Building the enterprise

By the end of June 1960, with Mansel Ramsey's preliminary assurances of June 1 to the effect that we were OK with Oak Ridge National Laboratory policy, we were deep into the business of setting up the company. Enthusiasm had developed in our group -- far beyond what I might have expected.

As I worked on it and looked at it, I got more and more excited about the effort, as did the others involved. Everyone was not only working on his part of the operation -- we were supporting each other and enthusiastically supporting the overall effort. That mutual support, enthusiasm, and the mutual trust we practiced and built increasingly strongly as we went along were without doubt major keys to the ultimate success of the enterprise.

There was a lot to do and we needed to keep track carefully. During capitalization we talked with Joe Guarneri, who had accounting experience and was a member of (I believe) the Finance Division, which assigned and managed the administrative assistants in ORNL's major divisions .

Joe was assigned to the Instrumentation and Controls Division (Cas Borkowski's division), but did not report to Cas. He was enthusiastic to join in with ORTEC and was glad not to be affected by Cas's "blanket ban" on I&C division members' association with ORTEC. Joe agreed to be secretary-treasurer and to keep the books.

ORTEC's first budget was simply a budget for the cash outlays required to get started. Joe was to make the distinctions between expense and balance sheet items and keep the records in accordance with good accounting practices and IRS rules.

We had divided the various areas of work among us, but now we had to deal with actual purchases, work and budgets. We thought it best, for reasons of efficiency, initiative, and accountability, to set up so the guys in charge of an area also had budget responsibility for that area.

We were a group of independent personalities and knew everyone would want to make his own decisions about expenditures. Everyone agreed.

We also agreed if any major account items in the budget were going to be overrun, we would bring it to the board as soon as we knew, discuss it, and decide jointly how to handle it. It was clear budget overruns were serious matters, not to be regarded lightly. We all took budgetary matters as a challenge, and our approach here seemed to add greatly to the rapport we had in setting up the company.

The immediate tasks facing us were practical and each task had its own difficulty. We had a lot to do in the next two to three months in our evening-and-weekend activities.

We needed an attorney to draw up corporate documents, including charter, bylaws, state filing forms, stock subscription agreement, etc. Attorney Elliott Adams did the legal work, but only after we had selected a name and had a corporate address. Recall, the name Oak Ridge Technical Enterprises Corp. (ORTEC) was selected June 15, 1960.

Immediately after we had a company name, we rented a post office box, obtained a telephone number, initial letterhead, and began stationery and brochure design, etc. Jim Johnson was our designer and graphic artist; he came up with a logo.

After we found and arranged for a location (July 7), we needed to clean the rooms and physically set up the facility. This included installing the telephones, lab benches, shelves, cabinets, proper electrical and plumbing connections, painting the walls and surfaces, and insuring cleanliness throughout.

The phones and the electrical and plumbing parts were done by professionals; the rest was done by crews of shareholders who came to the new facility and pitched in with enthusiastic help. A fun atmosphere prevailed while this was going on. Leaders were John Walter and John Neiler, with 10 to 15 shareholders participating at various times.

Probably the single most expensive equipment item we would need was a vacuum evaporator. We would try for a lease-purchase arrangement, but also compare that with outright purchase. A deal was arranged with Consolidated Electrodynamics Corp.

Machined parts for our specific purposes added about another $300 to the purchase price of $1,700. Detector mounts and other machined parts, jigs, etc., had to be designed and made; Jim Johnson and Al Lynch did this.

We needed a multi-channel analyzer for alpha-particle testing of detectors. Dallas Yeager, an instrument sales representative who had joined in as an investor, arranged an agreement with Vern Hartzer, president of RIDL (Radiation Instrument Development Laboratories Inc., an instrumentation company), whereby RIDL furnished us an analyzer as a demonstration unit at no charge.

They required only that we place on each detector test spectrum a label stating that it was taken with an RIDL analyzer. No problem there! This saved us a capital expenditure of $5000 or more. Tom Emmer led this effort along with John Neiler and John Walter.

