Interview with George Herbert Jonas and Winifred Jonas

              This is Ruth Hendrickson interviewing Winifred and George Jonas. The date is May 9, 2005. We thank you for doing this for us. And I know neither one of you were born in Harford County, so maybe you want to tell us how you ended up coming to Harford County and spending the rest of your life here. And let me go back and say it is George, but he really prefers to be called Herb. So, from here on after it will be Herb and Wink. [Laughter] O.k.

GJ	O.k., I was born in Bay City, Michigan, and as a child was an acolyte in a church for nine years and while going to high school I worked in a grocery store full time. In April of '35 I just turned seventeen and I enlisted in the Army, and I was sent to a nine-month program at Michigan College and minored in technology, which you specialize in an accelerated college training program. From there in 1946 went to Fort [missing dialogue], Illinois and was sent to APG. When I first got to APG, in Aberdeen, Maryland. When I first got here they put us up in the [missing dialogue] area, which is behind BLL, in tents. It turns out that this is where I am going to work for thirty-five years in the future. [Laughter] The first weekend I came into town, to see what Aberdeen was like, ate at the Aberdeen Restaurant, which is at the South East corner of Route 40 and Bel Air, and had my first western sandwich. [Laughter] And each weekend from then on in the following order, I went to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and New Castle.
RH	Did you get there by train, or did you drive?
GJ	Bus and the train.
RH	O.k.
GJ	In the fall of '46, I went to Fort Bennett, Georgia and went to OCS for a six-month program. And there is where I first ran into racial problems. The town bus that would go out to the post and assuming the bus was heading towards town, hit the gate and stop, then they would shift around in the bus. And from there it did the same thing; it happened on the way back. But while in Columbus, Georgia on the first day, there was an African American friend of mine and we'd sometimes go and get the same bus and so we were walking down on this Georgia street. We were stopped by a policeman and we were told right then and there that either he had to walk in front, behind, or off the curb. And that was my first real experience with a racial issue. So then I graduated at OCS, came to Aberdeen Proving Ground in '47, and the first thing we did on that weekend was to go to the swimming pool, at the Officer's Club. And then again, we had an African American in the crowd and he was told that he could not come into the swimming pool and if he had any objections, he could go see the Commanding General, that he had an open-door policy. So then the Proving Ground was, they had three Officer Clubs.
RH	Oh!
GJ	The first club was the main club. And that was only… white officers could go there. The second club could be a mixture, and the third club was the African American Club. So in getting back to swimming. The officers were required to swim in a swimming pool at the Officer's Club because the water was not suitable is what they were told. But the black officers and the enlisted men had to swim in Swamp Creek.
RH	Oh my!
GJ	My first assignment here was Advanced Schooling for Officers and then from there I was assigned to the Ordinance Board. Everything was fine and dandy and the Ordinance Board is an organization that was strictly under Chief of Ordinance in Washington, DC, and not under the post itself. Then they got a new commander of the Ordinance Board and he's said I will not have anybody who was not a combat soldier. So the group that was within the organization had to be reassigned. I was reassigned to the [missing dialogue] system Officer's Club, which is very non-challenging. [Laughs]
RH	The white officer's club?
GJ	No, the whole thing.
RH	Oh.
GJ	It is not very challenging. Then I was discharged in October '48 and went back home. I stayed back home until January '49 where I returned to Aberdeen and went to the University of Delaware to school. I rode the train everyday to get there. In 1952 I got my degree in Mathematics and went back to APG for a summer reserve duty. Then I went back for my Masters. In 1951 I was in [missing dialogue] at BRL. There I worked for thirty-five years and took charge [missing dialogue] design and target configuration. The job was really good because I made contact with people like [missing dialogue], if you remember your physics [missing dialogue]. I had time with him. I had time with two authors of books I had, [missing dialogue] and Francis Monohan. Then I had time at [missing dialogue] Laboratory, which I wrote a paper later on, which is based on some work he did. I got awards. I got the Research and Development Award of 1970, the bronze medallion. This is a… They have a paper submitted from all Department of Army places and they judge which papers will be given. They go up to West Point and they give the papers, and then there's some industry college heads to decide which are the best of the year. I got third place [missing dialogue]. And I also received an award for the work [missing dialogue]. We were supposed to go to the White House to be given the award. But it turns out there was some crisis, I forget what it was, and so they had the doings out here. And, of course, Jimmy Carter signed the… They said that Jimmy Carter personally signed the letter. So that's my military… Oh, I worked on computing machines in the [missing dialogue], ten different machines. Univac, [missing dialogue], [missing dialogue], CDC, what have you. [Laughs]
RH	I guess you never figured when you were the grocery clerk back in Michigan that this is what you'd end up being.
GJ	No.
RH	What did you think you were going to do when you were a kid?
GJ	The class prophecy they would probably be back in the grocery store. [Laughs]
RH	Is that right? What did you think you would do?
GJ	I thought I'd go to college.
RH	Did you?
GJ	I mean the reason I enlisted in the Army in the first place was because I knew I could get college training.
RH	O.k. What [missing dialogue]
WJ	Well, do you want to know how it started? I was born in Martinsville, Virginia. That's up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. [missing dialogue] and somewhere along the way, we moved down on my family's tobacco farm. I lived there on the tobacco farm for four years. [Laughs] I learned how to hoe tobacco and to string it for barn curing. And then I went to college, I went to [missing dialogue] College and then I went to Furman. I graduated in Mathematics and Science. When I graduated from Furman I had… The president of our college got a letter from Aberdeen Proving Ground. If you have any Mathematic majors, we will give them a job. So I applied for the job and that's how I got here because of a recommendation from my school. I didn't even fill in a form fifty-seven, I didn't fill out anything. And I just got a letter and it said we'll give you a job. I didn't have to go through a lot of things. And so I came in July '46 and [missing dialogue] trip into Aberdeen. I came in and of course I came from a little town and then I come from a farm so it wasn't that little. But Aberdeen, you came into the train station, and you wondered where you'd go next and they told me I could spend the night at the [missing dialogue] Hotel. Now the [missing dialogue] Hotel is a Harvest House is at the front of it and if you look at that building you will see this big old house back behind there. And I had a room that must have cost three or four dollars. And the bathroom was down the hall and I was kind of worried about that because I never done anything where I had to run down the hall in the middle of the night or whatever. And so I came to work here and I liked it, cause I figured that I was going to get me a job and was going to make fifty dollars. So they offered me a job for twenty-three hundred dollars a year, which is great pay and within eight months to a year and a half, I could go up to three thousand dollars. And I thought I was going to be real rich. So I went to work in the computing lab as a Mathematician T-1. Now there is something interesting about that that I would like to tell you. There was a woman, an Astronomer who had [missing dialogue] the war from Harvard and as soon as the war was over she went back to Harvard and she became head of the Astronomy Lab. Things were not going… In those days they did not hire women as professional [missing dialogue], they got [missing dialogue], [missing dialogue] professional. So she refused to come so she broke the rating thing just by doing that. That was interesting that that happened. It was very, very hard to be considered a professional, I guess, if you were a woman. So I hadn't been there very long and at that point they were getting ready to bring the ENIAC, which was the electronic name for the computer which was the all purpose, all electronic computer in the country that had ever been invented. And so my boss said there's going to be a vacancy for one Mathematician Programmer on that machine, so I'm going to go to the boss and suggest that you get that job. So in the middle of '46 or the first of '47 they brought the ENIAC down from Philadelphia. It was invented and designed at the University of Pennsylvania by Doctor [missing dialogue] Eckard and Doctor John [missing dialogue]. And they were just testing it then because they were inventing that machine to do firing tables for the firings that they were doing. Anyway they were making the firing tables for cannons and guns and stuff for them to use overseas for our military men. So all they had done in Philadelphia is that they had tested it, they had put one program on it with the firing table, a sample. And then they brought it down here and it costs fifty thousand dollars to bring.
GJ	Five hundred thousand dollars.
WJ	Five hundred thousand dollars, right, to bring that machine down here and set it up in [missing dialogue]. It was on like one half of a floor, so it was the only place that had any air conditioning in [missing dialogue] room. Because they had those IBM cards, a reader and printer that you put you're input in and got your output out on that. It had 18,000 [missing dialogue]. I guess it had enough [missing dialogue]. So I got to be the one- person…six women had worked as program operators in Philadelphia and two of them didn't want to come down here, and so I got their job and I was lucky.
RH	Did you know anything about computers at that time?
WJ	No, I hadn't even heard of the word "computer". The only thing I knew about it was that people were using in those days were hand computers [missing dialogue] and [missing dialogue] and Monroe's. They were making those fire tables by hand and send them off to the war. It was fun working on the ENIAC, a lot of fun. People came from all over the United States to see it, even people from [missing dialogue]. They brought all their problems. It was a 24-7, twenty-four hours, seven days a week we worked on it. It just kept [missing dialogue] problems. It had a lot of problems and there was a Mathematician on it and also you wouldn't want to be with the engineer and you stood beside the machine and you would have to look for trouble. [missing dialogue] got lost you could see these tubes that light up and one would go out and everybody was standing there trying to figure out what is this problem. [missing dialogue] before it would run, but then it would run and run well and pull out all the data. I got to… I was the main programmer for the German [missing dialogue] after World War II and took them to White Sands and they use the [missing dialogue] System and they reduced them down and [missing dialogue]. One of them that were fired, went over into Arizona somewhere. But anyway we had such important people that came here. President Sherman came one Saturday to look at it. He talked to us [missing dialogue]. Of course they really had to make the place safe for him. They had other people like Doctor [missing dialogue] that came from Princeton and his wife. And from [missing dialogue], Doctor [missing dialogue] who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics since Madam Curry. Doctor [missing dialogue] came here. A lot of them came at night. [missing dialogue] people were here with the Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb [missing dialogue]. I even got to go to [missing dialogue]. Three of us went out there. [missing dialogue], but that's another story. But anyway Doctor [missing dialogue] nuclear strategic stuff. It was an interesting time.
GJ	[missing dialogue] wrote a hundred books.
RH	Was he a Physicist? 
GJ	He was [missing dialogue] Institute.
RH	O.k.
WJ	And one of his books was on the basis of Doctor [missing dialogue].
RH	Did the community know about this? Did they have any idea that this totally new kind of thing was at Aberdeen and how important it was?
WJ	Only the people who worked in BRL, a few of them, you know. Because of work was going on in BRL in every direction. It was a very, very… It had a lot of brilliant people there who had come from everywhere, who were always going to leave. No one was ever going to stay in Aberdeen when they first came. I mean you're here to here and they were always having a habit of going somewhere. And a lot of people did go. They started computers labs all over the country. They started in Pittsburgh, then they went to Canada, and then they went everywhere. It was the grandfather of all computers, you know.
RH	Who was instrumental in getting them to come to Aberdeen, do you know?
WJ	It was that they wanted something fast that would compute firing tables. 
RH	That's all it was used for in the beginning, right?
WJ	Yes, just basically, not very much at first. They did Red Stone; they did everything up here. They did all the stuff for the missals and [missing dialogue]. By then [missing dialogue] coming more computers on…The Edback was next and it was being done and then the Irdvac came. And then after that they were out across the country doing the kind of computers that Herb worked on, because I wasn't there after 1955. So I had a really good time. I loved working there. It was fun, and knowing some of the people and staff. And 1955 was when I resigned to start having children.
RH	Well you missed something in between. You missed how you met Herb. We have to hear that story.
WJ	Yes that would be interesting. You see there was like nowhere to live hardly in Aberdeen when you first came. And they had these two long barracks out in Baldwin Manor. One of them was, they had women's, you know, for women and the other one was for men. They were across the roads from each other. And then they had a little recreation hall down there at Baldwin Manor right on the railroad track. And you came to a, they had a little square dance or something down there and they had a pool table and that's about all they had. All the young people would kind of gather in there.
GJ	It's [missing dialogue] a friend at the post to come and meet this group. And so the first place I saw her was leaning over the pool table shooting pool. [Laughter]
WJ	We were young then. And so from then on out we were…
RH	And what year did you get married?
WJ	In 1959.
GJ	'49.
WJ	Oh '49. [Laughter] It was fifty-five years ago.
RH	O.k. So, after you resigned is when you started having your family?
WJ	Yes. When we got married at first we lived in one of those little Baldwin Manor Apartments. It was the last building next to the railroad track and every time if it sleeted or iced and the electric train would go by, it would be daylight arching on that thing. And so we stayed there for the first part of '59. And then we moved down to Perryman across from the post office in Perryman upstairs in an apartment. And it was along the same road as the tracks and you couldn't hear. There were a lot of trains ran in those days because there were no cars. I remember putting my name on a list to buy a convertible because I wanted a convertible. And I did that in '46 when I was so rich cause I was making so much money. And they put my name on the list and I was 800 on the list if you wanted a new car.
RH	Oh my.
WJ	Of course by the time they got it, Herb and I were engaged and I said I wanted a convertible.
