An Interview with Campbell M. Wade
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Harrison:
An interview with Campbell Wade, December 29th 2003.
Wade:
I’ll not try to anticipate your questions because you know where you started.
Harrison:
Well, tell me about the coffee break.
Wade:
Well, that was right after the IAU meeting in 1961 that was held in California, and probably September, and Dave Heeschen came back from that meeting - he was not yet Director, he was sort of the chief scientist of the organization, and Otto Struve was still Director. Heeschen became Director a little over a year later. But at this time, of course, the big problem with radio astronomy was getting resolution of things you were mapping or whatever, and one approach was aperture synthesis, which is a term that I think goes back to Sir Martin Ryle, who was one of the leaders in it. I don’t think myself that Sir Martin ever gave full credit to other people like Bernie Mills in Australia, or even Joe Pawsey in Australia, who also had significant ideas that he built on, but that’s a personal opinion. But this was big talk, aperture synthesis, at the IAU meeting. And so Dave Heeschen came back all fired up over it. And so it was an afternoon coffee break, I think September of 1961, which in my mind is where the VLA project really got some sort of existence started.
Harrison:
Where were you?
Wade:
This was in Green Bank, the Green Bank cafeteria. Curiously enough, I think I remember exactly where the table was we were sitting at - I have a rather geometrical memory. And so it seems to work that way. I’m right sometimes! Well, anyway, Dave Heeschen got to talking about all this. The other people there - since I remember it I know I was there, since he was talking I know he was. I’m pretty sure that Dave Hogg, whom you probably know, was there - he was a graduate student then - and Frank Drake and Roger Lynds who left NRAO in the next year or two, so they were never really connected to the project in a constructive way. But Dave made quite a speech, and we began kicking around, "Well what if we build an array? What should it be able to do?" Well gee whiz, maybe it should have a beam width of 10 seconds of arc, which was unheard of small in those days - now we go down to thousandths - but you’ve got to remember this was over 40 years ago. So it was discussed until everybody was tired of it, and then we went back to work. And not a lot happened immediately, except I think there was general agreement that something like this ought to be done. We had no one on the staff with any experience in that sort of thing, and so we had to learn a lot. Most of us could spell aperture synthesis, and that’s about as far as we could go. So, is there more that I should try to drag up about the coffee break?
Harrison:
No, that’s good.
Wade:
I really think it took form at that point. This had been in people’s minds at various levels of seriousness, I’m sure. I’d wondered about it, but, oh, heck, I don’t know about that, I’ve got this stuff I’ve got to do right now. But also, I’ll mention one opinion I’ve got that perhaps some would disagree with, although I don’t think so. I think Dave Heeschen was very much the father of the VLA. He provided the impetus, the sort of leadership that kept the project all headed in one direction instead of several directions, and he kept that going right through. I think he would have resigned the directorship of NRAO earlier had it not been that he wanted to see this project get going. He had a strong belief, you know, that ten years was the absolute maximum that he should stay in the job like he had, and he stayed with it for 16, and I think this was what made the difference. So if they ever name that thing after someone, it ought to be Dave Heeschen. He’ll go into the modesty routine and demur. But I do think that the credit goes there. Of course, he didn’t do it by himself. A lot of people made contributions, but he and a very few others made more than their share. Barry Clark comes to mind. So anyway, what should we do next here?
Harrison:
Well, what was your first initiation to aperture synthesis yourself, your first hands on aperture synthesis activity?
Wade:
Well, this wasn’t born in one piece. I came to NRAO from a post-doc in Australia. I went down there in December of 57 and left in December of 59. Arrived as father of one and left as father of two, you know, one of these transitional times in one’s life.
Harrison:
Let me have a second and ask you a question. Is your undergraduate degree from Harvard?
Wade:
Yes.
Harrison:
OK, so that’s where you were doing your first radio astronomy?
Wade:
Yeah, that’s another story, because I think this is about the VLA and not about me. But yes, I got started there and I was involved in the Harvard radio astronomy project. Some people blame me for being one of the sinners who got it going. But remember I was an undergraduate, let’s see, I’d come out of the Army, and with two years of college behind me, and I picked up again. Going back to being an undergraduate after being a platoon sergeant, that was a sort of loss of status, you know. I guess maybe it was a little bit brash so anyway....
Harrison:
And then you went back to Harvard, you got your undergrad, and then what did you do there?
Wade:
Then I got a Master’s and I finally finished up the doctorate. I finished all the work, the oral exam and everything, in 57. And the degree itself actually was dated 58 because that was the next time they were conferred.
Harrison:
And that was at Harvard as well?
Wade:
All three degrees from Harvard.
Harrison:
And then you went to Australia?
Wade:
Yep. Radiophysics, which is, well, let’s see, do you know all the alphabet soup, or have people forgot? CSIRO? Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, and I was in the Radiophysics Division, which did the radio astronomy. And it was a real privilege to be there, because I was working with real pioneers, you know. It was a great education. Well, let’s say I took the job offer I had that paid the least, and it was the right thing to do.
Harrison:
So that was where you got interferometry work?
Wade:
I saw it.
Harrison:
You saw it.
Wade:
I did not participate in it. I quickly learned to admire Bernie Mills very much; the Mills Cross is probably a familiar name to you.
Harrison:
Oh, I didn’t realize; I hadn’t put those two together.
Wade:
Bernard Y. Mills, for some reason known to everyone as Bernie. He was one of that handful of people I’ve known in this business who was brushed with genius and like most legitimate geniuses or geniui or whatever you want to call it, he was really quite modest about it, but not shy either, you know. And there are a lot of bright people, but arguably it was my feeling that he was the brightest of the lot, but there were other people who were ahead of him in places, so this isn’t worth arguing. But the point is that he had excellent insights, he had got the Mills Cross, 85.5 megacycle cross, working shortly before I arrived there. I mean within a year, something like that - I don’t trust my memory on that, but it was that order - but that certainly was doing a lot of what one would call aperture synthesis. What you were doing was taking a distributed aperture and making it produce a beam you could do very good astronomy with. What he was not doing that Ryle [Martin Ryle] did later on was - he was trying to make it act like a single dish, so you produced a beam in real time. Ryle spread out the job a little more, as we wound up doing here. You don’t really have a telescope until you’ve run these noises through the computer. But Bernie was trying to produce things that look like it came out of a dish. I don’t think there’s any fundamental difference between that and what came later. A real pedant might claim there were some, but I don’t think the... well, for one thing, you have a certain amount of information striking your collecting elements, as we call them, antennas of some sort, and what you do with that information is various, and so the labeling that we put on reflects more about how you handle that information than what that information is or where it comes from. I’m getting very much into personal opinions here....
Harrison:
That’s fine.
Wade:
So you get a lot of argument from others. But that’s the way I see it.
Harrison:
So you saw interferometry when you were in Australia?
Wade:
Oh, yes. And I worked with another cross that Alex Shain had built, a 19.7 megacycle cross. Big and it stretched over 3000 feet, I guess. My involvement there produced very little, because when I left Australia the end of 59 we had a great ream of data, then Alec became fatally ill and died rather promptly. Here’s a guy probably not past 40, and he had something like 8 children. It was just horrible. Stomach cancer probably got back to what, the conditions under which he lived in the islands during the Second World War. He was an Australian infantryman, and those guys suffered a lot, and there were weird things that hit your system and so on. That was the speculation. Point is that all the data disappeared. No idea where it ever went. So I didn’t have any real published result from that, but I did play with the stuff, and got some feeling for it, but nothing that would make me an expert. I was following somebody else’s lead.
So there were 3 crosses down there. There was Bernie Mills’s Cross, that was the first. It may have been done a year before I got there, but not much more than that. There was the Shain Cross, that I mentioned, and then there was what they called the Chris Cross, it was named for Wilbur Christiansen and he was known to everyone as Chris, and brother-in-law of the head of the Communist party in Australia, {leading to definite?} conversations at times, and the Chris Cross is different because it was an array of dishes instead of dipoles, and so they were separately steered. It was working during the time I was there, but I had no personal involvement with it. I’d walk over and watch it humming along, but there’s more to participation than eyeballing it. So I ... and I worked with some of the data from Bernie Mills’ Cross, but I nothing to do with taking the data as I recall. If I did it was pretty tangential. But I did work pretty hard with Alex’s Cross. Anyway, I had a feeling for all this when I came back from Australia at the end of 59, went to Green Bank, went on the payroll there on Groundhog’s Day 1960, and had not yet developed an appreciation of my own ignorance - that came later, but anyway, sort of normal history here. That was the background.
And then when Dave Heeschen comes back, oh, a year and a half later or so from that meeting, certainly it wasn’t as strange a thing as it would have been otherwise, and it looked like fun. That was 61. Not much happened at first. Everybody was very busy. All of us except Dave Heeschen, I think, were desperately working to get tenure or something because we wanted to be able to feed our kids and all that stuff. The next tangible thing that I did with this really, apart from occasional discussions, I spent three weeks [late in 1962] in California both at Pasadena and up at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, where, under John Bolton, they’d built the interferometer with two 90-foot dishes which is very much a pioneer and again, a lot of the techniques that one uses with this were worked out there. It’s always dangerous in a business like this where you are dealing with an idea whose time has come, to start handing out credit. People build on each other’s work, and I have never seen science as appropriately an ego trip for anyone, although it works that way in some cases. But I do think it is the game and not the players that ultimately make the difference. So I don’t claim too much credit for myself, and I think I hurt some feelings by not being too quick to give it elsewhere either. Again, personal prejudices.
