X-10 Nuclear Reactor (#atozchallenge)

I have always fancied that the end of the world will be when some enormous boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up the globe. ... They [the Americans] are great boilermakers.

— Jules Verne

Five Weeks in a Balloon 

Official seal of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

X-10 Nuclear Reactor

       In my post for the letter N I referred in passing to Oak Ridge, Tennessee which played a big role in the developing of the first atomic bombs during World War 2.   This project, known as The Manhattan Project because it was planned out in an office in Manhattan, expanded to a number of research and development centers throughout the United States.  This effort, which was one of America's most intensive projects ever, resulted in developing and producing atomic bombs within a time frame of less than three years.  

       In order to accommodate the R & D facilities and its employees and their families, the city of Oak Ridge was rapidly planned and built.  By the end of the war in 1945, the city had grown to become the fifth largest city in Tennessee.  After the war the city continued to serve as an important scientific center for the study and manufacture of nuclear materials.

       A key facility at the Oak Ridge Laboratories was referred to as the X-10 Pile, the first nuclear reactor designed for continuous production.  The X-10 Graphite Reactor produced the plutonium necessary for the atomic bomb.  This reactor is no longer in operation after being shut down in 1963 and designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1966.

        The three key nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford,  Washington are now the three sites of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.  Visitors to the park can visit museums and see the original reactors and other components of the laboratories.  For security reasons the X-10 reactor and other buildings at the Tennessee site can only be visited as part of a bus tour provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

         Visiting all three sites would be an epic history vacation for anyone with a strong interest in atomic bomb development, but if you are near any one of these areas a visit to the one to which you are closest is highly recommended.  Oak Ridge is the most accessible to the greatest population area as it sits just a short drive from the most visited National Park in the United States--The Great Smokey Mountains.  The Laboratories are also a two hour drive from Nashville.

            A vacation to the Great Smokies with all of the tourist activities nearby will provide memorable adventure and entertainment for adults and as well as families with children.  There is literally something to please everyone.

        The history of the area ranges from the time when the indigenous peoples such as the Creeks and Cherokees inhabited the land, to the time of the early European settlers, to the Civil War Era and beyond.    The X-10 Reactor is just one more piece of the history that brought the United States into the Atomic Age.

         Have you visited any of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park sites?   Have you ever visited any nuclear power plant or other similar facility?    Do you see a positive future for nuclear energy?
     
   

Related articles

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• Maintaining the bomb
• Exhibit chronicles hard life for blacks at WWII Hanford

Ask Arlee: Vacation Locations

Photo in or around Grand Teton National Park (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

         This past summer I spent over a month in traveling.  Vacation I guess you might say.  My wife was on her vacation time, but since I haven't been working I guess it's almost like I'm almost always on vacation.  And for me staying home makes for a pretty good vacation location.   But let's talk about vacations away from home.

       In one of my recent calls for Ask Arlee questions, Susan Kane asked: 

Where is your favorite vacation spot? 

        This summer found my wife and I in Ecuador and on a cross country road trip that took us to New Jersey, Tennessee, and something like thirteen other states as we drove the highways of this wonderful country.   All the travel was great fun.   I love traveling as much as I like staying at home.  Okay, call me easy to please.

        So far I've been able to find something positive about everywhere I've been.  I may not always be jumping at the opportunity to go someplace, but if I'm there I try to make the best of it.   Stick me in Odessa, Texas or Williston, North Dakota or whatever out of the way place and I'll try to seek out the points of interest that are there.  I'm not saying I'd want to live just any old place, but if other people are living there and seem to be relatively content in doing so, then there must be something worthwhile about the place.

        A lot of my adaptability comes from my years touring one-nighters with a theatrical company.  We played some towns that most people wouldn't think of going to unless they had a specific reason to be there.  Since we usually had at least a few off hours in these towns I'd try to find something to do there that might interest me.  Sometimes it was just going to the local mall or whatever they had there in the way of shopping.  A meal at a local restaurant was almost always part of the schedule since we had to eat.  And whenever we could we'd visit the birthplace of some famous person, a fort, a natural attraction, or some other point of interest.  There are some fascinating places in the United States as there are throughout the world.