RH	So you never got your convertible.
WJ	I never got the convertible. So we went down to Perryman and stayed there until Larry was born and then we moved to Aberdeen on Rogers Street and the kids grew up on Rogers Street.
RH	What was there to do in Aberdeen back then when you were first married? Was there anything?
WJ	Well before we were married we would go to the diner there.
GJ	The Mayflower.
WJ	In the Mayflower. We didn't have much money so we would drink a coke all night and sit and talk to each other.
RH	Now was Aberdeen still segregated then?
WJ	Oh yes very much segregated, yes. And they didn't integrate the schools until '63. Didn't they?
GJ	Somewhere along that area.
WJ	That's another story we'll talk about.
GJ	How about Bogart's, something to do in Aberdeen.
WJ	Well when we came to Aberdeen Bogart's, do you remember the store?
RH	The furniture store.
WJ	Yes, the one that burned down. What they did was they got a microwave to sell and they wanted people to see it and so people would go down and look through the window and they microwaved a hotdog in one minute. And we were all so impressed. We were watching it. Another time they had a TV.
GJ	They had a TV. in the window and people were outside looking at this old TV., vintage, I should say. And it was for one of the championship fights.
RH	Was the U.S.O. in Aberdeen at the time.
WJ	Yes, there was a U.S.O. That's why Herb was a U.S.O. fan always.
GJ	They had buses from different places bringing girls in for dancing. That's another thing. That was at the ARC Building. The ARC Building is where we had our…
WJ	Had our reception.
GJ	Yes. That's also where the library was at that time. When I first came here there was some place on Bel Air Avenue, I think where the Western Union Place was, I don't remember where it was.
RH	Right.
GJ	And I went in there to look for a book or something and I happened to mention John Hopkins.
WJ	John Hopkins, you say.
GJ	The lady who was in charge said, "Johns Hopkins". [Laughter]
WJ	I don't know whether you want her name, but that was Mrs. Frank Baker. She started the library system, I guess all over Harford County.
RH	I think so.
WJ	Because she had one, like I mentioned, at the Baldwin Manor, down at that recreation place and had another one. Then they had one at the ARC Building. They kept moving the library around. By the time my son came along, he was like five years old, Mrs. Baker was still there and he would check out the automotive books, [missing dialogue] for years and years because he wants that kind of thing. He checked it out so many times that Mrs. Baker finally just told him to take it. [Laughter]
RH	Now where did he go to school when he was on Rogers Street?
WJ	Where did he go to school? He went the first year to the very first year of Harford Day School up in Bel Air. But after that we really didn't have the money to pay any more to go there so he went to Aberdeen Elementary the first three years. And then came along Bakersfield School which is wonderful. And by that time when Billy went to school, they both went to Bakersfield. And then [missing dialogue], did too there. But it took them a long time to [missing dialogue] with that school.
RH	Where was Aberdeen Elementary?
WJ	Aberdeen Elementary was the old Aberdeen High School.
RH	Oh, the old high school.
GJ	On Route 40.
WJ	See there was no Route 95 over there, and all of the trucks that went from Philadelphia to Baltimore stopped at that light by that school. And those trucks screeched in there, and the teachers literally had to stop talking when the trucks would come rolling in there.
RH	Wow.
WJ	I mean it was one crowded highway where that school was. We were going to discuss Aberdeen a little, what it looked like.
RH	Oh yes, what did it look like?
WJ	What did Aberdeen look like when we first came here? Well for years and years it stayed the same until maybe the K-Mart, I think. The main street had… Of course they were making a fortune off of the soldiers during World War II. They was Barnett's Drugstore on the corner that sold all the bus tickets which was a fabulous amount for them, because buses were coming in and out of there taking people out to the trains. That was the only way you could get out, almost if you came. And if you came you always wanted to leave because for kids there wasn't much to do in there. But the first year I came to Aberdeen, I think I stayed here two weekends because I had all these relatives in New Jersey. All my relatives had moved from the South to New Jersey because at that time, during the depression, there were no jobs, so they all moved there. Except for my mother and she stayed in Virginia. That corner had Barnett's Drugstore, and the other corner had a big old house where the gas station is.
RH	Oh.
WJ	One of those big houses and then they had that tiny little thing that's there now that they've torn down the rest of it. It's a business [missing dialogue].
RH	Was the big house apartments or rooms?
WJ	Yes. They used every house and every room in Harford County that they could to rent to people, because there was nowhere to stay. When I first came, I stayed in that Baldwin Manor in a room for about half a year. And they we moved over to Osborne Road with friends of mine. I lived with this lady who had all the rooms she rented to us. That was the only way you had to live. And there were no cars; you had to take the bus.
RH	Was there a bus that would go back and forth to the Proving Ground?
WJ	We had the Jitter Bug.
RH	Oh, o.k.
WJ	The little train came in and out. And it came in and out every half an hour. It was constant in and out.
RH	Did you have to pay for it?
WJ	No, it was free. It was called the "Jitter Bug".
GJ	[missing dialogue] because trains use to come in at two or three o'clock in the morning and people would get back to the Post.
WJ	And the cabs down there, people were making a fortune but only because they put eight soldiers in every trip they made to the Proving Ground and back.
GJ	The cabs were interesting too because they had metal fences for the different areas on the Post. So you would line up in those different routes [Ruth talking over him] They were that many people going [missing dialogue] transportation.
WJ	Because there were thousands and thousands of GI's because all those barracks were full of GI's.
RH	Now where was the main gate at that time? Was it down by where the fire station was? Was it that far down?
GJ	It's [missing dialogue] now, not the one over on Chesapeake Road but the one in the middle.
RH	So that was the main gate then.
GJ	Yes.
WJ	And there was one fence around if you worked in D&T, [missing dialogue] it was called then and then it was [missing dialogue] when I went back to work out there. The gate was way back where they were testing things. But eventually they moved the gate up in front of [missing dialogue] and then eventually moved it in front of DRL.
GJ	This is what they called the industrial area. There's a gate up there.
WJ	They were testing day and night out in that area. They were killing people too, but we never knew about it until six months later when somebody got killed. The rumor was that somebody had died. You [missing dialogue] because they was really high powered stuff going on.
GJ	There was one plane that crashed into the water. I think that only one survived out of nine or ten.
WJ	But you didn't hear about it, even if you were working over in BRL. BRL was locked because when we went in somebody would be working and they would have to unlock the door or you would have to go down. When I was working on night shift…We worked night and day all the time because people were bringing problems from all over the United States to the ENIAC. So it was a real interesting time to work there, I kind of hated to quit at that point. [Laughter]
GJ	Way, way back there [missing dialogue], the Univac.
WJ	When I was to see the Univac?
GJ	Yes.
WJ	Oh. Yes, I saw the first Univac on the [missing dialogue] in Philadelphia. Because Doctor [missing dialogue] and Doctor [missing dialogue] who had invented the ENIAC had decided to start a company called the Univac Company. They didn't like the fact that IBM had all those computing machines. They had a whole room of the [missing dialogue] equipment out on the [missing dialogue]. We had the collator, we had the key punch and they were getting lots of money every month. They really had themselves a business.
GJ	They rented, they had a rental situation.
RH	Oh.
WJ	Except they rented their [missing dialogue] and the printer to the ENIAC for one dollar a year. That's because the cards went in the ENIAC and the cards came out of the output.
RH	[missing dialogue] in place of the ENIAC?
WJ	Oh yes. It supposedly cost five hundred thousand dollars to build it and it cost five hundred thousand dollars to remove it from… because it had all those tubes in it. It had eighteen thousand tubes, of those big old tubes in it.
RH	How long did it take to put it together when they got it here?
WJ	When they got it here? They brought it here in January of 1947 and they had already transferred me out of there. I was glad because I was learning about it. We were sort of like engineers and mathematicians, both, because you sort of how to go and learn everything about it. We knew what a [missing dialogue] would do and how you got in there and we went around with marking tape and put these tubes in and out. It was an interesting time.
GJ	They also used her for her nose when something smelled like it was burning. [Laughter]
WJ	[missing dialogue] something's burning. It was really an interesting time to be there. And eventually… Every time you put a problem on this machine it was [missing dialogue]. So if you went in around this room, this big room, a lot bigger than this room, and you had to wire in what you had… Cause all it could do was add and subtract.
GJ	It had a square rooter.
WJ	It had a square rooter but you did it with adding and subtracting, naturally. That's all it did. Big, huge [missing dialogue]. I'll have to get a picture and show it to you. It was an interesting time to be there.
RH	When you first encountered it, did you have any idea what this meant for the future?
WJ	Well, once in a while someone would say, "This is the beginning." And it is because it's the granddaddy of the whole thing, you know. Every computer that has even been built worked off of it, even those little hand computers. People thought they had something big when you had a [missing dialogue], or something that you could add and subtract numbers. And the first thing I ever did when I got there was to get a firing table, to do just one thing with all of the stuff. I mean a hand computer, you see how long it took to do that kind of stuff. So this was so fast considering, so like this was just a drop in the bucket, to what we have now. I mean we can do a hundred million times more on the computers that we have now, than any [missing dialogue]. So, it was it.
RH	And that's now in the Smithsonian, correct?
WJ	There is some of it. And there is some of it in Philadelphia, and there is some at IBM. People have got pieces of it everywhere.
RH	Oh, so it's not the whole thing in the Smithsonian.
GJ	No.
WJ	It's just two panels.
RH	Oh, o.k.
WJ	Because these were sections around.
GJ	You know Maryland has some pieces of it and the museum has a piece.
WJ	And the [missing dialogue] has some of it. What they did was they decided to put a program on it just like a computer is programmed. And so when they did we all wired in a program. Because when you went in you literally wired in the program from the start. Every program you had, you wired in. Like I had the B-2 Rocket and that was my program. And I did all the programming for the B-2 Rocket that they fired in Germany. They got the B-2's over the white sands and fired them over here. And that was the beginning of all the rocket programs.
RH	And who taught you how to do this?
WJ	Well Doctor [missing dialogue] was one person from up there. You had all the manuals.
RH	Oh, o.k.
WJ	I don't know where they have to go, to the Historical Society or somewhere, because everybody had brought me manuals over the years, because they know I'm saving them. And you had these big old manuals you had to read and it was a big fun time.
GJ	Getting back to where is the ENIAC now. We took our grandchild to the Smithsonian and went into the computer exhibit. And low and behold we looked and there was Winnie's picture. [Laughs]
WJ	Yeah, the four of us was up there. And Red Stone and every missile that has been fired always has been done at Aberdeen. I mean they have done all the initial, everything on them. And everybody was out here in the world getting ready to try and get their next computers going.
RH	You probably never dreamed you'd be doing that when you were back tying tobacco, did you?
WJ	No, I did not. I really didn't like doing that. [Laughter] I was a stringer and I was fast. I could do five hundred, six a day.
GJ	When I was working in the grocery store we use to add all the groceries in a sack with a pencil.
WJ	It's just such a different world. We have lived through a different world. [missing dialogue] It was a great time. And the Univac is a [missing dialogue], you know, [missing dialogue].  [missing dialogue] because one of the girls that worked on the ENIAC up in Philadelphia, when she transferred down here, eventually when Doctor [missing dialogue]'s wife died, she ended up marrying him, and they came down to our wedding. We had our reception in the ARC Building, and we got married in the Catholic Church over here.
SIDE TWO
WJ	It was a good time.
RH	Did the inventors of the ENIAC make any money on it, or the kind of money that they probably should have?
WJ	Well, I guess he made some money on the Univac. I think he made some money on it, because they got stuck in the [missing dialogue]. They had a big argument about it somehow. I think they had a lot of court stuff over it. He was just a professor at a college.
GJ	He was mathematics and Eckerd was an engineer.
WJ	A brilliant engineer, I think. They just wanted to [missing dialogue] IBM. So, it was a good time. And of course [missing dialogue] good times too [missing dialogue]. I'd like to say one thing about the ENIAC. Doctor [missing dialogue], who was [missing dialogue] of mine in Pittsburgh, he took the manuals and he programmed the problem of the [missing dialogue]. The thing that was interesting about him, he had his hands blown off at Cornell in a chemistry lab when he was a student. And he would drive his car from Pittsburgh to over here in three hours and a half, or something. That was the fastest thing I ever heard in my life. He programmed the problem and brought it over here by reading the manuals because he was so brilliant. And he was so interesting to know and he brought all those mining problems over here. And he would put them on the ENIAC and away we would go. [missing dialogue] things sometimes they'd run and you'd have two weeks [missing dialogue].
GJ	Just to mention all these people like Herman [missing dialogue] and people like that. They would go, we would do the night shift, and we would go to the diner and eat.
WJ	And we got to know them real, real well.
RH	And somebody had a clue as to how brilliant these people were, I'm sure.
WJ	We kind of knew; the other people didn't know.
RH	[Talking over top of Winnie]
WJ	These were brilliant people that came from all over the country here. And it was fun to know them.
