By Phyllis Bicknell Carroll

It had been a stormy, windy October night but, as the sun rose, the winds lessened to a perfect sailing day, sunny and bright. A good breeze enabled us to move our 32-foot Pearson sailboat, Flyway, right along about two miles off the New Jersey coast. Because we were avid sailors who often spent months aboard our craft, we had added several additions to it for comfort. My husband Dave had designed and built a padded seat which fitted over the threshold of the hatchway at the top of the ladder leading to our cabin below. Then we wired the controls for the autopilot to the cabin ceiling in easy reach of anyone sitting on that seat. Thus, once the course was set, one could sit in comfort under the sprayhood (a shelter) out of the sun, rain or wind, watching through the windshield while steering with the autopilot. Later, when Dave’s Uncle Gene (who had loved our boat) died and left us a small inheritance, we decided to honor him by using it to add a major comfort. We had a custom-built enclosure fitted to Flyway’s cockpit, screens for summer and lightly tinted non- glare clear plastic panels for cooler or stormy weather. One other detail is needed to picture this story. When Dave sat in his command seat, to his left was a wide flat area where we placed the navigation charts in their plastic cases.

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Part 2 of a series of memories shared by Resident Pete Jackson

Oak Ridge was a completely different place than Pittsburgh. It was built from scratch in 1943. The government needed an isolated place with access to a lot of electrical power. Eastern Tennessee fit the bill, so Oak Ridge was built in that location.. The TVA had built a number of hydroelectric facilities in the area. Many of the streams were dammed up, widened or re-routed to provide cheap electrical power.

This part of Tennessee is beautiful. It is in the midst of the rolling hills of Appalachia and Oak Ridge was built in a remote area.. Also, coal was plentiful in the area, so coal-powered plants were built in addition to the hydroelectric ones. Because of all the dams and waterways, fishing, boating, water-skiing, etc. were nearby.

Originally the town was built for about 15,000 people but ended up with 45,000 by the end of the war. It was hastily built. People compared it to a frontier town which, in fact, it was. It had minimal facilities, and this didn’t improve until after the war. The atomic facility was located nearby. Various buildings in the facility were spread out and placed in the valleys of the Appalachian washboard. This was done partly for security and partly in case of accidents. When I got there, much improvement had been made but vestiges of the “old Oak Ridge” still remained. There were still prefab homes, barracks-type apartments, and unpaved roads.

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Resident Pete Jackson shares his memories of the intensity of his studies at Carnegie Tech in a two-part article.

In 1954, I graduated from Michigan State College with a degree in electrical engineering. I went to work as a civilian for the Navy at a research and development laboratory at NADC in Warminster, Pennsylvania. I started out in Anti-submarine Warfare but moved into the field of radar development after a couple of years. I was moving around just to find an area that I liked. After I had been there about four years (in 1958), an opening came up which interested me. The military was interested in equipping aircraft with nuclear reactors. This would theoretically give them very long airborne time and enable them to more effectively perform their mission. To anticipate research and development in this area, the military decided to train a number of engineers in nuclear physics. The military already had some personnel with that knowledge, but if the effort took off like expected, many more would be needed. I saw an opportunity for advancement here so I applied. The training was six months at one of several colleges and six months of practical experience at the AEC’s research laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There were several other applicants, but I was chosen.

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