        My ideal vacation would not be in just one place, but traveling on a road trip to see many places.  For example, I'd like to be able to take two or three week tours that were thematic in nature.  A tour of Civil War battlefields would be very interesting I think.   Or maybe picking a famous person and visiting the places they'd visited and lived.   A journey of this nature would be educational and fun.

        National parks are wonderful places where one can just settle in and see the sights.  I'm not so much for camping like I used to do and I know my wife would have none of that, but settling in at a lodge in a park like Yellowstone or Glacier would be enjoyable. The National Parks of the United States are some the best places to go for relaxation mixed with awe-inspiring sightseeing.

         On the other hand, cities and tourist destinations both have a lot to offer.  I've always enjoyed spending time in Toronto, Ontario.   Washington, DC and the surrounding area has enough attractions to keep one busy for a few weeks, as do many cities around the world.  Then there are the places like Orlando, Florida.  I don't like being in crowded places and having to wait in lines, but Disney certainly offers some cool attractions if you're willing to pay the price.

         There are so many places to go that it's kind of difficult to pick just one.   However one place stands above all others for me--East Tennessee.  That's where most of my vacation times have been spent.  Staying at my mother's house--the house where I lived while attending high school and college--feels almost as much like home as the house where I live.  

           Spending time with my mother and brothers and sisters is time that takes me back to days of my youth.   I enjoy being with my family.  Then there are longtime friends who I rarely get to see anymore.  When in Tennessee I usually have some time to catch up with at least a few of those old friends.  

            Places exotic or somewhat mundane but different for me are all fun, fascinating, and curiosity inducing.   I feel excited and adventurous when I'm traveling in places where I am but a passing stranger. But there's no replacing any of these places with home.  I feel like I've got two homes.  Those are my favorite vacation spots.

           Thank you, Susan, for the questions.  Anyone else have a question they'd like me to answer in a future Ask Arlee post?    Where is your favorite vacation spot?    Do you enjoy traveling?   What is your favorite mode of travel?   If you could settle down in any place in the world where would it be?

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Unusual Tactics

Bust of Cas Walker at the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee, USA. Walker was a well-known East Tennessee businessman and politician. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cas Walker:  Promotion by Unusual Tactics 

         When I first moved to Tennessee in 1966, one of the most popular grocery chains in the region was the Cas Walker Stores.  I couldn't help but laugh when I first saw this guy on his television commercials--he was so countrified and sounded like he had hardly any idea what he was doing.  But as I came to learn, Cas Walker was a marketing genius.

            Cas started his first stores in the 1920s during the Great Depression.  Low prices made his stores a favorite of blue collar white and black customers alike.  In order to boost business he resorted to unusual tactics to attract attention.

            In one of his most famous stunts he threw live fryer chickens from the roof of his store.  Whoever caught a chicken got to keep it.  When he saw how sales boosted on that first day he did this he turned it into a weekly Saturday event.  Sometimes as many as three thousand people showed up to try and catch one of those chickens.  Then afterwards, many of those people would go shopping in the store.  Cas won the hearts of the common folk and turned them into regular customers.

           Later Walker sponsored radio and television shows that featured country music and his own homespun wisdom and commercials done by Cas himself.  He was not some slick talking announcer, but he came across as one of the common folk.  He used the unusual tactic of turning himself into a local celebrity rather than hire attractive smooth talking professionals.

          The Cas Walker show was a East Tennessee television mainstay for many years.  The show introduced artists like Dolly Parton and gave the Everly Brothers a career boost.  Many top name country artists appeared on the Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour.   Some may have thought ol' Cas to be crass and crazy but he had a natural sense of what caught the attention of his customer base.

             Here's a brief clip to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:





Try Something Different

           Like Cas Walker you should determine your customer base and find out what will catch their attention.  Free stuff always gets attention, but don't let it backfire.  The point in giving something away is to get the recipient to like you and to hopefully encourage them to buy another one of your products.  Entice them into the store so they'll see what else you have and pay for the next item.

            There's nothing wrong with a gimmick if it makes sense and attracts attention.  You don't want a gimmick to distract people from what you're doing, but give them enough of a sample to make them curious.  When you see something that is working well for someone else, you might want to try your own version of it.  However if everyone is doing the same thing then maybe you need to come up with your own idea.