RH	But you must have hated to leave. [talking same time as Winnie] to have kids, but…
WJ	I wondered what would have happened if I would have stayed. I would have stayed on the computers and [missing dialogue]. I don't know what I would have done. 
RH	At this point, were they teaching Computer Science anywhere?
GJ	Not at that time.
WJ	We had some courses at work just to help us. You know, as a new computer would come around. But it was just on and off, you know. [Laughs] [missing dialogue] So at that point, Herb at the same time, you need to tell her what you did along the way. Because what he did, he was over there, he went to school, but then he…
GJ	[missing dialogue]
WJ	What he did [missing dialogue] working on…
GJ	As much as I can. [Laughter]
RH	[missing dialogue]
GJ	As much as I can.
WJ	O.k.
GJ	You left BRL in 1955.
WJ	Right. I started going back to school to the University of Delaware and got my Master's Degree in Education and Mathematics. And then I went taught at the Harford Day School.
RH	Was that located the same place as it is now?
WJ	No. [missing dialogue] The first Harford Day School was in the black school in Bel Air.
RH	Oh.
WJ	It now belongs to the County. But that was the black school and since they integrated the schools, it was closed. Harford Day School was there for one year.
RH	And who started Harford Day School?
WJ	[missing dialogue] Cameron and Sarah [missing dialogue] and a few others. Mrs. [missing dialogue].
GJ	Mrs. Fuller and Mr. Fuller.
WJ	And Sydney Fuller and her husband was the head of the big labs at the Post. I think Mrs. Green was involved. She was involved in it. Those were probably the first…
GJ	And Kitty Reese.
WJ	Oh yes, Kitty Reese. She just died.
RH	Do you think this was a reaction to people not wanting their kids to go to integrated schools?
GJ	From what I gathered more they wanted [everyone talking at once] You could learn so much more in small classes. You had the parents putting out money therefore there was a little extra pressure on the children.
RH	I mean [missing dialogue] getting kind of [missing dialogue]. Was there a lot of resentment when the schools finally did become integrated?
WJ	You mean this school?
RH	No, any school in Harford County.
WJ	In our County? I think it took so long, because you know the law [missing dialogue] six or eight or something. What they were doing here, they were going one grade at a time.
RH	Oh.
WJ	And then the NAACP said that won't do. And so at that point they said that it's got to be…
GJ	You ought to tell her what happened with the task force we had.
WJ	Oh yes that's a good time to talk about the task force.
GJ	They were going to redistrict the schools and the boundary was going to be north of Bel Air and Aberdeen Proper there.
WJ	All the people that lived in the town.
GJ	This is where it is getting set up because the people had a poll with the Board.
WJ	Their kids [missing dialogue].
GJ	Because they said they didn't want their children riding busses over two railroad tracks. It was dangerous. Of course the people up here, above Upper [missing dialogue] Road [missing dialogue].
WJ	People [missing dialogue].
GJ	Carsin's Run and south of [missing dialogue] and also through [missing dialogue] Crossroads.
WJ	Our kids would be going all away over two railroad tracks.
GJ	Past the schools and as it turns out our task force was for them, the Ripkins.
WJ	The Ripkins and the…
GJ	[missing dialogue]
WJ	And a few other people were on that committee. And who appointed them was…
GJ	Mrs. [missing dialogue].
WJ	[missing dialogue] They decided [missing dialogue] one through three would be Bakerfield, three through six would be Hillsdale. And that's what they kept doing. And that's the only way they got that done, but we won't tell about that committee. [missing dialogue] the committee. And so it worked fine for the elementary. You see they were going to start out with first grade to integrate and then they were going to integrate the second grade and then move that way. Sometime in the sixties before it all actually came together, they had a real thing at Aberdeen High School around '63. The [missing dialogue] was up there, Billy I guess was in the eighth grade and I had told him that if anything started to go to somebody's house and stay [missing dialogue].
RH	Didn't the Freedom Riders come through Aberdeen around then?
WJ	Maybe that's when it happened. Something happened. But they were sold on the uptake of integrating schools here.
GJ	I experienced the same thing in the University of Delaware. The undergraduate school was completely white.
RH	Oh really?
GJ	And the graduate school was mixed because there was no graduate school… They had the school over on the Eastern Shore and stuff like that.
RH	And they went to the same school?
GJ	Yes. But they had a state school for blacks and then…
RH	I hadn't thought about colleges being segregated.
WJ	You know I came from North Carolina and I had seen too much of that stuff. Our bus would ride up the road, a school bus when I was in high school, and half empty and the black children who lived on the next farm to us had to walk two miles over to the hard road, get on the bus and go all the way to [missing dialogue], North Carolina which was fifteen miles to school.
RH	Wow.
WJ	Wasn't that wrong? It was so wrong.
RH	Did you… This is something that I thought about before. I mean when you were in college as a woman in Math, this had to be unusual at the time. Did you ever feel that people, especially when you came to Aberdeen, that they just weren't accepting you in the same way as a professional woman as they were accepting the men?
WJ	When I was at Furman all the men were off to war. 
RH	Oh.
WJ	We had three people in my senior math classes and they were all women.
RH	Oh my.
WJ	And two of them went and taught school, but I decided I didn't want to teach school. But I did end up teaching school. [Laughs]
RH	What about the professionals and the people that came working on this computer. You have never felt that they didn't think you were quite as capable since you were a woman?
WJ	Well, I don't think so because I was kind of new. [Laughter] You know these very brilliant people came, men and woman, mathematicians from all over the country. They just treated you like you were…I mean they knew you. I mean Doctor [missing dialogue] stood at the blackboard and explained this machine to us in such language that it was so easily understood to you, you know?
RH	Uh huh.
WJ	It was a wonderful feeling. I guess we were kind of young and our brain maybe had been more willing to accept things. It was great; it was wonderful.
GJ	Doctor [missing dialogue] has written a bookcase, like encyclopedias of mathematics. There were volumes and it shows you how great he is.
RH	How long did you stay at Harford Day?
WJ	Eleven years. After I had my last child, I went to school. Then I had decided that I was going to teach school, I can do that. So I went and took courses at Delaware and got my Master's Degree. So that I could, and I was taking at the same time, the headmistress over there, Mrs. Drumfield, she was [missing dialogue]. They and Rachel [missing dialogue]. Did you know her?
RH	No.
WJ	She taught at the Aberdeen High School and had worked for BRL. They talked me into going over there before I finished getting my Master's Degree.
RH	And did you like that?
WJ	Oh, I loved it! It was children and they were wonderful. If they didn't do what you wanted the to do, the parents came right in there and made them. I mean they had, they really truly, the children at Harford Day School, were really truly no smarter and no brighter than the children in the public schools. It's just that they're smaller classes and they got more attention. And then they could do well. Because if you looked at what came out of the public schools here, [missing dialogue] public schools [missing dialogue] I would have taught over there, only because it was convenient. It was convenient for me there because I got out of school in time to get Lizzie home and Lizzie was the only one in middle school. She went over there to school from fifth to eighth. And then she went two years to John Carroll and then she went to Brenmar. And then she went to Georgia. It was good place to teach.
RH	And what made you decide to go back then to the Proving Ground?
WJ	Money. [Laughs] I mean I just went back to the Proving Ground and made three times as much money as I was making teaching school. And we needed it because Lizzie was going to Georgia to vet school. We would have survived but we had more help. I loved going back to the Proving Ground. I went back to the Proving Ground and worked on another computer and became Assistant Manager on it. That computer in that big room was nothing like this little computer in this room. But we were doing ten introductions for about two years at least. Everything on it was for the Proving Ground until they got another system going. We did all the stuff for the Bradley, and the inland tank and for all those things that were being done out there behind the gate. And at one point behind the gate they were doing seventy percent of the testing for the whole United States.
RH	Wow.
WJ	They really were busy doing some of those because of those wars and stuff.
RH	Now you both were really busy at work, when did you become community activists?
WJ	When our kids grew up.
GJ	Well we had a little incident in between. We knew a family that had a child who wasn't going to school and was staying home. And we caused a [missing dialogue]. They called the county and got him transportation to school and he got an education.
WJ	I think I was out taking up collections [missing dialogue]. I was supposed to collect money for Red Cross and Blue Cross and whatever there was, everything. And then I [missing dialogue] was sleeping in a bed, in a [missing dialogue] that the neighbors around him had ripped rags on. And that just made me feel so bad that I just came home and called everyone I knew. How can this situation exist? And after that, other people got into it and got on the school boards and things like that. Those are things that kind of you knew were right, or wasn't right.
GJ	We also had a lady that was very sick and we tried of course to get her in the hospital and try to keep her in the hospital. [Everyone talking at once.]
WJ	She was a black lady.
GJ	She was alone and as sick as she was she couldn't be at home. They finally took care of that.
WJ	There's just so many people in the world that need help, and still.
RH	Oh, yeah.
WJ	And still. So we sort of got started that way.
GJ	Then we retired June 3, 1987, both the same day.
WJ	And we were really ready to do it.
RH	You haven't got there yet, have you?
WJ	[Laughs] No, we haven't.
RH	Well, let's get to the meat of this. How did you get involved with Gravel Hill, and tell what that whole fight is.
WJ	Well, since 1989 that started. We had two years of boy scouts, girl scouts, and all those other things. A neighbor called up and said, "[missing dialogue]?" And they lived behind the church, and there was going to be a meeting. And they had already had one meeting. So we sort of got involved in it and went to the meeting and [missing dialogue]. This church at that point was 150 years old, a black church. And they were going to put clay, mountains and rubble in it. That was the plan. And now it's like a little church on a hill. And when it got finished it was going to be a little church in the valley.
GJ	It's the highest point around here. It's two hundred and thirty feet up. That's what they wrote on their church bulletin, they had a church on the hill. The landfill was dumping rubble 25 feet on the church building. Not the property, but the building itself. And there's a historical cemetery down there with eight Civil War veterans.
RH	Wow.
WJ	So we went to the first meeting out at the church. And I don't know whether we'd ever been in a church before.
GJ	Nope.
WJ	I mean our children were off with their children and we'd all been working and everybody had been working and trying to get your children through school. So from thereon we just moved out. Everybody moved out into whatever we could find out. How you could stop a politician's son and a politician from putting a rubble-fill right in that villa of this black community. This black community, you know, was one of the first Freedman Communities in the state of Maryland. Evidently they taught these people who moved in here those many years ago that the land wasn't very valuable because it was all rocky and hilly and stuff like that. And these servants who worked for these rich people in Baltimore City, who had given this land to these people. Which is interesting that they had done that and they had all come over and put up their little houses and they had their children, and carried their water from one stream from the other side of the road. And then gradually after they got a little bit of money, and a lot of them worked at Perry Point, the black people did. And they had come from West Virginia and places like that because evidently Perry Point went down to West Virginia some time during the war looking for people to come and work for Perry Point.
RH	I remember Mr. Hank telling me he got recruited.
WJ	That's right and almost all of them did in that area. And that's the way it kind of started. How it became this nice little black community. And we really didn't know them. We've lived here since '59, twenty years almost. We all got well acquainted when we got started and we met in the black church. And it's a wonderful little church over there.
GJ	We knew the people on this end, three or four friends at this end, but not all the way down the road. [Ruth talking over him]
RH	And what's the status, I mean this is [missing dialogue], the status of the situation today?
WJ	Well we're getting there. In 1989 when they decided to put that rubble field there, they were suppose to go for an exception. 	Because you just couldn't do that without going through the proper procedure. Instead they didn't, they just went to MDE, you know, to the Department of the Environment and said we want a permit to put a rubble field in here. And they bypassed all the steps. Well that's where we are now. They're back now where they're trying to get an exception because you could not put a rubble field on agricultural land unless you had an exception to that. And so that's what we're getting to do now. We're going to have twelve more hearings beginning…
GJ	May 25th.
WJ	May 25th, which will run right on into August, or past August and see if they can get an exception. They have come in for seven exceptions. You see you are supposed to have things like buffers. Well, the plans are to put it right next to the property owned by the people. You are supposed to have wetland things. From [missing dialogue] to fill the streams, and that type of thing. And they're not going to do that.
RH	What do you think you have learned the most from that whole fight, even though it's not over? What have you learned most?
WJ	We have learned, but we have some really good friends. We have learned that people really, people that you didn't know and that you didn't bother know, are really good friends. Some of the best friends we've ever had in our lives. They live around here. We have a community. We didn't have a community before, we just lived in a house.
GJ	We didn't mention this about the Gravel Hill Fighters getting sued for two point seven million dollars. Should I give the names? [missing dialogue]
WJ	Her house was on the other side of the rubble field.
GJ	[missing dialogue]
WJ	Who was down on the south-side, no east-side.
GJ	And us.
WJ	And us.
GJ	We had a meeting at the church with [missing dialogue]. They all wanted to go see the property and they asked us to go on the property with them, which they should not have done. But they told us, so it's right. So that was one of the charges they had because we were interfering with business and trespassing. Anyhow, we had Senator James as a lawyer and also Karin Quinn, ACLU, who worked for ACLU. Karin Quinn worked on the Baldez situation [missing dialogue].
