Community Stories

Oak Ridge is a city of stories, from Bud's farmhouse coffee shop, run by a famous trumpeter, to Big Ed's pizza, which happens to be many East Tennesseans' favorite pizza place. But, the best stories are stories remembered.

Cordell Hill

Y-12 is not just a science center. In fact, it is also a machine shop. Machine shops use metals, and so does Y-12. They put lots of different chemicals in the metals. Some of the metals they have they do not need. That means there are byproducts. But they can't just throw those chemicals out the window because it would be bad for the environment.

Because of this, the government said that they needed an environmental policy. It took a while, but they came up with one. It was Y-12 EMS=P2C2. This stands for Y-12 environmental management system is to protect the environment, prevent pollution, compliance, and continued improvement. "If any auditor came around to one of us employees and asked what the policy was, we would answer, 'Y-12 EMS=P2C2'," Cordell told us in an interview.

The phrase was imitating Albert Einstein's famous "E=MC2." Y-12 hosted an event to announce this new slogan and needed someone to pretend to be Einstein. "They needed someone with gray hair to put in a lab coat and have him to grow a mustache. He would carry a sign that had the Y-12 policy on it. So, naturally, they chose me," said Cordell. As Einstein, Cordell met a woman named Gadys Owens. She had been a Calutron girl in Wolrd War II. A Calutron girl was a young woman recruited to help enrich uranium using a machine. They would have to get the numbers exactly right and bring the enrichment from a small level to a big level. Gladys was one of those girls. Meeting a Calutron Girl was a fun experience for Cordell.

Cordell worked very hard as a Y-12 employee. One time, in a newspaper, Y-12 created a Mount Rushmore of their best environmental employees. Cordell was one of them. Surprisingly, all four were from Tennessee--unusual for a big national organization. They were called the shining stars of environmental compliance. This was a very honorable recognition.

Patsy Burdette

 Patsy Burdette worked at K-25 for seven months in the 1950s. Her job was to test uranium samples. Below the lab where she worked, there were pipes that uranium flowed through. She and her coworkers would get samples in little cylinders and then test the samples. Before leaving work every day, Patsy would have to put her hands under a special light, and if they lit up, it meant there was radioactivity on her hands. In those seven months, the light lit up a few times. That explained why after Patsy left and got married, splotches of her hair would sometimes fall out. "It was embarrassing because you could see it very clearly," Patsy told us in an interview. I think it is a very interesting story and that there is nothing for Patsy to be embarrassed about.

Interestingly, Patsy's father, Clarence, helped build the buildings of K-25. He was a farmer in Paris, Tennessee, and she remembers him leaving with his carpentry tools to go help build.

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