Harrison:
So you spent time there....
Wade:
Yeah, I spent time there, observed what they were doing. I do not at this time recall doing anything really hands on. I was looking over shoulders, trying to understand what they were doing. They were doing some things in very primitive and laborious ways, which are alright when you are starting, you know. In any field you don’t start out with a finished product or it’s not much of a field, but we.... I remember having a feeling there as I watched them working horribly, laboriously at handling the data, "We’ve got to do better than that if we get into this." For one thing, NRAO is a visitor-oriented organization. We’ve got to have instruments and techniques and supporting structure that will let people who don’t know the instrument very well, but who do know the science, do good science with it. That’s what it’s for. And it was not to anyone’s discredit that things were so laborious then because they were pioneering it. So that was alright. But I did come away impressed with the fact that one place we could make some headway was how we handled the information. There were a lot of other things I saw there that impressed me very much. John Bolton died a few years ago, but he again is one that I think was touched with a dusting of genius.
Harrison:
And he was Australian, wasn’t he?
Wade:
He was actually an Englishman. He worked in Australia. He emigrated out there at the end of the Second World War. The person who knows John Bolton much better than I is Barry Clark, because he worked under Bolton there. Barry cut his teeth on that interferometer there.
Harrison:
That’s right.
Wade:
And Barry has a much more profound mind that I do anyway, so you’ve got to talk to him if you haven’t done it already. Barry is another one who is definitely piled with genius dust.
Harrison:
Yes, he is.
Wade:
Probably the brightest guy I’ve ever known, but that’s a dangerous thing to say because there are other people who think they should get the laurels. [Laughter]
Harrison:
I think everybody would be in complete agreement over Barry.
Wade:
Yeah. No, he is exceptional, as a human being and as a scientist. Anyway, I learned a lot, as I said. And I know I had one idea that didn’t bear any fruit then, and maybe didn’t ever, but I got interested in what we might do with fiber optics to replace the cables, and I went up to Silicon Valley, actually, south of San Francisco. Spent a couple of days there, saw the much smaller interferometer that they had at Stanford, Ron Bracewell’s project. It was interesting. Good people. I did go and visited some of the industrial establishments that were busily developing fiber optic techniques, and it was pretty evident that this might be promising. But on the time scale we were going to be thinking of it wasn’t ready. So we dropped it. But I told some people about what I’d seen there and why I’d gone up there, and it was, I think, an idea that was there before its time, and I don’t think it bore any direct fruit in this, but now, you see, they’re doing it. One reason I checked it out was I was so ignorant about it.
Harrison:
Sure, that’s the way we learn.
Wade:
That’s the way we learn. All that time.... At this stage, you know, I’m 31, 32, beginning to settle down a bit. The sort of ego that one develops in graduate school, where you actually think a PhD means something, it’s why you’re working for it.
Went back, and I was doing other astronomy. At that time the only instrument we had working in Green Bank of any significance was the first 85 foot telescope. You’re personally familiar with Green Bank?
Harrison:
Yes, I know it.
Wade:
OK. So this was what we called 85-1 when we built the interferometer and hooked the two moveable elements on it. And.... Am I doing rambling here and you should be calling the shots?
Harrison:
No, you’re doing just fine. Keep going.
Wade:
Because I’m basically giving you a time-ordered stream of consciousness, which depends upon an untrustworthy memory, but I’ll.... It’s as honest as I can do it, but nobody will disagree.
Harrison:
If I need exact dates I know where to check on them.
Wade:
OK. Yeah, you can check my police record! I’ve got a son just retired from the Albuquerque police department. But anyway....
Harrison:
You worked on the 85 foot?
Wade:
Yes, single dish work.
Harrison:
Right. How far away was the 140 foot?
Wade:
Oh - same distance it is now! [Laughter] About a quarter of a mile, I suppose. It’s been a while. Probably a quarter a mile or a little more down the road. The 140 was being built at that time, and I was much involved in that. I think I was the only astronomer really involved in it, aligning the axis and all that stuff. I spent many nights up there freezing to death with the theodolite trying to get it going. But that has nothing to do directly with the VLA. I say directly because anything you learn with any telescope may pop up somewhere in some other place.
Well, anyhow, I think the next thing that I remember doing was, oh, probably, about October into November, I wrote up a little thing which I circulated to some of the people around there, just about, basically reflecting what I had learned and figured out about aperture synthesis. And the way I was setting it up, I know I was thinking of how one makes it work with computers so you don’t have to do all this rice paddy type labor that I saw going on at Caltech. I don’t recall a lot of particulars now about it. I just remember being impressed that surely there is an easier way to do it than they were. Fellow named Nigel Keen, he was from England, you’ve probably heard his name. Nigel was more or less hired to work on getting some of this stuff together. And another person who was around then, I think... boy, someone else would have to check me on this, I don’t think he was at Green Bank primarily because of our interest in the array, but his talents were used for it, was a Frenchman named Marc Vinokur. Does that name mean anything to you?
Harrison:
Yes, it does. In fact, the three of you, didn’t the three of you write a paper?
Wade:
Whew!
Harrison:
You and Vinokur and Keen [Nigel Keen]? Because I’ve seen those three names together.
Wade:
We were doing the same things. I do not remember actually writing something. But you know, after you write a bunch of the stuff it falls apart.
Harrison:
Runs together....
Wade:
I certainly was much associated with them. I got along with them. It took some doing in both cases, because Marc is the typical, fiery, chauvinistic Frenchman, and he was very short, wiry, one of the fastest walkers. I’m a fast walker, but he could keep up with me and even pace me a bit, and he’s probably at least 6 inches shorter, even more than that, maybe 8 inches shorter.
Harrison:
So the three of you were the ones who worked on the interferometer?
Wade:
We weren’t the only ones. What I can’t really remember now is when other people began coming into the effort, so you’ll have to bear with me on that. Some of it may come back to me. I’m talking about stuff I haven’t thought about in years. I’m just dragging it up.
Harrison:
I’m impressed that you remember the names. If it was me trying to remember a few years ago I’d be....
Wade:
If you get mad at people often enough you remember the names. OK. But Marc was, he was actually from Algiers. This was the time the French were busy being thrown out. His parents were there, sort of a dangerous place. He was Jewish, and so he was very bright and very kinetic. A combination of French and Jewish I think often leads to a very fiery, focused mind, and Marc was an interesting person to work with. Awfully bright. It was a great concession for him to admit that anyone else’s ideas had merit, but he was willing to do it. I think part of that is the inferiority complex that you so often see in short men. They feel they have to make up for something. If you’re over six feet you don’t give a damn, and I’m blessed to have been in that category.
Larry D’Addario, in many ways very similar to Vinokur, but I’m not sure they ever knew each other. Trying to think - of course, Vinokur was gone. Vinokur was in Green Bank maybe two years. I think he left in early 64, maybe even earlier than that. But he had a lot of very good ideas and one thing I welcomed was his skill with what then was called information theory. I guess that term is still used, but possibly with a change in meaning. And very strong on mathematics of the game, and certainly very expert in setting up the kind of problems you wanted to get a solution to. One of the problems a lot of us had, and I think I did too, was taking the fact that we recognized something here needed to be analyzed, but not having that feeling for it so we could set it up in terms that could be solved. Marc was very good at that. So even though he’d drive you nuts at times, I was awfully glad he was around. And then he went back to France. He was a diabetic, and I think by the mid-60s he was dead. Which was quite a loss. Keen, of course, I’ve explained his [***].
Well, it was this document that I wrote, I reckon it was my own words, my own thinking, but I know also it had to involve mental enrichment from these other guys. So that was circulated. And that was circulated in about the third week in November 1963, and you probably remember what happened then. Mr. Oswald shot President Kennedy. And I know it was that same week. And so nobody paid much attention to this thing I’d written. In fact, I sort of forgot about it myself. That really was... you had to have been younger than we were at that time, so it may not have made the same kind of impression.
Harrison:
No, it’s one of those days I’ll remember.
Wade:
I was working on a notebook with some stuff on galaxies, and I wrote in the margin, "They tell me the President was shot." Right there. That sort of thing. It was the week before I turned 33, by which time I had some family responsibilities.
Anyway, it was during 64, as I recall, there was a lot of action now that was taking form on the ground. We were well aware that we did not have in house the expertise that one needed to build basically what was a collection of hundreds of interferometers. 27 elements out there, you get 351 pairs. Each one can be legitimately regarded as an interferometer. So we raised the money from NSF to build the second 85 foot antenna which was on that great collection of tires. I don’t know if that is still there. Last time I set foot in Green Bank was 1989, so I don’t know what the condition of those antennas is now.
Harrison:
Well, they’re still there. The two of them and the track are still there, but I don’t know that I ever saw the machine that moved them.
Wade:
Oh, we just used a couple of bulldozers.
Harrison:
Oh, just bulldozers.
