Magdaleno Gamboa: From Migrant Fields to Hanford’s Motor Pool

Many families in Washington's Tri-Cities trace their story through migration, family, hard work and service to the community, and Latino families are no exception. The Hanford Latinx Experiences oral histories, collected for Manhattan Project National Historical Park, record a few of the many Latinas and Latinos who brought their skills to the Manhattan Project, to Hanford and to the Tri-Cities. Magdaleno Gamboa told his story to Drew Gamboa on November 11, 2024.

Following the crops

Gamboa was born in Edinburg, Texas, on April 16, 1937, one of eight boys and four girls. His parents had come to the United States from Mexico in the 1920s and settled their citizenship in that decade. It was a close family, near to cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides.

With little work in Texas, the family did what many others did and followed the crops: cotton in Texas first, then fields in Ohio, Mississippi, Oregon, California and Washington. Near Toledo and Lake Erie, in the years after the Second World War, they picked tomatoes in the same fields as German prisoners of war. The two groups worked opposite sides of the field and never mixed, but he remembered mutual respect. He went to school in Sunnyside, Washington, and in California.

The Army

Gamboa enlisted in December 1959 for three years, choosing an overseas posting because it was his one chance to see countries he could never afford to visit. After mechanic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was stationed in Germany.

• The work. He was trained to drive and fix everything from tanks to armored personnel carriers — tank-like vehicles that carry troops inside, over land or water — and to fire a tank if needed. Most of the time, though, he worked in the motor pool on semis, three-quarter-ton trucks and jeeps.
• The travel. He visited Germany, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands, and saw Paris too, often on Saturday bus tours. He preferred the countryside to the cities, though in Spain he kept to the cities, unsure how locals would receive soldiers. He climbed the Eiffel Tower, walked through the Arc de Triomphe, saw bullfights (without caring for the kill), visited a gladiator arena being excavated in Spain, and found the Dutch cheese good but not to his taste. Italy was the one place he never made it to.

The Army skills carried over. When he later trained at JM Perry for the certificate he needed to work as a journeyman mechanic, he already knew the work.

Hanford

Gamboa was working at a garage when a friend from Sunnyside, a security patrolman at Hanford, urged him to apply there, as Hanford was hiring after a strike. He doubted the job could be easier than the garage, but found it was.

He started in 1976 or 1977 and stayed about twenty years. Hanford kept whole fleets of cars, trucks and buses, so a broken vehicle was simply swapped out while he fixed it properly. His assignment was overhauling bus engines, about a month's work each, rebuilt until they made their rated horsepower without leaks. His supervisors were former mechanics who wanted the job done right and done safely, not fast. His crew also learned to fit air conditioning into old 1940s buses that had neither heat nor cooling, and a Hanford News photographer once snapped him under the raised bed of a big dump truck.

The start was hard. There were no toolboxes for him, and the other mechanics, mostly Southerners from Oklahoma and Arkansas who had worked together since Hanford's early years, would not share theirs. He was the only Spanish speaker, and he felt that was part of why they held back. Conversations stopped when he walked up, and they joked that he was a spy, since Hanford was then checking on workers who called in sick when they were not. In time they got to know him, and they got along fine.

After Hanford

The job's benefits helped the family start saving. His wife had long cared for children, first in their home. They bought land and built a daycare in Sunnyside for up to 150 children, with teachers, a nurse and a cook. By the 1990s he had retired from Hanford to help her run it.

Sources

Based on "Latinx Experiences at Hanford: Magdaleno Gamboa," Manhattan Project National Historical Park, National Park Service, which presents Drew Gamboa's November 11, 2024, oral history interview with Magdaleno Gamboa; rewritten in hubnx's own words.