Dr. James Edmond Thomas

Physicist and Teacher

W

ith both an inquisitive nature and a knack for solving problems, Dr. James Edmond (Jim) Thomas has done much during his lifetime. Having grown up on a farm in Saline County, Missouri, during the Depression, Jim moved on to become a high school teacher and a college professor. During his life he has also participated in the war effort of World War II, missile defense projects, gathering data in nuclear weapons tests, and testing the effects of radiation in space. Dr. Thomas currently resides in Pittsburg, Kansas.

I was born May 17, 1926 on a farm in Saline County, Missouri. It’s in central Missouri, a little bit north, north of I-70, close to 65 highway. I’m a Junior; so, my father was J. Edmond Thomas, James Edmond. My mother was Holly Boswell. He [my father] was a farmer, all his life. My mother was a school teacher and she lived in the country about five miles out of Collins, Missouri, by the intersection of [highway]* 54 and 13, probably about four hundred people.

You know, your family was the center then. Everybody worked and contributed what they could contribute, because it took everybody, and all the time, to put shelter over your head, and clothes on your back, and food on the table. We grew up in the Depression, and people didn’t have money then. So, our families were together all the time when they weren’t in school.

Well, life was work. I started at milking cows when I had to stand up to reach the cow’s tits, which we call teats nowadays. When I was young, we farmed with horses. We didn’t really farm with tractors until after World War II, and then when we finished the day’s work in the field, we had to come home and get the cows up and milk the cows again (laughs); and so, we didn’t have much time for hanging out. You know, in the wintertime we’d milk cows by lantern light. We’d want to be in the field as early as we could, or sometimes the girls would milk the cows if we got really behind in the farmwork and had to work from daylight to dark; but we were pretty much limited on how long you could work because you had horses.

Sunday was truly a day of rest, except when you had things you just absolutely run day and night–which we did at times, when we got behind–but with horses you couldn’t. That was another thing. You rested the horses on Sunday. That’s when they didn’t have to work. We had to work on Sunday because we had to milk the cows, we always had to milk the cows, and we sold the cream from the cows. We separated the milk; we had a separator in the basement. We went to church on Sunday, of course. You know, you didn’t have a whole lot of free time. By the time you did the chores in the morning and the evening and you went to church, you just about killed a day. My grandparents lived right across the field from us, about a quarter mile, and we’d go to dinner some. But you had no money to do anything with. I didn’t start going into town until after the war when I came back.

We went to school and walked. We lived on one corner of a [mile] section, and the school was on the other corner, in the very corner. A section’s [a] mile by mile; so, if we went diagonally, you can figure that out how far that was a day. I had two sisters: one was older [than the other] and she went from grade school to high school, and that’s when I had to start walking with my middle sister, because she didn’t have her older sister to walk with. I first started walking with my sister so she didn’t have to walk by herself, then I walked with one of the little neighbor girls.

Well, we had one teacher that taught all grades; and we had thirteen to fifteen people. And what the teacher would do is she would teach grades together, so she really taught four grades. You might take the sixth grade and then go back and take the fifth. That’s one of my stories. I started a year early to walk with my sister. Then, I think it was the sixth grade, I was supposed to go back and take the fifth, but there wasn’t anybody in the fifth grade to work with me so they put me in the seventh grade; and so, I graduated from eighth grade at the country school when I was eleven. You really got individual attention at the country schools.

It [graduating from the eighth grade at eleven] was a disadvantage in sports, definitely. Socially, I was at a disadvantage. As far as intellectually, in the school work, you know, I didn’t have any trouble there. We had as good an education as the kids in town. In fact, maybe better, I don’t know. We got exposed to a lot of things, and we had to become independent because the teacher would put us to work on something and then go teach–work with another group.

Well, [in high school] they taught everything they do now, except they don’t call them [the same names]. I liked geometry and, you know, when I think of Latin I think of the teacher we had in Latin. The only year I didn’t make the honor roll was when I got an ‘M’ in Latin (laughs). I’ve forgotten what it was, it was something she did that got me an ‘M’; but she was a good teacher and it didn’t hurt me to not get on the honor roll that year. [The grading system was] ‘E’, ‘S’, ‘M’, ‘I’. They were ‘E’ for excellent, ‘S’ for superior, ‘M’ for medium, ‘I’ for inferior, and ‘F’ for flunk. You were expected to attend class. I remember an English teacher that I had; she came in and at class time she locked the door. So, yes, much more was expected of you.