Wade:
Yeah, jockey them along. There was not an actual track initially, there was a roadway. And then you had a great number of tires under there. And the great adventure was to move the antenna, it was about 1964 we were getting that thing running, and it wasn’t too sudden. So in 63 a lot of the preliminary work had to be underway. But I don’t remember the details now. But I do know that by the summer of 1964 we were actually trying to get fringes. There were two 85 foot antennas. The third 85 foot came several years later, and that went operational, as I recall, in 1970, a fair bit later. I can date that - there’s the work Bob Hjellming and I did, first science off the three element interferometer, it’s where we discovered the radio emission of stars. You see what I have to rely on for this. I never kept a diary. When I retired 10 years ago this week, I kept nothing. I figured I was done with it. There were other things I wanted to do. Why come fill up a very small house with that junk? So, it went. So I can’t give you pictures or documentation of any sort. I didn’t even save my reprints. I was tired of it.
Well, 64 was an important year. Because 64 was the year we actually had a working interferometer. It was an instructional tool, and it didn’t do much science right away, for two reasons. It wasn’t good enough to do the science, and the other thing is that we hadn’t learned how to use it. Now people who were much involved in that thing. I know Barry was. He was doing, as I recall, most of the programming. But he wasn’t immediately because he didn’t come until the fall of 64, if my memory serves. But he shows up then. But we had already done a lot of work then, and I do know some of those long summer nights down there the ionosphere would build up, and - you’re probably familiar with the system. We’d have a receiver on each antenna and we, at that stage, I can’t remember if we were recording signals separately or combining them electronically. I know we had great amounts of cable there for the delay line because you had to have the path link the same, unless you have an infinitely narrow bandwidth when you can get away with everything. But we didn’t. So you take the radio frequency signal, and I think we were doing this first at 1400 MHz. I might be wrong with that. We may have been doing 2695 [MHz], 10 cm. You see how good my memory is. Dave Hogg might be a good person to straighten out this because he was very much involved. He’d gotten his degree by this time, and was no longer a graduate student. I was down there not so much to work on specifics, but as more to keep the whole thing balanced. I was involved in a lot of things; I was trying to look and see where the holes were. How useful that function was I’m not sure, or how well I carried it out I’m not sure, but that was my involvement. But the advantage was I saw everything that was going on - which I’ve now forgotten.
I remember some of the ironies, one of the things that you learn a lot from. We had not learned how to shield and ground things properly so [as not to] have extraneous signals running through the equipment. Particular extraneous signals that were giving us fits there for several weeks were Radio Moscow getting into our intermediate frequency from somewhere over there, and Voice of America from North Carolina or wherever it was, and we had these signals, neither of which was wanted, in there completely drowning out what we wanted to work with. And we corrected the problem, and learned a lot of useful things, by learning about how to shield things, the grounds that were needed, and we got rid of the problem. Then we began to get signals we could do some astronomy with. Along with this, it’s not enough to have this instrument, but you have to calibrate it, have to know where to put the numbers on the dial. And I got very much involved in that, and, this was building directly on what I’d seen in California a couple of years earlier. I wanted to automate the process, and there are still probably some reports I wrote here, how phase drifts, phase changes here, and how one can take that information and use it to refine the geometrical constants of the array. It actually worked. It was probably the first place where I made a real contribution myself, because I did the work that made it possible to calibrate the thing accurately and easily. I did write a bunch of memos on that, which probably exist somewhere. Dave Hogg might even have them. He doesn’t throw away stuff the way I do.
Harrison:
You’d be astounded at how much Ellen {Ellen Bouton, NRAO Archivist] has.
Wade:
Hmmm, Ellen’s an impressive lady. I never knew her terribly well, but everything I knew about her was just, she’s so often ahead of the rest of us, you know. Besides, she went to Radcliffe, which was really part of Harvard.
Well, this led to one thing and another, and somewhere in here it dawned on me, I think some other people were about to have the same idea at that time, it was one of these ideas whose time had come, that we could actually, if we set up the problem right we could make the interferometer calibrate itself to a large extent. And with that came the ability to measure the absolute position of radio sources. That was something I was much involved in, and I still sort of feel that in many ways it was the best thing I did. The chance to maybe do something before someone else had, although I knew it was going to come very soon with other people. But that was important, because it did basically make the calibration problem controllable. Now whether anyone else remembers what I did then, I don’t know. I suspect Dave Hogg, possibly Barry Clark. This is not an ego trip for me, but I sort of groped at finding something useful, and I did it in such company as Barry Clark. And I think I had some success there.
Well, once we were able to get information out of those two antennas and do some science with them, then we.... I think we were really on our way. Something that never got written down, couldn’t be, I suppose, is the fact that we hadn’t believed that we could do it. This was very mysterious. None of us had done it. Well, Barry Clark, when he arrived from Caltech, of course, had experience, and that was very valuable. And in fact, when he arrived, I had just written a paper on how we could take the digital output of the correlator and get calibrated fringes out, and I think that probably is still behind the way we extract information at the VLA. I think the ideas are there, the details are very different. And I believe the first memo Barry wrote after he arrived was showing how I could have done it better. [Laughter] And he was right. But still, somebody has to break the ice before somebody else can fall through without effort, you know. So it was fun days. We were learning so much new, we were learning to believe in ourselves. I think of all my years at NRAO, the ones I enjoyed the most were probably the ones I spent working at the Green Bank interferometer. Because there I understood most of it. This thing up here [the VLA], not even Barry Clark totally understands it! And I’m very uncomfortable putting my reputation on the line working on something that I don’t understand. Well, I don’t have an IQ of 10,000, and that’s about what it would take to understand this. But still those of us with more ordinary abilities could grasp it.
One person I haven’t mentioned to you who should not be forgotten is Jim Coe. Does that mean anything to you?
Harrison:
I don’t know that name.
Wade:
He was the engineer who was working right with us on the interferometer. He was very good. He solved the problems on the delay line more than anyone else. I don’t know enough about it to say where he made other big contributions. But I have a strong feeling, and I did then, that his presence was vital in that project. He was very good, and a laid back fellow. The seeds of his destruction were there - he chewed tobacco. One of the few intelligent people I know who chewed tobacco. And you’ve seen the billboards, you know, "half off with tobacco", well that happened with Jim. It eventually killed him. He still had kids in their teens, it was just awful all around. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him well enough to admire him greatly. So, Coe, C-O-E. I just hope his name can be kept in things. It is very easy to forget people like that.
Other things going on then. I had not learned how to measure absolute positions yet. That came a bit later. But at least we got to the point where we could bootstrap our ways in getting the calibration constants of the two element interferometer and relate it to the geometrical parameters which we called position of the radio source. And several of us did collaborate on the paper which was presented in early 65 giving a list of positions, which was very competitive with [the position measuring by] other people. In 65, things began to get a lot more formal. I think - I’m guessing here - but I think I am right, or not too far wrong, in saying Dave Heeschen did not want to proceed with a formal project organization until we had proven we could make the two element interferometer work.
So it would have been summer, maybe early fall, of 1965, that there was a formal project organization. And my recollection is that there were eight of us on the staff who were a part of it. Let’s see.... Dave Heeschen, he was the Director, but he sort of kept his hands off. I don’t know how well you know Dave, but he’s one of these guys who doesn’t miss anything. And so, he’ll watch there, and you think, "Oh, he’s just an administrator." Well, you’re about to step on a nail. And I have a great respect for Dave in many ways, he’s one of the few scientists I’ve ever thought was worth a damn as an administrator. [End of tape 1, side A]
I was just mentioning that I think Dave Heeschen and his management style were in fact a very important part of this. In my mind this instrument is Dave Heeschen’s memorial, not that he needs a memorial yet, but it’s worth more than a pile of marble somewhere.
Another person that seems to have been largely forgotten, and it’s too bad, is George Swenson. George was hired away from University of Illinois by Dave. Dave had gone to the University of Illinois, knew George there, and George was the son of a very fine electrical engineer and was himself a professor of electrical engineering. And George... Have you ever met him?
Harrison:
I have not.
Wade:
He’s a big guy. He’s about 6 feet 4 inches. He has a slow and ponderous manner, which, to the imperceptive, looks like he ain’t very bright. Well.... [Laughter]
Harrison:
It’s a ruse.
Wade:
That’s the wrong impression. So.... He’s just a big bear of a man. But George was hired to be the leader of the design group. His job was to run the design group. The rest of us were trying to do some science along with it. And, boy, who was on that? Heeschen and George Swenson. I don’t remember now if the eight includes those two or not. But there was, of course, Barry Clark who was well in the system by then, Dave Hogg, Sandy Weinreb, I’m probably going too fast. Warren Tyler, myself, and a Chinese graduate student named Leonard....
Harrison:
Chow.
Wade:
Chow, who made a huge contribution that even missed Barry. The wye-shaped...
Harrison:
He was a graduate student?
Wade:
I believe he was finishing his thesis, but working out of one of the universities in Canada. Alright, I’ve named six in addition to the first two. There must have been some others - and they can be looked up.
Harrison:
And I have eight if you include Heeschen and Swenson.
Wade:
Right. I’ve always thought of it as initially eight. Then other people came and went. We all had different things to do. Not surprisingly Barry Clark played a vital role on computer stuff, though Warren Tyler and I were much involved in that in the beginning. What we were trying to do was avoid having this group, a collection of prima donna experts, each one of whom was expert on something no one else knew. When it came to writing a proposal, George had us write... we’d draft chapters, but then they’d be finished off by someone else. It was like that. And it was good, because all sorts of the mental inbreeding we get when we work on something too hard had a chance for being shown for what it was and corrected. Well, that was later when we had the first design.
