Jon Spargo, Interviewed by Kenneth I. Kellermann, 19 November 2024

Kellermann: 00:01

So this is Ken Kellermann, and I'm in Socorro, New Mexico, with Jon Spargo. And it's November--

Spargo: 00:14

Nineteenth.

Kellermann: 00:15

--nineteenth [2024]. And Jon was one of the early employees at NRAO. Worked in Green Bank, Socorro.

Spargo: 00:25

What's your RAO number?

Kellermann: 00:27

Mine is 534.

Spargo: 00:29

Mine is 717.  [laughter]

Kellermann: 00:37

So Jon, you've worked almost everywhere. But first, let's start. What brought you to NRAO?

Spargo: 00:45

I was in the Air Force. And I was about to get out after four years. And my dad, I had corresponded with my father. And he knew I was going to get out. And so, he sent me a copy of the Sunday want ad section from the New York Times. And in that section, there was an ad for an antenna engineer at NRAO. And of course, I was not an antenna engineer, but it gave me an address. So I had put together a resume of my experience in the service. And I sent it off to NRAO. And I got an immediate response.

Kellermann: 01:41

From?

Spargo: 01:45

Was it Monroe?

Kellermann: 01:48

What year was this?

Spargo: 01:50

This was '67. I think it was Monroe Petty. No, it wasn't.

Kellermann: 01:55

This was before his time.

Spargo: 01:56

No, no, no, it wasn't. Trying to think of the person before him. I can't remember now. Anyway, you can look back.

Kellermann: 02:05

It was a personnel person, though, was it?

Spargo: 02:06

Yeah, yeah. So about two, three weeks-- two months before I actually got discharged, I took-- I had some leave saved up. So I had corresponded with several other places. And so I went on a big loop of visiting all these other places. And in that loop was NRAO. And I showed up in Charlottesville, and the position that they wanted me to interview for was a digital technician for Art Shalloway to build a correlator, an auto-correlator. So I met with Art.  Apparently, I did not meet Art's approval. I was talking with other people and the-- if I remember the personnel guy's name. Anyway, he said, "Do you have some extra time?" And I said, "Sure." He said, "We'd like to send you over to Green Bank." So, now I had been to Green Bank before, a long time ago. When I was in college, I took a field trip to Green Bank. Saw the 300 foot. So I sort of knew what Green Bank was, and I had read Walter Sullivan's book, We Are Not Alone. And so I knew quite a bit-- a little better, I shouldn't say quite a bit, but I knew a little bit about Green Bank.

Spargo: 03:35

So they sent me over to Green Bank, I met with Fred Crews. And I was there for a day and a half, two days. And on the spot, they offered me a job as a telescope operator. Which I accepted on the spot, cause I just thought that was the coolest place I'd ever been [laughter] and I was just tickled to death to work at a place like that. So I got discharged, got engaged to Dora, all in this stretch of a couple of months, showed up in Green Bank in June of 1967. My first job at Green Bank was to calculate pass-through times for low-frequency observations on the 300 foot. So I sat in an office up in the Lab building, and this was based, of course, on the sidereal observing times. So I had to translate that into-- and these were times that vehicles could go down to either the interferometer or go down to the, other than shift times.

Kellermann: 05:01

Let's explain by pass-through times.

Spargo: 05:03

Yeah.

Kellermann: 05:04

It's when people were--

Spargo: 05:06

Allowed to--

Kellermann: 05:06

--allowed to drive on the site--

Spargo: 05:08

Yeah. That was the--

Kellermann: 05:09

--between observations.

Spargo: 05:09

Yeah. That was before they had that diesel fleet of the old Checker cab things. So that was my first job. Then they sent me down to the 300 foot, and I spent one day there. And I don't recall why it was just one day, but then they moved me up to the interferometer. And that's where John Weaver trained me to be an operator on the interferometer. And one of my little stories about being trained was that I was told by John Weaver and others at the Interferometer-- Leroy Webb. Anyway, they were adamant that I was not to allow anyone to touch any buttons on the DDP-116 computer. And so I'm sitting there on a maintenance day with John Weaver, and this tall, disheveled guy with a white shirt and a tie flopped over his shoulder came roaring into the control room, slammed down a big bundle of printout, and immediately started going crazy, punching buttons on the 116. And I go, "Hey, John, John." "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I forgot to tell you. That's okay. That's Barry Clark." I said, "Oh, really?" I said, "Well, who's Barry Clark?" And it was explained to me who he was. And I said, "Boy, he must be an interesting guy to talk to." And "No, nobody can talk to Barry." I said, "Really?" Said, "Yeah. He's on a different plane. Nobody can understand what Barry says." I said, "Really?"