I went out for sports as a sophomore, well, as a freshman I guess. I went out for football. I couldn’t go out for basketball because it was too late. Farm kids had to walk home from school if you went out for sports. So, in the wintertime it got dark so early I had to go home, so I played intramural basketball.

[As for my college education,] well, there’s a private–then a church-affiliated–school called Missouri Valley in Marshall [Missouri] which we lived about four miles away from Marshall. So, I went there as an undergraduate, and then I was teaching at Gallatin; and I decided after teaching a while [that] I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and there were things I wanted to learn more about. So, I decided I was going to go back to school to get a masters degree. I decided I liked physics. I had an old math teacher let me do a reading course in the summer in classical mechanics. So, I applied and had been accepted at University of California [at] Berkeley and was going to school out there, and this was in the summer time when I was taking that course, and in the meantime I met Shirley. So, I went by for a session on the weekend with a teacher at Missouri Valley and he said, “I got a call from the math department at Rolla, and they wanted someone to teach math. You could work on your masters in physics at the same time you’re teaching.” So, I went to Rolla and accepted a position down there. I got my Ph.D. [at the University of Missouri in] physics.

[My future wife] Shirley lived on a farm about four miles away [from me]. [Adults in my area] their entertainment was playing cards. They took the kids with them. So, I don’t know when we met, but we were part of the kids that were involved in playing cards. But, of course, she went to a different grade school than I did, and I was a little older than she was.

Shirley’s mother and her [my mother] were in the same club, and she [my mother] said, “Jimmy, Virginia [Shirley’s mother] asked me if I’d ask you to ask Shirley out,” (Laughs) and so I did, being a beautiful son. And so, I called her up and asked her if she wanted to go to a movie, and she said, “No, she was busy,” (laughs). I ask her to go, and she goes with her girlfriends. I said, “Well, if she wants to go with her girlfriend instead of me, then that writes that off.” (laughs). It was maybe like a friend, her cousin–he married a gal from New York–and his mother asked me down to dinner, and Shirley and her folks were there. So, we–the friend and his wife–we were going out that night after supper. I don’t know whether he did it or who, but asked her [Shirley] to go along. As a result, why she went. She wouldn’t get out when I let them out (laughs), so I had to take her home. So, we started going out then. That was in May, and we got married Thanksgiving.

Well anyway, [before I met Shirley] my mother...I kept telling her I wanted to go to war. [There were a number of reasons to go to war]. You know, then it was patriotism. They [other people] looked down on people that were 4F, the people that were physically rejected. My sister went into the Army, the WAC, the Women’s Army Corps. I had a farm deferment. You didn’t ask for it, they automatically [gave it to you]. The only way a farm guy could get into the service was to volunteer, they would not draft you. I had a deferment for maybe a year before I finally talked my folks into letting me go into the service. You know, that wasn’t an easy [decision]. My sister was already in the service and I had one other sister and she was in college. So, you know, I have a great deal of admiration for my mother deciding to let me go. They had to run the farm by themselves. If she had told me not to I wouldn’t have, see. I [volunteered and] went into the service. They were drafting and giving them three weeks’ training and shipping them immediately to Africa, and the only thing that turned out to be open was Navy radar technicians’ program. She finally agreed to let me volunteer if I wouldn’t go into the Army. So, there was a Navy recruiter in town and they gave me a battery of tests, and so I went up and took the tests and was accepted into that program.

In my draft group, there were thirty-three of us. We had to go to Ft. Leavenworth and I was the only one out of there that didn’t go into the Army. I think to the best memory I have I was one of the two people out of the thirty-two besides me that didn’t get wounded. I think half of them, exactly half of them, were killed in action. One of them [the two that didn’t get wounded] went to the Aleutians in Alaska, and I’ve forgotten where the other one went.

[Once in the service] I missed about two weeks of basic training. It was the standard drill stuff, if you’ve seen any of the pictures in which they show basic training. It’s drills and physical training and marches and guns and in the Navy it was swimming. You had to learn to swim through fire. I contracted scarlet fever when I was in basic, and the doctor called my mother and told her that if she wanted to see me alive she’d better come to the Great Lakes. But, that was the time that penicillin had just been developed. They gave you a shot about every two hours. The service was the only place that would’ve had it, if I’d been anywhere else I would’ve died.

