Attachment #3 STANNARD: This concerns Operation Gabriel - continuation of the discussion ____ Harold Hodge at his home in Carmel on Sunday, October 26, 1980. HODGE: I wonder is that was concerned with what - I never have known and don't know right now - came by plane to Rochester. STANNARD: That's right. HODGE: And Staff asked Bill Bale and Francis Bishop, and maybe somebody else, and me if we would help in a test that he wanted to run there at the Medical School and it was going to start after supper. To begin with we went out in the morning, and I think we had a flatbed truck (where we got that I don't remember), and we met the airplane, coming from Boston, I think on American, but I am not positive. [Yes, was, N.S.] I hadn't the slightest idea what this was all about. I just came along because it seemed to me that I ought to. Presently, from up in the plan someplace, somebody carried down a box not a very large one) with a handle on it - carried it like a small dressing case - and after discussion Francis (and maybe a M.D. Captain who was with us - Fred Bryan, or somebody) decided (the plane was still sitting there) that what we should do, since we didn't known anything about it, was to thread a board (and they had brought a board maybe 2 x 2) about ten feet long- they had threaded that through the handle, and one got on one end of the handle and one on the other and they picked that thing up and took it over and set it up on the truck (pulled the board out). The captain of the airplane looked out the window - he pushed the window open - and yelled down at us and said, "What is that?" One of boys told him it was just a sample from Boston, and he yelled back at him, "Jesus Christ, I have been sitting on that all the way from Syracuse." Did you ever hear that story? STANNARD: Yes, it's in Chapter 6. And he insisted on having a full medical check-up and all. Another little part of it was that somebody was making measurements (radiation measurements) and that peaked his curiosity. The only part of it that was not clear, (it had been very carefully loaded, and all - and in Syracuse, since it was due to get off at Rochester, and that was in the days when they stopped at Albany to refuel, etc.) and it was due to be off-loaded here that somebody stuck it right up in front. But there seem to be two versions - one where he was sitting on it - and one that it was right next to him, and that's in the chapter. Incidentally, if you have a chance to read those two, I would certainly appreciate it. What I had hoped you might do is give mean impression of whether you think it's at the right level. Or if there are any terrible omissions, or things that are wrong. But one of the things I am most anxious to know is whether to try to do about the same thing in the rest of the chapters, or whether it's too monographic and not enough chatty, etc. As I say, we have editorial help coming along. HODGE: Do you know the rest of that story? STANNARD: No. HODGE: Was that the sodium? STANNARD: That was the sodium. Sodium-24. HODGE: This is the first time I knew what that was. STANNARD: Sodium-24 that MIT's cyclotron made, and Bob Evans was responsible for it. When I talked to him about Project Gabriel and soon as we got into it just a little bit, he said, "Oh, I remember that. We shipped it to Rochester." The thing I have never been able to find out is - I am sure there must have been other aspects of Project Gabriel than just that. They wouldn't give a whole name to just that. I never found out anything else. [I subsequently learned more, N.S.] HODGE: Well, now, do you know what happened to that sample? STANNARD: I understood from Bill Bale that it was spread around on things and measured, and it had to be done right away because of the short half life. HODGE: So that was in the morning, or noonish, they were getting the stuff off the plane, and then we were supposed to meet after supper. So that day, Isabelle Thomas (remember her - tiny, very attractive little gal) came to work with me (she was a college girl) as a technician (her first day). During the afternoon I got word from Staff or somebody, "If you have somebody who can help tonight, we can use another hand', so for some reason or other Isabelle was the one who was available, so I asked her if she could stay and work and told her we would be working late, so she said yes she could do it. So we met, and in those days out in back by the animal house were the garages, and they were wooden garages that some of the lucky people, advisory board I suppose, could rive into. So that's where we met, and the first thing that was done was that Staff and Bish (I believe) [Francis Bishop] diluted it into large iron barrels with lots of water. Have you ever heard this story? STANNARD: Not this part. HODGE: Oh, yeah, Bill Bale was, of course, one of the ones. Then we dipped bucket in and poured the solution into ordinary garden sprinklers (sprinkling cans), and the first thing we did (it was supposed to be put on various surfaces) was start with the driveway. We walked along and sprinkled the driveway. This was after dark. Then Bill, and I suppose Bish, etc., had measuring devices, and