WJ	He was a top lawyer two or three years ago in the United States.
GJ	Yes.
WJ	Trial lawyer.
GJ	Trial lawyer. They took us and Senator James sued them for fifteen million. [Laughs]
RH	[missing dialogue] nothing happened.
WJ	Oh yeah.
GJ	They settled for forty thousand dollars for the four of us. But we took our money, after we paid the lawyer…
WJ	They gave us eight thousand dollars after we paid Mary Dulaney about four thousand.
GJ	And the rest of it we put back in the fight.
WJ	We just put it right back on because we already had spent that much money anyway making trips.
RH	Right, right.
WJ	And so we're right back where they should have been in 1989 asking for a exception.
GJ	You know we've been to the appeal court in Annapolis three times.
RH	Do you think it will finally end?
GJ	They'll be back in the appeal court. [Laughs] 
WJ	We do think it will ever end until the land is bought. As long as those two people who own it now, have it, and as long as they can get some free help or whatever. [missing dialogue] a lawyer and he's got some percent in it. As long as that happens we think they're just waiting for someone to die. And we are too.
RH	Just waiting for someone to get tired.
GJ	He's got notoriety because the CNN team here did six hours of filming and Charles [missing dialogue] program that's on radio was here and interviewed a couple of us. And they put the program on the Underground Railroad in Cincinnati. The Underground Railroad in the Historic, National Historic came here.
RH	Who is the lawyer that's helping you now with this?
WJ	Doctor  [missing dialogue]. She's from the law school.
GJ	Before that was…
WJ	Maryland Law School. There was a Patricia [missing dialogue], and she had to come all the way from Prince George's County because we tried to get a lawyer here in Harford County but they're all kind of (can I say this?) [missing dialogue] to go. [Laughter]
GJ	Well the thing is that the companies around here use the lawyers and various lawyers, and so there is conflict of interest all the way around.
WJ	That's what they want to call it all the time. So, we are still going to keep on fighting. That's the way it goes. 
RH	Now, I mean you've done so many things, what do you think is the most important thing you've done?
WJ	It's probably to preserve that church, and for the sake of the people, the people who live there. Because we could have moved. We didn't have to stay here. Fifteen years ago, I was about ready to move. I was even thinking about it.
RH	Would you go out with us to the church and let Doug takes some pictures out there?
WJ	Oh, I would like to.
GJ	The other thing, just one of the things that happened, the white area over here and the black combined.
WJ	We didn't know there was a color, and that's nice, isn't it? Because they are such nice people. I mean you never find nicer people than the Hayes, or the rest of them who lived around there.
GJ	Denise Perkins.
RH	Maybe you're right. Maybe that's the good that will come out of this.
GJ	Yes.
WJ	It is the best part of it.
RH	It did form a community.
WJ	I mean because before you had a [missing dialogue] of people over there. You had [missing dialogue] over here, too. All the people over here, it was just like unreal. And another good thing that has come out of it is this piece of land right down here is in farm preservation. And they can't ever use that land right there. And that's a good thing.
GJ	And that borders with the landfill.
WJ	It touches right onto the landfill.
RH	The development of the Parks and Rec [missing dialogue] out there.
WJ	Oh yes. Herb has to take a lot of credit for that one. [Laughs] You don't know [missing dialogue], do you?
GJ	Our son went to planning and zoning to look up [missing dialogue] property. [Everyone talking at the same time]. He came all the way from New Mexico to do this. He came back in and said, "You know there is a park land over there?" So we started checking the parkland. [missing dialogue] They said that if the people in this area would pay for the equipment, they could have a park there. [Winifred talking over Herb] This was back when they first got the park.
WJ	Seventies, I think.
GJ	Seventy something.
WJ	They didn't have money.
GJ	So we got together with [missing dialogue] and the Bishops.
WJ	And Sylvia Hudson.
GJ	And Sylvia Hudson. We got [missing dialogue] and told her and she said she didn't even know parkland existed. So she said we will do something about it. And so she put up some money and the state put up eighty thousand dollars and so for a hundred twenty thousand dollars they did the initial work. And then I don't know where the next bit of money came from but the next bit money was for the equipment.
WJ	And they got…
GJ	What's there, not counting the playground equipment was a hundred and eighty thousand dollars that they put into it.
RH	And tell us who it is named after.
WJ	That's correct. It's named after… What's his name?
GJ	Hilton.
WJ	Hilton, and he was a Civil War, a black Civil War veteran who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. And he lived right across, in front of that park. Isn't that wonderful? The people got really mad because they wanted that park named after Herman [missing dialogue], but they didn't understand, the people that lived [missing dialogue], they didn't understand how important it was to name it after  [missing dialogue].
GJ	Parks and Recreation said in the future they are going to put a building there, a concession stand and equipment storage and they will call it the Herman Hague Building.
RH	Oh, I didn't know that.
WJ	That's nice too.
RH	That's nice.
GJ	If the building ever comes up [missing dialogue]. If they remember.
RH	Well, did we forget to talk about anything that you wanted to talk about?
GJ	Well, there are Boy Scouts and Little League and [missing dialogue]. You got the Den Mother of the Year for Harford District and another year I got the Scout Master of the Year.
WJ	Yes, that was in between. We were doing that when our kids were young. [Laughs]
GJ	I guess about twenty or thirty years of Scouting.
WJ	[missing dialogue] in town like that, too.
GJ	The thing about it was when I was a boy and the people were going into Boy Scouts and they said you had to have ten cents a week and you had to buy a uniform. My family said, "We can't afford it." So I had no Boy Scout training. 
RH	Wow.
WJ	But he was top notch on that thing. 
RH	Well, we sure thank you for your memories and we thank you for all the tips. Do you have some pictures that Doug could take pictures of the ENIAC?
GJ	Yes, there's one in that book right there.
WJ	Yes, but we have another one, I think.









Harford Living Treasure
George Herbert & Winifred Smith Jonas

This is Ruth Hendrickson interviewing Winifred and George Jonas. The date is May 9, 2005. We thank you for doing this for us. And I know neither one of you were born in Harford County, so maybe you want to tell us how you ended up coming to Harford County and spending the rest of your life here. And let me go back and say it is George, but he really prefers to be called Herb. So, from here on after it will be Herb and Wink. [Laughter] O.k.

GJ	O.k., I was born in Bay City, Michigan, and as a child was an acolyte in a church for nine years and while going to high school I worked in a grocery store full time. In April of '35 I just turned seventeen and I enlisted in the Army, and I was sent to a nine-month program at Michigan College and minored in technology, which you specialize in an accelerated college training program. From there in 1946 went to Fort [missing dialogue], Illinois and was sent to APG. When I first got to APG, in Aberdeen, Maryland. When I first got here they put us up in the [missing dialogue] area, which is behind BLL, in tents. It turns out that this is where I am going to work for thirty-five years in the future. [Laughter] The first weekend I came into town, to see what Aberdeen was like, ate at the Aberdeen Restaurant, which is at the South East corner of Route 40 and Bel Air, and had my first western sandwich. [Laughter] And each weekend from then on in the following order, I went to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and New Castle.
RH	Did you get there by train, or did you drive?
GJ	Bus and the train.
RH	O.k.
GJ	In the fall of '46, I went to Fort Bennett, Georgia and went to OCS for a six-month program. And there is where I first ran into racial problems. The town bus that would go out to the post and assuming the bus was heading towards town, hit the gate and stop, then they would shift around in the bus. And from there it did the same thing; it happened on the way back. But while in Columbus, Georgia on the first day, there was an African American friend of mine and we'd sometimes go and get the same bus and so we were walking down on this Georgia street. We were stopped by a policeman and we were told right then and there that either he had to walk in front, behind, or off the curb. And that was my first real experience with a racial issue. So then I graduated at OCS, came to Aberdeen Proving Ground in '47, and the first thing we did on that weekend was to go to the swimming pool, at the Officer's Club. And then again, we had an African American in the crowd and he was told that he could not come into the swimming pool and if he had any objections, he could go see the Commanding General, that he had an open-door policy. So then the Proving Ground was, they had three Officer Clubs.
RH	Oh!
GJ	The first club was the main club. And that was only… white officers could go there. The second club could be a mixture, and the third club was the African American Club. So in getting back to swimming. The officers were required to swim in a swimming pool at the Officer's Club because the water was not suitable is what they were told. But the black officers and the enlisted men had to swim in Swamp Creek.
RH	Oh my!
GJ	My first assignment here was Advanced Schooling for Officers and then from there I was assigned to the Ordinance Board. Everything was fine and dandy and the Ordinance Board is an organization that was strictly under Chief of Ordinance in Washington, DC, and not under the post itself. Then they got a new commander of the Ordinance Board and he's said I will not have anybody who was not a combat soldier. So the group that was within the organization had to be reassigned. I was reassigned to the [missing dialogue] system Officer's Club, which is very non-challenging. [Laughs]
RH	The white officer's club?
GJ	No, the whole thing.
RH	Oh.
GJ	It is not very challenging. Then I was discharged in October '48 and went back home. I stayed back home until January '49 where I returned to Aberdeen and went to the University of Delaware to school. I rode the train everyday to get there. In 1952 I got my degree in Mathematics and went back to APG for a summer reserve duty. Then I went back for my Masters. In 1951 I was in [missing dialogue] at BRL. There I worked for thirty-five years and took charge [missing dialogue] design and target configuration. The job was really good because I made contact with people like [missing dialogue], if you remember your physics [missing dialogue]. I had time with him. I had time with two authors of books I had, [missing dialogue] and Francis Monohan. Then I had time at [missing dialogue] Laboratory, which I wrote a paper later on, which is based on some work he did. I got awards. I got the Research and Development Award of 1970, the bronze medallion. This is a… They have a paper submitted from all Department of Army places and they judge which papers will be given. They go up to West Point and they give the papers, and then there's some industry college heads to decide which are the best of the year. I got third place [missing dialogue]. And I also received an award for the work [missing dialogue]. We were supposed to go to the White House to be given the award. But it turns out there was some crisis, I forget what it was, and so they had the doings out here. And, of course, Jimmy Carter signed the… They said that Jimmy Carter personally signed the letter. So that's my military… Oh, I worked on computing machines in the [missing dialogue], ten different machines. Univac, [missing dialogue], [missing dialogue], CDC, what have you. [Laughs]
RH	I guess you never figured when you were the grocery clerk back in Michigan that this is what you'd end up being.
GJ	No.
RH	What did you think you were going to do when you were a kid?
GJ	The class prophecy they would probably be back in the grocery store. [Laughs]
RH	Is that right? What did you think you would do?
GJ	I thought I'd go to college.
RH	Did you?
GJ	I mean the reason I enlisted in the Army in the first place was because I knew I could get college training.
RH	O.k. What [missing dialogue]
WJ	Well, do you want to know how it started? I was born in Martinsville, Virginia. That's up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. [missing dialogue] and somewhere along the way, we moved down on my family's tobacco farm. I lived there on the tobacco farm for four years. [Laughs] I learned how to hoe tobacco and to string it for barn curing. And then I went to college, I went to [missing dialogue] College and then I went to Furman. I graduated in Mathematics and Science. When I graduated from Furman I had… The president of our college got a letter from Aberdeen Proving Ground. If you have any Mathematic majors, we will give them a job. So I applied for the job and that's how I got here because of a recommendation from my school. I didn't even fill in a form fifty-seven, I didn't fill out anything. And I just got a letter and it said we'll give you a job. I didn't have to go through a lot of things. And so I came in July '46 and [missing dialogue] trip into Aberdeen. I came in and of course I came from a little town and then I come from a farm so it wasn't that little. But Aberdeen, you came into the train station, and you wondered where you'd go next and they told me I could spend the night at the [missing dialogue] Hotel. Now the [missing dialogue] Hotel is a Harvest House is at the front of it and if you look at that building you will see this big old house back behind there. And I had a room that must have cost three or four dollars. And the bathroom was down the hall and I was kind of worried about that because I never done anything where I had to run down the hall in the middle of the night or whatever. And so I came to work here and I liked it, cause I figured that I was going to get me a job and was going to make fifty dollars. So they offered me a job for twenty-three hundred dollars a year, which is great pay and within eight months to a year and a half, I could go up to three thousand dollars. And I thought I was going to be real rich. So I went to work in the computing lab as a Mathematician T-1. Now there is something interesting about that that I would like to tell you. There was a woman, an Astronomer who had [missing dialogue] the war from Harvard and as soon as the war was over she went back to Harvard and she became head of the Astronomy Lab. Things were not going… In those days they did not hire women as professional [missing dialogue], they got [missing dialogue], [missing dialogue] professional. So she refused to come so she broke the rating thing just by doing that. That was interesting that that happened. It was very, very hard to be considered a professional, I guess, if you were a woman. So I hadn't been there very long and at that point they were getting ready to bring the ENIAC, which was the electronic name for the computer which was the all purpose, all electronic computer in the country that had ever been invented. And so my boss said there's going to be a vacancy for one Mathematician Programmer on that machine, so I'm going to go to the boss and suggest that you get that job. So in the middle of '46 or the first of '47 they brought the ENIAC down from Philadelphia. It was invented and designed at the University of Pennsylvania by Doctor [missing dialogue] Eckard and Doctor John [missing dialogue]. And they were just testing it then because they were inventing that machine to do firing tables for the firings that they were doing. Anyway they were making the firing tables for cannons and guns and stuff for them to use overseas for our military men. So all they had done in Philadelphia is that they had tested it, they had put one program on it with the firing table, a sample. And then they brought it down here and it costs fifty thousand dollars to bring.
