Word: smiths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Formal schooling ended for Smith at the tenth grade. Then, through more than 20 years of self-education and training programs, he learned to master topics like atomic weights, valences and isotopes. Ironically, Smith loved the work. His testimony may have made him a hero to antinuclear activists?and all the more so in the wake of Three Mile Island?but for Smith the workaday life with plutonium fulfilled that old American dream of self-made success...
...orphanages in Wyoming. "When Mamma died, Daddy boogied," he explains. Later he caught up with Daddy for a night, just long enough to get a signature allowing him to join the Army at 17. Before he was 20 he had a bronze star and two Purple Hearts in Korea. Smith still bears a military imprint. He is intensely patriotic. The old pistols, swords and insignia patches he sometimes sells at the Old Paris provoke a special delight. He reads war histories, likes to carry a gun and believes deeply in following procedures. Just married and out of uniform...
...Smith learned. He soon switched to the production staff as a helper. Over the next 17 years he worked up to foreman and finally supervisor. He was present as scientific knowledge of plutonium grew from infancy, and he remembers these as his golden days. Smith worked at purifying plutonium and mixing it with other elements. He changed it from liquid to powder to metal and molded it into the workings of atomic weapons. Like most Americans, but in a more immediate way, he has made concessions to the nuclear hazard. "There's no way to get that plutonium...
...When Smith left Rocky Flats for Oklahoma in 1969, he commanded several dozen men and made $12,000 a year. He had similar responsibilities with Kerr-McGee, where his crews produced fuel pellets for experimental reactors. When the plant closed in 1975, Smith was furloughed. His wife Phyllis, 43, a tall brunette with fashionably frizzed hair, carried the family finances with her job as a district manager for Avon. Smith began doing the family cooking. He also kept busy taking his motor home to auctions, picking up stuff for the flea market. He and Phyllis spent a lot of time...
This quiet life was disturbed two years ago by the visit of an investigator for the Silkwoods. Smith made a decision that swept him into a complex legal fight. "I figured if somebody, no matter who, asked a question, I ought to answer," he recalls. "Well, pretty soon it was the Silkwood people, the Kerr-McGee people and the reporters, and then I'm in court. If nobody had found me to ask questions, I wouldn't be involved in the damn thing...