Yeager also agreed that he and his secretary could answer the ORTEC telephone during workdays while we were at work at ORNL. We arranged with AT&T to install an extension in Yeager's office, several blocks away. This was an enormous help in that they could call any of us if a really urgent call came in. Mostly they would take messages.

We also had to negotiate a supply of n-type, single-crystal silicon. John Walter made sure the specifications were right and talked with the technical people at MERCK & Co., which was known to us as a quality supplier. The quoted price was $1.89 per gram and we needed an ingot section of about 300 grams to start.

We were convinced the technical person at MERCK understood our requirements, but of course his instructions (to ship) came from the sales and/or credit department. The sales/credit guys had a hard time understanding our special requirements and also didn't readily understand who we were or what we were doing.

Finally, I ended up talking with the sales manager for specialty items who said, after being sure that his technical guy understood, "Oh, well, I'll give you a $500 line of credit and we'll ship it to you, whatever it is." They did, and we of course paid the invoice immediately after it arrived.

That started a good relationship through which they provided for our regular needs and provided, as well, ingot sections of rarer high-resistivity silicon as they became available, which was needed later for a number of our customers' applications.

The ingots we received from MERCK had to be sliced, and the slices had to be cut and shaped into the detector shapes we needed. The saw cuts would cause the loss of useful material of course, so we searched for a firm that could cut the ingots with minimum-thickness cuts. We used the firm MERCK technical people recommended, which was Semiconductor Specialties Corp. in New Jersey, which did an excellent job.

We applied for and received a license from the Atomic Energy Commission for handling radioactive materials, so we could procure alpha-particle sources and use them for testing the detectors. We had to work out and understand the procedure for purchasing the sources from ORNL, where we knew good sources, especially 241Am, would be made by Al Chetham-Strode and his group, who had made excellent sources for my work at ORNL. Phil Baker, in the isotopes group at ORNL, helped us, smoothing out the procedural wrinkles.

Parents React to Bus Driver's DWI Arrest

Early this morning, a Windham Middle School bus driver was charged with driving while intoxicated during her morning route.

Kimberly Hooley, 50, of Londonderry was arrested in the parking lot of the school after her driving was described as "erratic" by several parents and students on the bus.

One of those parents was Jenn Cavers, whose son Michael was on that bus this morning. Cavers was in the parking lot of the school to pick her son up this afternoon, which she plans on doing for the foreseeable future.

"I got calls and emails from other parents whose children were on the bus expressing their concern about seeing the bus driver drive up on the lawn and drive down the wrong side of the road and almost hit a child," said Cavers.

According to Cavers, parents of children on the bus knew something was wrong right away.

"Immediately, before the school was alerted or the police, there was concern amongst the parents," said Cavers. "It was observed by several parents that something was just not right with this woman."

Cavers plans on driving her son to school until there is more clarification on what will be done to ensure a repeat incident doesn't occur. She also said that the guidance counselor at the school met with the students who were on the bus today to talk about the incident, but didn't have any details of the discussion.

Also in the queue to pick his children up was Troy Heath, who has a seventh-grader and a fourth-grader in the school system. He normally picks up his children, but does allow his daughter to take the bus to school. He will not change that routine at all.

"We fortunately have a bus driver that we know and have had her for years," said Heath. "I trust her."

Heath did explain how he would react had his children been on that bus.

"I'd want some assurance from the school district or whoever is responsible for hiring the drivers that these people are screened better," said Heath. "Obviously this person has a real problem."

Jim Kauhl hasn't allowed his children on the bus for nearly eight years. He is a parent of a child at the middle school as well as a high-schooler. He disagreed with the harsh way the bus drivers would discipline the kids and make their own rules for each bus.

"We decided as parents it's best for us to pick up and drop off," said Kauhl. "This puts the nail on the coffin for me. This proves my point."

Kauhl did mention that there has been a vast reduction in parents picking up their children from the school.

"If you look at this line here this year versus last year, it has dropped over 50 percent," said Kauhl.

Kim Marotta also takes Kaul's approach, citing that she has had too many problems in the past. It's all about her children's safety.

