Theodore R. Riffe, Interviewed by Kenneth I. Kellermann, 2013
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Please bear in mind that: 1) this material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) an interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event.
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Kellermann: You don’t mind if we record?
Riffe: Uh – I don’t like that stuff!
Kellermann: It won’t be held against you!
Riffe: Oh, OK.
Kellermann: Today is July 16th [2013] Ken Kellermann, and I’m here with Ted Riffe, former Associate Director for Administration, is that right, and Ellen Bouton, and you know Sierra [Smith]?
Riffe: Yep.
Kellermann: Right? Okay. Just to get things in proper chronological order or know where we stand. When did you start at NRAO? What year?
Riffe: 1959.
Kellermann: 1959.
Riffe: Yeah, I was invited to come to – well, Lewis Burchill who was the Comptroller of AUI and Frank Callender, who had only been at the NRAO a few months, before with the NSF.
Kellermann: And he was the Business –
Riffe: He was the Business Manager, well they had these crazy titles, Chairman of the Administrative Department or Administration Department, I guess, and there were three divisions. Heeschen was Chairman of the Astronomy Department. Findlay was Chairman of the Electronics Department and Callender was Chairman of the Administrative Department. But, Burchill and Callender came to Charleston and interviewed me. Now the –
Kellermann: Burchill was from AUI?
Riffe: Burchill was the Comptroller of AUI from Brookhaven. And, I – sort of funny how I made the contact. I was comptroller of the department store in Charleston and two other little smaller corporations which were family-owned. It was about a five million-dollar department store which in 1959 was a fairly good size store. And, the guy who had been tax commissioner before, Joe (Soto?), who was now, or then, was the Executive Director of the state Chamber of Commerce. So, he called me and said, I had met him when I was a budget analyst for the state, and he said, “You know up at Green Bank they are building a space station of some sort.” And he said that somebody from New York called him, I guess he gave me Burchill’s name, and said they needed somebody with an accounting background, business background, knew the state of West Virginia tax laws, and this or that. And he said, you’re the guy I thought of. He said now, we been given the name of a headhunter over here and I’m going to call him and give him your name. I said well I don’t know - a space station? You mean Sugar Grove don’t you? He said no, no this is a different outfit altogether. This is not the Navy or military. And so I said, I don’t know whether I am interested or not. Well, he did call the guy and the guy called my house, talk to my wife Clara, and I go home. And Clara said some guy called and said he was interested in talking to you about this job. And I said I didn’t think I would be interested. I was happy where I was and so forth and I wasn’t interested in talking to him. So my wife insisted. So, Burchill and Calendar came to Charleston to interview me, that was in I believe February of 59, it could have been March. Callender didn’t have much to say. His background was political science, and so they needed, but he had been very instrumental when he worked at the NSF in getting the NRAO going. But they needed someone to – with business, pure business background. And Burchill led the conversation. He said, “Well, there are two major things that this job entails,” which is what that they are interviewing me for. He said Brookhaven was doing most of the accounting and personnel stuff for the NRAO. “We got to move that down and set it up here.” He said he didn’t want Brookhaven to have anything to do with it, that was a separate contract altogether. “The second thing is,” he said, “we are building this 140-foot telescope and I don’t know what the problems are, but we got problems.” He said he would need someone that has an auditing and financial background to go to Canton, Ohio once every month and pre-audit the billings of E.W. Bliss who was building, the contractor on the telescope. He said, “So that’s the job.”
I said, “Who will I be working for?”
He said, “Well, two people really: Mr. Callender locally, and me, the corporation comptroller. The financial stuff you come directly to me and the administrative matters, locally, Callender.”
I said, “Well, okay.” So, I went back home and or, sorry. They came back home and I think it was March or April they invited me to come up and look the place over. Wasn’t much going on. The foundation for the 140 was in and so forth. We talked and I said, “How much are you going to pay me?” and this kind of thing, and we settled on that. I went back home and about two weeks later Callender called me and he said, come run it. I said I can’t get away for about two months because they have an audit of the books where I was working. So in August, I came to work.
Kellermann: I didn’t realize that Callender came from the NSF.
Riffe: Yeah, he worked for Jack (Luten?) who was the administrator of the NSF. Callender was a pretty-good man. He had problems when he got here, but I think he had only worked in government.
Kellermann: Yeah, so he resigned his NSF position.
Riffe: Yeah, NSF staff. He could not do that today. They have that waiting period you know.
Kellermann: Right.
Riffe: But, back then, you could do that. Yeah, and he was, I don’t know what his title was. They only had 100 or some, few people at NSF then. So, when I came in the first two weeks that I was here, he and I went to Washington. He wanted to introduce me to all the people. They were in the old AEC building down on Constitution Avenue. I don’t know if you were familiar with it?
Kellermann: No.
Riffe: They probably moved.
Kellermann: They were on G Street by the time I came.
Riffe: Yeah, so I met Alan Waterman who was the director of the foundation and Jack Luten who was the administrator of the NSF and good friends of ours. I don’t think Aaron Rosenthall was there yet. I think he may have moved. The most interesting person I met was Vernice Anderson. Did you know Venice Anderson?
Kellermann: No.
Riffe: I just read the book, The Truman Years or the Truman Presidency, don’t remember the name of it or not. She was secretary to the Science Board and became the administrator of the Science Board or administrative aid or something like that, but when I met her, Vernice Anderson, I recognized the name. Are you the lady behind the curtain? Do you know the story?
Kellermann: No.
Riffe: When President Truman flew to Wake Island to meet with Douglas MacArthur in the early part of the Korean War after the Inchon Landing and so forth, I read the book, and I got two stories on this. One, MacArthur, you know was such a megalomaniac that kept his, this is the first story I got. He kept his plane over the horizon until Truman’s plane landed. So, Truman would have to land – right.
Kellermann: Oh, so Truman would have to – right, right.
Riffe: I asked Vernice about that and she said that is not exactly true. She said that MacArthur got there first, but he waited and made Truman wait for half hour on the plane before he went out to greet him. She said that now I won’t say any more about that. So, I saw her there several times. It was an interesting side of the story of an interesting person.
Kellermann: So, where was the NSF located? You said on Constitution Avenue.
Riffe: Yeah, there was an old Atomic Energy Commission building. It was small. It wasn’t as big as this building. Well, about the size of this building, but I remember the room we were in it was sealed or the room that we met in was sealed and everything. You could see that there weren’t any bugs. They moved out down on 18th Street. I remember –
Kellermann: G Street, G and 18th.
Riffe: So, we had a, the Foundation began expanding and we had Randy Robertson, I’m sure you must remember Randy.
Kellermann: Yeah. – and what was his title?
Riffe: He was Head of Math and Physics, whatever the NSF called it. Paul Scherer came along a little bit later.
Kellermann: Tell us about him because I read some of this correspondence with Scherer.
Riffe: With Scherer? I didn’t have any, too much – Jerry Tape worked with Paul Scherer a lot. I can’t remember all the details. It had to do with the 140 foot telescope I do believe. Scherer and Aaron Rosenthal. Rosenthal was Comptroller of the NSF. After we went through a lot of the toing and froing of what you are going to do about the 140 foot telescope. Scherer and, I guess Struve was still here then, I’m not sure, but anyway Jerry Tape had gotten involved as the AUI guy.
Kellermann: Was he President yet?
Riffe: No. Jerry was not President. He was Deputy Director at Brookhaven.
Kellermann: Right.
Riffe: Anyway, finances were the big problem. We had to decide how we were going to build, and how we are going to get out from under this Bliss [contract]. Rosenthal, he managed to find a way to get some, the first 3 million dollars to start bailing it out. Well, actually the second 3 million dollars. Paul Scherer, he worked with AUI directly, and I guess at that time Ted Reynolds was President of AUI.
Kellermann: Yes, and I ran across the letter from, first from Reynolds to Emberson, chewing Emberson out for going beyond his authority, and then he wrote to Scherer about the same thing or something. I can’t remember the details, but –
Riffe: It really got messed up, now I’m getting into the 140 ft telescope. This was to be, “the Observatory,” as you noted, I think, on a number of occasions. So, one of my first jobs was to go to Canton, Ohio and see what kind of bookkeeping the guys were doing. The progress of the work, Spencer Greenwood, was at Canton plant, and he kept, he had a little book and would keep notes and number of people on this job.
Kellermann: He worked for for AUI?
Riffe: AUI? Well, he worked for NRAO.
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: So, I was to consult with Greenwood and see, you know, how it was.
Kellermann: He worked for you.
Riffe: No, he worked for the project. At the time, he was working for Emberson. Emberson was the Project Manager and I guess Acting Deputy Director of the NRAO because Lloyd Berkner was Acting Director of the NRAO, and he was also president of the AUI at that moment in time. At any rate, I went to Canton. The progress of the work that was –
Kellermann: This was right after you came?
Riffe: Right. Maybe within 1 or 2 months.
Kellermann: Late 1959?
Riffe: Yes, probably August to September. About the time, we put Struve on the payroll as I recall. Poor old Otto Struve was caught up in all this stuff right of the bat. Spencer Greenwood, I would check his records against what Bliss would give me that they were going bill us for, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I figured Spencer, he was pretty, meticulous and his records were pretty good. So, I went up and talk to the comptroller at Bliss and I said what’s this and what’s that. He talked about engineering variance. I said that’s a big variance they’ve got. Any big company has an engineering department and they have little jobs that they have to do in-house, I guess to design a new toilet for the administrative offices or something. Well, they just, they don’t even charge that. So after you get through it the end of the day or the end of the week, there are some hours that’re not accounted for. So what they do, is they just spread it over every job. It’s fair enough and you are going to wind up paying for it anyway.
Kellermann: [Whispering] That’s what I do.
Riffe: [Laughter] You do. Well, everybody does that. But ours seemed extraordinarily large, and so I asked the comptroller – and I’m trying to remember his name and I can’t do that. I said, “What is it, or can I check and see what you are charging to all departments?” He said, “No, you can’t do that.” He said, “We’ve got the Navy working there and that’s classified and you are not entitled to see it.” I said, “Well, this is a hell of a big variance you are charging to the NRAO,” and I called Lew Burchill and I told him that I have a funny feeling. “Now, do you want me to right you a memo about this.” He said, “No just stand fast.” He said, “We are having a meeting in the next few days about this with Reynolds.” So, I heard nothing else and got the train back to White Sulphur Springs, back to Green Bank, cause you know what the travel was like back then. When I went in, Frank Callender came up and he had a letter in his hand. It was from Ted Reynolds, to the President of Bliss saying we are going to change the contract from fixed price to cost plus. I said, “What in the hell? That’s a license to steal if I ever saw it.” [Laughter] Frank said, “Yeah.” He didn’t figure out what was going on. So, I called Lewis Burchill and asked what the hell is going on. He said, “Don’t worry about it. Another letter is on the way.” The other letter was from Reynolds to Bliss cancelling the contract with NSF. He had not consulted with anybody about changing to cost plus contract. So, the NSF, whoever up there I think, Rosenthal, I guess, blew his stack.
Kellermann: Reynolds, what was his background? Harvard?
Riffe: He was at MIT or Harvard. Harvard. Yeah. I don’t know what his exact position was at Harvard.
Kellermann: Science or?
Riffe: I think so? You can look him up?
Kellermann: What was his first name?
Riffe: Ted.
Kellermann: Ted.
Riffe: Whether it was Edward or Theodore, I don’t know.
Kellermann: So it was AUI? Sorry, it was NSF that instigated cancelling the contract with Bliss?
Riffe: Well, whether they instigated it or not, they were really cancelling the cost plus provision. They certainly were involved in that. Because that to me was –
Kellermann: So, that’s all they did. They just cancelled that part. They went back to the fixed price?
Riffe: Well, I think things got so tense there for a bit that they said, well – Bliss was just not performing. They just weren’t performing. So, Reynolds, to his credit, he was somehow or another, he was related to Stone Webster Engineering outfit. Stone Webster was just finishing up the power plant down here at Lake Anna, the first nuclear power plant. They had a reputation that was very good, but he put us in contact with them. So, we made the decision that we would be our own contractor. And, we got Max Small out of Brookhaven.
Kellermann: This is a couple of years later though isn’t it?
Riffe: Oh yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, no not two year. Heeschen was the director at that point. Struve had decided – well, Dave may have been acting director at that moment in time.
Kellermann: It was after Struve?
Riffe: Yes, it was after Struve. Well, Struve, he had, remember he had fallen and broken his arm, I think or shoulder or something and was in the hospital over here. Struve was a little bit upset the way things were going. I think if he had not had all the problems with the 140 foot he would have been a very good Director. He worked well with his staff and liked his students. I liked him. He and I got along just fine. At any rate, the decision was made that we would just go with our own set up. Max would be the project manager. Stone and Webster would complete the engineering. A lot of that telescope had to be re-engineered, and so we assigned anybody that we needed to on that job. Stone and Webster did a good job for us. Here I was the only person with the financial stuff and I said, “How are we going to handle this? We’ve got to hire more people.” “No, we can’t do that.” Okay, we will contract. So, Stone and Webster they furnished us a guy. I can’t remember his name now, business-type guy, and put him in the plant in Canton to inventory all the materials and say this can’t go to the telescope, can’t go into West Virginia. This we can salvage and so forth. There was a reason for that which I think I put them onto was, well the NRAO or the AUI was tax exempt in West Virginia. Contractors are not. So, anything of value that is brought into the State, the contractor has to pay a tax on it. So, this guy he did a real good job, the old sphere was thrown out and a lot of money was tied up in that. So, he did a real good job for us on that, and Max was very good with what he did. He and I had some knock-down-drag-outs as Heeschen called them, and he had to resolve them. Max wanted his own chart of accounts, his own accountants, his own personnel people and so forth. He was only 100 yards down the road from where I was sitting. I said, “No, we don’t need two of those. I can handle that in my office.” He goes to Heeschen and Heeschen says, well, “Riffe is the guy I’m relying on to do this and that was it.” So, we worked that out alright.
Kellermann: Was he on loan from Brookhaven?
Riffe: Yes, we transferred him to the NRAO payroll, and he and his wife moved into the old Hardy house.
Kellermann: Yes, I remember that.
Riffe: Max did a good job for us. Finally got that thing straightened out. It was pretty much a mess from the beginning. Ned Ashton, he got a little bit out of sorts with the way he wanted to do any redesign that was necessary.
Kellermann: He did the original design?
Riffe: He did the original design. He was an interesting guy. He was from Iowa State University, I think and he and his wife Gladys they would come down. And the first few weeks that he was here he had come down and he had rented a cabin at Bartow up in the woods. He and his wife stayed there. He had Dick Emberson and me up for dinner, a cookout type thing. He wasn’t too happy with some of the AUI people. Berkner to be exact. Berkner was fairly bombastic you know. He was playing on me – what could I do for him. I could see through that. But, they were nice people. Well, something funny about this with his wife Gladys. When we built the residence hall in the cafeteria, you know the ladies’ room and the men’s room right off to the side, they had not put fire sprinklers in the residence hall.
Well, Lloyd Berkner saw that and said, “That’s crazy.” So he took the plans, laid them out, and just drew up the line down two sides of the thing and said, “Put these sprinklers in.” He told the contractor. That’s why you have some sprinkler heads in the showers in the residence hall. You bought them standard and wherever they fit that’s where they went. Well any rate, the plumber’s hooked the sprinkler system up to same line that was to the ladies commode in the ladies room. Now the sprinklers they set off when the pressure drops. If the pressure drops on that pipe in there. Well, the sprinklers don’t set off but the alarm sets off. That’s what happened at Green Bank. Anyway, we had dinner. Gladys goes to the restroom.
Bouton: I can see what’s coming.
Riffe: [Laughter] You know what happened now and there is a big gong in the cafeteria. You remember that when the bell?
Kellermann: I think so.
Riffe: Well, no one had used it before. They just hooked it up that day. Mrs. Ashton, Gladys, she goes in and she had dentures. She goes in the bathroom and she was cleaning her dentures after dinner. At the same time she had flushed the commode and that gong starts out. Of course, that’s like all hell breaking lose in that restroom and she comes running out and carrying her teeth in her hand. [Laughter] I don’t know why I remember that of all things.
Kellermann: How well do you know Berkner?
Riffe: Berkner? I worked with him on a couple of little things: getting a post office in Green Bank was one and settling up with John Carrol.
Kellermann: There was no post office in Green Bank before?
Riffe: Yes, but we needed a new one. It just couldn’t handle it.
Kellermann: Is this story true that the grade of the post office, or level, was upgraded because of the weight of the stuff they carried and they was because of the 140 foot castings or something?
Riffe: Yes. Yes. I heard that, but I don’t know if it is true or not. No.
Kellermann: Oh, you don’t know if it is true.