My own involvement was on two very different things. One was to find a site for this thing. After all, something like the site is in fact an integral part of the instrument, because it will determine the limitations that you have to deal with at home in order to get at the sky. And so there’s a long saga on that. I got to eat in lots of bad backwoods restaurants, for example, and all that. My first trip out here, with Sidney Smith, who had already gone over the maps and found possible sites, a great number of them, back when we thought a 10-second array would still do it. We came out in November of 1965, and we arrived in the old Albuquerque airport terminal. When we left a week later they were in the new one, which was the first version of the present one, so that dates it right there.
The first site we looked at, in fact, it turns out to be the one we wound up with. Of course, we had to come up with a new list, and Sidney actually came up with a list of about 14, that were wyes of 15 mile arms. It was later, with understanding how to use the data better, that we could shrink them down to 13. And there Barry Clark somehow showed up, you know.... Anyway.... It was, this all happened about the time that Leonard Chow pointed out that we would do better if we used the wye shape instead of the T shape on the antennas. So that wye shape was built into that first list of the large antenna sites. I got into it, and then Sid sort of moved out to other things. He was basically an engineer, mechanical engineer. It was largely on me to find a site, and we eventually considered 34 of them, many of which we rejected quite quickly. Some of them were in the list for political reasons. Lyndon Johnson was president then, so we had to have a site in Texas in there. Actually, one of those did make it into the final list, at Marfa. Blah, blah, blah.
The other thing I was doing was sort of the thermodynamics. We had been talking loosely about 25 meter dishes because they were a controllable size and all that, but would it really do the job? So I wrote the chapter on antenna size and sort of made it look like we had come to that size from knowing the scientific requirements of the array. In all honesty, we knew the answer and then we went to find the questions. That was the other thing I did, so two very different activities. So thermodynamics vs tromping around a compass.
Harrison:
So how many sites did you actually end up physically going to?
Wade:
Probably about 20, low 20s. I can’t remember that. Again, don’t have my notes. [Rummaging noises in background]. Spring of 1965, Charleston West Virginia. That was a Swedish, no, Finnish forester’s compass.
[Wade gets a compass out of his desk.]
Harrison:
Oh, wow!
Wade:
$15 it cost then, and now about $120. It’s very accurate, you can work to a fraction of a degree with that little sighting thing there. I, through some swindle, got hold of some Luftwaffe World War II aircraft paint which adheres to aluminum, because the glare of the sun off that thing can affect taking readings in the daylight. That’s what I used to check out all the VLA sites - my own equipment! Major investment of $15. An excellent piece of equipment. So I’m very proud of it. But I used that thing to lay out the VLA up here. The initial layout. Of course when we really got going the surveyors came in and did it right, but I could get close. That’s one link to the time in the effort right there, because that was always on my belt. This isn’t the original case. [Laughter] So, anyway, much involved in that. Am I rambling too much?
Harrison:
No, you’re doing fine.
Wade:
Other people were doing their things. Sandy Weinreb and Warren Tyler, who had absolutely no use for each other, worked together very well getting the electronics roughed out initially, for example. I liked them both, but they did have great slabs of pure prima donna in them. We worked hard. And you know one thing.... All right, context here. It hadn’t really dawned on me until September of last year [2002] when George Swenson’s 80th birthday was being celebrated in Urbana, last time I made a stand-up talk in front of a bunch of people. George, Dave Heeschen was there, I was there, and Barry Clark was there. Let’s see - Dave talked, Barry was just in the audience, basically he’s getting his feet down again from losing Betty and all that. But Barry always improves the quality of the people in the room he’s in, on average. And so it was good. I got to talking with Dave the evening before, and saying, "You know Dave, have you ever thought about how young we were when we did that?" Look at what they’re doing now. Extending the VLA, depending on people in their 50s, all that. Barry Clark was I think 27 or something when he got started on that. Dave himself was maybe 38 or so when we got going with it. Not even 40 yet. Remember, in a mature organization like you’ve got down there, anybody that young is probably not regarded as capable of tying his own shoes. Dave was the old man in the project. George Swenson was something like 42 or something. I’m 73 right now, that seems juvenile, right! Remember, when I retired, my age caught up with my IQ. Well, the whole thing, most of us were in our 30s. Now I would have been 34 when I made that first site trip out here. But we were all young! And looking back on it, I think that in various ways that might not easily be particularized, our very youth, combined with the total dedication we all had to what we were trying to do, led to a very superior result, and it’s sitting right there out on the Plains of San Agustin right now. It was a real privilege to have been a part of it.
And you look back at George Swenson, who’s got to be given his due - so many people I think have never heard of him now. But I think Dave Heeschen and George Swenson were the, what would you call them, the magicians who made it happen. They combined, they kept us all on track - "Never mind, Joe - that’s a cute idea. However, we’re working on the VLA right now." This kind of thing. George, I thought, handled his work superbly, and I did not have the wit at the time to appreciate how well he was doing it. But since then, as I have matured a bit, perhaps, I have come to appreciate him much more. It was a funny situation, because except maybe in a few areas where he was particularly knowledgeable, he did not know as much about the various components of this thing he was coordinating, as the individuals working on it. But what he did do was appreciate and understand what was going on, and could see the holes, or he could see where too much work was going.... You know, you’ve got to keep the thing advancing on something like a straight line. If you get too many spikes into enemy territory, they may not work, or the spikes are going in the other direction. And George did a superb job, of coordinating that, and pointing out the things we were missing in our enthusiasm for our own little empires in this thing. Well, he deserves an A, those of us who remember him and know what he was like to work with, I think have all come to appreciate him very much. I think a lot of the younger people around have even not heard of him at all, or have heard of him in a way that builds no appreciation. But I think people would agree with me he performed a vital function.
Harrison:
How long was he with the project?
Wade:
OK, I’ll get ahead of myself a bit. He came, I think, about the fall term 1965 when the organized project took form, and he was the - I forget his exact title, but he headed the design group and so on. He stuck around.... Hmmm, alright, let’s see, another date here. We had the first two volumes of the proposal to NSF finished in January of 1967. And convulsive effort, there were heroic efforts of other people. I remember Peggy Weems, who was our technical illustrator, she didn’t want to be called a draftsman then, she’s been gone a good many years. But she - this was before there were any computers to draw all the stuff with - and she did a heroic job of preparing illustrations and doing it well. And Phyllis Jackson, did you know her at all? She was the Director’s secretary for many years. Phyllis is one of my favorite people, I hugely respect her. She did all the typing, in addition to being the Director’s secretary. Immensely capable. One of the things I admire about Phyllis.... Her name’s worth remembering, too. She was from Marlinton, West Virginia. I remember when I was living in Green Bank, she came on the payroll, and she was not great. But, she learned! And long before I left Charlottesville, I thought she was the best secretary I’d ever seen anywhere, and she deserves credit for that. You can’t put it in something you’re writing, but you know, she was another hillbilly girl, and she found a job at "the astronomy", as they called it over there then. Some spark got hit, and how she grew! And I kid you not, I still always regard her as the greatest secretary I’ve known. She was so capable. And it’s so nice to see something like that happen with people. So she’s retired now.
Well, gosh, this actually is germane to the question you asked about how long George was around. The first proposal was pretty much a casualty of the Vietnam War. And it could have died except too many of us believed in it too much, and we refused to put it aside. So more work was done, made things a lot better, it went from a 36 element array to a 27 element array, things like that. The arm length went from 15 miles to under 13, all because we understood better how to do it. The electronic design was much improved, because now you had time - it was the rush before. Barry Clark had some brilliant insights into how to handle the data that hadn’t surfaced yet. So the time was not wasted. And so Volume 3 of the proposal, which now updated the first two volumes, was submitted in 1969.
George left in there. I would not trust my memory on dates exactly here. George had seen us through heroically that period from - oh, it was only a year and a half, boy it seemed longer. It was, say the middle of 65 till early 67. He stuck around probably another year with this effort of trying to keep things improved, but he was terribly discouraged. And I know he thought it would never be built. It was sometime in there, I imagine it must have been about 68, George walked in my office there in Charlottesville, sort of bemused look on his face, sort of a half smile, "You know, Dave just fired me."
Harrison:
Oh!
Wade:
But, it says something about both those guys that they remained friends. But Dave fired him. Because he didn’t want someone in charge of the project who didn’t think it was going to be built. He more or less took over that role himself then. So George went back to the University of Illinois, he resumed his professorship. Probably not many people know that to be out there. But I think that tells you something about those two fellows as men, that they could do that, still a lot of respect there. Dave was absolutely hard-nosed, and he really felt that George was not benefitting the project any more, and out he went. And I know he thoroughly admired him.
Harrison:
Now you said your office was in Charlottesville?
Wade:
At that time, yeah. I went to Charlottesville at the end of 65, actually I moved my family over there in the summer of 65, but the building - Stone Hall, did you know that building was Stone Hall?
Harrison:
No.
Wade:
It was being built then. OK. It was moved into it in December, I think, basically the end of the year. And from then on that was our place. My office was upstairs. You know your way around the building there. You get to the end of the stairs and you walk - head down to the left. First thing you pass on the left is the men’s room. Next office was Dave Hogg’s. Mine was the next one after that. So that was my office. I forget the number on it now. I can still remember my office number in Green Bank, that was 304, no, it was 208, that’s right. I think my office was 304 in Charlottesville. I remember numbers forever, but I forget names in a minute. My phone extension in Green Bank was 105. Yeah, it was 208 that was my office there. Not that that’s of any relevance here.