GJ	Five hundred thousand dollars.
WJ	Five hundred thousand dollars, right, to bring that machine down here and set it up in [missing dialogue]. It was on like one half of a floor, so it was the only place that had any air conditioning in [missing dialogue] room. Because they had those IBM cards, a reader and printer that you put you're input in and got your output out on that. It had 18,000 [missing dialogue]. I guess it had enough [missing dialogue]. So I got to be the one- person…six women had worked as program operators in Philadelphia and two of them didn't want to come down here, and so I got their job and I was lucky.
RH	Did you know anything about computers at that time?
WJ	No, I hadn't even heard of the word "computer". The only thing I knew about it was that people were using in those days were hand computers [missing dialogue] and [missing dialogue] and Monroe's. They were making those fire tables by hand and send them off to the war. It was fun working on the ENIAC, a lot of fun. People came from all over the United States to see it, even people from [missing dialogue]. They brought all their problems. It was a 24-7, twenty-four hours, seven days a week we worked on it. It just kept [missing dialogue] problems. It had a lot of problems and there was a Mathematician on it and also you wouldn't want to be with the engineer and you stood beside the machine and you would have to look for trouble. [missing dialogue] got lost you could see these tubes that light up and one would go out and everybody was standing there trying to figure out what is this problem. [missing dialogue] before it would run, but then it would run and run well and pull out all the data. I got to… I was the main programmer for the German [missing dialogue] after World War II and took them to White Sands and they use the [missing dialogue] System and they reduced them down and [missing dialogue]. One of them that were fired, went over into Arizona somewhere. But anyway we had such important people that came here. President Sherman came one Saturday to look at it. He talked to us [missing dialogue]. Of course they really had to make the place safe for him. They had other people like Doctor [missing dialogue] that came from Princeton and his wife. And from [missing dialogue], Doctor [missing dialogue] who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics since Madam Curry. Doctor [missing dialogue] came here. A lot of them came at night. [missing dialogue] people were here with the Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb [missing dialogue]. I even got to go to [missing dialogue]. Three of us went out there. [missing dialogue], but that's another story. But anyway Doctor [missing dialogue] nuclear strategic stuff. It was an interesting time.
GJ	[missing dialogue] wrote a hundred books.
RH	Was he a Physicist? 
GJ	He was [missing dialogue] Institute.
RH	O.k.
WJ	And one of his books was on the basis of Doctor [missing dialogue].
RH	Did the community know about this? Did they have any idea that this totally new kind of thing was at Aberdeen and how important it was?
WJ	Only the people who worked in BRL, a few of them, you know. Because of work was going on in BRL in every direction. It was a very, very… It had a lot of brilliant people there who had come from everywhere, who were always going to leave. No one was ever going to stay in Aberdeen when they first came. I mean you're here to here and they were always having a habit of going somewhere. And a lot of people did go. They started computers labs all over the country. They started in Pittsburgh, then they went to Canada, and then they went everywhere. It was the grandfather of all computers, you know.
RH	Who was instrumental in getting them to come to Aberdeen, do you know?
WJ	It was that they wanted something fast that would compute firing tables. 
RH	That's all it was used for in the beginning, right?
WJ	Yes, just basically, not very much at first. They did Red Stone; they did everything up here. They did all the stuff for the missals and [missing dialogue]. By then [missing dialogue] coming more computers on…The Edback was next and it was being done and then the Irdvac came. And then after that they were out across the country doing the kind of computers that Herb worked on, because I wasn't there after 1955. So I had a really good time. I loved working there. It was fun, and knowing some of the people and staff. And 1955 was when I resigned to start having children.
RH	Well you missed something in between. You missed how you met Herb. We have to hear that story.
WJ	Yes that would be interesting. You see there was like nowhere to live hardly in Aberdeen when you first came. And they had these two long barracks out in Baldwin Manor. One of them was, they had women's, you know, for women and the other one was for men. They were across the roads from each other. And then they had a little recreation hall down there at Baldwin Manor right on the railroad track. And you came to a, they had a little square dance or something down there and they had a pool table and that's about all they had. All the young people would kind of gather in there.
GJ	It's [missing dialogue] a friend at the post to come and meet this group. And so the first place I saw her was leaning over the pool table shooting pool. [Laughter]
WJ	We were young then. And so from then on out we were…
RH	And what year did you get married?
WJ	In 1959.
GJ	'49.
WJ	Oh '49. [Laughter] It was fifty-five years ago.
RH	O.k. So, after you resigned is when you started having your family?
WJ	Yes. When we got married at first we lived in one of those little Baldwin Manor Apartments. It was the last building next to the railroad track and every time if it sleeted or iced and the electric train would go by, it would be daylight arching on that thing. And so we stayed there for the first part of '59. And then we moved down to Perryman across from the post office in Perryman upstairs in an apartment. And it was along the same road as the tracks and you couldn't hear. There were a lot of trains ran in those days because there were no cars. I remember putting my name on a list to buy a convertible because I wanted a convertible. And I did that in '46 when I was so rich cause I was making so much money. And they put my name on the list and I was 800 on the list if you wanted a new car.
RH	Oh my.
WJ	Of course by the time they got it, Herb and I were engaged and I said I wanted a convertible.
RH	So you never got your convertible.
WJ	I never got the convertible. So we went down to Perryman and stayed there until Larry was born and then we moved to Aberdeen on Rogers Street and the kids grew up on Rogers Street.
RH	What was there to do in Aberdeen back then when you were first married? Was there anything?
WJ	Well before we were married we would go to the diner there.
GJ	The Mayflower.
WJ	In the Mayflower. We didn't have much money so we would drink a coke all night and sit and talk to each other.
RH	Now was Aberdeen still segregated then?
WJ	Oh yes very much segregated, yes. And they didn't integrate the schools until '63. Didn't they?
GJ	Somewhere along that area.
WJ	That's another story we'll talk about.
GJ	How about Bogart's, something to do in Aberdeen.
WJ	Well when we came to Aberdeen Bogart's, do you remember the store?
RH	The furniture store.
WJ	Yes, the one that burned down. What they did was they got a microwave to sell and they wanted people to see it and so people would go down and look through the window and they microwaved a hotdog in one minute. And we were all so impressed. We were watching it. Another time they had a TV.
GJ	They had a TV. in the window and people were outside looking at this old TV., vintage, I should say. And it was for one of the championship fights.
RH	Was the U.S.O. in Aberdeen at the time.
WJ	Yes, there was a U.S.O. That's why Herb was a U.S.O. fan always.
GJ	They had buses from different places bringing girls in for dancing. That's another thing. That was at the ARC Building. The ARC Building is where we had our…
WJ	Had our reception.
GJ	Yes. That's also where the library was at that time. When I first came here there was some place on Bel Air Avenue, I think where the Western Union Place was, I don't remember where it was.
RH	Right.
GJ	And I went in there to look for a book or something and I happened to mention John Hopkins.
WJ	John Hopkins, you say.
GJ	The lady who was in charge said, "Johns Hopkins". [Laughter]
WJ	I don't know whether you want her name, but that was Mrs. Frank Baker. She started the library system, I guess all over Harford County.
RH	I think so.
WJ	Because she had one, like I mentioned, at the Baldwin Manor, down at that recreation place and had another one. Then they had one at the ARC Building. They kept moving the library around. By the time my son came along, he was like five years old, Mrs. Baker was still there and he would check out the automotive books, [missing dialogue] for years and years because he wants that kind of thing. He checked it out so many times that Mrs. Baker finally just told him to take it. [Laughter]
RH	Now where did he go to school when he was on Rogers Street?
WJ	Where did he go to school? He went the first year to the very first year of Harford Day School up in Bel Air. But after that we really didn't have the money to pay any more to go there so he went to Aberdeen Elementary the first three years. And then came along Bakersfield School which is wonderful. And by that time when Billy went to school, they both went to Bakersfield. And then [missing dialogue], did too there. But it took them a long time to [missing dialogue] with that school.
RH	Where was Aberdeen Elementary?
WJ	Aberdeen Elementary was the old Aberdeen High School.
RH	Oh, the old high school.
GJ	On Route 40.
WJ	See there was no Route 95 over there, and all of the trucks that went from Philadelphia to Baltimore stopped at that light by that school. And those trucks screeched in there, and the teachers literally had to stop talking when the trucks would come rolling in there.
RH	Wow.
WJ	I mean it was one crowded highway where that school was. We were going to discuss Aberdeen a little, what it looked like.
RH	Oh yes, what did it look like?
WJ	What did Aberdeen look like when we first came here? Well for years and years it stayed the same until maybe the K-Mart, I think. The main street had… Of course they were making a fortune off of the soldiers during World War II. They was Barnett's Drugstore on the corner that sold all the bus tickets which was a fabulous amount for them, because buses were coming in and out of there taking people out to the trains. That was the only way you could get out, almost if you came. And if you came you always wanted to leave because for kids there wasn't much to do in there. But the first year I came to Aberdeen, I think I stayed here two weekends because I had all these relatives in New Jersey. All my relatives had moved from the South to New Jersey because at that time, during the depression, there were no jobs, so they all moved there. Except for my mother and she stayed in Virginia. That corner had Barnett's Drugstore, and the other corner had a big old house where the gas station is.
RH	Oh.
WJ	One of those big houses and then they had that tiny little thing that's there now that they've torn down the rest of it. It's a business [missing dialogue].
RH	Was the big house apartments or rooms?
WJ	Yes. They used every house and every room in Harford County that they could to rent to people, because there was nowhere to stay. When I first came, I stayed in that Baldwin Manor in a room for about half a year. And they we moved over to Osborne Road with friends of mine. I lived with this lady who had all the rooms she rented to us. That was the only way you had to live. And there were no cars; you had to take the bus.
RH	Was there a bus that would go back and forth to the Proving Ground?
WJ	We had the Jitter Bug.
RH	Oh, o.k.
WJ	The little train came in and out. And it came in and out every half an hour. It was constant in and out.
RH	Did you have to pay for it?
WJ	No, it was free. It was called the "Jitter Bug".
GJ	[missing dialogue] because trains use to come in at two or three o'clock in the morning and people would get back to the Post.
WJ	And the cabs down there, people were making a fortune but only because they put eight soldiers in every trip they made to the Proving Ground and back.
GJ	The cabs were interesting too because they had metal fences for the different areas on the Post. So you would line up in those different routes [Ruth talking over him] They were that many people going [missing dialogue] transportation.
WJ	Because there were thousands and thousands of GI's because all those barracks were full of GI's.
RH	Now where was the main gate at that time? Was it down by where the fire station was? Was it that far down?
GJ	It's [missing dialogue] now, not the one over on Chesapeake Road but the one in the middle.
RH	So that was the main gate then.
GJ	Yes.
WJ	And there was one fence around if you worked in D&T, [missing dialogue] it was called then and then it was [missing dialogue] when I went back to work out there. The gate was way back where they were testing things. But eventually they moved the gate up in front of [missing dialogue] and then eventually moved it in front of DRL.
GJ	This is what they called the industrial area. There's a gate up there.
WJ	They were testing day and night out in that area. They were killing people too, but we never knew about it until six months later when somebody got killed. The rumor was that somebody had died. You [missing dialogue] because they was really high powered stuff going on.
GJ	There was one plane that crashed into the water. I think that only one survived out of nine or ten.
WJ	But you didn't hear about it, even if you were working over in BRL. BRL was locked because when we went in somebody would be working and they would have to unlock the door or you would have to go down. When I was working on night shift…We worked night and day all the time because people were bringing problems from all over the United States to the ENIAC. So it was a real interesting time to work there, I kind of hated to quit at that point. [Laughter]
GJ	Way, way back there [missing dialogue], the Univac.
WJ	When I was to see the Univac?
GJ	Yes.
WJ	Oh. Yes, I saw the first Univac on the [missing dialogue] in Philadelphia. Because Doctor [missing dialogue] and Doctor [missing dialogue] who had invented the ENIAC had decided to start a company called the Univac Company. They didn't like the fact that IBM had all those computing machines. They had a whole room of the [missing dialogue] equipment out on the [missing dialogue]. We had the collator, we had the key punch and they were getting lots of money every month. They really had themselves a business.