Riffe: No. I don’t know. What happened on that was Margaret, she was Frank’s and my secretary, Margaret Ervin. Berkner was down at Green Bank and he had mailed himself a package a week before to Green Bank and when he got there, the package wasn’t there. So, he came in and Frank wasn’t in the office, but he wanted to borrow our secretary. He wanted to dictate a letter to Summerfield, Postmaster General, about that lousy postal service in Green Bank . Within a week the guy was in talking to Frank and me about where do you want the post office. “Do you want it right across from you main gate?” We said no, let’s put it down in Green Bank where it was. So Berkner, as I said when he was bombastic, he really got bombastic so he got the post office. The other was John Carrol, you know that story. John Carrol was an engineer at Brookhaven. He was assigned to the NRAO. On a Sunday, he was going to church in Marlinton, he was Catholic, and that’s the only place or the nearest place. He was running late and down at Dunmore, they have changed the road now, he had come up over the hill and hit head on with a car. It was Berkner’s wife and daughter. It was a real mess. Carrol was killed outright. It was a GSA car he was driving. Mrs. Berkner got a helicopter called in and brought her to UVA. She was in really bad shape. The daughter, she was banged up pretty badly and they brought her in, too. They both lived, of course. John Carrol –
Kellermann: When was this?
Riffe: This happened right before I came, but I got caught up in having to settle up some of this stuff, particularly with GSA for that car. Oh, that became a mess. Callender came in and said, “I don’t know what to do about this,” and threw a file down on my desk. The question was – was it a misuse of a government vehicle? I got a hold of Peter (Rathon?) who was the assistant secretary and counsel for AUI. He said let’s argue on this one. So, he and I went down and argued: if a guy is away from home on temporary duty, going to church on Sunday if he is really religious, it is a part of our duty to see that he can get to church, and they accepted that argument. They said that you had to pay for the loss of the car and no fines or anything like that, and the other thing was, (Rathon?), he handled it. Back then you had to pay for your life insurance. It was 35 cents a thousand or something like that for the additional insurance. You could reject it if you wanted, but you had to have it in writing that you rejected it. John Carrol rejected his. His wife claimed that he should receive that anyway, the additional amount. So I had to get involved in that. Finally, AUI made a Solomon-like decision to give her the money. It was a bit of a mess.
Kellermann: Back to Berkner. Everything I have read about him, he had a tremendous background. He did all sorts of things, but he left shortly after Struve did.
Riffe: That’s right. He went to Southwestern Texas or the graduate center in Texas or some place. He was an interesting guy. I didn’t have that much to do with him, but a few times we did. He gave Callender a hard time. The roads were unpaved. It was just a mud hole, that place in 1959.
Kellermann: The site or the public road?
Riffe: The site. We had a meeting with Berkner and the staff, at least the administrative staff. Berkner said, “I want this damn road paved and I don’t want any excuses or anything else.” Well, a month or so, three or four weeks late,r we had another meeting when Berkner was back. “Nothing happened on the roads!” He was really given Callender a hard time. Frank said, “Well, I told you that we got a lot of heavy stuff coming in here and there’s no point in paving those things until it is dried up.” He said, “You stood there and you agreed with me.” Berkner said, “What do you mean I agreed with you?” “Well, you nodded when I explained to you.” Berkner said, “That did not mean I agreed with you, that meant I understood.” [Laughter.] That’s the kind of guy he was.
Kellermann: Now is this when he was Acting Director and President?
Riffe: That was all the same thing.
Kellermann: He did come to Green Bank regularly.
Riffe: Oh yeah, he came down regularly, about every month.
Kellermann: This was before Struve?
Riffe: Well, Struve came in September. I believe it was September of ‘59.
Kellermann: ‘59?
Riffe: So Berkner continued with, oh, I don’t know, he continued with the project certainly. When he resigned, it was after his wife, and he was pretty torn up about that which is understandable. He went back to Texas. I heard nothing further from him after that.
Kellermann: So you don’t think he left because of the 140 foot mess and the difficulty in finding a Director when Struve left?
Riffe: Well, Struve left, it was pretty – not much was happening. Struve was complaining a lot about people didn’t do what he told them to do or something. That’s not the right words. He couldn’t get a grasp on the thing because everyone was focusing on the 140 foot telescope and other things were just floating around. But, Struve did a lot of things, he wanted the student base at NRAO and we went through that – undergraduate research program.
Kellermann: Now, I was surprised that Findlay was in charge of that.
Riffe: Well, Findlay was the Deputy Director under Struve and when Struve came in, he wanted Armen Deutsch as his deputy, and Deutsch came to Green Bank and spent about week with us.
Kellermann: What was their connection or where did get – ?
Riffe: I am not sure. I think Deutsch may have been a student of Struve’s at Chicago when Struve was there for a while.
Kellermann: Now we are talking what year?
Riffe: Well, this is in ‘59.
Kellermann: ’59.
Riffe: Deutsche came and he stayed several days with us, I remember.
Kellermann: Because I’ve seen his name turn up in a Visiting Committee –
Riffe: Yeah.
Kellermann: Or Trustee? Cause I’ve always wondered because he lives in aernegie, no Mount Wilson Palomar. He was a graduate student at Caltech.
Riffe: Well, later that was later.
Kellermann: Well, I started in ’59.
Riffe: Well, it was about that time I guess.
Kellermann: But he had no involvement or interest in radio astronomy.
Riffe: No, but Struve –
Kellermann: So, I was surprised to learn some years later that he was involved in the NRAO.
Riffe: Yeah, yeah, and he came to Green Bank and spent some time with us, with the Struves mostly. I think he was a student of Struve’s, but I’m not absolutely certain of that. Anyway, that’s who Struve wanted as his deputy, but Deutsch didn’t take it. So then, they named Findlay as his deputy and moved him where the Fiscal office was there in this, the [Laughing] Green Bank building. John, Struve had to assign something to somebody, so he assigned John the UGRPP (Undergraduate Research Participation Program).
Kellermann: Yes, because just the day before I ran across something and Findlay was the contact for or PI. I was surprised because –
Riffe: Well, the other job that John had at that particular time was Little Big Horn.
Kellermann: Yes.
Riffe: And, he was –
Kellermann: Wait. He was also head of electronics or engineering or something?
Riffe: No, after he – when he became Deputy Director he put Hein [Hvatum] in charge, which did away with those – Heeschen and Struve got together and did away with these chairmanships. Heeschen never did like them, he said, and Struve certainly didn’t like them. He said, “Hell, the Observatory is an astronomy department. And, so Hein was named head of the electronics department.
Kellermann: Who hired Hein?
Riffe: I think Berkner. Berkner did. Now there is a letter in the file. Hein had leave. Remember the old H visas. You could only stay so long, then you had to leave at least a year.
Kellermann: Right.
Riffe: So Hein went back to Norway to Chalmers, I guess. I’m not sure he went to Chalmers or not. After his—
Kellermann: He first came as a visitor as a post doc or something?
Riffe: He was a post doc.
Kellermann: He was a post doc.
Riffe: Well, as a research associate.
Kellermann: A research associate, we called it.
Riffe: And, he went back – I was instructed get the letter out Berkner wrote. I told Hein that, I said, “I read that letter,” and I said, “I thought they were bringing Albert Einstein over here.” Boy, I had never seen such glowing –
Kellermann: We had to do that to get the visas.
Riffe: Yeah. So a year later, here Hein, Randi, and the kids came back. So, Hein then became Head of the Electronics Division. John may have been Acting Head, but he was Deputy Director at that point. He was doing some research with the Horn after Cassiopeia or whatever it was. John always worried that he couldn’t figure out what the cost of the Horn was and that was a he job assigned to me when I first came. [Laughing] Trying to figure that one out – it was crazy. John also started working about that time on the LFST. Which the 300 footer, 300 foot telescope came out of that. And, that was, well Struve. Struve did the groundbreaking and all – I remember going down to the field on that one. So John was contributing a lot to the –
Kellermann: Who hired him?
Riffe: Findlay?
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: Berkner.
Kellermann: And what was their connection? How did he know about him?
Riffe: I really don’t know. I really don’t. John, during the war, he had been in a lot of, done some, a lot of radar work in, I think India.
Kellermann: India, yeah.
Riffe: And, his – I really don’t know. But Berkner was the one that sent out, I think he may have sent out word to friends that he knew and said we need an electronic or – and Findlay’s name popped up. It was a – John, in earlier days he made a lot of good contributions to the place. Things got a little rough later on, but the Horn, the 300 foot, and the 36 foot in Tucson. He got half way through the job and lose interest in it and somebody else would take over. That’s the way it seemed to me, but it may not be true. So, the organization was Struve, Director; Findlay, Deputy Director; and Heeschen was, I think Heeschen was Head of Telescope Operations. I’m not absolutely sure of the new titles that came in, maybe Senior Scientist and Drake was Head of Telescope Operations. I don’t know.
Kellermann: I thought he stayed on as Head of the Astronomy Division.
Riffe: Well, he was, I guess he was. Yeah, yeah. But, we changed, Heeschen hated organizational charts. You probably know that [Laughing] and job titles and things didn’t impress him in the least, and so, he, we had the NSF and AUI kept telling us we needed organizational charts and so forth. So, Dave and I we got together and came up with one. It would be two parts, or three parts actually. There’s electronic, or Technical Services, Administration, and Basic Research.
Kellermann: Because when I came it was called Basic Research.
Riffe: Yeah, and a Director. The Basic Research went straight to the Director and the other two, which was Hein and me, would go to the Director. So that was sort of the management organization, very simple and pretty good. It worked anyway. And, so Dave, yeah, he was hiring and so forth, or I don’t know, Struve, I guess was initially involved in some of the hiring, although I don’t recall too much. Struve was an interesting guy. [Laughing] Though I had several, well one of the things - he wanted me to talk to the State about seeing if they could, was it was possible to get a little piece of land up on Bald Knob to put an optical telescope up there. And what he wanted was for students to go up and actually see the stars as well as hear the stars. So I checked with the State, the department that bought Bald Knob and they said we surely could work out something. Struve liked that because there are no lights, pollution or anything up there. Nothing ever came of that. Heeschen and Kochu Menon, and I, I was chairman of the Cass committee that got this railroad started up there. So I got a motorcar and took Heeschen and Kochu, we went to Bald Knob as far as we could get one day. Heeschen asked me, he said, “Could I get up there?” and I said, “Yeah, it’s the only way you could get up there then.”
Kellermann: On the train tracks?
Riffe: Yeah, on the train, railroad tracks. And, Heeschen didn’t say so, but I think he wasn’t satisfied that was true. “Okay, yeah you could do it, but why?” [Laughing] He wasn’t very enthusiastic about it at all. I don’t think any of his staff was. So, but Struve, I recall when we settled up the Bliss contract, it was a check to pay to Bliss for a million and three hundred thousand dollars. And all checks had to have two signatures, of that size, had to have two signatures. Mine was always on it and one other person either the Director, or Heeschen, or somebody. Anything under ten thousand dollars just, they used the signature plate. Well at any rate, I, Struve they had a, every morning about 10:00, the scientific staff. It’s like an old check on your little biddies, you know. Head to the cafeteria for coffee about 10:00. So I had this check for a million three hundred thousand dollars to pay, you know [Laughing] Bliss. So I signed it and walked out to find somebody else to sign it and Struve was just coming out of his office. It was that place where you had the mail there. And I said, “Ah, Dr. Struve, just the person I need to see.” I said, “Could I get your signature please?” And he said, “Oh sure.” And I laid this down. I said, “Just put your John Hancock right there.” [Tapping] And he signed the check and backed up and he said, “My name is not John Hancock.” [Laughter] Oh boy, oh I presumed to a familiarity that really didn’t exist, you know? Oh boy! [Continued laughing]
Kellermann: Did you call him Dr. Struve?
Riffe: I called him Dr. Struve.
Kellermann: And did everybody, Dave Heeschen?
Riffe: Yeah, Dave did too. Dave usually would use Professor –
Kellermann: Uh huh, okay, but still formal.
Riffe: But Callender would call himit was Otto and I thought that was presumptuous.
Kellermann: How did he refer to, call staff – you and Heeschen?
Riffe: Well, he would call me Ted.
Kellermann: Oh he did.
Riffe: Yeah. And at any rate, I felt pretty small around Struve that he said that. So I go back in my office and I’m sitting there and looking across and here he is walking across the way. He goes in and a couple minutes later, here he comes back walking very fast. He came into my office and he said he wanted to apologize.
Kellermann: Oh!
Riffe: And then, I said well, “That’s okay,” you know something like that. [Laughing] And he said, can I see that check? And he said, “Can I take it with me?” [Laughter] He took it over and showed the staff and said, “Now there’s power worth millions.” Go ahead.
Kellermann: Uh, this alarm is going to go off. We are having a fire, having a fire alarm.
Bouton: We are having a fire drill.
Riffe: Ahhh, okay.
End of Part 1, interview with Riffe
===================
Begin Part 2, interview with Riffe, continuing on 16 July 2013
Kellermann: Okay, so we were talking about [Otto] Struve, I guess. Who are the people on the scientific staff when you came? So there was [Frank D.] Drake?
Riffe: Well, yeah, well [David S.] Heeschen, Drake, [T. Kochu] Menon. Well, he?called [John W.] Findlay, he was on the scientific staff, he had tenure --
Kellermann: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.
Riffe: -- track, well anyway whether he had tenure at that time or not, I don’t know. Uh, I don’t know who else. There weren’t very many.
Kellermann: No.
Riffe: A fellow named Hugh Johnson came a little bit later, I think. Ahhh –
Kellermann: Roger Lynds?
Riffe: Roger and Beatty. That’s right they came, Struve brought them in, that’s true. And Cam Wade. Ahhh.
Bouton: Cam Wade?
Kellermann: He was here already then?
Riffe: Cam? came same time, same month as Struve did. I remember we used to talk about that and Frank Low was a little bit later I think. Course, Gart Westerhout was up as a visitor for a while, wasn’t he?
Bouton: He use to spend summers here.
Riffe: That’s right, that’s right. Uh, (?) I guess. George Miley was there for a while.
Kellermann: No, no. That was later.
Riffe: Was that much later?
Kellermann: Yeah. That was much later. He was after I came. He was post doc.
Riffe: Yeah, but the ones that, you know, as I recall when I first came in the spring to visit the place, it was Heeschen, Drake, and Menon, I think that was pretty much about it.
Kellermann: How about Grote Reber?
Riffe: Reber was here, yeah.
Kellermann: Did you have any interactions with him?
Riffe: On the –
Kellermann: He must have been hard to deal with or?
Riffe: No, actually, he was sort of fun. I enjoyed being, just watching him function. No, when I came up in August to take the regular job, it was on a Sunday night I remember, and I stayed at the Hill house. They had me room at the Hill house. And I went over and Kochu Menon and Reber were sitting in the living room just chatting away, and I introduced myself and Kochu, well, nice to know you where you from, background, a little small talk, you know. Reber, his first question was, “Are you hungry?” [Laughter] And I said, “No, I ate down at Richwood or someplace on the way up.” He said, “Well let’s get something to eat.” So he goes over and the kitchen door was locked. Virginia Irvine was our cook. That was a love-hate relationship if I ever saw one. I mean he loved to eat and he hated Virginia Irvine. So he goes over and he picked the lock on the kitchen, kitchen door. And, went in and fixed himself something. And I didn’t, oh I may have eaten a piece of pie or something like that. So I got to know him very well, and we had a pool table John Findlay had bought someplace and put in a side room. And Grote was growing beans or something and putting a reverse twist on them or something.
Kellermann: Right.
Riffe: And he was always stealing Harry Wooddell’s postage scales which infuriated Harry because he’d weigh a bean or something. In the middle of the pool table, he had about two bushels of beans piled up there and we couldn’t shoot any pool or something. Findlay got all mad at him and took his beans and put them on a blanket or something, dragged them into another room. But, he was doing things like, oh and Virginia Irvine. [Laughter throughout] Capacitors, he made his own capacitors, and you have to bake them hot in something hot. And he was going to the kitchen and it was capacitors laid out on a cookie sheet baking in the oven and a sign – do not touch – or something like. Oh, Virginia Irvine, she just infuriated with that. So he was one of our great characters.
Kellermann: Was he actually on the pay roll or?
Riffe: Yeah. He was on our pay roll, but they reimbursed - Research –
Kellermann: Research Corporation.
Riffe: -- Corporation reimbursed us. Every month we sent them a bill.
Kellermann: Uh-huh.
Riffe: They reimbursed us 100%.
Kellermann: So why was it done that way?
Riffe: They wanted to do it that way –
Kellermann: No. Oh, because they didn’t employ people, I guess.
Riffe: I guess that’s right.
Kellermann: I guess.
Riffe: I guess not. That’s they way I wanted to do the sort of VLBA antennas, you know work that out with one of the universities, but that’s a different story.
