FREDERICK (FRED) J. FRAIKOR. Born 1937. <B

FREDERICK (FRED) J. FRAIKOR. Born 1937. Transcript of OH 1359V A-B This interview was recorded on June 16, 2005, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. The interviewer is Hannah Nordhaus. The interview is also available in video format, filmed by Hannah Nordhaus. The interview was transcribed by Sandy Adler. NOTE: Interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets. [A]. 00:00 (OK, we’re recording. This is the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum Oral History Project. I’m interviewing Fred Fraikor. I’m Hannah Nordhaus. It’s the 16th of June, 2005. We’re at Fred’s office at the Colorado School of Mines, where he teaches.) (Fred, to get started, if you could just tell me a little bit about your background, where you were born, what your parents did.) OK. I was born in a steel town called Ducaine, Pennsylvania, which is one of the suburbs of Pittsburgh. My parents, although my dad grew up here, were of Slovak—back then it was Czechoslovakia—origin. My dad, like all the other immigrants at the time, would run back and forth, they’d make their money in the coal mines and the steel mills and then they’d go back to Czechoslovakia, buy up land, and come back here. What they didn’t realize was that the Communists would then confiscate the land, which is why I’m not a big land baron at this point. He brought my mother back here in 1936, just before World War II, when the Nazis invaded. So I literally grew up in a Slovak-speaking culture in a steel town. There were enclaves. You had a Polish hill, a Germantown, etc. And so when I went to kindergarten I didn’t really know English. We were mentioning the Carnegie Library, because this was a Carnegie steel mill, I literally learned to read well in a Carnegie library. I know, you tell your grandkids you walked five miles in the snow and back, and they say, oh, yeah. But we did. It was a wonderful Carnegie library, and by coincidence, perhaps, I ended up going to the Carnegie Museum, where I developed an interest in science. Every Saturday I’d ride the streetcar, the trolleys here, I guess, to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and really began being interested in paleontology, the usual thing, dinosaurs, that kids do, even back then. 02:27 After that, and after graduation from high school, I went to what was then Carnegie Institute of Technology—it’s now Carnegie Mellon University—and got a degree in metallurgical engineering. I did work in a steel mill. My first encounter with the nuclear industry was as a summer student at Carnegie Tech, working in a welding thing at the Westinghouse atomic power plant, which is just outside of Pittsburgh, where they were building the first nuclear power plants for the nuclear Navy at the time. And everything you’ve heard about Admiral Rickover is true. He would fly in, look through the desks, everything. It was quite different for a junior in undergraduate school. I did work in a steel mill as a laborer, was a member of the AFL-CIO. Working as a laborer in the steel mills in the summer and as a management trainee later convinced me that that’s not what I wanted to do. People don’t realize how it was to work in a steel mill in those days. But I did go on. I had two years of active duty as an ROTC officer at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. After that I went back to graduate school, because again, I wasn’t going back to the steel mill. I was married to a Carnegie Tech coed when I was in the Army Signal Corps, a typical wedding with swords and the whole bit. Came back, went to Ohio State University, where I got my Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering. 04:17 After that, one of the interviews that I had during the summer—it would have been a year before, so it would have been about June of 1965 or so—I came out here for an interview. You couldn’t even go on the plant at that time for an interview, so they took me around Arvada and showed me housing and everything else. But of course, I saw the mountains, and that was it. It looked like a wonderful place to raise children. Two of my children were born at Ohio State and one here shortly after we came here. So I interviewed and got a position with Rocky Flats as a scientist in what was then the physical metallurgy R&D group under Dow Chemical, which was fascinating. My first task was to do transmission electron microscopy on plutonium. We were stationed in what was building 779 at the time, a relatively new building. 779 was the research and development center, so to speak, for the plant at the time. And understand, Dow Chemical—and again, this is in December of 1965, so at that point, Dow was heavily involved in striving for excellence in science and engineering, partly because that’s their tradition as a chemical company. They had research facilities and the people they had here, we communicated. But mostly because the laboratory personnel, obviously we had to work and interact with Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Berkeley, and Sandia Livermore for the most part, and these are of course Ph.D. scientists, some from the Manhattan Project. So talking to a physicist, you should have the expertise. That’s how Dow felt. They wanted some of the best. The physical metallurgy group that I came in, I think it was within eight months or so I ended up being the manager of the physical R&D group. The other two went to Midland, were promoted into Dow Chemical’s Midland corporate headquarters, so I ended up with this group. The physical metallurgy R&D group, in the late ‘60s, basically consisted of roughly twenty people at one time, half of whom were Ph.D.s, working on the physical metallurgy, that is, understanding the relationship between the structure and properties of the various materials at Rocky Flats. It wasn’t just plutonium; there was a separate plutonium metallurgy group. But it would be looking at everything: beryllium, the stainless steel components, the exotic alloys that they would come in, and so on. Our thing was to do research and publish the unclassified portion of that. So it’s just like any other research institution, either at a company or here at the University. In fact, we often had Q-cleared faculty from the School of Mines and other universities come in and do consulting for us. That was the level of expertise. This is not production, but much more into the research orientation. We all published papers, gave presentations at scientific conferences and so on. 08:14 I would say that in this group—and again, half were Ph.D.s, another half were experimental operators, these were the union and hourly people—they were outstanding. As technicians, I’ve never seen a better group of individuals that did a lot of the handling, they did the data extraction, and so forth. In our group, a lot of the experimental operators were people whose career was interrupted by World War II. They were community college graduates or so forth. But they had to have fairly extensive—for the time—knowledge of algebra, math, etc. You didn’t want them to mistake a hundred grams for a hundred kilograms. You can’t give enough credit to those people in terms of supporting the engineers and scientists. In terms of that group, the environment was one, as I mentioned, of science. I was the first, certainly, my experimental operator and I, to examine plutonium in a transmission electron microscope and publish it. And also in terms of beryllium, ingot sheet beryllium was the big thrust at Rocky Flats in terms of quite unique way of making and casting beryllium. There was a separate beryllium research group; we provided support to that. You have down here [on the list of questions for the interview] the difference between the contractors. I worked my way up to being the Acting Director of Material Science. I left in 1972, something like that, to become the first Dean of Engineering Technology at Metropolitan State College. At that time there was no Auraria campus. My office was down there in an old Dodge auto dealer’s thing on Colfax. It was quite different. But anyway, I came down there. At that time they were looking to integrate the University of Colorado and Denver, the community college in Metro, as a four-state intermediate university. Politics being what they may, they pretty much grew up on the Auraria campus still separated. But I left there because my—I should go back—my wife married, as I said, we married in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, while I was in the service. But after three children, I really, really prodded her to go back to school and finish her degree, which she did. Got a fellowship and got a Ph.D. in physical anthropology at CU. She had her first teaching job in Wichita, Kansas, and went there, and I ended up as a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where I worked on archeometallurgy.

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<B>FREDERICK (FRED) J. FRAIKOR.</B> Born 1937. <B