GJ	They rented, they had a rental situation.
RH	Oh.
WJ	Except they rented their [missing dialogue] and the printer to the ENIAC for one dollar a year. That's because the cards went in the ENIAC and the cards came out of the output.
RH	[missing dialogue] in place of the ENIAC?
WJ	Oh yes. It supposedly cost five hundred thousand dollars to build it and it cost five hundred thousand dollars to remove it from… because it had all those tubes in it. It had eighteen thousand tubes, of those big old tubes in it.
RH	How long did it take to put it together when they got it here?
WJ	When they got it here? They brought it here in January of 1947 and they had already transferred me out of there. I was glad because I was learning about it. We were sort of like engineers and mathematicians, both, because you sort of how to go and learn everything about it. We knew what a [missing dialogue] would do and how you got in there and we went around with marking tape and put these tubes in and out. It was an interesting time.
GJ	They also used her for her nose when something smelled like it was burning. [Laughter]
WJ	[missing dialogue] something's burning. It was really an interesting time to be there. And eventually… Every time you put a problem on this machine it was [missing dialogue]. So if you went in around this room, this big room, a lot bigger than this room, and you had to wire in what you had… Cause all it could do was add and subtract.
GJ	It had a square rooter.
WJ	It had a square rooter but you did it with adding and subtracting, naturally. That's all it did. Big, huge [missing dialogue]. I'll have to get a picture and show it to you. It was an interesting time to be there.
RH	When you first encountered it, did you have any idea what this meant for the future?
WJ	Well, once in a while someone would say, "This is the beginning." And it is because it's the granddaddy of the whole thing, you know. Every computer that has even been built worked off of it, even those little hand computers. People thought they had something big when you had a [missing dialogue], or something that you could add and subtract numbers. And the first thing I ever did when I got there was to get a firing table, to do just one thing with all of the stuff. I mean a hand computer, you see how long it took to do that kind of stuff. So this was so fast considering, so like this was just a drop in the bucket, to what we have now. I mean we can do a hundred million times more on the computers that we have now, than any [missing dialogue]. So, it was it.
RH	And that's now in the Smithsonian, correct?
WJ	There is some of it. And there is some of it in Philadelphia, and there is some at IBM. People have got pieces of it everywhere.
RH	Oh, so it's not the whole thing in the Smithsonian.
GJ	No.
WJ	It's just two panels.
RH	Oh, o.k.
WJ	Because these were sections around.
GJ	You know Maryland has some pieces of it and the museum has a piece.
WJ	And the [missing dialogue] has some of it. What they did was they decided to put a program on it just like a computer is programmed. And so when they did we all wired in a program. Because when you went in you literally wired in the program from the start. Every program you had, you wired in. Like I had the B-2 Rocket and that was my program. And I did all the programming for the B-2 Rocket that they fired in Germany. They got the B-2's over the white sands and fired them over here. And that was the beginning of all the rocket programs.
RH	And who taught you how to do this?
WJ	Well Doctor [missing dialogue] was one person from up there. You had all the manuals.
RH	Oh, o.k.
WJ	I don't know where they have to go, to the Historical Society or somewhere, because everybody had brought me manuals over the years, because they know I'm saving them. And you had these big old manuals you had to read and it was a big fun time.
GJ	Getting back to where is the ENIAC now. We took our grandchild to the Smithsonian and went into the computer exhibit. And low and behold we looked and there was Winnie's picture. [Laughs]
WJ	Yeah, the four of us was up there. And Red Stone and every missile that has been fired always has been done at Aberdeen. I mean they have done all the initial, everything on them. And everybody was out here in the world getting ready to try and get their next computers going.
RH	You probably never dreamed you'd be doing that when you were back tying tobacco, did you?
WJ	No, I did not. I really didn't like doing that. [Laughter] I was a stringer and I was fast. I could do five hundred, six a day.
GJ	When I was working in the grocery store we use to add all the groceries in a sack with a pencil.
WJ	It's just such a different world. We have lived through a different world. [missing dialogue] It was a great time. And the Univac is a [missing dialogue], you know, [missing dialogue].  [missing dialogue] because one of the girls that worked on the ENIAC up in Philadelphia, when she transferred down here, eventually when Doctor [missing dialogue]'s wife died, she ended up marrying him, and they came down to our wedding. We had our reception in the ARC Building, and we got married in the Catholic Church over here.
SIDE TWO
WJ	It was a good time.
RH	Did the inventors of the ENIAC make any money on it, or the kind of money that they probably should have?
WJ	Well, I guess he made some money on the Univac. I think he made some money on it, because they got stuck in the [missing dialogue]. They had a big argument about it somehow. I think they had a lot of court stuff over it. He was just a professor at a college.
GJ	He was mathematics and Eckerd was an engineer.
WJ	A brilliant engineer, I think. They just wanted to [missing dialogue] IBM. So, it was a good time. And of course [missing dialogue] good times too [missing dialogue]. I'd like to say one thing about the ENIAC. Doctor [missing dialogue], who was [missing dialogue] of mine in Pittsburgh, he took the manuals and he programmed the problem of the [missing dialogue]. The thing that was interesting about him, he had his hands blown off at Cornell in a chemistry lab when he was a student. And he would drive his car from Pittsburgh to over here in three hours and a half, or something. That was the fastest thing I ever heard in my life. He programmed the problem and brought it over here by reading the manuals because he was so brilliant. And he was so interesting to know and he brought all those mining problems over here. And he would put them on the ENIAC and away we would go. [missing dialogue] things sometimes they'd run and you'd have two weeks [missing dialogue].
GJ	Just to mention all these people like Herman [missing dialogue] and people like that. They would go, we would do the night shift, and we would go to the diner and eat.
WJ	And we got to know them real, real well.
RH	And somebody had a clue as to how brilliant these people were, I'm sure.
WJ	We kind of knew; the other people didn't know.
RH	[Talking over top of Winnie]
WJ	These were brilliant people that came from all over the country here. And it was fun to know them.
RH	But you must have hated to leave. [talking same time as Winnie] to have kids, but…
WJ	I wondered what would have happened if I would have stayed. I would have stayed on the computers and [missing dialogue]. I don't know what I would have done. 
RH	At this point, were they teaching Computer Science anywhere?
GJ	Not at that time.
WJ	We had some courses at work just to help us. You know, as a new computer would come around. But it was just on and off, you know. [Laughs] [missing dialogue] So at that point, Herb at the same time, you need to tell her what you did along the way. Because what he did, he was over there, he went to school, but then he…
GJ	[missing dialogue]
WJ	What he did [missing dialogue] working on…
GJ	As much as I can. [Laughter]
RH	[missing dialogue]
GJ	As much as I can.
WJ	O.k.
GJ	You left BRL in 1955.
WJ	Right. I started going back to school to the University of Delaware and got my Master's Degree in Education and Mathematics. And then I went taught at the Harford Day School.
RH	Was that located the same place as it is now?
WJ	No. [missing dialogue] The first Harford Day School was in the black school in Bel Air.
RH	Oh.
WJ	It now belongs to the County. But that was the black school and since they integrated the schools, it was closed. Harford Day School was there for one year.
RH	And who started Harford Day School?
WJ	[missing dialogue] Cameron and Sarah [missing dialogue] and a few others. Mrs. [missing dialogue].
GJ	Mrs. Fuller and Mr. Fuller.
WJ	And Sydney Fuller and her husband was the head of the big labs at the Post. I think Mrs. Green was involved. She was involved in it. Those were probably the first…
GJ	And Kitty Reese.
WJ	Oh yes, Kitty Reese. She just died.
RH	Do you think this was a reaction to people not wanting their kids to go to integrated schools?
GJ	From what I gathered more they wanted [everyone talking at once] You could learn so much more in small classes. You had the parents putting out money therefore there was a little extra pressure on the children.
RH	I mean [missing dialogue] getting kind of [missing dialogue]. Was there a lot of resentment when the schools finally did become integrated?
WJ	You mean this school?
RH	No, any school in Harford County.
WJ	In our County? I think it took so long, because you know the law [missing dialogue] six or eight or something. What they were doing here, they were going one grade at a time.
RH	Oh.
WJ	And then the NAACP said that won't do. And so at that point they said that it's got to be…
GJ	You ought to tell her what happened with the task force we had.
WJ	Oh yes that's a good time to talk about the task force.
GJ	They were going to redistrict the schools and the boundary was going to be north of Bel Air and Aberdeen Proper there.
WJ	All the people that lived in the town.
GJ	This is where it is getting set up because the people had a poll with the Board.
WJ	Their kids [missing dialogue].
GJ	Because they said they didn't want their children riding busses over two railroad tracks. It was dangerous. Of course the people up here, above Upper [missing dialogue] Road [missing dialogue].
WJ	People [missing dialogue].
GJ	Carsin's Run and south of [missing dialogue] and also through [missing dialogue] Crossroads.
WJ	Our kids would be going all away over two railroad tracks.
GJ	Past the schools and as it turns out our task force was for them, the Ripkins.
WJ	The Ripkins and the…
GJ	[missing dialogue]
WJ	And a few other people were on that committee. And who appointed them was…
GJ	Mrs. [missing dialogue].
WJ	[missing dialogue] They decided [missing dialogue] one through three would be Bakerfield, three through six would be Hillsdale. And that's what they kept doing. And that's the only way they got that done, but we won't tell about that committee. [missing dialogue] the committee. And so it worked fine for the elementary. You see they were going to start out with first grade to integrate and then they were going to integrate the second grade and then move that way. Sometime in the sixties before it all actually came together, they had a real thing at Aberdeen High School around '63. The [missing dialogue] was up there, Billy I guess was in the eighth grade and I had told him that if anything started to go to somebody's house and stay [missing dialogue].
RH	Didn't the Freedom Riders come through Aberdeen around then?
WJ	Maybe that's when it happened. Something happened. But they were sold on the uptake of integrating schools here.
GJ	I experienced the same thing in the University of Delaware. The undergraduate school was completely white.
RH	Oh really?
GJ	And the graduate school was mixed because there was no graduate school… They had the school over on the Eastern Shore and stuff like that.
RH	And they went to the same school?
GJ	Yes. But they had a state school for blacks and then…
RH	I hadn't thought about colleges being segregated.
WJ	You know I came from North Carolina and I had seen too much of that stuff. Our bus would ride up the road, a school bus when I was in high school, and half empty and the black children who lived on the next farm to us had to walk two miles over to the hard road, get on the bus and go all the way to [missing dialogue], North Carolina which was fifteen miles to school.
RH	Wow.
WJ	Wasn't that wrong? It was so wrong.
RH	Did you… This is something that I thought about before. I mean when you were in college as a woman in Math, this had to be unusual at the time. Did you ever feel that people, especially when you came to Aberdeen, that they just weren't accepting you in the same way as a professional woman as they were accepting the men?
WJ	When I was at Furman all the men were off to war. 
RH	Oh.
WJ	We had three people in my senior math classes and they were all women.
RH	Oh my.
WJ	And two of them went and taught school, but I decided I didn't want to teach school. But I did end up teaching school. [Laughs]
RH	What about the professionals and the people that came working on this computer. You have never felt that they didn't think you were quite as capable since you were a woman?
WJ	Well, I don't think so because I was kind of new. [Laughter] You know these very brilliant people came, men and woman, mathematicians from all over the country. They just treated you like you were…I mean they knew you. I mean Doctor [missing dialogue] stood at the blackboard and explained this machine to us in such language that it was so easily understood to you, you know?
RH	Uh huh.
WJ	It was a wonderful feeling. I guess we were kind of young and our brain maybe had been more willing to accept things. It was great; it was wonderful.
GJ	Doctor [missing dialogue] has written a bookcase, like encyclopedias of mathematics. There were volumes and it shows you how great he is.
RH	How long did you stay at Harford Day?
WJ	Eleven years. After I had my last child, I went to school. Then I had decided that I was going to teach school, I can do that. So I went and took courses at Delaware and got my Master's Degree. So that I could, and I was taking at the same time, the headmistress over there, Mrs. Drumfield, she was [missing dialogue]. They and Rachel [missing dialogue]. Did you know her?
RH	No.
WJ	She taught at the Aberdeen High School and had worked for BRL. They talked me into going over there before I finished getting my Master's Degree.
RH	And did you like that?
WJ	Oh, I loved it! It was children and they were wonderful. If they didn't do what you wanted the to do, the parents came right in there and made them. I mean they had, they really truly, the children at Harford Day School, were really truly no smarter and no brighter than the children in the public schools. It's just that they're smaller classes and they got more attention. And then they could do well. Because if you looked at what came out of the public schools here, [missing dialogue] public schools [missing dialogue] I would have taught over there, only because it was convenient. It was convenient for me there because I got out of school in time to get Lizzie home and Lizzie was the only one in middle school. She went over there to school from fifth to eighth. And then she went two years to John Carroll and then she went to Brenmar. And then she went to Georgia. It was good place to teach.