Kellermann: That’s being discussed again now.
Riffe: What? All the (?) that’s interesting.
Kellermann: It was just a meeting at the NSF, last week, week before.
Riffe: The NSF liked that too, because they liked to have the university involved in that.
Kellermann: They still do.
Riffe: Yeah, well that was my idea. I would have preferred that. I just say well, you send them a check once a month or once a quarter. And that’s the way, the Research Corporation we worked with Reber.
Kellermann: So what did he do beside beans?
Riffe: [Laughing] Well, we, I don’t know that he did anything, observing or anything like that on the telescope. We brought his whole antenna, his antenna down. He scoured the countryside finding parts for it and finally got what he needed. We erected it up in front. I guess it’s still in the same place isn’t it?
Bouton: Still there.
Kellermann: A lot of its not original as I understand.
Riffe: No.
Kellermann: Cause the wood had rotted.
Riffe: Yeah, well Jamie Sheets took him around the place and he needed a Model T trans, differential, I guess it was –
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: It’s not the transmission, it’s the differential that drives the thing. Well anyway, Jamie said, “Well, down on Route 92 there’s an old farm back in there we can –.” Did you hear this story?
Kellermann: No.
Riffe: So, we got a GSA car and Jamie is driving Grote to take him down to this place and drive back in, it had junk all over, just scattered all over the place. One of the things was a still, moonshine still, and here this government car, GSA on the side of it, you know. [Laughter] So, Jamie says, “Well, I had some second thoughts about it, but Grote got out and he was looking at that still you know. Old guy comes out and had a shotgun in his arm. So Jamie knew the guy and he goes up and explains to him what it was they were looking for, a Ford differential to for a radio telescope. So they guy could hardly blame Jamie because Grote had gotten so interested in this still. It was just something of interest to him. Anyway they found, finally found the differential for that thing. And, now he did, he was fiddling around with something all the time. He, I know once took a car over to, oh what was it? He took a car to Elkins and then caught a ride back to the observatory and left the car in Elkins [Laughing]. We had to send two guys over to get the car then, little things like that.
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: No big deal.
Kellermann: You told me once about when Heeschen was appointed director by [I. I.] Rabi. You met with him, went with him in.
Riffe: Yeah, that got to be one of the little messy times and, not messy times, confusing times for a lot of the people around there. Uh, Rabi became Acting Director after Struve left, I think or maybe after Reynolds, I don’t recall which –
Kellermann: Acting President [of AUI].
Riffe: Huh?
Kellermann: President.
Riffe: Acting President.
Kellermann: Oh, President.
Riffe: Yeah, and uh, we had named Joe Pawsey, he had been appointed Director to replace Struve and Dave was sort of the Acting Director I think during that period, scientific staff anyway. And Findlay was Deputy, still Deputy Director, and so Findlay was handling a lot of the administrative stuff that was going on. And, course, Joe Pawsey’s story –
Kellermann: Right.
Riffe: It didn’t work out. So they had looked around been hunting for an astronomer to head up the observatory and, the Executive Committee met. The offices were still in New York at (?) Circle, AUI offices. And Findlay and Callender were invited to come up to the Executive Committee Meeting. Well everybody knew what it was for, it was too make one of them, make or get the directorship set up. And I think most everybody, including Heeschen, thought well they’d named Findlay as being Deputy Director, he would be named the Director. And so, they got to train up Dave and John, they were getting along very, they were very good friends and worked well together back then. And uh, they got up there and they met and so forth.
Kellermann: Who is it? Who is we now? First, you said it was just John and Callender, but you were there and Dave?
Riffe: No I didn’t, no I didn’t go to – no. Just John and Dave went to that meeting in New York at that time.
Kellermann: Oh.
Riffe: And so we were waiting, you know, figured well Findlay will come back and he’ll be the Director and that will be it. The 300 footer was well on the way you know and so forth, so Findlay could work in that. And, stories I heard afterwards of Findlay, Rabi said, “Well, we decided it’s going to be Heeschen as the Director.” People said that Findlay, it’s just like it hit him between the eyes with a two by four or something. Cause he expected more, and Dave did, too. And Dave told me later that he thought that they would name Findlay. So they came back. Dave said it was a long trip back for those guys on the train and, of course, people called and told us what had happened. We knew when they came back. John was, after that his relationship with Heeschen, and certainly with Rabi, he just, the words he used to describe Rabi you don’t repeat in mixed company. You know, he hated the man, he was no good, and I said, “Well John, he won a Nobel Prize [Laughing] for crying out loud, somebody thought he had something on the ball.” And, but any rate, things were a little bit – .
Kellermann: Do we know anything of why he chose Heeschen over, did he say anything?
Riffe: Uh, I think Rabi had a liking for Heeschen early on and Heeschen had the first degree in Radio Astronomy in the United States I think.
Kellermann: Probably, yeah.
Riffe: And Findlay, later Findlay and I were talking, he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t the Director and I said well, I assume they want a guy that really is an astronomer after his name.
Kellermann: Well, what about an American?
Riffe: Well I don’t think that –
Kellermann: Cause the first time around they certainly, well because they had already decided on Pawsey so I guess that wasn’t, but the first time around that was very important.
Riffe: Well, yeah, they wanted a name and Struve was a big name. I mean, hell, his father and grandfather –
Kellermann: No, no, yeah.
Riffe: -- in Russia and all. So I think there was politics involved in that maybe, but I don’t know. I don’t know that ever came up. It could have been now, that very, I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought of that.
Kellermann: Well, but they, that can’t be too important cause they already offered it to Pawsey who was.
Riffe: Yeah, well but later on it might have been, but I think Dave had a – .
Kellermann: Well, it wasn’t later on, it was only a few months later.
Riffe: Well, that’s right. So that was a little tense time there on that, and so Dave Immediately, I don’t know if it was the first thing or not, but he called me in and said he wanted me to take over the whole business set up, make you an Assistant Director I think at that time. I said well okay after some talk back and forth. What are we going to do? I said, “Will weget together from time to time and talk about this?” He said, “I don’t want to talk to you at all.” He said, “You know more about the stuff you are supposed to be doing than I know.” He said, “Just don’t screw it up or something like that.” So it worked out pretty well on that, And Dave was pushing interferometer for completion at that time. Findlay was back to LSFT because the 300 footer was about ready to go into operation. And so we had these two competing systems, the VLA which was an outgrowth of the interferometer, and LFST, an outgrowth of the 300 foot telescope, which was still in the back of a lot of people’s mind. Of course, not being Director, guess which one won out, you know. I think that didn’t help that situation between Findlay and Callender, no, Findlay and Heeschen. But, at any rate, things, then, it was about that, well I guess ’64 the decision to move to Charlottesville came to be and things between Heeschen and Rabi got strained anew if you please. And that’s a different story altogether but a continuation of the saga of the NRAO.
Kellermann: So what about the move? When did you?
Riffe: I was.
Kellermann: Who initiated it? Heeschen?
Riffe: Heeschen. Well I, I knew there were mumblings amongst some of the staff members and their wives, you know, children going to school up there and so forth. Schools weren’t that bad.
Kellermann: No.
Riffe: But the perception that people had, you know, let’s get back into the big city and things like that. Oh, I paid a little attention to it. I lived over at Cass and things gone along pretty good. To be honest with you, I was thinking another year or two then I was going to probably look for some place else going into my career.
Kellermann: Right.
Riffe: But, one morning Dave called a meeting of his top guys I guess you would say. Findlay, Callender, and Drake, I don’t know if Drake was there then or not.
Kellermann: Probably was, yeah.
Riffe: Me, Bill Pleasants, you remember him. Maybe Hein. I think Cam Wade, (and that was in that one room where he had his where your office was. I made it into a conference room and you guys sort of took it back over as an office. And Dave sat down, “What are we having this meeting for?” he says. I want to assign jobs for people to look into, of moving to Charlottesville. Ah, the first thought that went through my mind, okay Eloise must have got to him last night or something. Because he had never.
Kellermann: Do you remember when this was?
Riffe: Ah that would have been late ’63 or early ’64 maybe?
Kellermann: No, it was before that.
Riffe: Was it before that?
Kellermann: Because I visited in, must have been July or August of ’63.
Riffe: Okay. Alright.
Kellermann: Because I was going to Australia and I knew I’d need a job when I came back, and he told me then that, but I don’t – Yeah, I think it was pretty definite.
Riffe: Okay.
Kellermann: The decision had been made already.
Riffe: Yeah, well we – So he assigned me to look at the financial stuff, contact the University of Virginia, you know the comptroller over here, ah not comptroller. It was a guy named Vincent (Shea?) who was Vice President for something or other. Dave was talking to a couple of people. I can’t remember exactly who now. They wanted us, really, over here. So I went through that. Findlay had something about the local stuff, living conditions, and Hein, contacts with the electronics that kind of stuff.
Kellermann: So the question was looking into Charlottesville, not looking into where to go.
Riffe: That’s right.
Kellermann: And comparing different places.
Riffe: No, Dave said Charlottesville, definitely Charlottesville. Well so that, so we started putting our stuff together and then Dave started calling meetings. And Manny Piori was named by Rabi, I guess, to chair a committee of Trustees to look into this thing. Well, Piori had no vested interest in it, so whichever way it went was. If you move over there, it’s a pretty good idea. It’s a pretty good university and so forth. Well, we had a meeting, I think it could have been at Brookhaven, and Rabi, who was not President then because things had evolved… that was before Keith Glennan. Ted Wright was the President then, from Cornell, and Rabi, he asked, “Well, why do you want to move to the University of Virginia?” Heeschen said, well it’s a good university, its proximity to Green Bank, and this that and the other. Rabi said, “Well you’re building an airstrip.” And it’s the first time I heard Princeton. And he said, “You could fly from Princeton to Green Bank quicker than you can drive from Charlottesville to Green Bank. If you want to go to a center of excellence, you don’t go to the University of Virginia. You go to Princeton.” Princeton he kept saying. A fellow by the name of Carl Chambers, who was a trustee from the University of Pennsylvania, I believe, well, politically he said, “We may have some problems here. Have you looked at other places, like West Virginia University?”
Kellermann: Yeah, I was going to ask you, Morgantown.
Riffe: And he said a little university down in Huntington, Marshall. I applauded. And so, we did. Some of us went over, I didn’t. Some of them went over to Morgantown and looked it over. I think Mort [Roberts] may have been involved in that. I’m almost sure he was. And because they didn’t have an astronomy department or anything like that. Well, anyway, the conversation went on and Dave was so tied to UVA that there was no way that he was going to give off of that. And the Rabi and Heeschen to and fro at that meeting got pretty – I was a little anxious on that. And finally, Dave said, “We either move to Charlottesville or you can get a new Director.”
Kellermann: He pulled that line from time to time.
Riffe: Wow! Well, Rabi stood up, turned, and walked out. And someone said that they heard Rabi say, I didn’t, that somebody should take him up on that. He walked out of the meeting. And Piori was at that meeting, I remember that, and so they recommended, for whatever reason, that we move to Charlottesville. So then the wheels went into motion. I got move involved because of the legal stuff—getting a lease for this land, and how do you build the building. And we have $600,000 appropriated for a new lab in Green Bank, and so I called Rosenthal and said, “We want to give you that money back, because we don’t know how we are going to finance the building over here.” And that tickled them. That gave us a few points with the NSF. In taking with Vincent Shea and Larry Fredrick, I think he was involved in that, we decided the university would build a building to our specification, not to exceed a certain amount of money, $600,000, which it what we’d given back. And we’d pay for it over a period of about five years, or whatever it was, at an interest rate of whatever their endowment was bringing in at the time. And the NSF liked that because the interest rate helped the university a little bit, and they were anxious to do that. And Bill Pleasants, he was head of our engineering division at Green Bank—there’s a story on that one in a minute—he hired (? Chapman), Abbot McCarthy, and Straton Tams to design this building for us. Well, we found out that they were not licensed to do business in Virginia, so we had to get another firm here in Charlottesville to work with Tams and Bill did that. We got the lease, made the lease. And we got a very favorable lease, I think. We got our own parking and that was a good deal.
Kellermann: It still is. It is.
Riffe: And then I don’t know what happened with Bill Pleasants. I said a minute ago that he is going to be involved. It was pretty sure that he was going to be the site manager at Green Bank.
Kellermann: After people left?
Riffe: After the move was made. And I don’t know what happened, but he left. I think he got a better offer, maybe with Tams, back with them. And so I was head of the business and non-scientific and technical stuff, so I assigned Tom Williams, who was an engineer, to be the inspector and to work with the engineers on this building. I didn’t know anything about that stuff so I left it up to Tom. And sent Sidney over every once in a while to check out if the concrete was the right spec or something like that.
Kellermann: That’s Sidney Smith.
Riffe: Yeah.
Kellermann: I just want to get it on the record.
Riffe: So that’s pretty much what happened. And it was about several years later… I don’t know, maybe not several years later, sometime later, Rabi and Heeschen, Rabi didn’t speak to Heeschen for some times.
Kellermann: That’s what Dave told us
Riffe: But I remember when the change came about, when they got back together. Some outfit was giving Jerry Tate an honorarium at the Army Navy Club in Washington. I was invited. Most of the Trustees were invited, I think, or a lot of people were invited. Heeschen. I think Eloise went with Heeschen to that. And I was staying at the Embassy Row hotel. There were about 4 blocks from the Army Navy Club. As I came out of the Army Navy Club, Rabi was standing there, waiting for a taxi or something. He always called me Ted. And someone said, “That’s pretty good. You know Rabi. Why does he call you Ted?” “He doesn’t know my last name, probably. Ted’s an easy one to remember.” And, remember Bob Server? Well, he worked with Rabi at the old Rad Lab.
Kellermann: I’ve heard the name, yes.
Riffe: He did the calculations for how big the blast was going to be on the bomb. Well, he came up. Rabi said, “Ted, you going to the Army Navy Club.” “Yeah.” “Well, get us a cab.” I said, “Well, I was going to walk.” Rabi maybe had a cane at that time, and he said, “Well, I’m obviously not going to walk.” So I get us a cab. So I got a cab, and we went down and inside, and Dave and Eloise, I think was over there. And after we walked in and I went over and said hello to Jerry and Joey, and looked around, and there was Rabi talking to Heeschen. And that seems like years after that. But after that Dave became his fair-haired boy again, particularly when the VLA panned out. I know he was quite pleased with the way things worked then. So at any rate, that was the story there. It was a little bit dicey.
Kellermann: I only met him once. I was visiting my parents in Long Island, and he was coming down here for a meeting or something. And somehow, I managed to find out and get a plane ride. I had to go out to Brookhaven.
Riffe: On the AUI plane?
Kellermann: Yeah. Where did they fly? Stoney…?
Riffe: Ashland.
Kellermann: Ashland, right. And I remember there. He was quite impressive.
Riffe: Yeah, he was an interesting character. He was – As I say, I got to know him. Just to say that we were friends is an overstatement, but I knew him and he knew me. He was recognize me in a crowd. But we were at Brookhaven, and, you know, they had Berkner Hall set up with breakfast for the Trustees and things. So one morning I came in and had my tray and was walking by. And here was Rabi and Tate and somebody else, and he said, “Ted, come on and join us.” And I interrupted his conversation. And as soon as I sat down, he continued the conversation. Talking to the other guy, he said, “Well, then I said we better go see the President.” I was sitting there and this was a big conversation. And he said, “I told Oppenheimer that we will talk to the President about this.” And I’m in some big company here; I’m in history here. So I don’t think I said another word during. Another time, almost the same situation, Rabi was really raising cane about the Defense Department, how badly they managed these toilet seats and things like that that they were buying. And he turned to me and said, “How’s the VLA coming along?” And I said, “Well, I’m doing pretty good.” And he said, “How did you manage to finance that thing?” And I said, “We went to incremental financing, which the NSF had never heard of before, but it seems to be working out for us.” And I said, “It looks like it will come in right on the money.” And he said, “I think we should turn the Defense Department’s purchasing over to the NRAO.” And he goes on. He was really upset with that. He was a character. There were a lot of characters we’ve met around here.
Kellermann: I found in his papers in the Library of Congress a note from Jackie Kennedy. He wrote to Jackie Kennedy when Kennedy died and she wrote back.