Spargo: 07:03

And that was like throwing down a gauntlet in front of me. I decided, "By golly, if he's that blooming smart, I want to learn how to talk to him." [laughter] And I eventually did. And the problem with Barry was that - and I've seen this happen so many times - scientists would come up to Barry, and you can almost see or know the process going on in their minds. They're saying, "Hey, I'm a PhD astrophysicist. I know all this stuff. I ought to be able to talk to Barry." And they would think about what they wanted to ask him. And they would put it-- they would work on assembling a thought or a question for Barry at a very, very high level. And of course, they would ask the question of Barry, and Barry would recognize, "Hey, this guy asked me a question on a very high level." He would blurt out an answer, and this look of utter confusion would come over the face of whoever it was asking the question. And Barry and I finally came to kind of a tacit understanding. And the understanding was, "Barry, you've got to understand I am infinitely dumber than you are. And we also need to understand that you are infinitely smarter than I am. So if I ask you a question, for God's sake, put it into a format I can understand." And it worked. It was amazing,

Kellermann: 08:41

I think that, Barry and I were classmates in graduate school. I've known him for many years. And Barry assumed that his colleagues were on his level.

Spargo: 08:52

Were on his level, yeah.

Kellermann: 08:54

And so he'd give very short answers, and he assumed it, but he's very, very good with students, and I think he's taught in churches and everything, and he's very good. He's very good at explaining when he understands that the person needs [crosstalk].

Spargo: 09:13

From that point on, Barry and I got along just famously, and I mean, I could tell Barry stories forever. One of my favorites was that one year, it was about '68 or '69, there was an attack of the 17-year locusts at Green Bank. And they were into everything, so one Wednesday morning, we were-- a bunch of us mechanics and operators and technicians and Barry, we were all in the interferometer control room, and we all had a cup of coffee and we're all sitting around BS-ing about the 17-year locusts. And Barry was kind of hovering out on the fringe of all of this, listening, and we were all speculating, "Why are they 17 years? Where do they come from? What goes on?" And we were all asking these questions, and finally, Barry, I guess, decided he needed to set the record straight. So he stepped into the group and explained where 17-year locusts came from, every detail. And we're all standing there, "Well, I guess there's nothing else to talk about." So we all just kind of drifted apart, but Barry had the exact answer. And the looks on people's faces were just precious. It's just another classic Barry story, anyway.

Kellermann: 10:43

My memory is that you did work the 300 foot.

Spargo: 10:46

I did. I transferred down there in '70 and worked there until '75 when they shipped me out here, yeah.

Kellermann: 10:53

Yeah. Because I'm pretty sure I was observing then at the 300 foot, and that's where I had close contact with you.

Spargo: 11:02

My other favorite Barry story is that once the interferometer got working pretty much normally under computer control, Dave Heeschen forced Barry Clark to take a vacation. And so Barry loaded up his whole family. They had a VW microbus, and they drove to Texas, and they got into a car wreck.

Kellermann: 11:33

Yeah, I know, right.

Spargo: 11:34

And Barry had a fracture of his leg, right? So they transported him to a hospital in El Paso. And word came back, and the story about when Heeschen found out that Barry had been in this-- and they said something like, "Well, he broke his leg in two or three places," or something like that. And Heeschen said, "I don't give a damn about his leg what about his head?” So anyway--

Kellermann: 12:06

Yeah, unfortunately, Barry still limps from that accident. Yeah.

Spargo: 12:11

Yes, he does. Yeah. And I don't know if you remember Shep Sutton, Charles Sutton?

Kellermann: 12:17

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Spargo: 12:17

Okay. So Shep and I, we finally got an address for the hospital. So Shep and I went over to-- on a maintenance day, we took the interface console with the DDP. It was a teletype unit. So we took it offline. We activated the paper tape punch, and we typed out a long get-well message on the teletype as if the DDP-116 was pining for his long-lost daddy and everything. So we took this long punch tape, folded it all up, put it in an envelope, and set it to Barry. [laughter]

Kellermann: 13:01

And he read the holes?