I know a lot of people can't, but this validates why I pick up my children and drive them to school everyday," said Marotta.

Carmen Vallejo was also waiting in line for her son, who is in seventh grade, to get out of his last class. She questioned if all of the query checks are being done.

"Are they really looking into the past history and asking people if they have a drug history or an alcohol history?," said Vallejo. "If they need help can they come and say I need help and have a problem without being afraid of losing their job?"

Vallejo always picks her son up, the worry being that buses are simply unsafe environments for many reasons.

"You worry about your child being bullied on the bus, you worry that there's no seatbelt on the bus and now you've got to worry that there's something wrong with the bus driver," said Vallejo. "You always hope that the bus driver is going to be the responsible person. If they're not responsible and something bad happens they're the only adult. It's just little kids on the bus. They're all alone."

A little March madness

A sure sign of spring around our house is when my wife transfers the yellowed Christmas wreath from our front porch to the compost pile out back.

Of course, there's also the emergence of crocuses — followed by trumpets of daffodils, clusters of pear blossoms, random sprinklings of golden dandelions and free form forsythia.

Not to mention the fact that I begin to get one crazy thought after another.

"A little Madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King," wrote Emily Dickinson.

And what could be more mad than thinking of refusing to pay income tax this year. After all, the super rich got a tax break (we wouldn't want to cut into their country club fees, lest they stop playing golf, thus causing cutbacks in the employment of caddies and greenskeepers).

When questioned by the IRS, I could simply invoke the Geithner defense. (You may recall that Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, was confirmed by the Senate despite despite failure to pay $34,000 in taxes. "An honest mistake," he called it.)

It was the spring of 1982 that I came up with the idea of opening a coffeehouse and café (The White Buffalo) in the Stilwell Hotel. Consumed by spring madness, I thought I'd sit and visit, read a little, and discuss literature with my patrons over an espresso or latte while the place just ran itself.

I now know better. But alas, knowledge does not predict behavior, so I've instructed my wife that if I bring up the coffeehouse idea in the future she should hit me in the head with an iron skillet until the thought leaves me.

Smart people do dumb things. Years back I saw a doctor, an oncologist no less, step out the back door of his office to have a quick cigarette between cancer patients.

And a lot of wealthy, smart people, who should have known better, handed over their fortunes to Bernie Madoff.

"Wholly to be a fool while spring is in the world, my blood approves," wrote e.e. cummings. Still, over time, one grows tired of certain kinds of foolishness. I see hanging out in a loud, crowded bar on a Saturday night as akin to medieval torture. Young people relate stories about getting hammered and throwing up in the parking lot and I think, "Whew, I'm sure glad that part of my life's over."

But there's always some fresh foolishness to try.

Being Christian, you're probably already aware, is no guarantee against foolishness. Even in churches, like the one I go to, where the congregation sings from missals and songbooks rather than a PowerPoint projected on a giant screen above the altar, people are prone to spring madness about as much as the atheists who don't attend church at all.

On a warm spring day a man sets out to "love thy neighbor" and, before you know it, he's run off with her in his new convertible to live in the ultramodern house he bought with the cash from his 401K and life insurance. Pure foolishness brought on by spring. (As Mark Twain described it, "It's spring fever.... You don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!") Six months later, when the heat and humidity of Kansas summer replaces the balmy spring foolishness, the man comes to his senses and returns, chastened, to sit in the last pew.

To be sure a person has to develop a strategy of some sort to in order to make it through this time of year without doing something completely idiotic. Not just young people, mind you, us baby boomers and senior citizens have to be on our guard as well.

Kansas spring weather being mercurial as it is, watching a lot of the Weather Channel on TV is an option for getting libidinous ups and downs out of your system.

Or, one might fall back on an old adage for guidance. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop," for instance. A person can stay busy outdoors — raking leaves, planting new flowers and shrubs, and getting the mower running. As Margaret Atwood wrote, "In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

While yardwork isn't a sure thing to keep a person from getting the spring crazies, it should be noted that the treatment at early mental institutions, aka "Asylums for Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason," relied heavily on horticultural therapy to bring people back to their senses.