Riffe: Well, the first time I met him was in 1959 at Green Bank. We were working very hard to get the lab building set up down in the basement so that the Trustees could met. It wasn’t finished. We had to put boards down so they could walk because the tile wasn’t all down. But I wasn’t invited to the Trustees’ meeting but, I had to go to Marlinton, I suspect to the bank when the meeting was going on. Banking back then wasn’t at all like banking today. You had to go to bank and sign papers to get anything. Well, I thought I’ll have an early lunch and head to Marlinton while the Trustees were having their lunch. And, they set up in the cafeteria, you know, the tables over here and so forth. So I’m sitting there waiting for my hamburger and in walks this little elfin-like guy. He goes up and orders him something. He said, “Can I get something to eat?” They said sure and fixed him whatever it was. Anyways he looked around at all this set up and nobody around and he didn’t want to sit there. He came over. He said, “Can I sit with you?” And I said, “Certainly.” And so he sat down and didn’t say another word. And I said, “My name is Ted Riffe.” He said, “Oh yeah, they said something about you and new employees or something over there.” And I said, “Are you a Trustee?” And he said, “I’m Rabi.” I said, “Well, is the meeting over?” And he said, “No, no. I just got hungry and I decided that I would just come over and get me something to eat.” He walked out of the meeting. So I got to know him. That’s when I first met him, the first time.
Kellermann: So after the move to Charlottesville, you were Site Director in Green Bank.
Riffe: Yeah, I think it was…
Kellermann: So you didn’t get to move?
Riffe: No. I think it was ’64 or early ’65. I don’t – Heeschen had moved, of course, to Charlottesville, and he was coming back. And I knew that was going to be a drag on the people. And I was Assistant Director for Finance and Administration, call it whatever. And I guess it was ’64 or ’65, I don’t remember.
Kellermann: It was ’65. That’s when I came.
Riffe: Ok. Dave one day, he came down to my office and closed the door. And usually he didn’t like to look like anything secret was going on. And he said, “Ted Wright is coming down, flying in from Cornell tomorrow.” And I said, “Oh?” And I’m met Wright on a number of occasions, and he had been an FCC commissioner, or FAA Commissioner, sorry. And he was interested in flying. He flew his own plane, or Cornell’s plane I guess. And he was interested in the way we were building the air strip, particularly using the soil cement rather than concrete. And I thought, well, he’s coming down to check that out. And I said, “It’ll be good to see old Ted.” And he said, “Well, they are giving me hell about how we are going to manage this place up here.” And I said, “Well, a lot of people around here have been wondering that too.” I wasn’t expecting anything. And he said, “Well, I got to name somebody to be the Site Manager.” I said, “Good idea.” He said, “I’d like for you to take the job.” And I said, “Oh hell.” That really came as a surprise to me, because Bill Pleasants had been before. And I said, “Well, I don’t know. To be honest with you, Clara and I have been talking about moving on someplace else.” And he said, “Well you better go talk to Clara because I think she and Eloise had already talked about this.” Or something to that effect. I said, “I don’t know. I better talk to her.” So I said, “I don’t want to start getting knots on my head as soon as I walk in the door.” So at lunch I went home and Clara and I talked about it. And that’s when he told me that I should move over, back to Green Bank. His house, Burchill didn’t want to sell it right away because it would start looking like closing everything down. He said we can fix it up for you and do whatever. So I came back and talked to Dave and said, “Well, ok.” And that was pretty much it. Except the next day, Reynolds did fly in. And Reynolds on the way in stopped at my office and said, “Hello,” and walked on back. Whether he and Dave had had any discussion at that point, I don’t know. Anyway, a little while, fifteen-twenty minutes, Beaty [Sheets] came down and said, “Doctor Heeschen wants you. Come back to his office.” And, of course, I knew what it was. I went in and Dave said, “I’ve asked Ted to be Site Manager here.” And Reynolds said, “Good move, Dave. Good move. Now what I want you to do is to sit down and write out exactly what his job is to be.” Well, that’s been, what, about fifty years ago. To this day, Heeschen has never told me what to do or never wrote. Did he ever for you?
Kellermann: My letter of appointment just said, it was very vague. That’s right.
Riffe: He said, “You work it out.” And he hated things like that. Hein insisted one time when Dave… you know, Hein always became Acting Director when Dave was out. It wasn’t automatic; the Trustees had to… Dave had to plan it ahead of time.
Kellermann: Yeah, send them a letter.
Riffe: So Hein sat down and said, “Give me a job description. What the hell am I supposed to do?” Dave said, “If you want a job description, write your own job description.” And that was it.
Kellermann: You mean as Acting Director?
Riffe: Yeah, as anything, you know. That’s just the way Heeschen was. He didn’t want to tell you that your job is just this because he may want you do that. And if he wanted you to do that, you better be prepared to do that.
Kellermann: Well later on here in Charlottesville, I had to do that a number of times and it was Phyllis [Jackson, Heeschen’s secretary] who told me what to do.
Riffe: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Well at any rate, that’s how that came about, that I would be the Site Director or Site Manager. I did not use the term Director. I was Assistant Director and Site Manager. I was a little bit concerned and Dave and I talked about it that first day. I said, “Well, telescope operations—I don’t know anything about telescopes.” Bill Howard was, of course, doing all the scheduling, so Dave pointed out to me that you don’t need to worry about that. Fred Crews—he said whatever you do, work with Fred now, you continue, and the same thing with the electronics. So that eased my mind sort of. I didn’t have to do anything more. It worked alright for three years, I guess it was. ’68 Findlay came back from Arecibo. He went down about a year…
Bouton: A year.
Riffe: He was going to go for two years but only stayed one. And Heeschen was concerned. “Well, what are we going to do with Findlay when he comes back?” And Dave had been hinting to me that he wanted me in Charlottesville, and how he was going to handle that, I don’t know. With the 36 footer and Hein and I, he called us, and I was travelling on that until we got it straighten up. And then the VLA in ’68, remember, it was really popping at that time. We thought we had it. And so he told me that I’d be moving over. Well, when Findlay decided to come back and Dave didn’t know what to do with him, he didn’t want a Deputy Director, particularly Findlay. So he said, “Well Findlay can go to Green Bank and replace me as Site Manager.” Well, John, he didn’t mind it. John thought I was going to stay in Green Bank and that he would have his own little fiefdom up there. That’s the way he looked at it. But any way, Dave told John that I was going to move from Green Bank, and John had the audacity to call Burchill and Ted Wright and say, “Why is he moving Ted Riffe over there?” And Dave got irritated at John then. The Director has the right to put his business guy where ever he wants.
Kellermann: Well also bypassing the Director…
Riffe: That’s right. Well, they had some real arguments. John came back from a week trip from Arecibo and he and Dave stayed in Dave’s office. And it got pretty bloody in there. John wanted to be the Project Manager for the VLA, and no way Dave was going to tolerate that. And that was when that we found out that budget that (?) had put money in, $65 million I think, in for the VLA. Or they told us they were going to put it in. Later on, they withdrew it, if you recall. So then I moved over to Charlottesville.
Kellermann: We’ll have to come back to the VLA because that’s a whole story in itself. So it was three years?
Riffe: Yeah, you don’t realize that. I travelled an awful lot then. I recall when Hein called me and said that Dave wants to have a meeting with us, and I was in Green Bank. He said, “Come over tomorrow.” So then John had just announced that he was going to Arecibo, so that was ’65…?
Kellermann: Yeah, he was already there when I came.
Riffe: ’66?
Kellermann: ’65, yes.
Riffe: And Hein and I were in Dave’s office, and he said, “What’s going on with the 36 footer?” He had no idea, and I said, “I don’t know. I thought there was a contract, but there wasn’t. Callendar and Findlay had worked together on that earlier on.
Kellermann: There was a contract with Rohr.
Riffe: With Rohr, yeah. And they were working on a letter of intent, and they were actually machining on the dish out there. And Frank Callendar, he left right before that. Calendar went to the University of Hawaii. So he told Hein, “Alright Hein, you’re the Project Manager of this.” And he said, “Ted, you do whatever you can to help him with this. We’ve got to get this thing straighten out, find out what the hell is going on.” And so Hein and I, we went to Chula Vista, and there was nobody working there. Well, they were machining on the dish and they were having some problems when the machine would gouge in at certain times of the day and so forth. And they didn’t know what the hell was going on. And nobody else was working on it, because Rohr was having all that trouble with BART, that Bay Area Rapid Transit, that they were building, so they just pulled everybody off. Bob Hall and everybody else had gone on that. But we were trying to figure out why that gouging was going on. I think some janitor came in and said, “The tides.” Have you heard that story?
Kellermann: Yes.
Riffe: And the tides would come in and such great pressure on the land that it would raise that dish just half a millimeter or something like that, and that thing would gouge right in. And as soon as the tide goes out, back to smooth as everything. So they adjusted to that. So then I thought things were going well. I got the contract straightened out and had them sign the contract. And about several months later, Hein called me. He said, “There’s no progress on the work. We’ve got to go out there and meet with Rohr. We’ll meet on the mountain at Kitt Peak.” So Hein left from here; he went out maybe a day or two before I did. And I came along. And Hall and company was going to be up there. Driving out, the dish was sitting down on the Indian reservation there with Pinkerton agents guarding it.
Kellermann: I remember that. I saw that.
Riffe: And this is odd. Why don’t they take it up on the mountain, you know, and they wouldn’t have to have these Pinkerton agents. (?) Indians have a habit, like in West Virginia, where they see a sign, they shoot at it.
Kellermann: Like a target.
Riffe: So they were guarding it, and it was pretty well protected, I’ll say that for them. But anyway, we met up on the mountain. And there had only been one guy working up there, Junior Madden. Remember him? And still that Bay Area Rapid Transport was giving them fits I guess, or maybe they had gotten another big job, I don’t know. Finally, Hein and Hall, they just came to an impasse, and I said, “Well, Bob, there is one of two things that you can do. One, we can declare you guys in default because you aren’t progressing on the job like you should.” I said, “Then you are going to have a hard time getting another government contract.” Well, we didn’t have that much power, but I might as well go on and flex whatever muscle I had. “Or we can take over the management of the job. You furnish all the labor, but we direct it here on the mountain. Bob says, “I don’t know.” And I said, “Well you better know because those are your alternates.” So he said, “I got to make a phone call.” So he went in and called Burt (Rains?), who was President of Rohr, and a few minutes he came back out and said, “Alright, what the hell do you want?” (Rains?) saw that that wouldn’t be good publicity for them I guess. And so Hein put John Hungerbuhler in charge of the project. I don’t know whether John was the best man for the job or not, but we sent Tony Hamed out, and he worked on the dome, the rollers. They were always a horrible problem for us. And Sidney, he took care of all the civil engineering stuff.
I got involved only tangentially, where I got to know Nick Mayall very nicely. We had to bring power in, going around the north side of the mountain and then go over the crest to come down where the telescope was. But you can’t have open wires coming over the mountain, which makes sense, and so you have to dig a ditch and put conduit in. So I had made the agreement with the power company about how they were going to put the poles in around the side; a helicopter drops the poles in, and then dig a ditch, and then, I think we had three conduits that we wanted in. Well, I was talking with Jim Miller, who was my counterpart at AURA, or at Kitt Peak, and Nick Mayall. And they wanted to meet. And Nick Mayall said, “Can we put additional conduit in? We may want to develop down the mountain in the future and we don’t want to have to dig up again.” And I said, “No problem. How many do you want?” “Well, two. But we’ll have to go to the foundation to get permission.” I said, “What do you want to do that for?” Because we didn’t have to get permission from the foundation to write a contract, if we had the money and it was a project. He said, “Well, we want two conduits.” And I said, “That PVC isn’t very expensive. How much is it?” Miller said it’d be about $2,000, or something like that. I said, “Well the ditch is already open.” So I picked up the phone and called Bill Bolling or Erin Rosenthal and told them, because we did say that we would always inform the foundation. And I stuck to that very closely. I didn’t want to get them caught up in something. So I said, “We want to put some extra conduit in Kitt Peak.” And told them the story of what was going on. Rosenthal or Bolling, whichever it was, said, “I think that’s an excellent idea. Keep us informed.” I said, “I’ll call the guy and get the extra conduit put in.” Mayall, he was impressed. He said, “We can never do something like that.” The NSF would not let them. They had a big difference in contract than what we had.
Kellermann: Do you know why?
Riffe: They had some real troubles early on. That’s when they brought Miller in from the University of California. There were a couple of guys about to go to jail out there.
Kellermann: Over what?
Riffe: Well, if you came in as a scientist and he liked your looks, he’d give you fringe benefits other than the salary. They couldn’t account for the money that came in up in the mountain and in the cafeteria, things like that. It got real nasty. I can’t remember the guy’s name. They fired about three people there, and brought Miller.
Kellermann: Miller?
Riffe: Jim Miller. You didn’t know him?
Kellermann: He was your counterpart?
Riffe: Yeah.
Kellermann: I think I did.
Riffe: And even after he left, he and Leo Goldberg, things got a little tense between them. And I know I was out there in, Miller and I come from lunch or going to lunch… I don’t know, we were walking down the hallway and Beaty Lynds, she became Beaty Goldberg later on, she saw me from way down the hall and she came running down the hall, and said, “Oh, I haven’t seen you in years.” Miller just turned around and walked off. So Beaty and I had small talk about the old days in Green Bank. I went in and said, “Jim, Beaty is a friend of mine.” He said, “That bitch.” And I said, “What’s wrong?” He was getting ready to sue AURA, and AURA was getting ready to sue him. His resignation was in and so forth. It was a mess out there.
Kellermann: You went out there as a consultant or something once?
Riffe: Early on, yeah. Well, Geoff Burbidge said that if you want to leave Green Bank, that he would offer me a job. (Walt Roberts?) offered me a job up at UCAR when he was president up there. He didn’t offer; I take that back. He said, “If you ever want to leave Green Bank, get in touch with me.” They asked me to come out early on to look at some of the things that they were setting up. Mort and I, we’d go out and Burbidge wouldn’t say anything. Mort was Director at that time. And later on Burbidge and I got together,r and he said that he would like to see Kitt Peak run the way that the NRAO was run.
Kellermann: He tried.
Riffe: I said, “You aren’t going to have it as long as you’ve got nothing but a bunch of astronomers on your board.” I said, “It’s going to be difficult.” And that was really their problem.
Kellermann: So the 36 foot was funded entirely with internal funds?
Riffe: No.
Kellermann: No. You did have to propose to the NSF?
Riffe: Yeah. Sort of the story was Frank Lowe, you remember he was Green Bank and we had that old (Nike Mountain E?) and he went back to Arizona. And that sort of started all that going. And initially we did have enough money out of our OOE budget. That’s the way we started the 300 footer too. And Dave wrote to the NSF and said, “We’d like to build this telescope on Kitt Peak.” And the NSF wrote back and said, “Fine. Now get together with Kitt Peak or AURA and see what you can do.” So Mayall and Kitt Peak people were very happy to have us. But Dave told Findlay and me to go to the University of Chicago where the AURA board was meeting and explain to them what it was all about. Findlay could explain the technical stuff: the telescope, the structural stuff, and so forth. Any business arrangements I would be there for. So we met at 9 o’clock, I guess it was 8 or 9 o’clock, at the University of Chicago where the AURA board was meeting. And Mayall and Miller said, “We’re going into Executive Session so you guys have a cup of coffee or a doughnut or something and we’ll come out and call you when we need your information.” Fifteen minutes they came out with smiles all over their faces. “We don’t need you guys. They voted unanimously. Get these guys out here. That’s exciting science.” Or something like that.
So we came back and I started looking for some money, seed money I guess you would call it, to get the antennas. Findlay had already talked to Rohr and Bob Hall and company to get the dish going. And so we did put the seed money in, yeah. But there’s a letter, it’s certainly in my files and I think it’s in the Director’s files, that Callendar wrote for Struve to the NSF. We wanted to cover all bases and get some blanket permissions, I think. “Could we use our OOE (Other Observing Equipment) electronic money to build small radio telescope?” The reason for that was I think there was a 35 footer Heeschen wanted built, 35 or 40 footer or something, down on the site.
Kellermann: Right. Sure.
Riffe: You know the telescope?
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: And Dave was doing some stuff and he wanted to do that. And I didn’t want to have to put a line item in for that. I said, “Hell, let’s just do it.” So Frank wrote the letter and I guess it was John Wilson, who was a Deputy Director at the NSF, wrote back to Struve saying just let us know when you are going to do that. I kept that letter because when we started the 300 foot telescope we didn’t have any money. So I quoted that letter, and they said, “That’s the biggest telescope in the world. How do you justify that under this?” Because the first $300,000, I think, for the 300 foot telescope, we got it out of our OOE budget. The Foundation came up with the rest, which was only another $300,000 or something. It was about $600,000, the total price of that thing initially. So we had that kind of relationship going with the Foundation. They trusted us. We had two GAO audits as a pro forma thing early on, very early on. This was ’60 or ’61 that they were there for that. The 140 footer was a mess. Arecibo was a mess financially. And the Navy thing over at Sugar Grove. Sky and Telescope magazine had a picture on the front of those three telescopes half completed on it with “Radio Astronomy in Trouble” or something like that.