Spargo: 13:02

He read the holes. [laughter] And he sent back a cryptogram, and we were all scratching our heads over that. Well, it turns out Shep Sutton, in an earlier life, had been a communications crypto guy for the CIA. And so he cracked Barry's message. And that was kind of a fun thing. I don't think Barry ever forgot what we did there.

Kellermann: 13:36

So what else did you do in Green Bank beside being a-- my memory is you were involved in a lot of things.

Spargo: 13:43

I was editorial board for the Observer [early NRAO newsletter]. And I may have mentioned to you, I have a complete bound set of all the Observers ever published.

Kellermann: 13:57

Yeah. So I checked. And yeah, we have that in Charlottesville, so we don't need any. Yes. I did check.

Spargo: 14:02

Okay. Good.

Kellermann: 14:03

Thank you for offering that. Yeah.

Spargo: 14:04

Yeah. So anyway, I did that. We had a night watchman, Pete Tallman, who was from Durban. And he was on the-- he got elected to the county commissioners of Pocahontas County. And Pete would come down-- when I was on night shift, he'd come down and we'd sit and drink coffee and BS.

Kellermann: 14:38

Right. Well, all the guards did. Yeah.

Spargo: 14:41

Yeah. And we got talking about politics and about the county and about this and about that. And so when he got elected one night, he walked into the control room of the 300 foot and he said, "I've got two positions. Which one do you want?" [laughter] So I got appointed to the board of directors for the Pocahontas Hospital, which I served on until I left for coming out here. And that was another interesting little--

Kellermann: 15:16

Did you have any expertise or experience?

Spargo: 15:18

No. No. No. I learned quickly, though. [laughter]

Kellermann: 15:21

Yes.

Spargo: 15:25

One of the more famous stories about me back there was that one night, I was on duty at the interferometer, and I got a call from Tom Carpenter at the 140-foot. And he said, Arno Penzias is here observing, and he's really upset because leakage from the local oscillator cables along the interferometer baseline are contaminating his spectral line And I said, "Well, nothing I can do about that." He said, "Yeah, but he's headed for your control building." [laughter] He came in, storming in the door, and wanted to know what was going on. He wanted me to shut down observing. I said, "Well, that doesn't work because whether or not I'm observing, those oscillator cables are still running." I mean, that's not going to-- he says, "Where's your local oscillator?" I said, "Well, the rack's in the back room." So he went storming in there and started twisting dials on the local oscillator chassis. I followed him in there and I said, "Please don't do that." He said, "I know what I'm doing." I said, "I don't care. I don't want you to touch that panel." We got into a big argument, and I threw him out of the building. So I had the honor of throwing a Nobel laureate out of the control building of the interferometer [laughter].

Kellermann: 16:57

What year was that?

Spargo: 16:58

That had to be '69, I guess.

Kellermann: 17:00

Okay. That was after their discovery, but before the Nobel Prize.

Spargo: 17:04

Right. Right. Yeah, I had the honor of throwing a [laughter]--

Kellermann: 17:11

Well, that sounds like Arno. He took charge.

Spargo: 17:14

Yeah. Well, anyway, what was really funny, the next day, I came in. I was working the evening shift, and Len Howell was waiting for me at the door. He said, "What the hell did you do last night?" I explained it to him. He said, "You get your ass up to Fred Crews's office right now." I said, "But I'm going to be—”  “I'll take the console." "You get your ass in that thing, and you get up to Fred Crews right now." "Okay." So I drove up to the building and I walked into Fred Crews's office. Jerry Shears was there, and Jerry said something like, "Fred's expecting you." So I walked in, Fred looked up, and he said, "What happened?" I explained it to him. I said, "He was messing with the controls of the local oscillator at the interferometer, and I told him to stop. He wouldn't, so I chased him out of the building." Fred got this funny grin on his face. He says, "Well, you did the right thing [laughter]."

Kellermann: 18:17

I knew you were going to say that. Knowing Fred, that would be his reaction.

