...

MR. SILVERMAN: One of the things that influenced my decision to go to Oak Ridge and leave Chicago was the fact that a sizable number of young PhDs fresh in the field of radiochemistry were working in Chicago. I learned that ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Mrs. Silverman, if you'll just look at me or look at him while he's talking, I would appreciate it. There you go.

MR. SILVERMAN: A sizable number with majors in radiochemistryhad been put on a 48 hour week from a 40 hour week with no increase in pay. I had come out of industry and the salary that I was offered was in excess of these young PhDs. The reason being that they took account of the fact that I went from a 40 hour week to a 48 hour week. A second thing that influenced my decision was the fact that I was going to be working in the field of Chem Engineering in Oak Ridge.Where as in Chicago I would be working with PhDs and I only had a master’s degree and they were trained in the field that we were following. So I accepted the position in Oak Ridge to work in the technical division under Dr. Miles Leverith as a design chemical engineer.

MR. MCDANIEL: So what did you do? I mean what is it exactly you worked on here in Oak Ridge?
MR. SILVERMAN: To begin with, I worked on the design of a chemical process for recovering uranium from the wastes which we ended up with from the bismuth phosphate process.That was a basic process for separating plutonium from uranium during the war.A hundred tons of uranium had been pushed out of the Graphite Reactor and processed.That was the material that was being processed for the plutonium and a third of a gram of plutonium was obtained out of a third of a ton of uranium each day for the year 1944.That plutonium was shipped to Los Alamos for testing and to Washington University so that the properties of plutonium could be examined. Well, we worked on that process, had a design ready to go in ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Excuse me.May I help you?Oh Mr. Hudson,I had you scheduled for 11:30.
MRS. SILVERMAN: You're talking too much.Your talking in detail.

MR. SILVERMAN: I give detail ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: You show off you ...

MR. SILVERMAN: Hee hee ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: You show off ...

MR. SILVERMAN: I'm not a show off. It's the detail thing I'm describing ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: Shhhhh.

MR. SILVERMAN: Brought us to Chicago and all that ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: How did you get started in the music?

MR. SILVERMAN: Ok ... .

MRS. SILVERMAN: How long are you going to go on with this ...
MR. MCDANIEL: He told me 11:30.So alright.Well, let’s go ahead and move along a little.

MR. SILVERMAN: Ok.

MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so I'll just ask some questions ...
MR. SILVERMAN: Ok, can I point out what we were, when we arrived in …

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure ...

MR. SILVERMAN: …Oak Ridge ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.

MR. SILVERMAN: …we were housed at the Andrew Johnson Hotel the week after we arrived.The only housing available to us in Oak Ridge was in separate dormitories which were crowded with cots in the hall and we were a married couple. We decided that was for the birds. So we managed to obtain a master bedroom and bath in housing with a TVA economist in Knoxville. So for three months we commuted from Knoxville to Oak Ridge for the work day.Because I had had a B ration card from my position in New Jersey working on important stuff there, we were able to drive a carpool back and forth until we were offered housing. An A house was offered to us in March of 1944.So we moved into Oak Ridge ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Mrs. Silverman, what was it like for you, working here and living here ...
MRS. SILVERMAN: Well, I don't think I had much time to think.It was all action.I was moving into a house for the first time with a man I'd never... wasn't used to yet. An A house and working six days a week, meeting people and learning to work with... takenotes when I'd never had a course of shorthand in my life. So I devised my own shorthand and these were very technical reports, but evidently I did alright,and managed to get the reports out. I had taken a course in typing in high school. I majored in languages ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Look at me if you can ... look at me and talk to me ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: I majored in languages, French and Spanish.

MR. MCDANIEL: Umhum ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: And that was out the question. I had no time to do any of that. I wanted to be a teacher but it was hard at the Lab. I enjoyed my work there.

MR. MCDANIEL: How long did you stay there?
MRS. SILVERMAN: How many years Mike?

MR. SILVERMAN: In where?

MRS. SILVERMAN: At the Lab ...

MR. SILVERMAN: She was at the Lab through shortly after the end of the war, '45, but then when I decided to do a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Tennessee. I had to complete a year’s residency. Dorothy accepted a position again at the Laboratoryand she worked as a secretary to Dr. Waldo Cohn.

MRS. SILVERMAN: Waldo was a cellist, but we called him a biocellist. He was a biochemist.He played the cello beautifully and we had a few little occasions for string quartets. I played the violin and there were others, budding musicians and we played, had small groups, trios, quartets and out of that little group we formed…Well, the idea came,“Why don't we form a string orchestra?”And that was the beginning of, I guess, of the Oak Ridge Symphonette.Right?

MR. SILVERMAN: Yes.

MRS. SILVERMAN: And it was purely strings: cellos, basses, and from that began the Oak Ridge Symphony. That grew out of that.

MR. MCDANIEL: When was this?What year was this about ...?

MR. SILVERMAN: The Symphonette gave a concert in June of 1944. There were 19 strings. Waldo got in touch with a wind ensemble ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Who was Waldo again?