So we got ours straightened out, or I guess because we did get it straightened out, people looked on us as, “Ok, these guys know how to run an Observatory.” And it was Heeschen’s personality this Observatory was. He wanted to be a visitor-oriented organization. And he wanted a small scientific staff of very good guys. You were one of those guys that he always talked about being the fair-haired boy or something. But he wanted it to be a pleasant place to do science. Now, he could get pretty testy with his staff sometimes but overall things worked out pretty well. He wanted two or three top guys. He got [Sebastian] von Hoerner. Von Hoerner never observed, I think. Did he?
Kellermann: Yeah, he did occultations. He was the first observer on the 140 foot actually.
Riffe: That’s right.
Kellermann: Before it was even finished, or before it was handed over.
Riffe: That’s right. I forgot about that. So he wanted it just to be a pleasant place to work and to do science. And that’s why when we had the union thing up thing, Dave Hogg was site manager at the time, and Heeschen told me, “You’ve worked around this kind of stuff before.” And he said, “I don’t think we want a union in here. I think it could become unpleasant.” Because Arecibo had gone through a lot of this stuff. And I called Frank Drake and got a lot of information they had about fighting the unions down there. And we weren’t anti-union. Hell, I came from the coal fields of West Virginia, and I know in the ‘30s that if there was anybody that needed a union, it was the coal miners. But our engineers and technicians at Green Bank didn’t need a union to protect them. Philosophically the approach was just to have a good, pleasant place. He didn’t want it to become big. He didn’t want the Observatory to become real big. I think if Heeschen had still been still the Director when the 300 foot collapsed, Green Bank may have closed after he saw there was nothing going with the 140 foot telescope. He didn’t want to spend extra money. He wanted to be sort of a unit of something else. Just do science, that’s all. He didn’t want us to have tourists.
Kellermann: I know.
Riffe: He hated tourists. They just get in his way. Those damn cars, you know, they interfere with the telescopes.
Kellermann: The culture changed with the VLA though.
Riffe: Yeah, it did.
Kellermann: It couldn’t help but be big. That crossed the threshold.
Riffe: And he didn’t like floss. He was ashamed when a scientist from a university would come and would go into his office up here. That big desk and all that. And he would often meet with people in other places. He didn’t like that. He was always self-conscious, I guess that’s what it was. He wanted to prove to people that any money we had went into the science. And the OOE budget, which early on we set that account up, any money at the end of the year went into that account. And that’s how we could build the 300 footer, the 36 footer because once you got down the pike and told the NSF that, yeah, we could do this much of it, then they could do it by fiat almost. They didn’t have to go for a line item to Congress for it because, hell, these guys had already got it set up. And that was just the way he wanted to approach the thing. He didn’t want flossy carpeting and stuff like that. I remember he refused to let anybody get business cards. That had come up, because I asked him one time.
Kellermann: That’s why I never had one. I didn’t realize that.
Riffe: But the first time, the first business card, Sandy and Hein came up to my office one day and said, “We’re going to do away with the cabling on the VLA. We’re going to go waveguide.” I said, “Woopty-do, why are you talking to me? Is it going to cost more money?” “No, it’s going to save money,” which it did. It was much cheaper. I said, “That’s good. Let me get my pencil out here,” And they said, “Well, we’ve got a little bit of a problem. The only place they build this stuff is in Japan.” And I said, “Well if that’s the only place in the world that you can get it, the Commerce Department and NSF, usually they agree to let us go outside the Buy American to get that stuff.” I said, “It may take some time.” And they said, “That’s just it. We got to have a contract written in about four or five weeks.” I said, “Well, that is fast. I don’t know how we can do that.” I said, “How come?” He said, “Well in Japan this is the last run. They are never going make it again.” I said, “Well why in the hell are we buying something that’s becoming obsolete the minute you order it.” They said, “Well there is no alternative.” I said, “There’s bound to be an alternative.” “Well eventually it’s going to be fiber optics.” And I said, “Why don’t we go fiber optics right now.” They said there’s only a 30 mile test run up in upstate New York at that time and they don’t know how to get around curves and all this stuff. I said, “30 days. I know just the guy, Jay Marymor.” I’ll put Jay on it.
Kellermann: He was already at NRAO?
Riffe: Oh yeah. And I said, “You need an engineer with him. What we’ll do, we’ll go to the NSF and the Commerce Department to see if we can walk this stuff through,” which Jay did. He got that done in about a week and a half. He knew those guys up there. So Jay came up to me and said, “You know in Japan in business the first thing you do is you start swapping cards.” And I said, “Oh, hell.” I said, “I’m going to make a real decision here. I may catch hell for it later on but alright, go ahead and get you some cards.” And he and Pasternak, was that the engineering that went? No, it wasn’t Pasternak. Anyway, Sandy assigned somebody to and they went over and got everything going, brought it into San Francisco inspected. And saved us several million dollars as I recall. So that was one of our better moves. I’m going to have to be going here before too long.
Kellermann: Can we just go back for a second to the 36 foot? Why was it sitting down at the bottom of the mountain? Why didn’t they bring it up to the top where it would have been on NSF government property?
Riffe: Well, there are two stories I got. One the winds up there and they said that it might – No, they had to sit it on its edge when they moved it. And I said, “That’s silly, you can shield it someway.” And the other one was that they had, where you entered to go up the mountain there, of of Route 84 or whatever that it, you had to go under something there…
Kellermann: They would have to do it sooner or later.
Riffe: Sooner or later you are going to have to do it. They are paying these two Pinkerton guys 24 hours a day down there. I asked that same question but nobody had a satisfactory answer. But there wasn’t any space around where the construction was going on up there, and they didn’t want a rock to fly up and hit the surface. But it was covered pretty well as I recall. I’ve been rambling and that’s probably not the best way.
Kellermann: No, no, I remember seeing it at the bottom of the mountain. Soon after I came there was one of these joint NRAO – Kitt Peak exchanges meetings and so we went up the mountain. I remember seeing it. That would have been sometime late ’65 or ’66.
Riffe: Yeah. Well, they came to Green Bank once too, and I remember Mayall—this is a really sad story, one we can wind up on here. That’s where I got to know Nick Mayall. I took him around the site. And we went downstairs and we had our little photography shop down in the basement. Remember?
Kellermann: Sure.
Riffe: So I introduced him to Brown Cassell. Well Mayall thought that’s an interesting name. So we went upstairs to our purchasing department. I introduced him to French Beverage. Well, he was about to break up about that. So we go down to the warehouse. Guess who the first guy I introduced him to? Jack Daniels. [laughter] He was roaring when he told this story to all his people when we went out to lunch. “Guess who I met today? Brown Castle, French Beverage, and Jack Daniels.”
Kellermann: Ok, well thanks Ted. There’s so more we should talk about –
End of Part 2, interview with Riffe
=======================
Begin Part 3, interview with Riffe, continuation on 17 July 2013
Riffe: I wanted to finish a story about Vernice Anderson yesterday. I started, and I got to the point where either MacArthur kept his plane waiting so that Truman would have to greet him, or MacArthur landed first and made Truman wait on the plane until he got out. Well, anyway, the first story where MacArthur's plane circled until he got-- Truman was so incensed that he had them put a curtain up over the end of the conference room where he and MacArthur was to meet. And Vernice Anderson, who was Paul Jessup's administrative aide, was invited to go on the trip because he was the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs or something like that. Anyway, she, supposedly, was found there, took everything down in shorthand, it was said. She says, "No, what happened was that the conference"-- right before the conference started, she went-- there was a little canteen about like the one we have out here, and she went in to get her a cup of coffee. She just happened to have her stenographic notebook with her, and the door was ajar, and they started talking. She said, "Well, I had nothing else to do, so I just sat down and took everything down in shorthand." Well, after the conference was over, General Whitney, who was MacArthur's Chief of Staff, came in, and there he saw her there. What the hell is going on? According to Whitney, he goes back and tells MacArthur, said, "You know, they got this lady in here, " and what MacArthur said was, "Well, why didn't they tell us and she could've come in and sat at the table with us?" Well, I don't know which story is true, anyway, but Vernice Anderson got the Legion of Merit and you don't do that, for being a secretary to somebody in Washington, so. I just wanted to finish that story.
Kellermann: We've had trouble in previous interviews with proper names and spelling. Can you spell those?
Riffe: Vernice. V-E-R-N-I-C-E. Like Ber, okay?
Kellermann: And Anderson.
Riffe: Anderson. S-O-N.
Kellermann: Yeah. And then there was another person that was mentioned.
Riffe: Paul Jessup?
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: Yeah. Jessup was-- I think his name was Paul. I know it was Jessup. He was--
Kellermann: Jessup, J-E--
Riffe: J-E-S-S-U-P. Probably if you read some U.S. History you'll find his name in there. But anyway, that finishes that story yesterday. I don't know where we were.
Kellermann: Okay, well--
Bouton: You started to say something at the beginning about the West Virginia--
Kellermann: Right. You mentioned at lunch, once, about the- West Virginia's senatorbeing involved --
Riffe: Oh.
Kellermann: --being involved in the--
Riffe: Oh.
Kellermann: --development of the [crosstalk]--
Riffe: Yeah. Harley Kilgore was the senator from West Virginia. He was from Beckley. He was a lawyer, but he was also a schoolteacher and a principal of some school down around Beckley. He was very interested in education, anyway. And he was elected to the Senate, I believe, in 1940. He was a Roosevelt third-term set up. And he thought the government should fund science more. It was very disorganized before World War II. And so he made this proposal to establish a national science foundation, or whatever name it was then I have no idea. Vannevar Bush was working independently coming up with the national science foundation or something to that effect. And those were two competing proposals. Then, of course, World War II came along, and of course, Manhattan Project and all that, which caused things to become a bit more cohesive. But Bush and Kilgore's proposals were almost identical, except for one thing. Bush felt that the individual researcher at the university, or wherever, should retain patent rights to himself. Kilgore felt no, that it should be the government or the institution, such as the NRAO, if the government funded it, should have those rights. And by you asking me to sign that, that's what prompted that.
Bouton: Oh, all right. That's what prompted that. Yes, because--
Riffe: And so Bush's proposal finally won out. But Kilgore had the right to tweak it, and so the NSF came into being from that. I have no great knowledge otherwise than-- I do know that the early days it was proposed in that way. There were two--
Kellermann: That was before the Second World War.
Riffe: 1942. The war had just started. But that's when Kilgore put his proposal in. Busch is working on his at the same time.
Kellermann: Right. And so was Kilgore still in the Senate--
Riffe: Oh, yeah.
Kellermann: when the bill-- when he intercepted that to be established.
Riffe: Yeah. Yeah, he was committee chairman that rode it through.
Kellermann: Which committee?
Riffe: Probably committee on science and education or something like that, I guess.
Kellermann: Okay. I guess we can look up [inaudible].
Riffe: Yeah, you can probably google him and Kilgore and get all that stuff on him, I suspect. I wasn't an old man back then. I think I was 14 years old in 1940. 15 years old. 42, I guess. So if my memory doesn't always come up just right, you'll understand why now.
Kellermann: All right. Let's talk about the VLA.
Riffe: Okay. The VLA. Well, we've got 36 voter built, and –
Kellermann: Well, we'll go back to that.
Riffe: And well, the VLA was-- '68 was sort of the date which is common to most people. We'd been working on it, obviously, before that. You were probably involved in some.
Kellermann: Yeah. I don't remember either.
Riffe: See.
Kellermann: There were a number of-- you mentioned yesterday that it was in the budget, that it wasn't in the budget, so I'm confused.
Riffe: Okay. Well, I think it was the '68 budget. We were informed by the NSF that the Budget Bureau was aligned then to put it into the President's budget. And I think then it was $65 million. It could have been 466. Something. $65 sort of rings a bell, I think. That was to be the total project. If they gave us $65 million in one fell swoop, okay, we would build a 28-elemen,t or 27 plus a spare, array of about 40 miles of railroad track and the buildings and so forth.
Kellermann: And the original proposal though was for 36 antennas
Riffe: That's right. Well not in that-- that would cut it back at that point.
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: Okay. Yeah, but the very original one. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Kellermann: But cut it back under pressure from the NSF.
Riffe: That's right.
Kellermann: Or –
Riffe: No, I'm not sure --
Kellermann: OMB?
Riffe: No, I'm not sure where that came from. But 27 seemed to be one that we could handle whatever we were proposing-- was doing. But whoever said-- cut it back. Probably was just to-and-froing. It got cut back. But I don't remember. I do remember that 36 got to 27 plus a spare. Well at any rate-- well, everybody was elated, you know, and we were ready to go. Heeschen wanted me to move to Charlottesville at that time. Keith Glennon was [AUI] President, and he started pushing me. He said, "Well look, you're being overworked. You're spread too thin. I didn't want to say overworked. Nobody here is overworked." But he said, "What kind of people?" I said, "Well, I need some contract help at this place." I wasn't that adept at the job. And so Glennon, he called me a few days later, after he'd gone back to Washington. He moved the offices from New York to Washington, if you recall. Okay? Because he lived in Reston. I guess that was what it was. So he gave me Jay Marymor's name. Jay had worked at NASA, and he was president of the Government Contractors Association. He had a pretty good resumé. And I invited Jay over, and I already--
Kellermann: Where was he working before that?
Riffe: I'm not sure. I think it was the Defense-- someplace in the Defense. But at any rate, he-- any rate, I hired him. And Jay was a big help to us. I mean, he drove some people up the wall, with the nit-picking, as they call it. Sandy and he, I thought they were going to fist fight sometimes. But I had to jump in and resolve those problems. Y'all wouldn't probably remember-- I just remember the one about the purchase orders. Jay had to requisition-- typed up the requisition. Sent it down to Jay. Jay approved the requisition for a book, whatever the book was. He had no idea what that book was. Then they typed a purchase order. Distributed copies all around to receiving and so forth.
Bouton: Like nine copies. Carbon copies.
Riffe: And I think Ellen or Sarah Martin or somebody is just really complaining to me about this. I said, "Oh, well gee, what?" "You don't bid these things out and there's nothing to--" and Jay didn't do anything except put his name on the requisition, I guess. So I said, "Well, why don't we just have them type the purchase order up there." Jay found 10,000 reasons why they shouldn't do that. But that's the way we wound up doing it.
Bouton: Yep. That's what we did. Well, typing those was terrible-- if you made a mistake, you had to go through and correct all nine copies.
Riffe: Well at any rate, Jay-- I hired him. And that's after I got over here. And so we were jumping along, trying to get organized-- how we were going to build this thing. And then suddenly they called us and said, "No. It's out of the budget. We can't get to it."
Kellermann: "They" being?
Riffe: The NSF. And so that would have been '69, I guess, by that time. So we were pretty despondent around here. Especially Heeschen because he had really put his blood into that and, Hein, he just went back to the lab. And of course, I was going. To continue. But I had to let Jay go. And there was no point I didn't have any big jobs going, you know? So Jay left and went to San Francisco. Then about a year later, they came back. Fellow the name of Tom Owen. You remember him? He was the Assistant Director for Math and Physics or whatever the department astronomy came under. He called Heeschen and said," Look, I think we've got us going, but we can't get the entire $65 million. Now we can maybe incrementally fund this thing but we need to know what the price is going to be if you find it, say, over a seven years thing. "Well, now, Hein had become our absolute expert in PERT. This is the project evaluation and review technique I think is what it is. I may be wrong on that.
But so Heeschen, called Hein and me says," All right, you guys get to work and see what you come up with and here's the way you do it. One antenna for us to sort of look to see what we've got." Then whatever incremental number 3, 4, 5 and on up to 28 and the buildings going in and purchasing materials up front, because the biggest cost to be up front. So we went to work on it and Hein was very good at that. But what kind of escalation feature do you want to put in? Well, 6% sounded pretty good. And so if you do that just across the board, 1.06 times 1.06 times 1.06 times 1.06, all out through six years, I guess it was or five years. I mean that cost was astronomical. So we go back and we start paring back. Well, if you do three this year, you do three this year, maybe four next year. How about the railroad? I'd done the Cass railroad thing and priced ties, railroad ties in place in 1960, I think it was $4 apiece, which is about $10,000 per mile and 2600 the mile. So that was about $10,000 per mile we call. And by 1970 or whenever it was, we were working on this '71? they were something like $11 each in place.
And wow, you could see where the price was going on that. So we decided to call around and got some rough prices for, used ties and used rails and so forth, and the government owned a lot of these things and all we had to do was go in and pay to get them pulled up and bring them back. So we got some pretty good prices. Electronics, that always goes down. And Heeschen’s theory always was I’m building a radio telescope. You put in the current state of the art for the electronics, knowing that if you're going to take seven or eight years to build something, good, you're going to have a much better antenna at the end. So you put your money into the basic structure. You have the best antenna. Once it's built, it's built, that's it. But the electronics constantly are going to be upgraded. So Sandy didn't particularly care for more money in mind, but, "Well, Sandy, you can't do it." But Sandy was very good at what he did, business-wise as well as his profession.