they would walk along - they had them so they could watch the meter - and I think they were either writing it down, or somebody was walking along beside them and writing down what the observations were. They simply cornered it like a working hunting dog. They went over it very carefully, then the field west of the driveway had just bee plowed to plants and grass - it was pretty weedy out there as I remember - the next thing, w went out and sprayed quite a considerable part of that field, and if I remember rightly, too, it was sprayed and then after awhile sprayed again, so there was a second or third application. Oh, we had to dress in rubber boots and rubber suits, and we put on heavy gloves - I don't think we had anything over our head ( can't remember that). We were all in rubber, so we didn't get wet with the stuff. We would sprinkle and then walk around and record readings. We went over into the grass - first the mowed grass - and then the tall grasses (it was almost like a hay field out beyond.) So systematically various types of terrain were covered, then we went back, and Staff said that one of the things we needed was to see what would be the effect on the inside of a wooden building. So we took the end of the parking garage, and we sprinkled that up about as high as our shoulders, and somebody went inside and made measurements, and we sprinkled it again. Then we wanted to know about the inside of a brick building, and so we sprinkled the side of the animal house - and somebody went in to see what happened on the inside of that. I had no idea what the readings were - I didn't hear them - they weren't repeated to me. I hadn't the foggiest idea of what we were doing, except that obviously it was something radioactive. This sounds like something that could be done like this (quickly). But as a matter of act, it took all night. We stopped for a break at midnight and had a little bite to eat, and my gal Isabelle was working right along with us, all of this time,and we kept on, and I remembered that just as we were getting down to the last part of it, which I think was sprinkling the wooden building, there commenced to be what Homer calls "the early rosy-fingered dawn", and it was a beautiful day. We washed ourselves off (and the rubber things) and cleaned up all the stuff first, of course, got it all out of the way and gone. I believe there was some of the annex just being built, or there was a building or something over there that we could use. It ended up my job to take Isabelle home. She lived way out just off East Avenue; her father was an M.D. on our staff, and so I can remember driving up to their house just as the sun came above the horizon. Her first day of work. She went up to the door, rang the bell, and her mother and father came down, and I told them that I had not the slightest idea that this test would take all night, but it did, and that we had been busily working, an I realized this was a startling way for their daughter to start out her first day at work. It was perfectly all-right and above-board. That was one of the brighter moments of the Manhattan Project. speaking to fallout. When there was fallout here and there and the other place, but again it was one of those occasions where whose fallout was it? The Russians or ours? We had ways of identifying the Russian's from ours because you can pretty well tell the degree of development of the weapon by the quantity and the composition of the fallout it produces. We know, for example, what the status of the Chinese is. One of the things was this shot on the Fourth of July (or 5th of July). - Gap - STANNARD: This is a continuation of the discussion with Dave Bruner at Delray Beach. We were just discussing some of the things going on in AEC and elsewhere during the days, let us say the most hectic days, of the fallout problems. There are two things I think I need to discuss about the fallout - one would be the science part of it and the things it stimulated - the new research. The whole business of environmental pathways certainly got a big shot in the arm. Were there any other new laboratories or complete laboratories built around the fallout problem, except that one that Comar headed at Tennessee? BRUNER: Yes there were. These began to be (John Wolfe at this time was with us) John was really a field environmentalist. He and other people developed outdoor experiments, like the ring at the test site that UCLA handles. The cleared, unspoiled areas at Rattlesnake Ridge at Hanford, and some other places near Augusta. They set aside that (Augusta site) as an environmental space. Also, some at Argonne Laboratory. In other words, they began to think in terms of using the laboratory facilities as an outdoor laboratory, and then, of course, there began to be some effort at Oak Ridge with Auerbach. STANNARD: Both Auerbach and Karl Morgan emphasized what a terrible time they had getting funding till the fallout business came along. BRUNER: I don't agree with that, because the fallout was around a long while before they got funding. They got their funding within the last six years, and there had been fallout for a heck of a long time before that.