Spargo: 18:21

Yeah. But when I got back down to the interferometer, old Len was on me again. I said, "Hey, Fred told me I did the right thing." "Oh, okay." One of my other favorite stories about Green Bank was that when I was working at the 300 foot, Pat Palmer and Ben Zuckerman had a program and had time on the 300 foot at 21 centimeters. They had assembled a list, a card deck of nearby stars that they were going to use the correlator for to check for the water hole, basically.

Kellermann: 19:08

Yeah, I remember that.

Spargo: 19:10

Yeah. Anyway, they were guarding this card deck. They wouldn't let anybody see it. I explained to him, "Listen, I can hold that card up and read the code. I don't know why you're being so private about all of this." So, anyway, they had observed for a couple of days, and they were about to finish. They were both in the control room there. I said, "I've got an idea." They said, "What's that?" I said, "I know why you're looking in the water hole, but who's to say that there's something somewhere else?" So I said, "Why don't you leave that deck of cards with me? I'll put it in my locker. And if there's any complete dead time on the-- I'll just throw it in the hopper and see what happens.” We discussed that for a little bit. And finally, they said, "Well, that's a good idea." So they gave me the deck of cards. And before they left, I said-- I went home and slept on it, and I said, "That was the era when Gerrit Verschuur got nailed for pirating time on the 140 foot if you remember that incident." And I said--

Kellermann: 20:30

I don't, but that sounds like Gerrit.

Spargo: 20:31

Yeah. Yeah. And I thought, "Oh, my." And I got a hold of Pat and Ben, and I said, "Look, I'm a little worried about doing what I said I would like to do. Why don't you, when you get to Charlottesville, put in some kind of a proposal and make it legal? Okay? And then there's no question of anybody—" and they said, "Yeah, you're probably right." So they went to Charlottesville. And probably the stretch of time, about a month long, and one day I was in the control room with the 300 foot and the phone rang, and it was Bill Howard. [laughter] And before I could say anything, he went up one side of me and down the other. He read me the riot act, "How dare you presume to be--?" I'm going. "Ba, ba, ba." I had no idea what was going on, but he chewed my butt up one side, and I finally, after a few minutes on the phone, "Bill, I'm sorry. I apologize. It'll never happen again." And I hung up. And that's all I knew about that until some time later, somebody else was at the 300 foot, and I was relating the story of getting chewed out by Bill Howard. And whoever it was, it might have been Barry Turner.

Spargo: 22:05

Anyway, he said, "Well, you know why that happened, don't you?" And I said, "I haven't got a clue." He said, "Well, they put in an observing request, and they put your name in as the principal observer." And that just set Bill Howard off. And I thought, "Well, all right. So there goes any relationship I ever hoped to have with Bill Howard." Well, interestingly enough, years later, out at the VLA, I was on duty one day, and Bill Howard showed up with a whole bunch of people, I don't know who they were, and was showing them around. And I noticed them out in the electronics room and walking around. So I walked out in there to see what was going on. Bill Howard turned around and saw me. "Jon!" He ran over and gave me a big old bear hug.

Kellermann: 23:03

Yeah. Well, he wasn't one to hold a grudge. He had probably long forgotten the incident that you remembered.

Spargo: 23:11

Yeah. Oh, boy.

Kellermann: 23:14

So what brought you out here?

Spargo: 23:18

Well, what started it was that in early 1970, just before they transferred me down to the 300 foot, Len Howell walked in one day with a piece of graph paper and so forth. And he said, "They're designing the control building for the VLA." And from the operator's standpoint, they wanted know, to work out the layout for the control room and all this kind of stuff. And so we sat down, and I drew out a plan of what the control room should look like and where the computer room was where the central electronics room was. And they adopted it. That turned out to be the final, or something very close to the final thing, layout. And that got me interested in the VLA. And I forget who I had talked to. But to somebody, I expressed an interest that someday I'd like to go to the VLA. And I actually forgot, although I had heard that you had something to do with that. Somebody told me that you had said-- I don't know who you talked to or what, but that they should transfer me out to the VLA. And I've been thankful ever since.

Kellermann: 24:58

Well, if that's the case, I'll take credit. Now that you mention it, I have a vague recollection.

Spargo: 25:13

I knew who you were, and I’d met you a number of times, but I don't think you had done very much observing for-- I hadn't run any programs for you, maybe one or two.

Kellermann: 25:24

I think we did. [inaudible] for it. No, we knew each other pretty well. Maybe it was through our respective spouses. They knew each other. Where did you live?