Kellermann: Well, I was opposed to that philosophy too, because it delayed maybe something working.
Riffe: Yeah. Yeah, of course. But it was something we almost had to do.
Kellermann: Yes. Of course.
Riffe: So we came up with a figure, and I think it came out around $75 million when we got all done. And so Tom Owen called Heeschen and said, "OK, this is what we're going for." It was the first year, we get $3 million. The next year we get maybe $10 million. The next year $4 million. And then $7 million. And whatever based on our estimates. Well, Heeschen, and after Owen sold that incremental way of doing things to the budget bureau, they said, "Yeah. We'll go with that." Well, the Foundation had never encountered that before because here Hein and I were constantly dealing with the NSF on how do you going to do this? And we said, "Well, it's pretty obvious here what to do." So the Foundation was demanding this kind of assurances from us and so forth. Hell, we would swear to anything at that moment. So after it was nailed down, we were all sitting around wondering, well is it really going to fly? Owen called Heeschen and said, "We got it." Well, Dave is really happy. And we all were. And we didn't know how we were going to do it. We knew we were going to get $3 million up front. That was to finish the design, get the contracts going, and so forth. So--
Kellermann: Also build the first antenna, wasn't it? With that $3 million?
Riffe: I think it probably was.
Kellermann: The design.
Riffe: Yeah.
Kellermann: 18:01 We own the design.
Riffe: Yeah, well. The first antenna wasn't in that $3 million. Well, I don't remember. I'd have to go back and really dig into that. Well at any rate, Dave called Hein and me in, and this is where some of the good stories came about. Dave says, "Okay. I've done all the hard work. We've got this thing. I'm going to go sailing." And he said, "Hein, you're in charge. The project is yours. You're the Project Manager." So Hein did something that I'd learned a long time before with Heeschen that you don't do. Hein says, "Okay." And Hein's taking notes like mad here. He said, "We've got to have an organization chart." Now this to Heeschen was like throwing mud in his face, man. Heeschen just ignored him. And he went on talking, says, "All right, Hein you get this. Ted, you find out what the NSF's thinking is about the finance and how you're going to report this to them and so forth." And after a few minutes, Hein said, "Well, you know, we've got to have an organization chart." Well Dave looked at him sort of disgusted-like, walks up to the chalkboard, draws a circle, and directly under it another circle, a line from the top circle to the lower circle. In the top circle he wrote, "Me." And in the one below he wrote, "Them." He said, "There's your organization chart." And he stuck to that pretty much. Well, he looked at me--
Kellermann: That was the same time he said he was leaving for six months.
Riffe: Yeah. And he looked at me and said, "You can fill in the details, whatever they're worth." Something like that. So I knew exactly what he was going to do because he never approved of organization charts in NRAO, but we had to have one every year for the Foundation and for the AUI. So I cobbled something together working with Bill Howard and everybody like that. At any rate, so Hein, he copied this down, and long after Heeschen had retired, Hein still had that in his notes, this one page of the organizational chart for the VLA. Well anyway, Dave took off. Well the Foundation called and said, well, they wouldn't release that $3 million until they had the management plan for the VLA. Well, I'd been working on the management plan.
Kellermann: The management plan for the construction?
Riffe: For the construction of the VLA. Yeah. I'd been working online, and Heeschen still didn't like those kind of things, but when you're dealing with the devil, you've got to stoke the furnace for him every now and then. So here Heeschen was out in the Bahamas or someplace. I don't know where he's sailing in the Caribbean. I worked up a plan and Hein and I made an appointment with Dan Hunt. You remember Dan? He was head of the astronomy section, department at the NSF at that time. Well, we started up to the-- Oh, before that Dan Hunt decided he was going to deal with the corporation, not within NRAO directly. That was the thing. Heeschen wouldn't talk to anybody except the top people at the NSF. He refused to do that. I mean, if the contracts guy wanted to talk to the-- if he called Heeschen, he'd tell Phyllis, "Riffe is going to take that call." And so Dan Hunt started calling Jerry Tape who was the president at that time. And he told Jerry, he said, "We're not going to release this $3 million until you get the management plan in." Well, Jerry called me. He heard Dave was out. So I said, "Well, Jerry, I've got a rough draft of one. Phyllis and Sandra--"
Bouton: Sandra Mason.
Riffe: Mason. They had been working late every evening trying to get this thing put together for him because the pressure was on. Just Hein was, "Where's my $3 million?" He wanted to get started on something. So Tape says, "Look." He was with the International Atomic Energy Agency, an Ambassador or something wasn't it? He said, "Can you come into my house on this coming Saturday?" And he says, "Let me go over this with you. And we'll get it to the NSF." Or "You guys can get it to the NSF." Okay, so on Saturday morning, I got up bright and early and drove up, and Jerry lived up there. We spent the whole day until about 9:00 that evening. He was critiquing it, and he'd make a change, this here and so forth. And it was maybe this thick. There's a copy someplace around here. Jack Lancaster used it as his Bible as he called it. Blame it on me if something's wrong. But instead of me putting copies of everything in there, I just referred to Federal Procurement Regulation number so-and-so applies here instead of putting the whole regulation in itself. Well, Jerry thought that was a-- "Hey, that's a good idea, you know.
Riffe: And so we got through and he signed off on it, and I came back and finished it up. So the next week, Hein and I, we were had an appointment with Dan Hunt. We would take the thing up, well, it was raining to beat everything that day. We left and we got out to about Culpepper, and the rain was pouring out. It was a cyclone or a hurricane was coming through. The rain was really pouring down. And I checked, I said, "Hey, why don't we turn the radio and see what's going on in Washington?" Okay. We had the old blue Oldsmobile. Turned, it on. The guy says they're letting every employee go in Washington. The essential employees. Nobody wanted to leave.
Kellermann: When would this have been?
Riffe: Oh, I don't remember the exact date.
Kellermann: No, but the year.
Riffe: I mean, I don't even remember the year. It would've been '72, I guess.
Bouton: Agnes, I'll bet.
Riffe: I think you're right.
Bouton: Hurricane Agnes. Yeah.
Riffe: Yeah. Well, anyway, we were in Culpepper and there was a state police headquarters up there. So Hein says, well, why don't we-- after we'd listened to the radio and I said, "Don't go in." He said, "Why don't we stop and ask the state police what's going on there?" We did, and we walked in. The trooper said, “No, guys,” he said, "Don't even try to get into Washington." He said they're stopping people at the bridge and telling them to get out. Said the water's rising up there on the Potomac, stuff that, okay, we got [inaudible]. And Hein says, "Does the Acting Director have the authority to hire and fire?" And I said, "Why? I guess depends on the situation." I said, I wouldn't say yes or no to that. And he said, "Well, if he has a right to hire and fire, I should fire you for not turning that radio before we got up." We drove all the way to up there. So anyway, we turn around and come back, and next week Hein was tied up, and I made another appointment with Dan Hunt, but Jerry Tape decided to join me. So Tape and I took the management plan up. Well, Jerry, he was selling the idea. We got to have that $3 million. So we we're going, we're starting, we're heading down the road now.
Well, Dan says, "Look at that." He says, [inaudible]." So Dan excused himself, went out, came back, and he came back with stack of books about this high of something like you'd have over here. He said, "This is the kind of thing we need for it." Jerry said, "Well, what is it?" He said this is the Mohole Project, Brown and Root. And Jerry said, "Well, the damn thing didn't go." He said, "Well, what do you want these guys to do?" He said, "Do you want a whole bunch of paper or do you want them to build your radio telescope?" Oh, Jerry got really angry at that. And so after we sat and Jerry calmed down a little bit and to and fro, and he said, "Okay, I'm releasing the $3 million to you. We'll accept this, but subject to our further review," or something like that. I never heard anything more about that. Okay. So we got the $3 million bucks and by the time we got something going, Heeschen was back about that time. Oh, I think the one other little anecdote that came up in that, they had a – money was very tight. So Dave, before he left, he said, "All right. You guys do the salary review" for whatever time frame it was we were talking about. He said, "Except, we're going to give everybody a raise at the place that's deserving, except you two guys." He said, "You're the highest paid. What do you want to make?" And he was sure he wasn't getting a raise. Why should he, if he doesn't give us-- the two of us? Now this is something that really was internal. Nobody knew about this then.
So a couple weeks later after we'd gotten the VLA—Heeschen poured his blood into-- Jerry Tape called me and says, "What's Heschen’s salary right now?" And I told him. He said, "Does he get any other emoluments, or?" He said, "Does he have a car?" Remember Leo Goldberg got into trouble over that at Kitt Peak. I said, "No. He doesn't get a car." "What's his retirement?" and so forth. I said, "Same as anybody." Jerry said, "Well, that's what I thought," he said. And then he called Hein and told Hein that he was giving Heeschen a raise. Well Hein, oh he was gleeful out there. He got on his ham radio, notified Heeschen. And Dave came back for a few days. He was down on the Outer Banks or someplace. He came in. He called Hein to me. And he said, "I've got to do something I really didn't want to do." I said, "What's that?" "I've got to give you guys a raise," he said. "Because I'm getting a raise." He said, "It would be a shame that if everybody at the observatory except the two Associate Directors didn't get a raise." So, well he gave us a raise. That's totally an aside. Well so things were getting-- I was getting spread awfully thin and that's when hired Monroe-- got Monroe from Brookhaven.
Bouton: Now when did Jay Marymor come back? He must--
Riffe: Oh okay. Well I went--
Bouton: --have came back at some point.
Riffe: --yeah. Soon as I heard we were sure of getting it. Jay was in San Francisco. I went out and found him. He was working for somebody down around San Jose, I think. I went out and took him and Trudy to dinner and-- to ask him if he would come back. And Jay was happy to come back. He liked this place. So I got him back. Talked to one other guy from Brookhaven in the personnel area, because that was really getting to be a burden for me. Mary Anne [Star] was handling everything over here and a guy named Jerry Shears at Green Bank, he was a loser.
Kellermann: Well, he had no background in--
Riffe: That's right, but he didn't show any real enthusiasm for the job. And so they were constantly calling me. Mary Anne had to come up-- and bugging me all the time. So I said, "Well, I'll get somebody that knows something about this stuff." And so after one guy I talked with at Brookhaven, he wasn't-- he didn't want to leave. He said his wife wouldn't like it down here. And so I invited-- or Vincent O'Leary said, "Well, I got this guy from Arkansas, Monroe Petty" So I invited him and Jerry down. And Clara and I took them to lunch over at the Boars Head or someplace. I think I was a member over there then. And Monroe took the job. He did a good job for us too. And I was really relieved of a lot there, I just--
Bouton: For Jay and Monroe.
Riffe: Yeah. So Hein and I-- Hein as I say, he was the PERT expert and we got that, but we didn't have computers like you got today either. And he had to go downstairs and jazz up and get online with all this big stuff. After Dave got back, he-- Findley came. Oh, Finley came over and he talked with Dave. Finley really wanted to be the Project Manager.
Kellermann: He came over from--?
Riffe: Green Bank. I guess, he was still at Green Bank then. No, he couldn't have been then. Well, he's probably back here, but he-- okay, I don't know where he was sitting because I had taken that--
Kellermann: He was sitting in my office.
Bouton: Yeah.
Riffe: Okay, because I was in that corner office out there then.
Kellermann: Yeah, I was just getting in because--
Riffe: Okay.
Kellermann: I came over just when he retired, so I was lucky I got that nice office with all the book shelves
Riffe: Okay. Well, at any rate-- but Heeschen was having none of that, and they had a long discussion, and John was sort of despondent as he could-- only John could be that despondent. Then we invited Max Small down, who had been the Project Manager on the 140-foot telescope. Now, Max and I had our little tos-and-fros at Green Bank. It seemed like I always won out. I don't know why. I guess Dave figured that I'm going to be here longer than Max is going to be. But at any rate, after spending a day, Max and Heeschen, in the morning, were talking upstairs, Phyllis came down and said Max wanted me to drive him to the airport. So he was going back to Brookhaven, to Islip. So on the way back, Max asked me what about the job, so. And I said, "What, are you going to take the job?" And he said, "No." He didn't think so. His wife Mou was very ill. And she did die a few years later. And he said he had his day in the sun. It was the 140 foot. So we were really in a pinch. Who do you get? Paul Sebring, whose name came up, was brought as a Project Manager. And I guess he was a Haystack at that time, wasn't it? And Bob Hall's name came up, but nobody knew where Bob was at that time. He was out in California someplace, but I think he had left Rohr at that time. He passed that off. So I think Tape may have called-- or Lee Hayworth, had called Dave and said, "Well, Jack Lancaster doesn't have project management experience, but he's reasonably good at what he does. And maybe you want to talk to him." We had met Jack before because there was a committee Cornell guy from Brookhaven, and they came down and talked with all of us on there, and Jack went down, worked and helped on the Arecibo telescope, doing some engineering work on it. But they came here. I remember they were in my office and I was totally disinterested in whatever it was they were talking about. But I remember Jack from that. So we were at that bind, but they had offered him the job, and Jack took it.
Kellermann: Okay. Go back a little bit during the earlier years when the project was being developed and everything. George Swenson was here.
Riffe: Yeah. George came from –
Kellermann: He came for a year, but he stayed several years.
Riffe: Oh, yeah. Two or three years.
Kellermann: Yeah, that's right, originally.
Riffe: Yeah. Yeah.
Kellermann: So he was running the project during the development, is that right?
Riffe: Yes and no. He ran parts of it. I think it's unfair to Heeschen to say that anybody other than Heeschen was running that project.
Kellermann: Yes.
Riffe: But George and Heeschen were constantly discussing, and I don't remember exactly what George was doing, because I didn't have that much. He and I would talk from time to time about something. After we got the concept down, then the planning and the financial stuff, Hein and I were, okay, we got into that. Sandy was in. Well, you were in on it too, there too, when they'd have these VLA meetings.
Kellermann: That's right. It was a committee.
Riffe: Yeah. But I don't remember-- I know George was here and he was doing several things and the VLA happened to be one.
Kellermann: My impression is that he wanted to stay on and run the project. In fact--
Riffe: Well, some of us sort of suspected that, I think. We knew that he was that interested in it. But he was living out west here someplace on 250. And the only thing I remember, I remember he came in and told me that he was going back to Illinois, and I was looking for a house to rent at about that time. It was back in the '60s, late '60s there. Yeah. And Mary Anne called his wife and she was irritated because they were having to move again. And Mary Anne said, "Well, would you give the name of the people who own the house to Ted Riffe?" She said, "Who's Ted Riffe? I've never heard of Ted Riffe." Well, I'd met her in a number of times. She was really angry at George. And they divorced.
Kellermann: Yes. That was shortly after that.
Riffe: Yeah, if I'd known that, I wouldn't have let my name be thrown out there. But yeah, I think George, I don't know to what extent any discussions came, but he would not be the Project Manager.
Kellermann: He wrote his view of the VLA history, which we have here somewhere, I can't remember. Does he say anything in there about being fired?
Bouton: I don't know.
Kellermann: He has said that.
Riffe: Oh, really?
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: Well, George and I got along pretty good. He didn't like Jay Marymor because George is a big man, as you recall. He, these gray desks that we had, the GSA desk. Well, George let the chair down all the way, and he still couldn't get under that. So he goes to Jay and said, "I need another desk." And Jay says, "Wow, we've got desks. These are the desks we order them. You're going to use that desk or not." Oh, George was incensed about that, I recall. So he came back to me and asked me, I said, "Oh, why don't we call the--" I said, "Don't you like the desk?" He said, "The desk was all right." He said, "I just can't get my legs under it." And I said, "Oh, why don't you call the maintenance people over here and get some risers and put on." He said, "That's a great idea." So that's all we did. So George’s desk was sitting up about this high. And so he go back and tells Heeschen, he said, "Riffe’s all right." Says, "He gets things done." He sticks to the book.
Kellermann: Now there's some point in there-- maybe it's when that '69 funding didn't appear, where Heeschen said, "Okay, we're going to stop work."
Riffe: Yeah. And that's when we started letting people go. I don't-- dates. You got--
Kellermann: There was a period there--
Riffe: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Dave was very despondent. He took off for a couple of weeks, I think. It was some period of time, just to get away. And he probably was considering changing-- I don't know that for a fact. But he was very disturbed by that. And so when Tom Owen called him and said, "Okay, we're going to go through this incremental funding thing." And nobody knew what it was, what it meant over at the NSF. Then Dave perked up a little bit. He saw a light-- where we would get the VLA. Because remember, his whole career was tied into the VLA at that point. And I mean, he did a great job at Green Bank, and everything was going fine, operationally and so forth. But if the VLA hadn't come along, where are you? The NRAO was Green Bank and Charlottesville-- well, and Tucson.