RH	And what made you decide to go back then to the Proving Ground?
WJ	Money. [Laughs] I mean I just went back to the Proving Ground and made three times as much money as I was making teaching school. And we needed it because Lizzie was going to Georgia to vet school. We would have survived but we had more help. I loved going back to the Proving Ground. I went back to the Proving Ground and worked on another computer and became Assistant Manager on it. That computer in that big room was nothing like this little computer in this room. But we were doing ten introductions for about two years at least. Everything on it was for the Proving Ground until they got another system going. We did all the stuff for the Bradley, and the inland tank and for all those things that were being done out there behind the gate. And at one point behind the gate they were doing seventy percent of the testing for the whole United States.
RH	Wow.
WJ	They really were busy doing some of those because of those wars and stuff.
RH	Now you both were really busy at work, when did you become community activists?
WJ	When our kids grew up.
GJ	Well we had a little incident in between. We knew a family that had a child who wasn't going to school and was staying home. And we caused a [missing dialogue]. They called the county and got him transportation to school and he got an education.
WJ	I think I was out taking up collections [missing dialogue]. I was supposed to collect money for Red Cross and Blue Cross and whatever there was, everything. And then I [missing dialogue] was sleeping in a bed, in a [missing dialogue] that the neighbors around him had ripped rags on. And that just made me feel so bad that I just came home and called everyone I knew. How can this situation exist? And after that, other people got into it and got on the school boards and things like that. Those are things that kind of you knew were right, or wasn't right.
GJ	We also had a lady that was very sick and we tried of course to get her in the hospital and try to keep her in the hospital. [Everyone talking at once.]
WJ	She was a black lady.
GJ	She was alone and as sick as she was she couldn't be at home. They finally took care of that.
WJ	There's just so many people in the world that need help, and still.
RH	Oh, yeah.
WJ	And still. So we sort of got started that way.
GJ	Then we retired June 3, 1987, both the same day.
WJ	And we were really ready to do it.
RH	You haven't got there yet, have you?
WJ	[Laughs] No, we haven't.
RH	Well, let's get to the meat of this. How did you get involved with Gravel Hill, and tell what that whole fight is.
WJ	Well, since 1989 that started. We had two years of boy scouts, girl scouts, and all those other things. A neighbor called up and said, "[missing dialogue]?" And they lived behind the church, and there was going to be a meeting. And they had already had one meeting. So we sort of got involved in it and went to the meeting and [missing dialogue]. This church at that point was 150 years old, a black church. And they were going to put clay, mountains and rubble in it. That was the plan. And now it's like a little church on a hill. And when it got finished it was going to be a little church in the valley.
GJ	It's the highest point around here. It's two hundred and thirty feet up. That's what they wrote on their church bulletin, they had a church on the hill. The landfill was dumping rubble 25 feet on the church building. Not the property, but the building itself. And there's a historical cemetery down there with eight Civil War veterans.
RH	Wow.
WJ	So we went to the first meeting out at the church. And I don't know whether we'd ever been in a church before.
GJ	Nope.
WJ	I mean our children were off with their children and we'd all been working and everybody had been working and trying to get your children through school. So from thereon we just moved out. Everybody moved out into whatever we could find out. How you could stop a politician's son and a politician from putting a rubble-fill right in that villa of this black community. This black community, you know, was one of the first Freedman Communities in the state of Maryland. Evidently they taught these people who moved in here those many years ago that the land wasn't very valuable because it was all rocky and hilly and stuff like that. And these servants who worked for these rich people in Baltimore City, who had given this land to these people. Which is interesting that they had done that and they had all come over and put up their little houses and they had their children, and carried their water from one stream from the other side of the road. And then gradually after they got a little bit of money, and a lot of them worked at Perry Point, the black people did. And they had come from West Virginia and places like that because evidently Perry Point went down to West Virginia some time during the war looking for people to come and work for Perry Point.
RH	I remember Mr. Hank telling me he got recruited.
WJ	That's right and almost all of them did in that area. And that's the way it kind of started. How it became this nice little black community. And we really didn't know them. We've lived here since '59, twenty years almost. We all got well acquainted when we got started and we met in the black church. And it's a wonderful little church over there.
GJ	We knew the people on this end, three or four friends at this end, but not all the way down the road. [Ruth talking over him]
RH	And what's the status, I mean this is [missing dialogue], the status of the situation today?
WJ	Well we're getting there. In 1989 when they decided to put that rubble field there, they were suppose to go for an exception. 	Because you just couldn't do that without going through the proper procedure. Instead they didn't, they just went to MDE, you know, to the Department of the Environment and said we want a permit to put a rubble field in here. And they bypassed all the steps. Well that's where we are now. They're back now where they're trying to get an exception because you could not put a rubble field on agricultural land unless you had an exception to that. And so that's what we're getting to do now. We're going to have twelve more hearings beginning…
GJ	May 25th.
WJ	May 25th, which will run right on into August, or past August and see if they can get an exception. They have come in for seven exceptions. You see you are supposed to have things like buffers. Well, the plans are to put it right next to the property owned by the people. You are supposed to have wetland things. From [missing dialogue] to fill the streams, and that type of thing. And they're not going to do that.
RH	What do you think you have learned the most from that whole fight, even though it's not over? What have you learned most?
WJ	We have learned, but we have some really good friends. We have learned that people really, people that you didn't know and that you didn't bother know, are really good friends. Some of the best friends we've ever had in our lives. They live around here. We have a community. We didn't have a community before, we just lived in a house.
GJ	We didn't mention this about the Gravel Hill Fighters getting sued for two point seven million dollars. Should I give the names? [missing dialogue]
WJ	Her house was on the other side of the rubble field.
GJ	[missing dialogue]
WJ	Who was down on the south-side, no east-side.
GJ	And us.
WJ	And us.
GJ	We had a meeting at the church with [missing dialogue]. They all wanted to go see the property and they asked us to go on the property with them, which they should not have done. But they told us, so it's right. So that was one of the charges they had because we were interfering with business and trespassing. Anyhow, we had Senator James as a lawyer and also Karin Quinn, ACLU, who worked for ACLU. Karin Quinn worked on the Baldez situation [missing dialogue].
WJ	He was a top lawyer two or three years ago in the United States.
GJ	Yes.
WJ	Trial lawyer.
GJ	Trial lawyer. They took us and Senator James sued them for fifteen million. [Laughs]
RH	[missing dialogue] nothing happened.
WJ	Oh yeah.
GJ	They settled for forty thousand dollars for the four of us. But we took our money, after we paid the lawyer…
WJ	They gave us eight thousand dollars after we paid Mary Dulaney about four thousand.
GJ	And the rest of it we put back in the fight.
WJ	We just put it right back on because we already had spent that much money anyway making trips.
RH	Right, right.
WJ	And so we're right back where they should have been in 1989 asking for a exception.
GJ	You know we've been to the appeal court in Annapolis three times.
RH	Do you think it will finally end?
GJ	They'll be back in the appeal court. [Laughs] 
WJ	We do think it will ever end until the land is bought. As long as those two people who own it now, have it, and as long as they can get some free help or whatever. [missing dialogue] a lawyer and he's got some percent in it. As long as that happens we think they're just waiting for someone to die. And we are too.
RH	Just waiting for someone to get tired.
GJ	He's got notoriety because the CNN team here did six hours of filming and Charles [missing dialogue] program that's on radio was here and interviewed a couple of us. And they put the program on the Underground Railroad in Cincinnati. The Underground Railroad in the Historic, National Historic came here.
RH	Who is the lawyer that's helping you now with this?
WJ	Doctor  [missing dialogue]. She's from the law school.
GJ	Before that was…
WJ	Maryland Law School. There was a Patricia [missing dialogue], and she had to come all the way from Prince George's County because we tried to get a lawyer here in Harford County but they're all kind of (can I say this?) [missing dialogue] to go. [Laughter]
GJ	Well the thing is that the companies around here use the lawyers and various lawyers, and so there is conflict of interest all the way around.
WJ	That's what they want to call it all the time. So, we are still going to keep on fighting. That's the way it goes. 
RH	Now, I mean you've done so many things, what do you think is the most important thing you've done?
WJ	It's probably to preserve that church, and for the sake of the people, the people who live there. Because we could have moved. We didn't have to stay here. Fifteen years ago, I was about ready to move. I was even thinking about it.
RH	Would you go out with us to the church and let Doug takes some pictures out there?
WJ	Oh, I would like to.
GJ	The other thing, just one of the things that happened, the white area over here and the black combined.
WJ	We didn't know there was a color, and that's nice, isn't it? Because they are such nice people. I mean you never find nicer people than the Hayes, or the rest of them who lived around there.
GJ	Denise Perkins.
RH	Maybe you're right. Maybe that's the good that will come out of this.
GJ	Yes.
WJ	It is the best part of it.
RH	It did form a community.
WJ	I mean because before you had a [missing dialogue] of people over there. You had [missing dialogue] over here, too. All the people over here, it was just like unreal. And another good thing that has come out of it is this piece of land right down here is in farm preservation. And they can't ever use that land right there. And that's a good thing.
GJ	And that borders with the landfill.
WJ	It touches right onto the landfill.
RH	The development of the Parks and Rec [missing dialogue] out there.
WJ	Oh yes. Herb has to take a lot of credit for that one. [Laughs] You don't know [missing dialogue], do you?
GJ	Our son went to planning and zoning to look up [missing dialogue] property. [Everyone talking at the same time]. He came all the way from New Mexico to do this. He came back in and said, "You know there is a park land over there?" So we started checking the parkland. [missing dialogue] They said that if the people in this area would pay for the equipment, they could have a park there. [Winifred talking over Herb] This was back when they first got the park.
WJ	Seventies, I think.
GJ	Seventy something.
WJ	They didn't have money.
GJ	So we got together with [missing dialogue] and the Bishops.
WJ	And Sylvia Hudson.
GJ	And Sylvia Hudson. We got [missing dialogue] and told her and she said she didn't even know parkland existed. So she said we will do something about it. And so she put up some money and the state put up eighty thousand dollars and so for a hundred twenty thousand dollars they did the initial work. And then I don't know where the next bit of money came from but the next bit money was for the equipment.
WJ	And they got…
GJ	What's there, not counting the playground equipment was a hundred and eighty thousand dollars that they put into it.
RH	And tell us who it is named after.
WJ	That's correct. It's named after… What's his name?
GJ	Hilton.
WJ	Hilton, and he was a Civil War, a black Civil War veteran who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. And he lived right across, in front of that park. Isn't that wonderful? The people got really mad because they wanted that park named after Herman [missing dialogue], but they didn't understand, the people that lived [missing dialogue], they didn't understand how important it was to name it after  [missing dialogue].
GJ	Parks and Recreation said in the future they are going to put a building there, a concession stand and equipment storage and they will call it the Herman Hague Building.
RH	Oh, I didn't know that.
WJ	That's nice too.
RH	That's nice.
GJ	If the building ever comes up [missing dialogue]. If they remember.
RH	Well, did we forget to talk about anything that you wanted to talk about?
GJ	Well, there are Boy Scouts and Little League and [missing dialogue]. You got the Den Mother of the Year for Harford District and another year I got the Scout Master of the Year.
WJ	Yes, that was in between. We were doing that when our kids were young. [Laughs]
GJ	I guess about twenty or thirty years of Scouting.
WJ	[missing dialogue] in town like that, too.
GJ	The thing about it was when I was a boy and the people were going into Boy Scouts and they said you had to have ten cents a week and you had to buy a uniform. My family said, "We can't afford it." So I had no Boy Scout training. 
RH	Wow.
WJ	But he was top notch on that thing. 
RH	Well, we sure thank you for your memories and we thank you for all the tips. Do you have some pictures that Doug could take pictures of the ENIAC?
GJ	Yes, there's one in that book right there.
WJ	Yes, but we have another one, I think.








Harford Living Treasure
George Herbert & Winifred Smith Jonas

This is Ruth Hendrickson interviewing Winifred and George Jonas. The date is May 9, 2005. We thank you for doing this for us. And I know neither one of you were born in Harford County, so maybe you want to tell us how you ended up coming to Harford County and spending the rest of your life here. And let me go back and say it is George, but he really prefers to be called Herb. So, from here on after it will be Herb and Wink. [Laughter] O.k.

GJ	O.k., I was born in Bay City, Michigan, and as a child was an acolyte in a church for nine years and while going to high school I worked in a grocery store full time. In April of '35 I just turned seventeen and I enlisted in the Army, and I was sent to a nine-month program at Michigan College and minored in technology, which you specialize in an accelerated college training program. From there in 1946 went to Fort [missing dialogue], Illinois and was sent to APG. When I first got to APG, in Aberdeen, Maryland. When I first got here they put us up in the [missing dialogue] area, which is behind BLL, in tents. It turns out that this is where I am going to work for thirty-five years in the future. [Laughter] The first weekend I came into town, to see what Aberdeen was like, ate at the Aberdeen Restaurant, which is at the South East corner of Route 40 and Bel Air, and had my first western sandwich. [Laughter] And each weekend from then on in the following order, I went to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and New Castle.
