Carlos Leon, Hanford’s First Latino Reactor Operator

Many families in Washington's Tri-Cities tell origin stories of migration, devotion to family, hard work and service to the community — and the stories of Latinas and Latinos are no different. The Hanford Latinx Experiences oral history interviews record a handful of the many Latinas and Latinos who brought their skills to the Manhattan Project, to Hanford and to the Tri-Cities, helping build a place that hundreds of thousands now call home.

Carlos Leon has deep roots in several Eastern Washington communities. He was born in Toppenish and has lived in the Tri-Cities for more than fifty years. At twenty-one, he became the first Latino reactor operator at Hanford. He spoke with interviewer Robert Franklin on October 5, 2018. What follows summarizes that interview in our own words.

A big family in Toppenish

• Carlos was born in 1953 at Toppenish Memorial Hospital. All four grandparents were born in Mexico; his father was born in Texas and his mother in Kansas.
• His mother's parents came to Toppenish in the early ’40s; his father's parents moved there while his father was in military service, and his father returned there afterward. That's where his parents met.
• The families worked the fields. His mother's family first lived in migrant cabins on the Golding farms near Yakima — once, he recalled, the largest hop ranch in the world. His father ran a trucking business hauling potatoes, peas and other produce.
• Summers, the children worked in the fields and orchards. Potato harvest meant starting at sunrise and working until about 10 a.m. in the heat, loading sacks onto trucks — then the afternoons were theirs to be kids.
• He grew up one of nine children (seven boys), with a grandmother living in the house and his other grandparents a few blocks away. The whole extended family knew one another. As he put it, they didn't have much, yet had a great deal.

Culture

His grandparents spoke no English, so Spanish surrounded him — at home, with relatives and visitors, at fiestas. He and his older and younger brothers spoke it but were never taught to read or write it; his parents never pushed one way or the other. He absorbed the culture's customs and its food: he joked that he had to learn to use a fork in college, because at home it was all tortillas — and beans, rice and a tortilla still make him happy. He's proud that his children, through his surviving aunts, uncles and siblings, still get some of that heritage. He credits his parents, who were outgoing and emphasized education and making people feel comfortable.

An ad in the paper

Carlos came to Hanford by answering a newspaper ad for reactor operators, which a relative had pointed out.

What he knew of Hanford beforehand:

• President Kennedy's visit, which was big news across Eastern Washington.
• The stacks and vapor he saw while driving potato trucks for his father along Route 240 — the nearest was B Reactor, and farther on, the processing at 200 West.
• The Hanford Patrol, which showed up almost instantly if you pulled over — even for a flat tire — and told you to fix it and keep moving, because the site was still highly secret.
• That a lot of smart people worked there; some schools sent a few students to tour it.

Certification: the first Latino operator

Carlos was the first in his family to earn a college degree. When he started, he didn't realize at first what was happening: it was the early days of equal employment opportunity, and after about six months he noticed that managers were going out of their way to help him get certified — making sure he saw reactor startups and shutdowns and stayed late or came in early. That ran against the grain for some union members on other shifts, but his own crew understood and backed him.

Certification meant:

1. a comprehensive written test;
2. a full-shift walkaround, answering how systems worked and demonstrating operations (down to explaining a water hammer);
3. an oral board of three examiners — nervous as he was, he felt ready for anything they could ask.

He became the first Hispanic ever certified as a reactor operator at N Reactor; there were other Hispanic workers at Hanford, but none in reactor operations. On the day he was certified, a photographer took pictures of him at the control board with his shift manager, control-room supervisor and another operator. He didn't make a big deal of it — he admitted he didn't know how to handle it, and much of it went unspoken, though he could sense it. It was, he said, a proud day.

Life at N Reactor

• In all he worked at N Reactor for about five and a half years. He also earned a bachelor's degree in science from Pacific University in Oregon — 30 hours of physics, math, chemistry and biology — and returned to Hanford for about a year and a half in the training department, teaching new operators, several of whom remain close friends. He came to love teaching; the key, he believes, is knowing your audience.
• A good day in the control room is a boring one. Steady, predictable operation is the goal, though graveyard shifts dragged and the crew was always talking. Each console had its duties — the nuclear console; the A console with turbines and steam generators; the BN console with dump condensers and radiation monitors — and the fourth person handled relief and surveillance rounds. When something abnormal happened, such as a scram or rising steam generator levels, there was always something to do.
• Old-timers from the Manhattan Project still worked there. In ’75, one of them took him by flashlight into the shut-down B Reactor, where he saw that its front face had more tubes than N but looked very similar — a lesson Carlos later realized was deliberate, a chance to learn without radiation exposure. The veterans teased him that he couldn't have handled the work in the old days; raised among nine kids, he gave the banter right back.
• Secrecy, by 1974, was mostly about security rather than whispering. Everyone knew N Reactor made electricity and plutonium, and knew their radiation doses; the real secrets were how much plutonium was produced, processed and shipped — held by scientists, the plant manager and the fuel calculators, and centered on the 200 Area's plutonium finishing plant.
• He is proud to have been part of Hanford's history, and prouder still of the friendships — though he has attended too many of their funerals, and some stories, he said, will stay untold.

The Cold War, remembered

Carlos started in July 1974. U.S. troops were still in Vietnam, President Nixon resigned a month later, and Hanford was still under the Atomic Energy Commission, not yet ERDA or the Department of Energy. In the control room, nobody knew how big the Soviet arsenal really was; it felt like a contest between the two biggest bullies on the block, and his crews saw themselves as serving national defense. That pride, he said, kept the place going and spread through the whole Tri-Cities — he remembered Richland High playing Toppenish in basketball and planting its green-and-gold bomb logo at center court. Good, bad or indifferent, he said, he is very proud to have been part of that long history.

Sources

Based on "Latinx Experiences at Hanford: Carlos Leon," Manhattan Project National Historical Park, National Park Service, drawing on an oral history interview with Carlos Leon by Robert Franklin, October 5, 2018; rewritten in hubnx's own words.