Kellermann: Well, just Green Bank, really. I mean--
Riffe: It was just--
Kellermann: Charlottesville didn’t count as far as the scientific--
Riffe: That's right. Yeah. That's right. Well, it was just an added expense. And a lot of people were complaining about the--
Kellermann: Exactly. They still are.
Riffe: Still are. Yeah.
Kellermann: Okay, so you mentioned that you built in a certain amount of inflation into the multiple year, but then it turned out that those were the years of this huge inflation. And the whole project was threatened.
Riffe: Well, what happened in '73-- I don't remember the exact month. We had a pre-bidders conference in Socorro. There were four or five companies there: E-Systems, Ford Antenna Division of Ford Motor Company, Collins Radio, Toronto Ironworks, I believe was in that, and, I'd have to go back over the files and look at that. So at the pre-bidders conference, we laid out what we were talking about. Time schedules and so forth. And we had this, okay, deliveries of antennas-- that's the pre-bidders for the antennas, not the whole project. One antenna, three antennas, or whatever on up the line. And the questions and so forth all that morning went that way. So we got together, Jay and Jim Finks, I remember he was here then, myself, and-- well, I don't know who else we had. Anyway, we said, "Should we offer these guys an escalation clause for their bidding if they want? Because this thing's going to stretch out over years and we don't know what's going to be. We're estimating something, but that's all. What do they want to do?" And we didn't have that written into the RFP-- Request for Proposal. And Jack was sort of wishy-washy on it, and finally he said, "Okay. Yeah. Let's do that." So we go back in, right before lunch, and he said, "All right, you guys, if you want an escalation clause-- do you want us to add an escalation clause in the Request for Proposal? And you'd put your own escalator in." And he said, "All right, you guys. Go to lunch. Talk about it. Come back with whatever you want." So they go to lunch. And so 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, whatever time, we came back. Jack said, "Okay. What are we going to do about the escalation clause?" Well, all of them except E-Systems says, "Yeah, we'd like to put an escalation clause in there." Now we're recording all this, keep that in mind, and--
Kellermann: Oh, do we have those?
Riffe: Yeah, you've got--
Bouton: Not that I know of.
Riffe: Well, in my file, you've got a typed--
Kellermann: Transcription.
Riffe: Transcription. Yeah. Or it'll be in one of the files that I have. And certainly the VLA files, someplace, in Lancaster. At any rate, E-Systems says, "No," and said, "If you try to change it now, we'll protest to the Foundation and to the government contractors office." Well, as far as we were concerned, we didn't want to-- we had a time scale ourselves. We had to get this thing going. We said, "Okay, you had to be unanimous if you guys wanted to do it. So it's not unanimous." Well, that helped us a little bit later on. So the prices came in, the contractors signed, and so on. This was in '73-- I don't know what. A couple of months after we signed the contracts, cashed in the concrete-- the price for E-Systems, OPEC turned the spigot off. You remember that? Price of oil went from $2 a barrel to $20 a barrel, almost overnight. And so people were projecting-- Jack was the worst. Lancaster. I mean, he started adding escalation clauses to this, and Jack came up with-- the bloody telescope's going to cost over $100 million. Way out there.
E-Systems did the same thing. And they came back and said, "We can't build these antennas for what our projection was going to." We said, "Look man, you had your day in court." And they said, "It's impossible. You can't drive us out of business because--" and that's true, legally. We said, "Well, you don't even know what the hell the price of things are going to be. It's still an estimate." And I said, "The first antenna is-- you're going to have to do that one under any circumstances." Well, we still argued about that and they came back, so I took this transcript, where-- I can't remember the guy's name, he went to work for Radiation Systems after that. I said, "Here, in writing. And I've got his voice on a tape here, saying that he would sue us and all this stuff if we tried to change that." Well, Dave (Tacky?), who's the president of E-Systems, he started backing down. He said, "All right, we're going to go until where they would be in such a bind that the company's going to collapse because they can't afford to do this." So that's where we stood. So we went ahead with that.
Sandy was refiguring everything. Jack was refiguring everything. But we had decided we were going to go with used ties and rails and all that stuff. So things were going pretty good until the Labor Department got involved. They said we're going to build this railroad, 80 miles of single track and 40 miles of doubletrack, all of that. We bid it out and got prices. And so, we were bringing the ties and bringing rails in and so forth. But here the Labor Department comes in and says, "You've got to pay Davis-Bacon wage rates for railroad construction." We said, "There's been no railroad construction in this area for a hundred years or something." As a matter of fact, they'd abandoned the railroads from--
Kellermann: Magdalena.
Riffe: --Socorro to Magdalena, and pulled up all the rails and everything else. But the government said, "Nope, but you've got to pay what we'll decide." So they go up and found up in Northwest New Mexico. There was a coal mine they'd built a railroad spur into, and the United Mineworkers were in there. And where we were paying. Now keep in mind, this was early 1970s when these prices were established. $10 an hour for labor, very good for New Mexico. Maybe $15 an hour for electricians or operators and things. Well, $28 an hour for labor was what Davis-Bacon decided we had to pay. $40 or $50 an hour for an operator of a spike-driving machine. We thought, "Oh, man." We were fighting it from every which way. So I called Rathvon and Dunbar and I said, "Are we going to fight this?" And they said, "Yes, we have to get a law firm." So Peter called me back and said he had set me up an appointment with Steptoe & Johnson, a law firm in Washington that handles this Davis-Bacon stuff. And so I went up, talked to the guys, and said, "Okay," and brought Jack Lancaster out, and he talked with them, and we signed them on. Steptoe & Johnson, they were going to fight the Labor Department for us. Tangentially, I was involved after that only you know, just that Jack would say, "I've got this question, can you come up with me and see the--?" Anyway, they took the job on, fighting the Labor Department, and said, "This isn't possible." So we went into court on it. We won. Lawyers cost us a little over $50,000, but it would have been millions otherwise. So it was worth it. The government was fighting its own battle, and the NSF wouldn't help us one damn bit. But they did give us money back for that. They added that in.
Kellermann: $50,000?
Riffe: $50,000, yeah. So those were the kind of things that we were doing. Electronics, the prices weren't going up that much. They were pretty stable during this period. And Sandy and Hein came up with the wave guide for the antennas, as opposed to cabling. That saved us 2 or 3 million dollars. I don't remember what the amount was, but it was significant anyway. And they could put that to something else, or the price was going up.
Kellermann: I thought the waveguide would've cost more.
Riffe: No, I don't think so.
Kellermann: It was better, of course.
Riffe: Oh, it was much better. Yeah.
Kellermann: [crosstalk].
Riffe: But, no, that was the whole idea. It would save us money. But that may not have been-- savings may not have been--
Bouton: It was the cost of the business cards that--?
Riffe: The business cards we kept. Yeah. But, no, it's got the price. I don't know why. They were having trouble with how do you get the signal to go up from the antennae back into the waveguide, and so forth. I don't remember.
Kellermann: Okay, anyway--
Riffe: I'm fuzzy on that, but it was--
Kellermann: Well-- or, wait. Say, I know. Saves money because the cable would've had so much loss you would've had to have amplifiers all along the way.
Riffe: Maybe. Yeah. I don't know, but the total--
Kellermann: But anyway--
Riffe: Yeah. Just cable to waveguide-- oh yeah, I think the waveguide because we had to bring it in from Japan and so forth.
Kellermann: Okay. But as far as the cost, there was a problem with the cost of steel in the antennas.
Riffe: Oh, yeah.
Kellermann: And then you made some compromise with E Systems?
Riffe: Well, yeah. Well, there was a number of things happened. The first antenna went up and pointing and all that stuff that you guys go through, and I don't much do it. And then we had two antennas after that. There was three antennas, one, and then two. And on the back of the backup structure, there was an equipment room. And they hadn't tested this before, but when they ran the dish to a certain elevation, it would hit steel, that room. And so they had to tear out that room for all three of those antennas and rebuild them. So they went back and repriced for the next 25 antennas, and that was significant. I mean, they had to change something. But for the first three antennas, everything was scrap and so it was just a double cost on that. But we didn't settle up on that until the end. So the steel price went up, yeah, and so we could do a little-- E Systems did a pretty good job, though, on that. But they claimed-- oh, one of the other things, we bought steel up front and that held the price down. E Systems tried to claim, though, that the price should apply, like a first-in-last-out or last-in-first-out, all that stuff. We didn't buy that. But that came into the negotiations, which I did at the end of the project. So the project went fairly well, I think. I'd heard horror stories about these things that were long-range and stretched out over a long period of time.
Kellermann: One thing which is very significant, both for the VLA and the VLBA, NRAO or AUI owned the design. Isn't that right? So we weren't obliged to get the antennas from E systems?
Riffe: That's right. Yeah. If they--
Kellermann: Here, we had the option.
Riffe: That's right. That's right. Well, we couldn't have just arbitrarily said, "Oh, we're going to take that." Yeah. I mean, if their price came in double, let's say, and we said, "Oh, yeah. We can't afford that, but we are-- we'll rebid," that was an option. Oh, yeah. We owned everything on that. That was every contract that we had on that one, though.
Kellermann: Because I think that's very important, I've mentioned this to other observatories, how valuable that was. They don't do it that way necessarily.
Riffe: Yeah. No. No. Well, that goes back to the Harley Kilgore, Vanever Bush question of who owns what. He could even-- said to Bill Horne, does he-- does Bill Horne have any rights in that design?
Kellermann: Let's talk about Bill Horne. We haven't mentioned him.
Riffe: Well, Bill-- of course, he was the engineer on the VLA. He became--
Kellermann: Antennas.
Riffe: Yeah. On the antennas-- the world's expert for-- engineer for building antennas. I think Bonn would've loved to have had him. They would've hired him in a minute to just help straighten out their antenna over there. But he worked well with E-systems, and Lancaster too, as far as I know. He moved out to Socorro and was right on top of everything. And I didn't have a lot of interactions with him on the VLA-- well, I did. Every time there was a change, I had to be involved in it until we got to-- down to negotiating the settlement with E-Systems. They came in, they had a-- their claim was-- after the last antenna was delivered, was around $3 million, as I recall, something in that order. And I took it and went through it with a fine tooth comb. And so I finally got it down to where I thought they had a legitimate claim for about $250,000. That was just very rough. I mean, give or take, 10% maybe, because I didn't have all the information that they had. And we were getting-- and we were getting ready to go into negotiations with them out there.
So Heeschen said, okay, I was the negotiator for the Observatory, and Jack, Bill Horne-- well, there were three of us, the three of us. And he said, Ted's-- was accorded the chief negotiator, if you want to call it that. Okay. And so we got together and talked this over. And in the meantime, Heeschen called Jerry Tape and said, "Well, Ted says he thinks he can resolve this thing for about quarter of a million dollars." And Jerry said, "Hey, that sounds great. Let's hope he can do it." Oh, before that we had to meet with NSF the week before we were going to go into these negotiations. E-Systems had been writing to the NSF, and their congressman and everybody else telling them they got to have this kind of money and so forth. And Bob Hughes was the AD at the Foundation. And he was the one that called this meeting, the curious meeting. Because I didn't like to talk to them about how I was going to negotiate a contract. A settlement or something. I mean, Christ Almighty, that-- keep that in my hip pocket.
Anyway, we Tape, Heeschen, Jack, me. We showed up, to NSF, we're going to tell Hughes what we're going to do. Because Hughes asked us. We go ahead, and there's a big—they had people all over the place. And Tape looked at me, and he said, "You've got to be careful what you say." You know? But anyway, I had to tell him how we were going to approach this negotiation. Bob Hughes, who's sort of running the meeting, okay, um-hmm, yeah. Yeah, just nodding and I thought agreeing with everything I was saying. So we finished the meeting up, went back to AUI offices. And Jerry said, "Well, I think I'll lay (this out for you well for the) [inaudible]--" he said, "Now, you dictate to Lois Chu," who was his secretary, “what you said.” And so Lois I got into a little anteroom there at the AUI office. She went out after, it took maybe an hour, I don't remember. And typed this whole thing up.
Tape goes in messenger services, sends a copy of these notes over to Hughes. About half an hour, Hughes is calling. "Hey, sending that note back." Or this memo back. And he said, "The NSF can have nothing to do with it." Tape, “Well why the hell did you have us come over and tell you what we're doing? Man, if you're not-- so we're not asking you to approve it.” But he said, "We want no knowledge of what your negotiations are doing over there." Tape was really incensed. You knew Jerry, he was very calm, easy going guy. And Heeschen just laughed about it, he didn't care. He had his antennas, and that was it. Well, at any rate, we go out for our negotiations. And met the E-systems, I didn't want to meet at their place, I wanted them to come here. But, couldn't do that. But we showed up at the place, and knew Jack, and Bill Horne and me. Carl Amthor. Heeschen-- he shows up. And I said, "Well, I didn't do that-- AUI didn't involve themselves, they let us do our thing down here." If I needed help from Rathvon, or from Gene Allick or somebody that Brookhaven, even. I call them, and-- but they didn't propose themselves. That was a good thing that we had.
Kellermann: Amthor was the Comptroller, or--
Riffe: Yeah, Vice President or something. And so, any rate, well, I couldn't tell. I could just get the hell out of here, you know? But any rate, we're negotiating. I know we're fighting and we're battling. Oh, we're going into the late afternoon, and we had, I think it was about $260,000, $265,000 dollars. Finally, not finally, but there was a $13,000 dollar item that came up that morning. But we couldn't agree on it, so we said, "We'll leave that to later – the sticky ones." $13,000 dollars. And it had to do with those first three antennas. And they had not put in the price for repurchasing of the steel and they thought they had to have for those three huts. And Bill Horne priced it out for me. He said they're not deserving a thing. It was their mistake. I said, "Bill, we designed the thing, and if this thing going to hit steel and won't let you drive down." And he said, "Well," he said, you guys, says, a reasonable person would say that they're stupid.” I said, "Well, I can't tell them."
Kellermann: So anyway, who was, I thought they were responsible for the design. We gave a conceptual design, but thought they were responsible.
Riffe: That hut came in later. And we gave them the specs for it. So sitting and we weighed the thing, how much was them and how much welding and so forth was going on. So they weren't giving off on that at all. And I wasn't neither. And so finally it just around 5 o'clock and I was getting bug-eyed. I wanted a drink or something. And Dave Tacky and Bob Lewis were E-Systems sitting across. Finally I said, "All right, you take half of it. and I will swallow the other half. Tacky put his hand across from shock. And Amthor said, you can't do that. I thought Jack Lancaster's going to kill the guy. He and Bill Horne grabbed him and dragged him out, said, "We're going to caucus." And they got outside. And Jack said, "What did he mean by that?" And I said, "He didn't mean anything." And I went outside, oh, they were going to pummel the guy. He said, "You never question what your chief negotiator's doing. If anybody's hides going to get fried, it's going to be his, not ours, but says you can't do it. He said, well, Ted told Heeschen, it'd be about $250,000. And he's over that. And he called, it was about 18, 20 thousand dollars over. "Can't you see me coming back, telling Heeschen" Wow. Oh man, we're going to court because of $18,000. You know, what a lawyer would've gone. So anyway, we settled that, that was the way it settled. And Dave, evidently, I called him immediately and told him what done. He said, good job and all this stuff. And he called Tape, Tape called me and said, "Hey, good job." And all that stuff. And E-Systems was happy with the outcome of it, and that was the story. I didn't think we got hurt at all on that.
Kellermann: Just as the VLA was being finished, as you've said several times, you've emphasized that this was Dave's main thing that he lived for, worked so hard for it.
Riffe: Yeah.
Kellermann: And went through all these emotional roller coasts up and down.
Riffe: Absolutely.
Kellermann: So just as he was about to become available, he resigns.
Riffe: I think he was just burned down. I think I was getting to that point myself. And I think all of us were-- we'd been through this Green Bank thing, you know, and the 140 foot, that was worse than in many respects than the VLA. But yeah, after a while he decided, well, okay, he would let it go. And then Mort, of course, came in and we were looking at what the 25 meter, I think, wasn't it for.
Kellermann: Well, 25 meter and the VLBA?
Riffe: Well, that was a little bit further. You were working on VLBA at that time. Yeah. And--
Kellermann: Well, I went off in Germany for two years then.
Riffe: That's right. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And well, at any rate, so then the VLA settled in, turned it over to the operating people.
Kellermann: Do you remember Cam Wade was the first?
Riffe: Oh yeah.