So, anyhow. That’s where George walked in, and he was gone fairly soon after that. I think he was gone before that third volume was done. And, if my recollection serves, there was no real successor to George appointed. I think Dave more or less took it over himself. And the.... I wrote the fourth volume of the proposal, if you have a copy of it, so that’s the one on site work. Basically it doesn’t have my name in it either. But, first chapter I did write all of, it described the work to get the site list and recommendations. Then the main thickness of the volume was made up of reports from Limbaugh Engineers, which no longer exists under that name, in Albuquerque. L-I-M-B-A-U-G-H. And they were a pretty good bunch. With our involvement, meaning my involvement, we choose seven sites that looked like they at least would be workable for the array. I was much closer to this thing than anyone else. I was the only person that actually walked all these things, had been there, flown them, and all that. So I knew them about as well as anyone from Charlottesville would know them. And we took the sites that looked like they could be made to work for the array and then tried to give them an absolutely objective evaluation. This is why you needed Limbaugh. Because by then, I was convinced the Plains of San Agustin was much the best spot. In fact, in a way it was good, because hunting through all these sites, and having seen that one first, that gave me a standard of comparison for all the others that came after, and that was awfully valuable, in focusing your attention.
Then comes all the committee discussions, and, "How do you know this is the best possible site?" Well, you don’t. There’s no such thing as the best possible site. We’re not looking for the best possible site. We’re looking for a site that will work well. See, that is an attainable objective. The best possible site is a metaphysical concept. Depends on who is defining "best," for example. It depends on the stage of the instrument. It depends on a lot of things that you can’t tie down. But you can be pretty sure that something will work. And that’s what we went for. But the, again, this sort of thing of having a straw man, OK, these arguments time and again I got tired of. "OK, you don’t like this here, I can see why you’re concerned about it, what would you say is a better choice?" Almost never got an answer. But you know, intellectuals tend to get their mouths going which gives them a chance to rest their brains. I know now that for myself, I’d have been much smarter to be an engineer. Because I don’t really have this curious type of view that the scientist really needs. I can do science, but I always sort of wanted to see things built and working. And that’s an engineer’s mindset. The other thing that didn’t help was my politics tend to be considerably more conservative than most of the people [***]. I’m the only one with a blue collar background, and blue collars do tend to be conservative. And it stuck. Well, anyway.... I ramble. Old man talking.
Harrison:
So you were with Limbaugh. And you came down to seven?
Wade:
We came down to seven sites. We contracted with them to evaluate them in depth, and this included things like analyzing what the array would do to the drainage in the area, that level of detail. What is the groundwater like? Can we drink it? Will it take a drain field for the septic system? Is the ground stable enough that the antennas will hold? Because we knew by then that we need them to stay steady to a fraction of a millimeter to hold the calibration. You look at them, they are so huge but in fact they are precision instruments. In terms of the overall size of one of those antennas, they are much more precise than any watch that anyone made. It’s not surprising when you think about it, but it seems odd when you first hear it. So, that’s the way it went.
Harrison:
So who made the final decision?
Wade:
OK, I’ll come to that in just a minute. We got the report back from Limbaugh, and it was 1970. Spent a large part of 1970 putting all this together into a volume, and I wrote that lead chapter in it. It even detailed a list of the most important site trips. There were other smaller ones, but these were actually critical to helping the list evolve. I haven’t seen it since I left Charlottesville, and I don’t have a copy - somebody hooked it.
Harrison:
There’s one in the library here.
Wade:
Yes? Don’t tell me! I ought to go look at it sometime. Well, anyway. At this time people were very worried about the politicians getting into the act, and with reason. The Argonne National Lab in Chicago, that was decided by the politicians, not by the requirement of the instrument, and people at AUI were well aware of this history. So I was under strict orders not to talk to people about any of this I was doing. Within the group, yes. And basically, word didn’t get out, though this will lead to another thing that perhaps should go in. But let’s answer your original question first.
By the end of 71, I believe, something like that, I had that thing finished. I was even, by then, Phyllis had done her typing and all that. And Gerry Tape was the president of AUI, strict orders, we would just sit on it, it didn’t go anywhere, no circulation of volumes, nothing.
Harrison:
So AUI was very much of a....
Wade:
They were the people who were involved at this point.
Harrison:
And they were the people who were saying, "Don’t talk to anybody about this."
Wade:
Yeah. But they were right. Because, see, these were experts from all over.
Harrison:
Right.
Wade:
And they had an awareness of some political realities that few of us would have been in touch with. But I think it was a beneficial system. It worked well. I’ve always had a lot of respect for the AUI Board. We’ve had an occasional one in there who perhaps could have done better elsewhere, but on the whole, for a group of that nature, I think they were remarkable. Way better than the AURA Board was for Kitt Peak, for example. And a very selfless group, very capable.
It was the State of the Union message and the President’s budget message in January of 72 that the VLA project actually went public. It was quite a day to remember for me, because I sat in [my son’s] hospital room and listened to Nixon, whom I detested, giving all this stuff, while he [my son] was down the hall getting bone marrow taken out to make sure he had leukemia. There went a lot of my attention in the next three years, that’s how long it took [to kill him]. But that day in January of 72 is one I do not care to repeat.
I remember Dave Heeschen’s comment: "We’ve wanted this thing so long, and now we’re getting it from a crook." [Laughter] This was before Watergate. It was later that same year that the Watergate thing came out.
Harrison:
Well, was it mentioned in his State of the Union?
Wade:
It was not in the State of the Union, but with the State of the Union, coincident in time, as I recall, some of the commentary, you know, after this was talking about the budget message, which did include it. And honestly, right now, especially given the stress of the day, I don’t recall just what I heard when. But it was a package in our mind, because it was at that time we knew that the VLA now had White House endorsement. It was proposed, it went in the budget then by the NSF, of course, not directly to us. So at that time this thing went out, and by then, we had flogged through things internally, and wanted the Plains of San Agustin. That was a single-handed argument on my part, I think. I felt it was, anyway. A lot of people, including some pretty respectable ones, were heavily in favor of putting it on the Papago land out west of Tucson. Well, it would have spilled over into private farm land, and about two thirds of it in Papago land. Why they thought it should be near a big city? And here’s where some stuff comes in. Most of these people had city backgrounds. I grew up on a remote farm in Kentucky. I hate big cities! So it’s.... And this prejudice affected everybody. And I think even people who weren’t aware they had such prejudice, it was there.
But one thing that helped with that one, I found a report put out by the Weather Bureau. I would make contacts all sorts of places. Really valuable. You’d learn stuff that you’d never pick up just walking to the library. And one guy in the Weather Bureau in Tucson, I was always talking to the Weather Bureau people, that was really a part of the site work. He gave me a copy of a report called "Desert Flood," and I forget exactly when it was, but it was sometime in the 60s, so it was recent at that stage, there had been a major monsoon rain storm out there which had actually flooded over half the area where we would put the array if we had gone there. And a few years later, actually it was right in that time frame, I went up to do some observing at Kitt Peak. And I had to turn around at Three Points because Brawley Wash had taken out the bridge. And I remember standing there in the lightning. It was terrifying! I was riveted. Enormous trees coming down this thing. Where did those trees come from in that part of the world? But there they were. It was a violent thing, and it was something similar to that that this report was about. And they reported.... The Weather Bureau has these people reading thermometers from their kitchens all over. And one rancher in there said, "Couldn’t tell if there was much rain. Gauge washed away." [Laughter] They just printed it in there verbatim. And that sort of killed it. It would have been horrible there. Walking around in there. Never really saw it in the daytime. You ever seen sidewinder tracks, sort of discontinuous interlocking arcs? All over out there. If we had to send technicians out.... Uh-uh. No, I did not like that! And the heat. It wouldn’t have worked. But I’ve said enough about that, I think.
But still, we had this kind of thing to worry about. The only serious contender to the VLA ultimately, I think, was Tucson. But if you put those two together there was no comparison. There were some others that could have given the VLA a harder run for its money. But they all happened to be in places where the logistics would have been much tougher than here. The VLA was the second highest site in the total list, and I don’t think wye-4, which is at 7400 hundred feet, actually made the final list. Yeah, in fact, I know it didn’t. If you flew over it you could see recent fault lines, still steep. After they’ve been out there a few hundred years they’re like this, and you’d never see that if you were down on the ground.
Harrison:
That was where?
Wade:
OK, you know where Grants is. The Grants lava flow there. That was very late prehistoric, because people could remember it when Coronado came in. Well, one of the many stages. On well to the south. I think it is New Mexico 117 goes on down towards El Morro? Wye-4 was down in the end there, there’s an area called North Plains, which on the map looked like it was serviceable. It would have been a little bit tight. You see, one of the things about the Plains of San Agustin, which most of the other possible sites did not offer, was the potential for expansion down the arms. There would have been none of that at it. I know its number, wye 4. VLA is at wye 15. Those designations aren’t used any more, of course. Flew over it and looked at it very carefully, and you could see these steps in the ground that were obvious fault scars. What had happened was that there was still settlement taking place from this volcanic activity, which geologically was extremely recent. So you would’ve had a moving array, had we gone in there, and the 400 feet extra elevation wasn’t worth it. VLA site actually is a very workable place. And there were a lot of things about it which we knew about, but we knew how to take care of it. For example, that lake bottom sediment, which is full of montmorillonite clay, which has the lovely property of expanding enormously when it gets wet, and then when it dries out it doesn’t go back, it’s just all fluffy. So the way we beat that, of course, was to ballast all the road works, and to put down deep, carefully designed foundations, and every foundation was individually designed, because of the soil profiles, that kind of thing. And this worked pretty well. We did find some that were moving a bit, but not too much. So yes, I’ve rambled off very far, here.