Spargo: 25:40

Right next door to Fred Crews in Arbovale.

Kellermann: 25:44

Oh, okay. Because we lived on the site.

Dora Spargo: 25:51

Pine Grove Road.

Spargo: 25:52

Yeah. Pine Grove Road. Yeah. Yeah.

Kellermann: 25:53

I know where that is.

Dora Spargo: 25:58

Coffee?

Kellermann: 26:00

No. No more for me, thanks.

Dora Spargo: 26:00

No?

Kellermann: 26:01

No.

Spargo: 26:01

I've been talking, not drinking.

Dora Spargo: 26:04

Okay. Let him talk. [laughter]

Kellermann: 26:07

So you came out here, when?

Spargo: 26:09

'75. They sent us on a house hunting trip in April. We found this house. It was one of three houses for sale in all of Socorro. And in one week's time, we bought the house. The family living in it was building a house, and they asked us if they could remain in the house paying us rent until theirs was finished. And I said, "Well--" they were building over in Eastwood Estates on the other side of the highway. And I said, "Okay," but we had rented a trailer over in that area, and the trailer in the winter, or in the fall and winter, belonged to a student at Tech. And so we were allowed to stay in it for the summer. And so I came back to these folks and said, "Look, we got a trailer, a place to live, but we have to be out by September 1st whether your house is finished or not." So yeah, we moved in and-- we were here in June. June 9th was when we arrived. And then we moved over here early September, moved back from the trailer to here.

Kellermann: 27:38

So '75, there were how many antennas? Were there any antennas?

Spargo: 27:43

None.

Kellermann: 27:43

None. Yeah, right. So what did you do?

Spargo: 27:46

Do you remember Victor Herrero?

Kellermann: 27:49

Yes, sure.

Spargo: 27:50

All right. So Vic and I have formed a group called Systems Integration. And it was our job, supposedly, to organize the installation of all of the NRAO equipment into the antennas. So the first antenna came out of the barn in July of '75. And Vic and I laid out all of the cable trays and other stuff on the antenna. Bill Horne had this company in Detroit that made the focusing feed mounts. He'd gotten hold of the first prototype for the VLA, sent it out here. Dave Weber had worked out all the controls for the rotation and focusing. But they hadn't done any layout work on the unit itself as to where all the cables went in the junction box and everything. So I helped to install and wire in the first focusing feed mount. Stories there as well. But I remember when the first antenna-- finally, we had to hand over this focusing feed mount for installation to E-Systems. And we finished it and they put it on the antenna. And then they brought the antenna over, the first actual use of the transporter to bring the antenna out of the barn over to what was called the maintenance pad, which is behind the Tech Services Building. And it turned out that the foot pads on the foundations did not match the foot pads on the antenna. [laughter]

Kellermann: 30:06

That's not good.

Spargo: 30:07

That's not good. So I remember I was up on one of the foot pads. We had loosened the bolts and everything. And of course, they were heavily grouted. And I was up there with a 16-pound sledgehammer trying to move the foot pad a little bit. I moved it a little bit, but not enough. So they had to take all the grout out and redo the holes and everything. And then they finally put the antenna back down. I remember Jack Lancaster standing there and looking at me and saying, "You can't move that." And I said, "Bet me." And I took the sledgehammer and actually moved it. So we did that. Now when the first antenna got all of its controls and everything-- Oh, when the first antenna came out of the barn, it was put on the master pad. We had an old Hewlett Packard 9810 desk calculator with the long magstripe programs.

Kellermann: 31:06

Yep. I remember that. Yeah.

Spargo: 31:08

All right? And Ray Escoffier had built an interface between that and the controller in the antenna. And so Herrero and I built a plywood seat, and we strapped it into the open space between the vertex room and the outside. Okay? We put a piece of metal on the ladder going up into the dish, opened the hatch, bolted a T2 Wild theodolite on there. One of us would go down to the trailer, the little trailer we had, and feed in star positions, and the telescope would react, and we'd check to the theodolite to see-- I discovered the first azimuth oscillation. I was looking at Vega one night, and Vega's sitting there doing that, [laughter] so we did that. And then, when they brought the antenna over to the maintenance pad, Vic and I started doing the same thing, but by then, the receiver was--

Kellermann: 32:15

Sorry, Dick, you said?