MR. SILVERMAN: The first director of the symphony, Waldo ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: Biochemist ...
MR. SILVERMAN: Cohn together with the head of the Wind Ensemble,Jonathon Weiser and the head of the Community Band and they agreed to form a symphony ... and in the fall, the symphony gave its first concert, in November of 1944. All that is documented in the brochure on the history of the Oak Ridge Symphony that I have just published ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the concert held?
MR. SILVERMAN: The concert was held in the high school, but at that time at the old Jefferson which was on the hill overlooking Blankenship Field.That was the high school ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.

MR. SILVERMAN: And when the new high school was built in 1951, that became the Jefferson Middle School ...

MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about that night, both of you. Tell me what you remember about that night, the first concert ...

MR. SILVERMAN: Well the orchestra had a sizable number of SED [Special Engineer Detachment] men in the Orchestra. There were also people who had played with major orchestras who apparently were deferred for the project. So we had a relatively good symphony.Matter of fact, Knoxville had to shut down its symphony because of the war. They lacked the personnel and so this continued until the end of the war, and in 1946, there was a sizable immigration of people from Oak Ridge.A number went to Hanford to start bigger reactors and a number went back to universities to pursue their education and so forth. So that symphony was struggling for manpower during the '46, '47 period. And at the same time in 1947, while I was in my residency, a man named Dr. VanVactor, David VanVactor, came to Knoxville to set up a Fine Arts Department at the University of Tennessee and they started the Knoxville symphony again and for the next several years both symphonies cooperated.The best of the personnel from both combined to give a concert one night in Oak Ridge and the following night in Knoxville.

MR. MCDANIEL: Oh ... ok ...

MR. SILVERMAN: So that's a summary of what went on.

MR. MCDANIEL: But tell me about that night, Mrs. Silverman.Why don't you tell me what you remember about that night of that first...

MRS. SILVERMAN: Well I don't know. I'll tell you that I worked for Waldo Cohn as a secretary at the Lab and then I also when the orchestra began I served as secretary to him at the orchestra. I ended up being his gal. Waldo was a fine, intelligent musician and scientific man. In the beginning of the orchestra, he did everything.He swept the floors. He'd pull the curtain. We called, tried to get musicians and...

MR. MCDANIEL: Try to look at me when you're talking. Try to look at me.

MRS. SILVERMAN: Don't look at you?
MR. MCDANIEL: No please do look at me when you're talking.Thank you.

MRS. SILVERMAN: We worked hard. I worked with him very hard and we got it done.We formed an orchestra. I was his gal.Every Friday, I worked right with him.

MR. MCDANIEL: What about that night? What about that first concert? What can you remember about that?How many people ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: Oh I don't know that. I do know his wife, Charmian, the opening night was with the curtain. At that time, the curtain was closed, when the people came in the audience, the curtain was closed. Usually today, we see the orchestra people coming in and the chairs in formation but then the curtain was closed.His wife, Charmian, dusted his tuxedo off and made sure his hair was combed properly and I was right at his side and he pulled the curtain and walked onto the stage as if he hadn't moved a single chair or dusted this or that. He bowed and our concert began. He was a very hard worker. He was the personnel then. He was the librarian.He reviewed his own concerts.At times, we didn't get anyone to review the concerts. And he did all the work. He swept the floors, moved the pianos. What else did he do?Everything and I was his gal. I lived next door to him.What were you going to say?

MR. SILVERMAN: No, go ahead.
MRS. SILVERMAN: He was a hard worker.He'd come home from work and would start pursuing, reading his, the music that was to be performed, and his wife said, Charmian, a lovely gal, his wife said,“He's just so busy that we never get to carry on a conversation. He comes home from work and then he has to pursue it, look at the music, make sure he knows what he's doing when he walks out.Here he is, with a baton in his hand and walking onto a platform as if he was accustomed to doing that,” and he wasn't he was just a cellist. We kidded him that he was a biocellist but ...

MR. MCDANIEL: How did he… how long did he ...

MRS. SILVERMAN: He'd do ...

MR. MCDANIEL: …conduct the Symphony?

MR. SILVERMAN: He conducted the Symphony for 11 years from 1944 throughuntil 1955, when he went to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. I would like to point out the Symphony and other groups like the Playhouse and others, they were partially funded by the contract the Roane Anderson Company that was given the job of handling things for the Army in the city of Oak Ridge.In '47, when the Army was going to be leaving the Project because the McMann bill was turning the Project over to civilian groups, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Symphony was going to lose its funding. At that point, Waldo got together with the chorus and they decided to form the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association, ORCMA, and such organization would handle ticket sales and management, scheduling and everything that was formerly done by the Symphony and Chorus people. So both Dot and myself are two remaining founders of the Oak Ridge Symphony from 1944. I happen to be the only surviving player from the original Symphony. Dot had to phase out because of macular degeneration, butwith the formation ORCMA, the musical program in Oak Ridge really expanded.