Before 1972 started, though, I think there was general agreement that the Plains of San Agustin was the best place, and from my own standpoint I am very happy that I never changed my mind after we were committed to it. That would have been a little hard to take. I still think it was the best place. But we sort of worked hard at it in order to get to that conclusion. Well, Gerry Tape, then, let us go public with this. It was April of 1972. Now the project was going to take form in a visible way, to everybody. Should I keep talking about this, or are you worn out?
Harrison:
No, keep going. No, I’m fascinated.
Wade:
Well.... I know I’m missing a lot too.
Harrison:
I know your phone number!
Wade:
Uh-oh! I’ll get it changed! We knew early on that there was likely to be a lot of opposition to this thing. Ranchers I admire. I come from that kind of background myself. But they don’t like change. They’ve worked very hard to get what they’ve got. And despite a lot of city prejudices, they are some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known. They don’t survive by being stupid. They can be rough, they cuss, and they use funny grammar, some of them, but most of them are better educated than you might think. And most of them are very well read. What do you do out in the middle of a long winter? They read. And so, anyhow, this is a place now where my own rural background turned out to be very important, because I was at home with people like that. Somebody from Long Island would not have been.
OK, so April of 1972. Victor Bremenkamp, who was then sort of the assistant - I forget his exact title. Have you heard of him?
Harrison:
[negative noise]
Wade:
He retired about the time I did. He was sort of the super go-fer at AUI headquarters in Washington. He did an awful lot of the organization of their meetings, he’d see to the details, etc. He was pretty good at that. He had a degree in mathematics, I think, which he never used. He also’d been a cross-country truck driver. He had a rather wide background. Sort of fun, he was a very liberal Democrat, and I was a Democrat, too, but a more Southern variety, I guess, more conservative. So it was fun to have discussions at the time on these long trips that we did to these places together. We had to go public, this got into the papers, there was a lot of unhelpful speculation in the community because of the vacuum that was there. There wasn’t anybody there to answer questions. So there was trouble brewing. And Vic and I came out, with the purpose of taking our lives in our hands and going to talk to the people were going to be affected by this. And we walked into a hornets’ nest. I don’t recall now whether we went to Santa Fe first or we went there afterwards. I think.... We made two trips back-to-back. I can’t really recall it now. I think we went to Santa Fe first. At that time, Bruce King was in his first term as governor, and.... Do you know of David King, nephew of Bruce King? David King was a nephew of the governor, and he’d just graduated from college, he was about 22 or something, and he was head of the state development commission or whatever they called it, I forget what it was. Green behind the ears, full of his own importance, and without any qualifications (according to me!). He was known over the state as "the man from uncle." [Laughter] You recall the TV program.
Harrison:
That I remember.
Wade:
Yes. OK. Well, we - Vic Bremenkamp and I, representing AUI, and Morrie Safer and Jerry Anderson from NSF, and ... not Morrie Safer, what was his name.... Oh - Phillips, Morris Phillips. Morrie Safer is a journalist.
Harrison:
I thought so.
Wade:
Yes. And Morrie Phillips came out. It was going to be their meeting, NSF was going to go to it. You don’t have to write all this down, I'm not looking. It was a place where I got very involved and probably made a considerable difference, since I know something about it. We stayed at La Fonda up in Santa Fe. And Jerry told us how it was going to be, he was the man from NSF. Jerry is a great glad-hander, very pleasant fellow and all that. He said, "Alright, we’re going to get together for breakfast, and we’re going to go over how we handle these characters." He obviously didn’t think much of the locals. Our meeting was scheduled with David King. And, boy, he really laid it on strong. He and Morrie Phillips were going to handle it, and basically Vic and I were there to back them up with technical information. Well, that’s not the way it worked. It was in the Roundhouse, the State Capital, the only time I’ve ever been there. David King, having read various books, knew how to handle people coming in like us. He kept us waiting a while. And I remember cooling our heels in a room that had photographs, small photographs of all the state legislators and stuff. Well, one stuck in my mind, that was Jesus H. Christ. [Laughter]
We were eventually called into the "presence," where David King had arraigned - not arraigned, arranged various state officials, including one guy, who was the head of the fish and game thing for the state. The state land commissioner was there, there were a bunch of these people who should have been informed, it was appropriate. And I forget which one it was, I think it was the fish and game man, who was obviously drunk. But he was one of these guys who could be drunk and still track very well. And he wound up making a difference in this thing, because, what happened, King calls the meeting, and here was a kid, and.... [End of tape 1, side B]
Wade:
We were talking about the meeting in April of 72 in David King’s office. At the Roundhouse in Santa Fe, and various state officials there. And King opened the meeting, he didn’t even give Jerry Anderson and Morrie Phillips a chance to say anything. He just sort of said how it was going to be and figured they understood our requirements and knew where to go. They were being heavily influenced by a lot of their ranching buddies, where a lot of their support was. The trouble is, nobody in New Mexico knew what the hell we were trying to do! And Anderson and Phillips both just caved in. Ooooo [whining]. After all that tough talk at breakfast! And I don’t get mad easily, but I got mad. Part of it was anger at these two guys from NSF. They were going to blow this whole thing! And I could tell by Vic’s face that he felt the same way I did. And at that point, I just sort of took over. And I said, "Look. We know where it needs to be, we’ve studied it hard, and if it’s not going to go there, it’s not going to be built in New Mexico." I went way out on a limb with that, but he didn’t know I was out on a limb. And, he was sort of taken aback, and it was at this point that this man, I think he might have been the fish and game commissioner, who I’m sure ran on high octane a good part of the time, came in and he actually backed me up. And he turned out to be a friend through the rest of the meeting. He had to be careful how to do it - he was vulnerable. I don’t remember the man’s name, I’m not even sure I’m remembering the correct person here. But it was a very tense time. And it was obvious that things could get pretty well ruined if we didn’t handle it right. And I, I guess, took more on myself than technically I was supposed to, but there was no one else to do it. Vic represented AUI. He could not represent the science. It had to be me and I did it. I was so angry. Finally this meeting settled over. We left. I could not bring myself to speak to Anderson and Phillips. I basically just walked off.
I think we returned to Charlottesville, I saw Dave Heeschen, and then Vic and I turned around, if I’ve got this the right way - and it might be backwards - and said, now we’ve got to go talk to the ranchers. And, it was, I was so furious. I told Dave the whole story, he backed me on what I’d done - he really had no choice, because I’d already made the marks on the wall, you know. But still, he backed me fully, he listened carefully, he paid me the respect of believing me. I don’t know what happened after that, but it was noticed that Morrie Phillips and Jerry Anderson were no longer involved with anything related to the VLA from the NSF. But, these gutless so-and-sos, who were great at talking tough when it was safe to do so, didn’t do anything - they should have behaved differently! Well, Vic and I - I think I have it in the right order, but I’m not certain - came back, within a matter of days, came here [Socorro].
The person whom we were going to hit the hardest was Jack Bruton. Jack, like a lot of the ranchers around here, totally distrusted the Federal government, and with damn good reason. Jack Bruton’s family was thrown off their ranch down there on the White Sands, temporarily, you know, until the war is over, faithful promises, this will all be returned to you as soon as the war is won. They don’t have it back yet. What sort of credibility does the government get out of this? And with my background, I was totally sympathetic to them myself, but I had to talk like I was presenting something they didn’t like. Well, I was. But I also believed in it. There was a meeting, Jack Bruton’s father-in-law, Mike Harriet, does that name mean anything to you?
OK, he was the father of Jack’s wife, father of.... I’m horrible with names of people I know perfectly well - oh, anyway, he was a programmer that left NRAO at the same time, I always called him Bob, never used his last name. Bob Duquet. He was a Canadian, basically a mathematician, worked as a programmer for us. So, Mike was a French Basque who had come over about the time of the First World War, and done very well in sheep farming, sheep ranching. He was one of the founders of First State Bank, etc. And a hard-nosed character. He died, I suppose, 20 years ago, maybe more than that. But anyhow, he was Jack Bruton’s father-in-law. You must know at least know of Jack Bruton.
Harrison:
Certainly.