And I guess I don’t really recall...sometime during the program the war ended in Europe and I volunteered for sea duty. The ship I was assigned to was in dry dock in Long Beach and we went out to sea for a trial run. But anyway, we go back into dry dock and the war ended. So, that’s where I went from that.

[After the war I] went to school, and I farmed while I went to school. So, I went to Missouri Valley and finished and farmed with Dad. I still helped him farm, [and] teaching high school [in Gallatin].

[After I got my doctorate] well, I worked in x-rays, x-ray defraction, and I worked with what they call “critical opalescence.” Around a critical point, you know, material coexists in solid, liquid, [and] gas form. That’s what I studied, I did x-ray defraction on it, what we call small-angle x-ray defraction. So, I went from there to solid-state physics with the advent in 1949 or so of the transistors. The small-angle x-ray defraction becomes diffuse x-ray scattering and allowed it to grow solids. It’s used to study the perfection of the crystals which the whole solid-state electronics field [is based on].

The first summer I was down here [Pittsburg] the people at Eagle Pitcher had a research lab in Miami, Oklahoma. Eagle Pitcher furnished Bardeen of Bardeen and Shockley who discovered the transistor effect. He and Shockley got the Nobel Prize for that. You see, the trace elements were a byproduct of the lead and zinc mining in that area down there from Joplin to Miami. So, germanium was one of the byproducts. There at Miami they had grown crystals of germanium, and they sent a crystal–the crystal that Bardeen and Shockley used to discover the transistor effect–they sent to Bardeen when he was at the University of Illinois. So, the guys down there–there were about five of them–they wanted to take an x-ray course with me about the first year I was down here. I asked them if they were working on something and they were trying to crystallize boron.

So, the Russians were developing an anti-missile missile, which was a neutron bomb that would hopefully fly up and explode in the vicinity of the missile and set off the atomic bomb in space, so we wanted them [the missiles] hardened. We [the men from Eagle Pitcher and I] had a contract to try to harden missiles against the neutron bomb. Well, the way that we were going to do it was put a shield of boron around and we’d absorb [the neutrons]. See, they could get the material smaller and it was more efficient as a crystal. It was a more efficient absorber as a crystal than it was as an amorphous. We worked with Bendex out of Kansas City. We finally developed a rubber matrix with crystalline boron, powdered crystalline boron, and they put it on the nose cone. That was my work with missiles. About two years ago I finally quit going down and consulting with them. I went down one day a week and worked with them as a consultant on everything they worked on. The people that started Texas Instruments were the people that I worked with when I started down there. I’d say probably half of them went to TI, and they were probably the nucleus of the TI group. They got rid of their last research group about a year ago last summer.

[Sometime later] well, I was with the Federal Civil Defense Administration–which I guess is equivalent to the Homeland Security Department–[in Nevada at the test site for nuclear missiles]. They sent some people from each state, I was from the state of Missouri. I was teaching at Missouri Valley in Marshall at the time. The areas around the tests were...cut in pieces of pie around there; and so, like, the Army had one sector and Berkeley, the University of California at Berkeley labs had a sector they did tests . We were interested in civil defense for shelters. It’s called “Operation Plumbob.” We had barracks. It was in a desert in Yucca Flats, I think about one hundred miles north and east of Las Vegas. It was effectively sand desert. Summertime. It was about twenty-five miles by ten miles. They had what they called tower shots, where they built a tower. The towers were steel structures five hundred to seven hundred feet high. Then they had what they called “balloon shots,” which they suspended a [nuclear] device from a balloon, and then they had artillery shots that were small weapons. We worked on defense structures that were involved, and we took data during and after the tests. The largest weapon they shot out there was a twenty kiloton device; it’s comparable to the two they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think [they] were both twenty kiloton weapons.

See, we wore over our regular clothing booties that we put up and tied up and then something that you put over your face. When we came back we had to go through radiation monitors. We had to take all our clothes off and leave them in a place where they laundried them. We were limited on the amount of radiation you could get. We could only have, uh, 3 R. Anytime we surpassed 3 R we could no longer go into any radiation zone. We could stay, but we couldn’t participate in any activity that could subject us to any more radiation. The levels were like 100 mR per day, 300 mR per week, 1.5 R [per month], and I think maybe it’s 3 [R] per year.