RH	Did you get there by train, or did you drive?
GJ	Bus and the train.
RH	O.k.
GJ	In the fall of '46, I went to Fort Bennett, Georgia and went to OCS for a six-month program. And there is where I first ran into racial problems. The town bus that would go out to the post and assuming the bus was heading towards town, hit the gate and stop, then they would shift around in the bus. And from there it did the same thing; it happened on the way back. But while in Columbus, Georgia on the first day, there was an African American friend of mine and we'd sometimes go and get the same bus and so we were walking down on this Georgia street. We were stopped by a policeman and we were told right then and there that either he had to walk in front, behind, or off the curb. And that was my first real experience with a racial issue. So then I graduated at OCS, came to Aberdeen Proving Ground in '47, and the first thing we did on that weekend was to go to the swimming pool, at the Officer's Club. And then again, we had an African American in the crowd and he was told that he could not come into the swimming pool and if he had any objections, he could go see the Commanding General, that he had an open-door policy. So then the Proving Ground was, they had three Officer Clubs.
RH	Oh!
GJ	The first club was the main club. And that was only… white officers could go there. The second club could be a mixture, and the third club was the African American Club. So in getting back to swimming. The officers were required to swim in a swimming pool at the Officer's Club because the water was not suitable is what they were told. But the black officers and the enlisted men had to swim in Swamp Creek.
RH	Oh my!
GJ	My first assignment here was Advanced Schooling for Officers and then from there I was assigned to the Ordinance Board. Everything was fine and dandy and the Ordinance Board is an organization that was strictly under Chief of Ordinance in Washington, DC, and not under the post itself. Then they got a new commander of the Ordinance Board and he's said I will not have anybody who was not a combat soldier. So the group that was within the organization had to be reassigned. I was reassigned to the [missing dialogue] system Officer's Club, which is very non-challenging. [Laughs]
RH	The white officer's club?
GJ	No, the whole thing.
RH	Oh.
GJ	It is not very challenging. Then I was discharged in October '48 and went back home. I stayed back home until January '49 where I returned to Aberdeen and went to the University of Delaware to school. I rode the train everyday to get there. In 1952 I got my degree in Mathematics and went back to APG for a summer reserve duty. Then I went back for my Masters. In 1951 I was in [missing dialogue] at BRL. There I worked for thirty-five years and took charge [missing dialogue] design and target configuration. The job was really good because I made contact with people like [missing dialogue], if you remember your physics [missing dialogue]. I had time with him. I had time with two authors of books I had, [missing dialogue] and Francis Monohan. Then I had time at [missing dialogue] Laboratory, which I wrote a paper later on, which is based on some work he did. I got awards. I got the Research and Development Award of 1970, the bronze medallion. This is a… They have a paper submitted from all Department of Army places and they judge which papers will be given. They go up to West Point and they give the papers, and then there's some industry college heads to decide which are the best of the year. I got third place [missing dialogue]. And I also received an award for the work [missing dialogue]. We were supposed to go to the White House to be given the award. But it turns out there was some crisis, I forget what it was, and so they had the doings out here. And, of course, Jimmy Carter signed the… They said that Jimmy Carter personally signed the letter. So that's my military… Oh, I worked on computing machines in the [missing dialogue], ten different machines. Univac, [missing dialogue], [missing dialogue], CDC, what have you. [Laughs]
RH	I guess you never figured when you were the grocery clerk back in Michigan that this is what you'd end up being.
GJ	No.
RH	What did you think you were going to do when you were a kid?
GJ	The class prophecy they would probably be back in the grocery store. [Laughs]
RH	Is that right? What did you think you would do?
GJ	I thought I'd go to college.
RH	Did you?
GJ	I mean the reason I enlisted in the Army in the first place was because I knew I could get college training.
RH	O.k. What [missing dialogue]
WJ	Well, do you want to know how it started? I was born in Martinsville, Virginia. That's up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. [missing dialogue] and somewhere along the way, we moved down on my family's tobacco farm. I lived there on the tobacco farm for four years. [Laughs] I learned how to hoe tobacco and to string it for barn curing. And then I went to college, I went to [missing dialogue] College and then I went to Furman. I graduated in Mathematics and Science. When I graduated from Furman I had… The president of our college got a letter from Aberdeen Proving Ground. If you have any Mathematic majors, we will give them a job. So I applied for the job and that's how I got here because of a recommendation from my school. I didn't even fill in a form fifty-seven, I didn't fill out anything. And I just got a letter and it said we'll give you a job. I didn't have to go through a lot of things. And so I came in July '46 and [missing dialogue] trip into Aberdeen. I came in and of course I came from a little town and then I come from a farm so it wasn't that little. But Aberdeen, you came into the train station, and you wondered where you'd go next and they told me I could spend the night at the [missing dialogue] Hotel. Now the [missing dialogue] Hotel is a Harvest House is at the front of it and if you look at that building you will see this big old house back behind there. And I had a room that must have cost three or four dollars. And the bathroom was down the hall and I was kind of worried about that because I never done anything where I had to run down the hall in the middle of the night or whatever. And so I came to work here and I liked it, cause I figured that I was going to get me a job and was going to make fifty dollars. So they offered me a job for twenty-three hundred dollars a year, which is great pay and within eight months to a year and a half, I could go up to three thousand dollars. And I thought I was going to be real rich. So I went to work in the computing lab as a Mathematician T-1. Now there is something interesting about that that I would like to tell you. There was a woman, an Astronomer who had [missing dialogue] the war from Harvard and as soon as the war was over she went back to Harvard and she became head of the Astronomy Lab. Things were not going… In those days they did not hire women as professional [missing dialogue], they got [missing dialogue], [missing dialogue] professional. So she refused to come so she broke the rating thing just by doing that. That was interesting that that happened. It was very, very hard to be considered a professional, I guess, if you were a woman. So I hadn't been there very long and at that point they were getting ready to bring the ENIAC, which was the electronic name for the computer which was the all purpose, all electronic computer in the country that had ever been invented. And so my boss said there's going to be a vacancy for one Mathematician Programmer on that machine, so I'm going to go to the boss and suggest that you get that job. So in the middle of '46 or the first of '47 they brought the ENIAC down from Philadelphia. It was invented and designed at the University of Pennsylvania by Doctor [missing dialogue] Eckard and Doctor John [missing dialogue]. And they were just testing it then because they were inventing that machine to do firing tables for the firings that they were doing. Anyway they were making the firing tables for cannons and guns and stuff for them to use overseas for our military men. So all they had done in Philadelphia is that they had tested it, they had put one program on it with the firing table, a sample. And then they brought it down here and it costs fifty thousand dollars to bring.
GJ	Five hundred thousand dollars.
WJ	Five hundred thousand dollars, right, to bring that machine down here and set it up in [missing dialogue]. It was on like one half of a floor, so it was the only place that had any air conditioning in [missing dialogue] room. Because they had those IBM cards, a reader and printer that you put you're input in and got your output out on that. It had 18,000 [missing dialogue]. I guess it had enough [missing dialogue]. So I got to be the one- person…six women had worked as program operators in Philadelphia and two of them didn't want to come down here, and so I got their job and I was lucky.
RH	Did you know anything about computers at that time?
WJ	No, I hadn't even heard of the word "computer". The only thing I knew about it was that people were using in those days were hand computers [missing dialogue] and [missing dialogue] and Monroe's. They were making those fire tables by hand and send them off to the war. It was fun working on the ENIAC, a lot of fun. People came from all over the United States to see it, even people from [missing dialogue]. They brought all their problems. It was a 24-7, twenty-four hours, seven days a week we worked on it. It just kept [missing dialogue] problems. It had a lot of problems and there was a Mathematician on it and also you wouldn't want to be with the engineer and you stood beside the machine and you would have to look for trouble. [missing dialogue] got lost you could see these tubes that light up and one would go out and everybody was standing there trying to figure out what is this problem. [missing dialogue] before it would run, but then it would run and run well and pull out all the data. I got to… I was the main programmer for the German [missing dialogue] after World War II and took them to White Sands and they use the [missing dialogue] System and they reduced them down and [missing dialogue]. One of them that were fired, went over into Arizona somewhere. But anyway we had such important people that came here. President Sherman came one Saturday to look at it. He talked to us [missing dialogue]. Of course they really had to make the place safe for him. They had other people like Doctor [missing dialogue] that came from Princeton and his wife. And from [missing dialogue], Doctor [missing dialogue] who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics since Madam Curry. Doctor [missing dialogue] came here. A lot of them came at night. [missing dialogue] people were here with the Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb [missing dialogue]. I even got to go to [missing dialogue]. Three of us went out there. [missing dialogue], but that's another story. But anyway Doctor [missing dialogue] nuclear strategic stuff. It was an interesting time.
GJ	[missing dialogue] wrote a hundred books.
RH	Was he a Physicist? 
GJ	He was [missing dialogue] Institute.
RH	O.k.
WJ	And one of his books was on the basis of Doctor [missing dialogue].
RH	Did the community know about this? Did they have any idea that this totally new kind of thing was at Aberdeen and how important it was?
WJ	Only the people who worked in BRL, a few of them, you know. Because of work was going on in BRL in every direction. It was a very, very… It had a lot of brilliant people there who had come from everywhere, who were always going to leave. No one was ever going to stay in Aberdeen when they first came. I mean you're here to here and they were always having a habit of going somewhere. And a lot of people did go. They started computers labs all over the country. They started in Pittsburgh, then they went to Canada, and then they went everywhere. It was the grandfather of all computers, you know.
RH	Who was instrumental in getting them to come to Aberdeen, do you know?
WJ	It was that they wanted something fast that would compute firing tables. 
RH	That's all it was used for in the beginning, right?
WJ	Yes, just basically, not very much at first. They did Red Stone; they did everything up here. They did all the stuff for the missals and [missing dialogue]. By then [missing dialogue] coming more computers on…The Edback was next and it was being done and then the Irdvac came. And then after that they were out across the country doing the kind of computers that Herb worked on, because I wasn't there after 1955. So I had a really good time. I loved working there. It was fun, and knowing some of the people and staff. And 1955 was when I resigned to start having children.
RH	Well you missed something in between. You missed how you met Herb. We have to hear that story.
WJ	Yes that would be interesting. You see there was like nowhere to live hardly in Aberdeen when you first came. And they had these two long barracks out in Baldwin Manor. One of them was, they had women's, you know, for women and the other one was for men. They were across the roads from each other. And then they had a little recreation hall down there at Baldwin Manor right on the railroad track. And you came to a, they had a little square dance or something down there and they had a pool table and that's about all they had. All the young people would kind of gather in there.
GJ	It's [missing dialogue] a friend at the post to come and meet this group. And so the first place I saw her was leaning over the pool table shooting pool. [Laughter]
WJ	We were young then. And so from then on out we were…
RH	And what year did you get married?
WJ	In 1959.
GJ	'49.
WJ	Oh '49. [Laughter] It was fifty-five years ago.
RH	O.k. So, after you resigned is when you started having your family?
WJ	Yes. When we got married at first we lived in one of those little Baldwin Manor Apartments. It was the last building next to the railroad track and every time if it sleeted or iced and the electric train would go by, it would be daylight arching on that thing. And so we stayed there for the first part of '59. And then we moved down to Perryman across from the post office in Perryman upstairs in an apartment. And it was along the same road as the tracks and you couldn't hear. There were a lot of trains ran in those days because there were no cars. I remember putting my name on a list to buy a convertible because I wanted a convertible. And I did that in '46 when I was so rich cause I was making so much money. And they put my name on the list and I was 800 on the list if you wanted a new car.
RH	Oh my.
WJ	Of course by the time they got it, Herb and I were engaged and I said I wanted a convertible.
RH	So you never got your convertible.
WJ	I never got the convertible. So we went down to Perryman and stayed there until Larry was born and then we moved to Aberdeen on Rogers Street and the kids grew up on Rogers Street.
RH	What was there to do in Aberdeen back then when you were first married? Was there anything?
WJ	Well before we were married we would go to the diner there.
GJ	The Mayflower.
WJ	In the Mayflower. We didn't have much money so we would drink a coke all night and sit and talk to each other.
RH	Now was Aberdeen still segregated then?
WJ	Oh yes very much segregated, yes. And they didn't integrate the schools until '63. Didn't they?
GJ	Somewhere along that area.
WJ	That's another story we'll talk about.
GJ	How about Bogart's, something to do in Aberdeen.
WJ	Well when we came to Aberdeen Bogart's, do you remember the store?
RH	The furniture store.
WJ	Yes, the one that burned down. What they did was they got a microwave to sell and they wanted people to see it and so people would go down and look through the window and they microwaved a hotdog in one minute. And we were all so impressed. We were watching it. Another time they had a TV.
GJ	They had a TV. in the window and people