            Familiar old tactics can be fine if they're tried and true, but they should not be your only strategy.  Try new ideas.  If those ideas don't work then either find a way to make them work or try something else.   Stay in keeping with who you are and what your product is.  Unusual tactics can attract attention, but they can also become a part of your branding.  Protect your brand so you aren't having to resort to damage control later on down the road.

And now some unusual blogs:

With a name like Clay Baboons you know you're heading into some funky territory.  Stephanie seems to have a thing about clay and funny little beings made out of the stuff.

Maybe a blog about U2 isn't all that unusual, but it's a fitting choice for the letter U.  Join Deena On the Road with U2 and sing along with Bono and the boys.  Lyrics are included.

A blog that is not especially unusual other than being unusually colorful and having some nice poetry is a blog that begins with the letter U.  Anna's Universal Gibberish is a pleasant place to go for a getaway.


         

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Open Mindedness

circus (Photo credit: fsse8info)

       
           My dad was always coming up with ideas to try out for the juggling act that my family did as a sideline.  He wasn't afraid to try something different to see if it would work.  Sometimes his ideas did work and sometimes they ended up being something we could tease him about.  A lot of my dad's thinking rubbed off on me.

          When we moved to East Tennessee from the Chicago area in 1966 our show business market became rather spare.  Our Chicago agent didn't have much that we were close enough to take and the agents who booked shows around Tennessee didn't have enough to keep us working regularly.

          Not one to wait idly for something to happen, my dad gathered up some business directories and began contacting every company in a 200 or so mile radius.  He put together a promotional package with a form letter describing our show and sent out hundreds of them.

           After a while we started getting so many replies from companies that were having parties and picnics that we were working with fair regularity.  Not only was our act working, but my dad started up his own theatrical agency and started booking acts from all over the country.

             My dad opened up his mind and started thinking up ideas that seemed workable and then he tried them.  He tapped into a market that no one had previously contacted in this geographical area. He built up a clientele and he made money in his sideline show biz job.

             If nothing is happening for you in what you've been trying to do then you have to take action.  You can't just wait for someone to contact you because you have a good product that you're sure people will want.   Sometimes you just have to take the initiative and do what is necessary to tap into the existing market or create your own.

             The main thing beyond the action of getting something done is having an open mind to allow you to come up with novel approaches to do it.   Don't blow a lot of money that you don't have, but test the waters first.  Bounce your ideas off of friends or family members who have adventurous spirits.  Avoid negativity.  Allowing those with closed minds to influence you will make you afraid and doubtful and then nothing gets done.

            Successes start with dreams.  If you open up your mind to the realms of possibilities, dreams can become realities.

 And now for the letter 'O':

She's from a place exotic to many of us and shares many a dream with her readers.  Most of us know her as Oceangirl  from the blog Live High.    

       

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The Costume Party

         When I was in my twenties and into my thirties, I hung around with a crowd that liked to party.  I say hung around, but not so much after I hit twenty-five and was usually not home most of the time because I was traveling with road shows.   I would be traveling most of the year, but whenever I did stop back home there were always parties to go to.

          As the years passed, my friends converged into ever growing circles of new friends who were people that I didn't know. That was fine.  I was still invited to their parties if I was in town.  Standing around the beer keg shooting the bull with strangers and maybe a few old familiar faces became the norm.  There were always new faces that I encountered and everyone was just plain congenial and welcoming.  At the end of the evening I felt like I had made a ton of friends whose names I didn't remember and who I probably wouldn't have recognized the next day if I had run into them somewhere.  Yeah, they were those kinds of parties.

          Then, there was this New Year's Eve party in the mid 1980s at the home of a housing contractor who I had come to know through some of the parties of the previous few years.  I had run into a friend from high school a few days before the party and he invited me to come to it.   He told me it was going to be a costume party.

           Now, I'm not sure why I knew, but somehow I knew that it was not really going to be a costume party and he was trying to play a joke on me.  And I could somehow tell that he could tell that I knew he was trying to trick me but was letting on that I seriously believed that it was going to be a costume party.  It's kind of hard to explain the layers of deception in this but we both just knew about the deceptions of the other and played along with it all.  I decided that I would go to the party in costume.