Kellermann: Site Director. Oh, after the construction. I mean, Jack was in charge during the--
Riffe: Yeah, well, yeah, Cam every telescope up until-- I don't know which Cam was responsible for the pointing and getting it set up and getting it started. Yeah, I do remember that. And yeah, he was sort of-- Jack was actually running the thing. We went through this business of common cost. That was something we developed, I developed that back for the GAO on the 140 foot. But the question was, here you have, you bring three antennas in, you start operating, and you've got four antennas then got eight antennas, and so forth. Well, how much of the electric power that you got is charged to construction? As an example, operation. And so you had to phase it over. And so I just came up with a formula or an equation that says, okay, you do it according to what you got there.
Kellermann: Yeah. But when the construction project was finished, so full operations and Jack, I guess left to go back.
Riffe: Yeah. He hung around out there for a while. He lived out there. He was sat in with … , then he sold his sailboat and got a powerboat, I think, and went down into the--
Kellermann: He kept his house there for a long time.
Riffe: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Kellermann: But in the beginning of operations, Cam Wade was in charge.
Riffe: Yeah. Well, Cam was involved in that, in the VLA from the word go. He went for the land. I remember back in '60s when we were looking at the land out there. I went out and he and I, and somebody had a meeting at the schoolhouse in Magdalena to assure the ranchers that we weren't going to have fast trains on that track. And we said, "You can let your cows run all over the place if you want to." And they were pretty leery of us coming out there, and they were ready to fight against it. And Cam handled that very well. He did a good job. He's just stayed out there for ever so long.
Kellermann: Well, I went with him on, a VLBA site trip. He did the same thing.
Riffe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for the 25 meter in Hawaii, he was involved on that one too. And well, I guess the--
Kellermann: But you don't remember him being in charge of operations?
Riffe: Well, I think I do. It was--
Kellermann: He was sort of fired, may not be the right word, but that didn't work out.
Riffe: Yeah. Well, I think Heeschen was so involved in getting it started. He said that he and Cam probably worked closer together. And I didn't like to travel and I--
Kellermann: Cam wrote the first memo back in '62 describing an array. Dave made a strong point to that when we talked to him. And we had the memo.
Riffe: That's right. Oh, that was very early,
Kellermann: '62.
Riffe: Yeah. And then as the interferometer developed and it became sort of obsolete after you got three and four. You got four antennas the VLA, the three element interferometer is no. Yeah, I do. No, Cam was involved in the thing all the while, and on the VLBA as well.
Kellermann: Yeah, but they must've been some, when Mort became director; something that must've happened between Mort and Cam because Mort hired Ron Ekers
Riffe: Yeah. Yeah. I remember when Ekers went up - well, I guess it was Cam and then Ron? Was that the way it was? Yeah, I know Ekers and I had, I had some too-ing and fro-ing with him after he got out there.
Kellermann: Well, it was also we had to buy off his - he had had a sabbatical (from Holland?) that he had to buy that off because he owed it and was supposed to go back.
Riffe: No, it was just - well, he became - I thought he was a little bit later than that. But my memory is gone. I do remember one of things that irritated me was some of the ties that we got were just rotten. But we had money problems, In building it. And Ron, he either wrote a letter or a memo or something, criticizing the guys who had built that thing because of why didn't they use new ties instead of putting this old stuff in there?
Kellermann: Right. Yes. Yes. I remember that.
Riffe: And I talked to Heeschen about it. And Dave is no longer - and Dave got a little bit irritated with that, too. He said, "Well--
Kellermann: That saved the budget really.
Riffe: Yeah, it was a budgetary item. We had to do the best. It was sort of like the electronics. You put in the electronics that's available at that time, and you don't plan for the ones down into the future. And we knew we was going to have to have new ties. So I guess that was, with Ron, that was the thing. But we set up a business office and so forth out there. We knew that you couldn't work that from here anymore than some of the guys early on at Brookhaven. They wanted to keep the NRAO’s businesses up there. Even AUI's officers recognized all that really wouldn't work, and so that's when I came into play. And my job really was to set it up down here. I recognized that it should be out there. So Lancaster did a lot of setting that up. He was there after the construction was over. And he and Cam, I guess Cam's more interested in getting the scientific stuff started. And Jack spent quite a while, as I recall, setting up the organization. I remember he, Jack wanted to have the NRAO join the Chamber of Commerce out there. And we said, "No, we can't do that. That's a lobbying organization." Or at least, it could be perceived to be a lobbying organization. AUI didn't want to get involved in that, so we didn't join the Chamber of Commerce. Jack was going to run for public office out there. You knew that?
Kellermann: No, I didn't know that.
Riffe: Oh, yeah. He was going to run for something, I don't know, County Commissioner or something like that. Yeah, he stayed quite a while.
Kellermann: Well, let's go on to the VLBA, which had its own complications with the multi-state activity.
Riffe: Well, yeah. It wasn't all that bad though. It was bad for you guys. Cam was looking at sites and consulting with you, yeah. And yeah, Hawaii, St. Croix, up in New Hampshire and those were the easy ones. Well, Hawaii wasn't too easy. Was that the last antenna?
Kellermann: I went there with Buck Peery actually.
Riffe: Yeah, the Hawaii antenna, I went over with Buck and Mark Gordon. It was Mark.
Kellermann: Well, that was partly for the millimeter antenna.
Bouton: For MMA he would have been because he wasn't interested in the VLBA.
Kellermann: No, it was the millimeter one. It was the 25 meter.
Riffe: Well, I remember 25. That was earlier.
Kellermann: So that was also Hawaii. Mark studied Hawaii in great detail.
Riffe: That's right. Well, the antenna in Hawaii was the one that gave us a lot of fits there, and extra cost and so forth. But remember, I'd left. I'd retired before the antenna came in to play there. But I was thinking it was—Mark. Did you want to put that antenna on top of the mountain, or just--
Kellermann: No, we did.
Riffe: Okay, we talked about that down on the saddle road – near Hilo
Kellermann: No, we talked about the place where they--
Riffe: Parker Ranch then.
Kellermann: Oh, yeah, that's right. That was too low. No, but the place where the submillimeter array is now, just off the top, and then we ended up somewhere else. We didn't really need -
Riffe: You see, I'm getting confused now on the 25 meter and the VLBA.
Kellermann: 25 meter was up at the top.
Riffe: On the top.
Kellermann: Or just below the top.
Riffe: Yeah, that was the one they called-- Mark and Buck, I think, called me and said John Jeffreys and (Matsumoto?), the vice president of the University of Hawaii were objecting to us going up there unless we put the power in and went underground. And they wanted me to come over and talk with them about that, and I remember, I went over. I hadn't been to Hawaii since 1946, I think when I was there on a ship going by. And anyway, Jeffreys, he sort of wanted us to be there on the mountain, Mauna Kea, but he wanted to get all he could out of it before his program. Fair enough, I won’t object to that. But this guy Matsumoto, he was adamantly opposed to us doing anything unless we put the power in underground all the way up to the mountain. So I said, "Well, look, you've already got NASAs up there, CFHT’s up there, I think, and what are they going to do? Are they going to tap onto this? They're using generators now." And he said, "Of course." And I said, "Well, look NASA could pick up their share of it." So I agreed that we would do half. It was about $5 milliondollars to put it in. We can go to the NSF and ask for maybe a share or half. We'll do half. And I said, "Well, what the hell are you talking about? It's all government funds. Well, I argued that it would come out of the NSF's astronomy program. And we were catching hell from everybody else already because of all the money we were taking for the VLA. It just chewed up everything. And I think Jeffries finally understood exactly what I was saying and the meeting sort of adjourned on that. And we came back and I thought Matsumoto even was leaning towards doing it this way. So I came back and I didn't think any more about it. I was waiting. The ball's in their court. And the next thing I heard Mort telling me that-- well, now maybe it wasn't Mort. Somebody told me. Bob Hughes was going to Hawaii and to talk with him. And Hughes went over and agreed that he would go to the NSF and ask for all the money. Oh, that really cut the legs out from under me. Ah, that was-- Hughes took his golf clubs with him, of course.
Kellermann: Yeah, of course. What finally happened?
Riffe: Well, we didn't build it. We didn't build it. 25 meter.
Kellermann: Oh, the 25 meter.
Riffe: Yeah.
Kellermann: Okay, it wasn't for the VLBA.
Riffe: Yeah. So that just went—Mort and Hughes didn't get along at all. That's why Mort left as Director.
Kellermann: Yes.
Riffe: And I could understand Mort’s feeling on-- so nothing happened on that. Then the VLBA-- I was as far as getting the sites-- I didn't think it was that much of a problem. You dealt with Iowa and--
Kellermann: No. I was referring to the fact that you had to get to get licensed to do business in all these states.
Riffe: Oh, yeah. You had to do that. I went up to-- the one in Washington was an interesting one. And I went up and talked to the guy who helped-- what was his name. It's a 25-meter settlement, the lawyer from Seattle. I hired them to help advise me on what to do up there. I was going to get a contract with the University-- or Washington State University. Because that was the closest to Brewster. And just have them pay the bills and so forth, and pay the payroll. And we didn't even have to get involved in it, other than owning the land. And I went to Saint Croix, did the same thing. I hired a lawyer down there to help us with that. And I can't remember his name, this big Black guy. He had the biggest hands. I thought he should've been a basketball player. And his daughter was going to the University of Virginia here. And so we hit it off pretty well. And there were the Navy-- not the Navy-- yeah, the Navy had a-- Franklin and Marshall University had something going on down there. And I thought we could use whatever source they were using to do the same thing. So I had a number of those, one in Texas. I got a lawyer down in West Texas or around El Paso, I believe. But the one in Hawaii, that was still hanging fire when I left. But, yeah, I just wanted to-- that was the way I wanted to go about doing this, and I knew that maybe one or two we would have to handle ourselves. But I didn't want to have the massive-- every month having to report what, 8 or 10 different places and so forth. When I left in '88, I guess it was, you hadn't completed it, you're still--
Kellermann: So you remember both of the VLA and the VLBA? Caltech had aspirations.
Riffe: That's right. Yeah, the Owens Valley stuff.
Kellermann: I can't remember. Were you involved in the discussions with Caltech?
Riffe: No. No. No, not through the VLBA. I was earlier on with the Neptune, the Voyager project.
Kellermann: Yeah. That was paid for.
Riffe: Yeah, that was.
Kellermann: This may have been after you left. With the VLBA, the discussions with Haystack about building the recording system, do you--?
Riffe: I remember hearing about that. I don't remember that I was involved in it. No. No. I don't remember that at all. No. We got the antennas, the E-systems built-- or Radiation Systems built the antennas. That was the big job of a practical matter and big money. And you decided on the sites that you wanted, then I had to tweak those a little bit up in Washington--
Kellermann: I remember you told me, "I favored the TIW bid." Because I thought it made a much better impression during the review or whatever it was that we had.
Riffe: Oh, that's right.
Kellermann: I mean, RSI just-- every question they'd say, "Oh, yeah. We can do that. We can do that."
Riffe: Yeah. I know. Yeah.
Kellermann: What was the name of the guy from TIW? He made a much better impression.
Riffe: Bob Hall, was it?
Kellermann: Yeah. Right. There was a million dollars more, 21 instead of 20-something. I thought it was worth it. And you said to me because I had written the specs. You said, "You show me where RSI isn't meeting the specifications that you wrote."
Riffe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. RSI, I had an in because having done the surface for the VLA and the new antenna's not that different.
Kellermann: Yeah. That's right.
Riffe: And they did a good job as far as I know. The antennas met your spec.
Kellermann: They're starting to fall apart though.
Riffe: Are they?
Kellermann: Well, they said they're going to have to replace all the azimuth bearings within the next couple of years.
Riffe: Really?
Kellermann: Yeah. Well, the contract said 20 years.
Riffe: Yeah, well, that was--
Kellermann: Which always seems like a long time.
Riffe: Well, the 36 footer, that was a big bug we went through, because that bearing, the azimuth bearing, because they installed it without any grease in the raceway. And they said, "Well, we can put grease in it once it's installed." And we said, "Yeah. But it's run without grease in there." And so we said okay. And this was Bob Hall. He was at Rohr then. I was fighting with him. Said, "Okay, you gotta give us a spare bearing." Well, that was sort of, I was just talking thought my hat on that one. I was just wanted to punish him somehow. Because to put that new bearing in you'd have to lift the antenna and do all this stuff. But anyway, they furnished this extra bearing and it laid around out there for ever so long. And the original bearing Bob Hall was right, it worked fine for the whole life of the thing. That cost us some extra $10,000 or something.
Kellermann: Bill Howard. For a long time he was Assistant to the Director. I think when Dave got involved with the VLA so much he handed over a lot of, in practice, a lot of the running of the observatory to Bill. No?
Riffe: No. Dave was criticized by, maybe you, but many of the staff, I know Bob Hjellming was one really. Dave was giving so much time to the VLA that he just didn't pay any attention to it.
Kellermann: Yeah. I was among the guilty yes.
Riffe: Yeah. But Dave would let people do things without formal assignment, and Bill just assumed, maybe assumed some things, but I didn't know. I do know that one thing with Bill is when-- when I was in Green Bank. Dave asked me to stay in Green Bank and as Site Manager whatever he called it. And I'd been doing budgets all along. And so Dave said, "Well, what are we going to do?" I told him, I said, "I'm getting overloaded." At Green Bank and there was the 36 footer at the time, and I was traveling quite a bit and still doing all my AD work plus looking after Green Bank. And for the budget we hired Jim Finks. You remember him?
Kellermann: Sure.
Riffe: Okay. And so he was to be our sort of business guy over here. Well, Bill is here and I wasn't most of the time. So Bill assumed the budget function with Jim. Well, I don't know whether we should record this. But Heeschen called me one day and he said, "I've got to get you to Charlottesville." I said, "Why?" And he said, "I want you to take this budget stuff back over." I said, "Why?" "These guys are driving me nuts." He said, "Every time they want to change something in the budget, they come in and want to meet with me." Heeschen. I never did that until it was fait accompli pretty much, and I could show him what it was I was doing. But he was-- so when I came back from-- when I moved from Green Bank to Charlottesville, the first thing he wanted me to do is take the budget back. And so Bill sort of got his-- I don't know whether he was dissatisfied or not with that. But with Heeschen, you just do things. But Bill would tweak things. You remember his famous coffee thing at Green Bank and so forth. Dave didn't care for that.
For instance, we would start the first year, I'd ask Dave, I'd ask him on a budget year I'd say, "What kind of a scientific staff do you want? How many and so forth. You're going to promote these guys." "You know I probably will." I said, "Well, if I add you two or three guys in there is that okay?" He said, "I've talked to Ken Kellermann he's going to come in September or something." Well, I'd put Ken, write a position in 12 months. And that's how we built up our OOE. I mean, you came in, in September so hell I had seven months of Ken Kellermann's salary and benefits, I could toss it over here. And Dave got on his high horse once and he came in raising hell about he wants this budget to be a truthful, actual, realistic budget. He said, "And no slop in it." I said, "A realistic budget has slop in it. It's got to have slop in it." So I said, "Dave you're not going to be able to work the way you have been." That was for the press or something. When he and I got talking he was happy with the way I was doing it. But Bill would try to-- he was a statistician by trade. He tried to put things into little cubbyholes that they were supposed to be in.
I don't know that he assumed any director's duties. Hein did, but that was-- finally, your know, every time Dave would go away for any length of time, he would have to go to the Board and ask them to appoint Hein acting director. Well, finally the board said, "Well, we're getting sick and tired of this." So they just made Hein, made that position of Associate Director for Technical Services automatically became Acting Director in Heeschen's absence. I wasn't aware that Bill -
Kellermann: Well, for those of us that were on the junior staff at the time, that was certainly the impression that Bill gave. But you've explained that. Do you remember the initial funding, or the initial VLBI work back in '65, and then the dealings with the Russians? Were you involved? When we did the first experiment with Russia, we had to send all those equipment there.
Riffe: That's fuzzy.
Kellermann: That's fuzzy.
Riffe: That's fuzzy. Yeah. I remember something about that, something Matvyenko?
Kellermann: Yeah.
Riffe: Is that the name that keeps--
Kellermann: He came here.
Riffe: He came here, and you sort of shepherded him around.
Kellermann: Yeah, I did. I mean, I wasn't involved in the negotiations with the NSF, Commerce Department and so on.
Riffe: I think Bill Howard was involved in that quite a bit. And maybe Jay [Marymor]. No, was Jay--?
Kellermann: No. It was somebody else from Green Bank.
Riffe: Jay wasn't even there.
Kellermann: Bill Powell.
Riffe: Who?
Kellermann: Bill Powell.
Riffe: Bill Powell could have been. Yeah. Bill Powell could have been. That's right. I was probably involved only if Bill Powell could have called me or Bill Howard would have called me in to say we need to do this do that. I do remember something about it. I remember you calling from Crimea or something saying I can't get in or out.
Kellermann: Okay. Well, I think we're done.
Riffe: Oh, great.
Kellermann: We can shut this off.
End of interview with Riffe.