SANDIA LABORATORIES

On my return to civilian life I accepted a position with Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque as a Staff Member Technical or as we were later known, a Member of the Technical Staff. There were only five Chicanos at the time who were members of this elite 1,500 member group, but one of them, Leo Gutierrez, was the Director of Preliminary Design. I really do believe that the only reason I was hired was that I had a BS degree from West Point. There were several other Academy graduates on the Technical Staff, three from Annapolis and two from West Point. All of us had to prove ourselves technically, but more me than the others who were all Anglos.

In my case I was challenged openly. I remember one particular day, shortly after I was hired. This one-armed ex-Marine Infantry Major, all six foot-four of him came over to my desk. He said he was a Physicist and wondered if I had any background in Physics, or had I majored in Military Science.

It took me a while to realize what he was up to. He wanted to humiliate me and perhaps get me to either resign or opt for not being in the elite Staff Member group. As I listened to him I put together in my mind a list of courses I had had, that to my mind fell in the area of Physics. I said, "Well, I do know what lift is. I have a Private Pilot's license and belong to the Aero Club on the base." Then I ticked off all the courses I had had at West Point in the area of Physics. I said, "And I have had Mechanics, Sound and Light, Thermodynamics, Statics, Strength of Materials, Fluid Mechanics, Metallurgy, Kinematics, Kinetics, Dynamics, and Nuclear Physics." I was lucky he did not know much about any of the fields I had studied.

I engaged him in a discussion of friction and the calculation of force. I recalled my Physics Professor at West Point; we called him "Free Body," and I started each and every point in my argument with, `Let us start with a free body.'

The Major never bothered me again; I did manage to get in a statement to the effect that he may not be aware that West Point was the first Engineering School established in the United States. One of the West Point guys later came to me and said, "You sure took care of Dick Poe. He had been asking for it."

I could have added some of the Ordnance courses such as Manufacturing Processes, Mechanisms, Automotive Engineering and Materiel, Armament Engineering and Materiel, Explosives, Ammunition, Atomic Weapons, Ballistics, Gun Construction, Recoil Systems, Guided Missiles, Small Arms, and Automatic Weapons, but I contained myself. An unusual feat for me today!

That little run-in with the ex-Major very early in my career at Sandia Labs took care of things for me. The word got around. Bob Devore the Project Engineer at Site Able asked me to transfer to his Division. He also saw to it that I got the latest scoop on Statistical Quality Control, so off to University of Michigan I went. (I am on the front row, 5th from the left.)

That is me fifth from the left - front row

After two years conducting Quality Program tests on real atomic weapons in storage at Site Able I came back to QA Engineering to help in the design of the tests. Eventually I went into the Quality Evaluation Systems Test (QUEST) program and had responsibility for such testing at all of the National Storage Sites for various weapons programs. I completely enjoyed the program and felt very competent in the various assignments.

During this period of my Sandia Labs days I traveled to all of the National Storage Sites (NSS) and to the Operational Storage Sites (OSS) on Quality Engineering Project assignments. However, I mostly traveled to Medina AFB at San Antonio, TX and Clarksville Base at Clarksville, TN.

One particular trip is worthy of mention. Clarksville had an unusual surveillance work load and the Project Engineer borrowed some help from the other sites. One of the borrowed technicians was from Kileen, TX. Most people took their own lunch into the top secret areas where we worked on atomic bombs and those of us who were on short visits would go to lunch at the base mess hall outside the restricted area. This particular day when I and another visitor returned from lunch before the lunch hour had expired I noticed the Kileen technician acting rather strange and apart from the group that was playing cards. He would remove his clothes and then put them back on. Then suddenly he grabbed his penis and pulled on it something terrible. I could hear him mumble, "I want the same wife and the same kids." He repeated this several times. It is very difficult for one individual to determine when someone is acting terribly irrationally and even more so to determine what to do about such behavior. I pulled the Quality Section Supervisor aside from the group and together we observed the man. Deciding something was terribly wrong we called security. The man became violent when he realized security was going to take him away for observation. They had to put him in a straight jacket. I and the Quality Supervisor made a written report on the incident and as a result the AEC made a policy change that is in effect to this day. Never can one individual be alone when nuclear weapons are being worked on. The buddy system was established as a result of this incident. I had a major, though accidental, role in formulating the extant policy. An irrational mind can set off an A-weapon particularly in an open bread boarded test environment such as we had, day in and day out, here-to-fore.

However, the first of the Nuclear Non-proliferating Treaties was signed in 1961 by President Kennedy and it looked like some day we would probably not need nuclear weapons. At least not in the numbers that we had here-to-fore maintained. I had also obtained an MA degree at UNM in evening study, and I was anxious to try my management skills. Computers were beginning to make their appearance. I learned to program the IBM 7090 using Fortran and even published an article in Purchasing Magazine on one of our applications.

I can not leave this stage of my life without going back to the one-armed ex-Marine Major, Dick Poe. As luck would have it we were both assigned to an inspection team at Bendix, Kansas City. In those days we stayed at Downtown hotels, as the outlying motels, i.e. the Holiday Inns, the Sheratons, etc. were still not in existence. On the last evening in Kansas City the whole team of six engineers went out to dinner at the Cock-N-Bull a Downtown eatery of some repute. Dick as usual was acting up. He made several unwelcome passes at our waitress, and she finally had enough, and told him, "Listen, you Mister, you could not make out in a whore house with a fist full of hundred dollar bills in your hand. Leave me alone, will you?" That was the last we heard of Dick Poe that night. I really felt sorry for him that evening.

By 1963 my conversion from warrior to peace advocate, i.e. from hawk to dove, began to take hold of me.

From Hawk To Dove!

Hawk                 To                         Dove

The Peace Corps beckoned and I answered the call, but first let me document our, mine as well as Isabel's, total emersion in politics, other community activities, and how my seventh life came to an end.

Read On! Enjoy!