Wade:
Well, they arranged that we could meet them at Mike’s house down here. And I walked in. And that was a tense time. These guys saw us a government people, and I had to explain that we didn’t work for the government, we worked for an outfit that was funded by the government. And gave them the whole background as we understood it. And I knew better than to tell anything but the purest truth that I could come up with. Because those guys will see through you. If I’d come from New York I wouldn’t have thought they were smart. I knew better because of my background. I was grilled. Sitting there was Marvin Ake. Have you heard of Marvin Ake? Marvin Ake was a rough guy. Extremely intelligent. He had two houses. One of them was full of books and one he lived in. But he was rough. He may of killed somebody once on a matter of principle, you don’t get the straight story on that, but I suspect that things happen that are not accurately remembered or talked about. And he was looking at me daggers, because I was doing the talking, Vic was there to back me up on the organizational things. And it was very tense. And then, alright.... Do you know Sissy Bruton? She worked at NRAO, she’s teaching school in Magdalena now. She was a new bride, had just married Jackie Bruton, who was Jack’s son, they all live up there at the Bruton headquarters south of the VLA, and she was sitting there, and she’s a bright-eyed young thing, you know, probably 21 or 22 at the time. And there is all this pretty tense talk going on, and then Sissy pipes up and says, "Are there going to be jobs for secretaries?" And that totally broke the ice! And she said it in such an innocent way, and I think she’s genuinely like that, and we all, everyone, just sat there and laughed. It broke the ice, considerably. But it’s one of these precious moments that one remembers. This young lady that didn’t have any idea what was going on, really, but she comes out with a really very practical question, and then the laughter that came, it came from the heart in all of us, so things got better. And - Jack and I had tense times. He’s now, I’m proud to say, one of my best friends. I immensely like him and I think he would stand me for once.
But [***] That was such, again, a dicey time. I went around and talked to some other people who had been more tangentially affected. There was the oil man from Texas. That was another trip. Should I talk about any more of these people or not?
Harrison:
Yeah, this is....
Wade:
I forget his name. He was a big Presbyterian and a complete pirate. He was an oil man, lived in Amarillo. The H-Bar-H ranch on the north side of US 60 out there was his. He told me, very proudly, he bought that during the Depression for about $3000. That’s a unit that at that time probably had a market value of somewhere over a million, or more. The guy was a total pirate, but he knew how to stay on the right side of the law. We dealt with him. I talked to him [***], and I always try to prepare. I couldn’t do it with the Brutons, but I try to reach people before I met them face to face so I’d get a reading on them. And.... He was big in banking, too. I mean, the guy had money, and he stayed on top of everywhere it went. The ranch was really a hobby, and his son was a part-time pilot, would fly him in there. And being flown in, and his daughter, Penny, she made a nice lunch for us that day we went up to the ranch. And nobody’s doing any talking except the old man, though. He’s long dead now. Wish I’d remember his name. [It was Jay Taylor.] Anyway, he was concerned about where we were going. He didn’t mind the right of way going across the ranch because it had very little effect on the ranching operation. However, he was in the process of developing North Lake for growing hay. That’s the low spot, and I don’t know if you’ve ever gone up there, it’s a dry lake most of the time, but the water table’s high in there so he can pump wells and so on, and he’d put a lot of money into that. And I said, "OK, well I think we can stay out of that." I said that knowing we could, but I wanted him to feel like he was getting a concession out of us, because that could be useful later on.
Harrison:
You bet.
Wade:
Said, "I’ll get back to Charlottesville, we’ll run it through the computer and see what happens, and I’ll let you know right away." So, yeah, the arm is a few feet shorter than it would have been otherwise. It stops right at the road up there. That’s the kind of game you play with these people here. He was smart like the ranchers, but not like the ranchers, you know. He came at it more from the Jolly Roger, black flag aspect. Everything he touched turned to money. So we talked to.... Actually, it was rather interesting. His son was very quiet when we flew the airplane, left all the noise to the airplane, I think. His daughter, while she didn’t say much, you got the feeling she had quite an intellect, and, I don’t know. It’s just interesting to see how these people work, because I come from dirt farming, not gentleman farming, it’s somewhat different.
Harrison:
Let me ask you a question about that north arm. There was another place I read that one reason why the north arm was shorter was because part of the end of the north arm was irrigated.
Wade:
That’s what I’m talking about. That was North Lake, that’s it.
Harrison:
Oh, oh. And the price went up considerably, and that’s why they decided to stay away from that.
Wade:
To go in there and actually impact an operation that the man had put a lot of money into, and he’d have fought it, it just wasn’t worth it. And it didn’t significantly impact what the VLA could do. We were giving up a very small percentage of that thing. No, you’ve heard exactly the thing I’m talking about.
Harrison:
OK
Wade:
The.... Buddy Major....
Harrison:
His name was Taylor, I think.
Wade:
You’re exactly right, his name was Taylor. To show how it went, I had some contacts and did some researching on him, found he was big in the Presbyterian Church in Texas and all this stuff, and learned a number of the things he was involved in. This is information to be found if you know the right people. And when I talked to him on the phone before going out there, he was calling me Mr. Wade, well I learned he had been doing the same on me, because when we met there he called me Dr. Wade. [Laughter] So I knew he’d been doing homework, too. But it’s ok, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. But I was amused.
Well, I talked to these people. But underlying all this trouble.... I mentioned the lack of information. You’ve been to the Eagle Café in Datil, it was run by Lee Coker at that time. Lee was State Senator at the time, totally in the pocket of the ranchers. So, when this first went public, all these people go to Lee, "This man’s in government, you know, he knows what’s what." Well, he couldn’t stand up there and tell them he didn’t know what was going on, so he handed out a bunch of plausible sounding stuff, which we had to undo later on. And, Lee in later years wound up selling that place, and Santa Fe Diner down south? That’s what he established and ran, and then his wife died, he died, and I think Coker’s son and daughter-in law now run the Eagle up there. It went on evil days a bit after he left because it went out of the family, and finally these people bought it back. But that’s another thing. But this is the kind of thing we had to do, and it did not make our time any easier approaching people.
Oh, there’s one more bit of history that is quite relevant here. Involves David King. King, of course, was looking at the politics of all this. He had lost control, the control he wanted of us, because he never got it. He called a public meeting, which was in the band room at the old high school at Magdalena. Ted Riffe, who was then business manager for NRAO, and I came out for that. They, of course, were involved on that one. This was again in 72, probably May or June, might have been a little later, couldn’t have been much different. Anyway, by then I had talked to everybody whom we really were honor-bound to talk to on this. It was King’s meeting. He had called in all the ranchers who were impacted any way by this, and plus some others around, and that’s fair enough. Because we were going to change the nature of the area a bit, and couldn’t object to that. So what happens? Ted Riffe and I show up there, and a lot of people milling around, some we knew, Jack Bruton was there, pleased to say he walked over and shook our hands, that was nice. Then here comes David King, in a big state government limousine, driven by a state trooper, dressed in a kind of suit I have never owned. His shoes were shiny, not - you go to Magdalena, how often do you see shiny shoes, you know? This sort of thing. Comes into the band room. Ted and I knew enough to dress like cowboys when we came out there. I wore my oldest shoes, you know, and all that stuff. Here’s King. He takes over. He says, "You’re going to have ten minutes to tell people what this is about." To me. OK. I had hoped to have a little more, maybe to be able to show some slides, and so on, but that wasn’t going to work, so I re-planned things. And so he has this piece of paper and starts calling the roll. "Jack Bruton." "Here." And on down the line. And I remember, Mr. Taylor’s foreman was there. "Here." "Montoya Cattle Company." "That should be Montosa Cattle Company!" "Are you sure?" "God damn it, I’m sure! I’ve worked for ‘em twenty years!" It was their foreman. And people just laughed, and it was not a friendly laugh. In other words, David King was already becoming quite unpopular in the state.
Harrison:
You bet.
Wade:
And so he goes through all that, with this baleful look on his face, you know, the avenging angel. "Alright." He pointed to me. "Talk to them now." And so I went in there, tried to lay it out, and I thought they were being quite sympathetic. They were open-minded, they probably wished this hadn’t come up, but these are basically honest people, I like them. In five minutes, King gets up and says, "Alright, you’ve talked long enough." I hadn’t finished yet. I couldn’t fight it, so I said, OK, you can have it. That had a bad effect on the audience, too. So we sat down, and we wound up talking privately to a lot of these people, King goes out and gets in the limousine and disappears again.
Harrison:
And that was it?
Wade:
That was sort of it. That was his public meeting.
Harrison:
No question and answer period, or....
Wade:
Hadn’t gotten to that. But we had it informally afterwards. Because I stood around, and I think that these people could see we weren’t man-eating tigers. Had to make the point over and over again that we were not from the government, we were from a contractor who was funded by the government. But, oh, the thing that resonated with them, you know, we could be fired!
Harrison:
Yeah, that’s right!
Wade:
And this kind of thing. And so I don’t think we lost anything from that. I think David King lost. At that point, I had no thought that we’d be moving to New Mexico. But in 1980, Mary Ann and I were among the people that stood in line for five hours to do a write-in vote that led to Mr. Steen taking office. But David King made himself hated everywhere. I... I... That guy is awful!
Harrison:
Back up, because I don’t know why - I haven’t been in New Mexico but for about the last five years. So, David King, he went on to be the Representative and Joe Skeen finally took his place?
Wade:
Here’s the story. It was back, I think, about the beginning of 1980, Congressman Runnels died. His son is still seen in politics, he’s been prosecuting attorney in the next county north, things like that. But he was very popular. He was a Democrat, if I recall, but the Republicans usually didn’t run a candidate against him. They found him very tolerable, and would probably have gotten beaten if they had run one. So he, in some ways like Governor Warren was in California, he had bipartisan support because everybody liked him. Did a good job. And then he dies. And he died at a time when it was just too late under the rules for the Republicans to field a candidate against him. Bruce King stopped that. There were efforts... they could have done a few things here. I think David King already had the nomination for the Democratic thing, and Bruce wanted David to get to Congress. He was a nephew. Bruce King did what he could, successfully, to block the Republicans from fielding a candidate against his nephew. Normally, this would have been a guarantee that his nephew gets to go to Congress. That offended people for some reason. And it offended a heck of a lot of Democrats, too, I’d like to point out. Because I was, well, we were both registered Democrats ourselves at the time. That changed with our recent ex-President. But anyway....