On days where there were shots, they’d get up early in the morning and watch the weather. The wind had to be right. The weather guys used to joke about they were going to go ahead and fire one when the wind was right to blow the fallout down to Vegas and they’d have to evacuate it out to crap tables (laughs). They wanted the wind to blow the cloud to the north and east, away from Vegas, up into Utah.

We stayed in a shelter on one of the blasts. We were in a Quonset hut that was buried about three feet in the ground. Normally, the opening to that kind of a shelter would have been a ramp down and then a right angle turn. Then the blast doesn’t get a shot at you. It was just like taking data in there (points to his office).

[Another] one of the things we had on one of the blasts was a vault, and it was set above the ground. [It was] a big steel vault with three foot concrete [walls and] reinforcement rods about the size of my wrists sticking out of the steel, and it faced the blast. And that blast got into the crack between the steel front of the vault and the concrete and just stripped the concrete off the side of it. The steel vault withstood the blast, but it ripped the concrete sidewalls off. They just ripped them sideways, that reinforcing rod was just as clean as it could be; you couldn’t tell it had been put in concrete. The impulse, it’s just like hitting it [the concrete] with a hammer. It didn’t fracture the concrete, all it did was just strip the rods out.

[On] one of our experiments they had penned up hogs in a fence at various distances from the explosion. Our pen didn’t do it, but one of the pens, they got close enough that it literally blew the hogs through the fence; and they were all gone. They had some experiments with donkeys and they actually suspended one donkey [in the air]. I remember that donkey; it [the blast] killed the donkey. One of the M.D.s that was there, he’d posted the donkey and he said there wasn’t an external mark on the donkey. But, he said the donkey’s internal organs were very badly damaged. For example, he said that the imprint of the ribs were layed all against the lungs and the heart. The internal organs were all just literally beat to death.

You know, we had cameras set up and that’s one of the things we did is we went in and collected the cameras and the film. We had a house, for example, that the thermal radiation set the front surface of the house on fire. It set on fire and then here came the blast. The pressure wave, it blew the fire out (laughs), and it caved in the side of the building. Of course, I’m sure there are some spots where the thermal radiation set it on fire, and probably when the blast blew the flame out it was still hot enough that it immediately flamed up again.

A nuclear explosion is, in today’s terminology, an absolutely awesome sight. We stood twenty miles away, outside, from a twenty kiloton blast. We had shields on that you could look at the sun and you couldn’t see it; yet, the flash from that explosion was almost blinding. In fact, they closed all the roads around the region on the night before the blast, but somebody snuck in; and she was fifty miles away, and she was blinded by the explosion. I don’t know whether she recovered her sight or not, but she was–at least for a period of time–totally blinded. The colors–and to watch it change as they–they kind of made a smoke ring, you know, a total ring around the blast. A doughnut shaped ring. And, of course, the radiation from the blast excited all the atoms around it and they gave off their characteristic lights, so it was like a glow discharge. I had on a pair of black boots, and we had uniforms that we wore when we went into the area. Those black boots got so hot I almost had to take them off from the thermal radiation from the blast, and then we watched it for a period of two to three minutes. If you can forget the destructive nature of it, it’s absolutely beautiful to watch it. Then you watch the cloud disperse, so that aspect was amazing.

[Later,] I worked with a fellow graduate student that I went to school with, he was at Oakridge [Tennessee]; and we were looking at neutron damage in copper and silicon and germanium, trying to look at the effects of radiation damage–this was radiation in space. Radiation damage to semiconductors and conductors that you’d send up in spacecraft–electronics.

I lived in a regular apartment [and] went to work, uh, at the plants down there [in Oakridge]. That was one of the three main plants that developed the atom bomb. And we just lived in town and drove back and forth and at the test site. The test site was a community, a locked up community. We lived there and we lived on the barracks there. The family went with us to Oakridge, and they lived in an apartment in town.

I’ve really been fortunate, see, I enjoy teaching. You know, I tell the people in class that I’d probably rather be out there digging a ditch with the guys for a sewer line with a Ph.D. in physics than to be out there digging a ditch without it, or to be running a big corporation without it. So, I probably wouldn’t [change anything about my life]. You know, I say there are little things–I probably said things to people I wish I could take back, and I’ve probably done things to people I wish I could undo–but on the big picture, I wouldn’t. I say I’m like [Barry] Goldwater, I’ve been a lucky son of a gun.

This interview was written and conducted by Joshua Elliott in December 2004 and January 2005

*[] indicates words not actually said by Dr. Jim Thomas