          On the night of the party I found an out-dated over-sized suit in my father's closet and then had my wife apply some garish pasty looking make-up to my face and touch it all up with lipstick, rouge, and eye make-up giving me a somewhat androgynous appearance.  I guess I was going for a David Bowie look but ended up looking like a cross-dressing floozy in a second-hand suit.  Whatever it was I looked like, I was not what one would normally see at an East Tennessee keg party.

          Upon my arrival at the party, thinking I had gone for the shock effect, I was perplexed to find that no one seemed to notice.  Here I was, the only one in costume and a ridiculous one at that, and I might as well have been there in overalls and a t-shirt.  Most of the party-goers were people I didn't know and they acted as though I were as normal as any of them.  There were only a few people in attendance that I recognized and none of them gave me a surprised look.  For them I was apparently just another casualty of the eighties.  

          This was not like the rowdy parties we used to have.  The crowd was down home Tennessee suburbia on the brink of middle age with kids, nice houses, and two later model cars in the garage.  I nursed a plastic cup of beer as I made my rounds of the house trying to find some of my old friends.  There were only a few of the old faces there.  The folks that I remembered were probably at home with the kids, at other parties, or maybe even at church.   An era had passed and in my silly costume I felt totally out of place at a party where I was politely accepted.

         We left before midnight so my wife and I could be at my parents house to ring in the new year.  Our kids were there with the rest of my family.   My parents and my brother and sisters and their families were all there happily celebrating.   They were surprised to see us come back so early, but happy that we would be there to see in the New Year with them.

          That was the last time I dressed up for a costume party.  Over twenty New Years Eves have passed since that night.  Many things have changed.  Since moving to California I rarely see those Tennessee friends.  Many of our kids have grown and married and have kids of their own.  I've been fortunate to spend many a New Years Eve with my family in Tennessee, but we don't have the parties like we had ten or even five years ago.

           Perhaps one day I'll go back to one of those Tennessee parties with some of my friends--if any of them still have parties.   Maybe I could even go in costume.  I could dress up like myself when I was younger. Of course, I don't have hair like I used to back then.   I guess I should buy a wig, but I think I'll skip the make-up and the over-sized suit.

..

Some Vacation Highlights

          I had almost forgotten how beautiful East Tennessee is in the Spring.   The lush greenness of the landscape is vastly different from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles.  In 1966 my family moved into the house where my mother still lives.  Now after forty some years the trees in the yard have grown considerably.   I spent a good bit of time just strolling through the yard, enjoying the variety of birds, the squirrels, and rabbits. It felt like being in a park or a nature preserve.  There is a peacefulness in this place that I did not realize how much I have missed.

View of my mother's house from the backyard.

         One day my daughters, sons-in-law, and my granddaughters all rode up to Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains.   The national park is less than twenty miles from my mother's house.  We visited one of the old Baptist churches that dates from the early 1800s.  We also stopped by the Cable home site which includes a grist mill which still operates and produces corn meal sold to the tourists.  Two and a half year old Marley delighted in seeing wild turkeys, deer, and a large black bear as we drove around the scenic loop--we all did for that matter.

Two of my daughters, my son-in-law, and the two granddaughters in front of the  Cable Grist Mill.

         It was the family time that really made the difference though.   I had the opportunity to spend time with my youngest grandchild, Lillee, for the second time since she'd been born.  I'd seen her when she was first born, and a couple of times in video chat, but it was nice to be around her and to be able to hold her again.  I see my other granddaughter, Marley, more often, but I never tire of watching her learn and grow.  It seems strange being a grandparent, but it's a wonderful strange.  Four generations under one roof can make for a might joyous occasion.   I wish these times were more often.

Granddaughters Lillee and Marley--different parents, but they could pass for sisters.

           On the first leg of my flight to Tennessee, I briefly met a blogger by the name of Kristi Ryan who has a fine looking blog called A Chick, a Flick, and a Kitchen.   She talks about movies and food--two of my favorite subjects.   Check out her blog and let her know that you heard about it from Arlee at Tossing It Out.

          On Monday I will be continuing the Blogging from A to Z evaluation.  Please stop in and voice your thoughts.

           Do you have vacation plans for the upcoming summer?   Have you visited the Great Smoky Mountains?   Do you find yourself talking about blogging to total strangers sometimes?

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