Harrison:
So Skeen became a write-in?
Wade:
There were two write-in candidates. Mrs. Runnels, for whom we voted, and Joe Skeen. So here comes election day, people stand in line for hours, and we did, to vote for one or the other write-in candidate. David King came in third against two write-in candidates. Now that tells you something about how democracy can work. And he got smashed. And rightly so, darn it! And it was I think only the second time in US history that a Congressional candidate, an endorsed Congressional candidate, had lost in a write-in. The other time was in North Carolina or something, some years earlier. But I felt so good about that. Democracy can work! I do believe in democracy. But even if I abhor some of the practitioners... but anyway. We did our bit on that, and an awful lot of New Mexico citizens did the same, bless their hearts. And so Mr. Steen got his 22 years in Congress.
But I remember thinking at the time we were there in Magdalena, "If I ever have a chance to vote against that son-of-a-bitch, I won’t miss it." And lo and behold, the opportunity came. [Laughter]
Harrison:
Now that meeting was in 72.
Wade:
That was in 72.
Harrison:
At what point did you move here?
Wade:
Well, that has to be put in the background of when people moved here. We got active on the ground late in 72, and there may be some anecdote there that is worth repeating. People began moving out here about 75, because there were things to do then. So there was a lot of work to get up and moving, get up to speed, in a sense, so you don’t move people there immediately. For example, engineering work, the surveying, laying out the buildings, getting the buildings built. Then you start moving the people in. Some were hired locally, and many more were in the design process in Charlottesville. Not the design group, these were the people who were actually designing the details. So that started in 75, and included Barry Clark, for example. The next year, I believe it was early 76, Hjellmings came out, and other people, Jack Lancaster. Have you met Jack Lancaster?
Harrison:
No, I have not yet.
Wade:
Oh, he’s great. He actually was the chief of construction. Forrest Wells, who was the man who went out and got his feet muddy, too, and he died in 1989. He came out at that time. And I came out in the end of 77, and I’d come out with my first wife, and we decided, yeah this was great and we wanted to do it, and we bought the house, our first house here, in the north part of town, which we got rid of when the kids were all gone because it was too big. So we bought that house in the early part of October, and before the end of October, she was diagnosed with leukemia. So here we were, we’d sold our house in Virginia by then, it was just all torn up. And she got enough of a remission, and we moved her on out here in December, she died in May following. And so here I was, a fellow with two junior high students at home, my daughter was married by then, she was a fair bit older. This was three years after we’d lost our son to leukemia, a different form. So we got tired of that disease. But, it was a good change, I guess, at the time.
One thing made me appreciative of the Plains of San Agustin. It was a very high stress time. And to go up there, go up, go up, go up. An awful lot of peace to the soul to realize how small you are, how small your problems are. Very healthy. I’m sure I’d have survived without it, but it sure made it a lot easier.
Harrison:
I’ve always said there’s a crankiness warp, just about this edge of Magdalena, if I’m having a really wretched day and all of us down here. I go out there, and....
Wade:
There’s some sort of magic there. Well, I felt it, and I’m grateful for it. So, anyway, it was a time of great stress. Countryside helped, to an extent that I think some of the contending sites would not have helped. And so it was. I ramble and ramble and ramble. I was going to mention, though, one thing, after we had things sort of going, we knew it was going to work, this was in November of 72, I brought Jack Lancaster and Forrest Wells out. They hadn’t seen the site at that point.
Harrison:
Now, were they employed by NRAO at Green Bank doing things that....
Wade:
They were hired in Charlottesville.
Harrison:
OK.
Wade:
Jack was hired because people at AUI knew him, he was based on Long Island, and recommended him highly, and it was a good recommendation. Jack had known Forrest Wells, who had worked with him on a number of engineering-type jobs, basically a field supervisor, and Jack thought you could not do better than Forrest Wells, and I think he was right. Jack was very good. He was a hard-driving so-and-so, but that’s what you needed. Forrest was more laid back. He was the sort of guy who could get the most out of people without offending them. They were a good team. Anyway....
Harrison:
They came out. They’d never seen it before.
Wade:
That’s right. They’d just been hired, you know, fairly recently. They were hired for construction, and we weren’t moving yet on construction. Well, actually, they got directly involved in things like, well it was called The Joint Venture. This involved some of the old Limbaugh group. Limbaugh had dissolved, and they’re the people who did the actual layout of the sort where you drive stakes in the ground on the VLA. I’d driven the stake in the center, the first one [in 1972]. But then, the gadget there, and topo maps and cross checks of various sorts. I knew where - I had marks. I was within a few feet, actually. You can do a lot with a thing like that if you go at it right. I think probably I was not off the final result more than 50 feet anywhere in 13 miles. But I’d done this sort of thing before.
I had to show Jack and Forrest the layout of the situation. I knew where the arms were going. And they needed to get a good feeling for what it was like, and feel what that dirt felt like when it got it in their shoes, and so on. You don’t know the ground until you’ve done that. And so I went and showed them where the stake got driven in the center, actually several years earlier. Jack Bruton didn’t know about it and it was his land. I’d walked out there and done it. No harm done. We looked at the land as carefully as we could, we got an airplane and flew it, showed them all this stuff on the north arm that we mentioned. There was something else there that was relevant. I don’t know how much time you’ve got for this stuff. A lot of this is just coming back to me now. But a real trouble spot from the construction standpoint was at the extreme end of the west arm. That’s C-Bar-N ranch, which was Marvin Ake’s. And there’s a windmill there, which was right on the original line of the arm. That southwest arm hit one of Jack Bruton’s windmills, and it hit this thing down there that belonged to Martin Ake. So I sort of on my own moved the arm one degree. So it’s not really all one hundred twenty [degrees between the three arms]. But that took it a sufficient distance from the windmills. How many times would you hit two windmills in a line! So that change was made.
But we had to go down and look at that on the ground. [This was at the outer end of the west arm]. It was very marshy. There was a lot of water that would stand there. I imagine the windmill was pumping some more water onto the ground. It was a place that needed to be looked at by the people that were going to be building on it. It did take some special handling. So there we are, we parked the cars on the dirt road there, and walked down toward it. Marvin Ake’s house is less than a mile away, up on a rise there, in plain sight. I don’t know if he was in it at the time or not. And I was walking next to Forrest. And I said, "Forrest, what you want to bet Marvin Ake’s got a telescope on us right now?" And Forrest said, "I hope there’s not a rifle under it." And the feeling between my shoulder blades I can remember to this day. [Laughter] It was.... But Forrest was like that. I mean, a wonderful guy, who could say the right thing at the right time. Well, it’s a privilege to work with people like that.
So that was that west arm. The thing on the north arm, I picked this up in the aerial photographs Limbaugh had taken when they were doing this study that I mentioned earlier. I’d noted it, but never really looked at it. Big cracks in the ground. And we were warned when they were trying to scare us off from here about these cracks. These [were claimed to be] earthquake cracks in the ground. Well, somewhere in there, I forget where it was, I mapped the things out from the aerial photographs, and then went in there. Here are these things, you know, a trench six, eight feet deep. And cattle would get in there and get lost, fall in and break a bone. What they were, were great mud cracks. The old lake bottom sediments were drying out. They were desiccation cracks, not earthquake cracks. And so what we did there, working with Forrest, we had the layout from The Joint Venture engineers, and knew exactly where we wanted to get through. Then we staked the area and resurveyed those stakes at intervals. And we never, at the time I was involved, there was no ground movement at all, so it must have finished, but it was a real worry. Because at one place, I could see them on the aerial photographs and you could see them on the ground, vehicle tracks. Hitting one of these cracks, and they’d continue on the other side. And they were the kind that an automobile would put down, or a truck. So it was in fairly recent times that crack had become open and active. So we, but, it must have done its thing and quit. The reason it wasn’t deeper, of course, is that the dirt would fall in from the sides. But I’m sure those cracks are there for our lifetime. But it was this kind of thing here, I was doing all that from Charlottesville at that time, this was before we’d moved out here. Actually, I don’t think I’d have moved out here except that the area of Albemarle County where we were living at that point.... Are you familiar with Owensville? You go out Barracks Road about five miles?
Harrison:
Yes.
Wade:
Towards White Hall. We had a place out there. It was starting to fill up with people. We weren’t out there to be crowded with people. One thing leads to another, and we decided to move out here, then momentous developments, and so here we are.
This carries it up to sort of my arrival here. I don’t know how much farther you want to go.
Harrison:
You know what, I think let’s stop right there for now.
Wade:
I’ve probably exhausted you. I’ve exhausted me.
Harrison:
Well, yeah, yeah. It’s a lot of work.
Wade:
It’s amazing. So much of this stuff really hasn’t been in the front of my brain for many years, so I haven’t had a chance to improve it.
Harrison:
Good!
Wade:
But it’s still not trustworthy.
Harrison:
It’s trustworthy as far an oral history, and that.... [Transcription note: Microphone apparently turned off here; no further record of conversation on the tape. The interview end point is about three-fourths through tape 2, side A, at approximately counter mark 420 measured from the start of tape 1, side A.]