Spargo: 32:16

Victor.

Kellermann: 32:17

Oh, Vic, right?

Spargo: 32:18

Victor and I. Victor Herrero. So then there was another famous story. They moved a big old trailer down by CW5, okay? And that trailer was going to hold the ModComps. It was going to hold the back ends for three antennas and a three-antenna correlator, right? So we decided before any of the antennas were out on the real pads, Barry was working on trying to control the antenna from the ModComps, and I had been talking with Emory Eggler and some others. The trailer had no windows in it, and I pounded the table. I said, "By God, you've got to put a window in here so we can look out and see what's going on. Just like in Green Bank, you have to look out and see what the antennas are doing," right? Well, big argument, and finally, they relented and put a little window in. Well, came the day, and we stretched a cable from the trailer all the way across up to the maintenance pad and hooked it up to the servo system and the antenna. And Vic and I, the day before, had been doing drift scans across Cygnus A on the maintenance pad, and we had a little back-end receiver in the trailer along with the controller, and we were doing drift scans across Cygnus A.

Spargo: 34:05

So I knew from looking where Cygnus A was in the sky. And so big deal. Everybody in the world was in the trailer. Barry was over at the console, one of the terminals, and he's typing away and away goes the antenna. And I'm over by the window watching, and it turns out the antenna was 180 degrees out. [laughter] And I said, "Hey, Barry, something's not right." I said, "You're 180 degrees out from Cygnus. Change the sign on your azimuth." [laughter] And he did, and he had kind of whipped around. And I turned around to one of the people who I used to argue with about the window. I said, "This window's not looking too bad right now." [laughter]

Kellermann: 34:59

So that was the very early years. So what was your role after that?

Spargo: 35:08

Well, I was just an array operator, and we observed part-time until then. I designed the original control console for the control room, and I wired up all the emergency stop panels for the control room so you could set individual emergency stops either on all antennas on one arm or individual antennas or whatever. And we had gotten-- as time went on, and more antennas showed up, one of the things that became obvious to me was that the mindset of people who build something is different from the mindset of people who have to maintain it. Okay? And we still had most of the guys who were builders. And to them, there's an antenna out there and something's not working, "I'm going to go out and fix it." And then they wouldn't call in and say, "I'm going out to antenna such-and-such." They'd just go out there. The antenna would be being operated and perhaps not at the band they wanted to go and fix. And so we'd have to get on the radio and call them and say, "No, you can't have the antenna. You have to come back in." So this started happening on a fairly regular basis. So I sat down and wrote - I don't know what you'd call it - a procedure. And the procedure was that if you were going to go to an antenna, you call us from the shop and say, "I need to go to antenna such-and-such."

Spargo: 37:02

And at that point, we will tell you, "I'm sorry. You can't have that antenna. It's busy doing something else," or, "Okay. When are you going?" "I'm going out such-and-such." "Fine. When you get to the antenna, call us on the radio. We will park it, and we will set the emergency stop. You can do your work. When you leave, we need to check to make sure everything was left in computer control. You leave the antenna, remove the emergency stop, but you can't leave until we can actually control the antenna and make sure it's working. Then you come home. And when you get back to the shop, you have to call us and say you've gotten back to the shop." Right? So I wrote this big, long thing up, and we started using it. And I forget who it was, but somebody came to me and said, "You know Jon, these look suspiciously like safety rules. How would you like to be the safety officer?" [laughter] And at that time, the safety officer was Bill Del Giudice. And so Bill took me under his wing, taught me how to be a safety officer. And so the last-- well, until I retired, I was a safety officer.

Kellermann: 38:18

So that was full-time. You were no longer a telescope operator.

Spargo: 38:21

No. Well, yeah.

Kellermann: 38:22

[A radio?] operator.

Spargo: 38:23

Well, I was for a while, but then I was full-time safety officer. Along the way, when I was in the Air Force, the Air Force did maintenance on-- I was in a missile squadron, and we had 28 missiles. And we had a periodic schedule for taking them down and testing them and making sure everything was working right on them. And the Air Force had what they called a maintenance manual, Air Force Manual 66-1, which was rather long and involved and complicated, but nevertheless worked. Well, I finally just sat down and I distilled 66-1 down to one sheet of paper, all right, which was our maintenance forms.

