clinical neurophysiology. That's all I can remember. So, you can't take -- well,
it could be that one was on midnights and the other one was on days, but I remember going up there.
I don't know how I got from South Charleston up there to Benton Station. I remember what a miserly guide dog I had. [laughs] VanWie, L.: No, I had -- the first one, I think, came into the area when I was at K - 25. But I had been with the older people for a while. And I remember one of the most unusual things. I had a group of men working for me. And we were finishing the job. And the boss fell asleep. And so I moved from one end of the house to the other, and I was standing on the steps doing my videos. And my husband came in the house and said, "Well, what's that?" And I said, "I'm preparing for a video." And he said, "You're what?" I said, "I'm preparing for a video interview with SAU." So since I was there, I started taping. And that was it. VanWie, L.: I don't know. [laughs] Actually, we had three bedrooms in the house.
The living room and the kitchen were in the middle of the house. And they had one bath. That's where I did all of my operating from. And it was a very nice house. VanWie, L.: Well, when I first got married, I wasn't married yet. My husband was working at K - 25, and so I lived in a dormitory. And once I got married, I then got a one - bedroom apartment over in Knoxville on Fifth Avenue. And we moved in -- We moved in with a lot of people. There was nine of us when we moved in. And then my sister and her husband came, and they lived with us for quite a while. Then later on, we moved in a house up in Jackson Square. VanWie, L.: By numbers or letters or something like that, telling which areas that you could go into. So not only were the plants -- the town itself to get into but then there were parts where there were guard stations before you got to K - 25 -- well they still today into Y - 12, I think. And X - 10 was the same. That was the way it was called. X - 10 was the same way.
You could not just go through those, even though you were in the residential area. Then for each of the buildings you have to have passes too. And so if you only worked in a certain area, this was usually designated on your badges where you -- so there was never going back and forth in the plant of the ordinary people. Now the men, the scientists could do that. To some extent, they could do that. VanWie, L.: Uh - huh (affirmative). But there was a lot of security. And I know that one woman that was -- when I was in special analysis who was training me for the job that I was doing. There was one particular apparatus that I did not know how it worked, and I was trying to find out how this thing worked, and she said, "That's what they told me to do, and I don't ask any other questions." And that was the way so many people from this area were. They just didn't ask questions. They were told the job. And you'd have to be in the area to realize what the people in this area were, not security minded, but they just were very loyal people.
This is what they were to do, and they were told they weren't to do anything else, by gum they didn't do it. VanWie, L.: I don't know what other stories. Actually, two of our children were born in Oak Ridge. The third one was born in Oak Ridge, but we lived in Knoxville at the time. It was a nice place to bring up children, shall we say. VanWie, L.: Well everybody had children. [laughs] I mean, it was a very young community. That's when I say the men would get in one corner talking business and the women got in the other corner, talking about kids and obstetrics because we had just so many kids there. There were good medical facilities. The original hospital had been set up as an Army hospital. We had good doctors there. We had good dentists there too. So, when -- and I had my children there in Oak Ridge Hospital. It was fine. You couldn't have asked for better people, really, to attend you as far as doctors and dentists. And the facilities were fine.
And so we never wanted for that type of thing at all. VanWie, L.: It was 20 miles by bus, you know, and then we went to the big town because we went to Knoxville to find things in stores. In the early days, they had a small department store. Gradually things started coming in. But in the early days, if you really wanted anything, like even throw rugs or something like that, you went to Knoxville for them. So you had a long shopping list when you went to Knoxville. Gradually, of course, things started to change, especially when the city was open. VanWie, L.: You know, I don't remember. I have really forgotten when they opened the city. Anyhow, we enjoyed living there, but we went to Knoxville when -- in those days they had a priority system on housing. If your job was such, you could get such and such. We had a two - bedroom house.
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