Kellermann: 39:14

This is just electronics maintenance--

Spargo: 39:16

No. It started there, but it evolved into computer downtime, weather downtime, power downtime, human error downtime, observer error downtime. All of these factors got fed in. And Don Retallack and I wrote a program for the old Dec 10. And I could distill everything on that form into a line of columns of numbers, type it into this database, and then we could run mean time between failure and downtime analysis and all of that. So I did that for a number of years. I also spent time with, when Cam Wade was the interim director out there, we were working on coming up with a really high-quality weather station. What they wanted to do was take pressure, temperature, and dew point and use it to-- Ken Sowinski wrote a one-point model atmosphere program for the ModComps to predict what the refractive index was to plug that into the pointing equation for each antenna. Okay? So I spent a year researching weather instruments and put together a weather station out back of the control building. And I had a chilled mirror dew point that could detect a tenth of a degree change in the dew point in a tenth of a second. I had the same for temperature and the same for barometric pressure. And then I had wind speed and so forth.

Spargo: 41:10

And that data was fed real time into the ModComps. So I did that. Did a lot of radio communication stuff. I remember I collaborated with, it was Gareth Hunt, Bill Randolph, and Ken Sowinski were the programmers for the ModComps. And we together sat down and worked out what we called a snow program so that if it started snowing hard, you'd shut down observing, invoke this, and the ModComp would tip the dish over to its maximum depression and then rotate it so that it was edge onto the wind. And the first try of that was disastrous because we forgot which side of the elevation wheel the limit switches were on. [laughter] And so when we rotated into the wind, the snow piled up on the limit switches. And so we had reverse, to change the sign on the azimuth for rotating the antennas into the wind.

Kellermann: 42:31

So you mentioned Cam Wade was the interim director. Cam had some difficulty, shall we say, with upper management. Aware of any of that? You want to comment on it?

Spargo: 42:47

I really didn't know what specifically his problems with them were. I had heard him grouse about it a couple of times, but I didn't know any of the details. The one thing that I will always remember Cam about-- well, Cam and I go way back to Green Bank. I remember one night on 85-1, Cam was going to check-- one night, he was going to check the alignment of the polar axis. And he had bolted a camera to the catwalk on the side of the polar axis. And he had a little glass plate in there with gel on it. And he would pull the dark slide on it, and I would be down in the control room. And I'd run the antenna from east to west limits with the camera shutter open. And then he'd shut the shutter and run it back and park it. And then we'd go up to the lab and develop the plate. And he was looking for, of course, the relationship of the arc of Polaris to the true north and determined that the polar axis was pretty well aligned. But I remember I learned a lesson that night because we were in the darkroom, and we had this-- I mean, this was a typical glass plate thing. We're there in the dark, and he said, "Do you know how to tell which side of the glass plate the emulsion is on?" And I said, "No." And he says, "You lick the corner. And if it's sweet, that's the emulsion." [laughter] So I did. Yep. So we developed it.

Spargo: 44:41

But the other thing about Cam was that there was a big memorial service or some kind of an honorary thing going on in New Mexico State for Clyde Tombaugh. And a whole contingent of astronomers from Lowell was going down to be there for this thing. They decided to stop at the VLA on their way. So it fell to me, I gave them the tour, and I took them all over and showed them everything and explained everything and so forth and so on. They went on their way. About a month later, the director at Lowell got a hold of me and he said, "Could you come to Lowell and give a colloquium about the VLA?" "Me, give a colloquium?" So Cam was there, and I went down to talk to Cam. I said, "Cam, I've gotten an invitation to give a colloquium at Lowell Observatory about the VLA, but I'm not a scientist. I don't know if it's proper for me to presume to be able to do that." And Cam looked at me and says, "Well, do you know the stuff?" And I said, "Well, of course." He said, "Well do it." So I did. Anyway, that's just all personal stuff. There were lots of other things going on out there that-- I remember stories starting back at Green Bank. There was a famous story about Howard Brown. He was the chief operator at the 140 foot.

Kellermann: 46:37

I had my run-ins with Howard.

Spargo: 46:39

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. Say what you will, but he saved the VLA.

Kellermann: 46:44

Oh. Cryogenics?

Spargo: 46:47

Yes.

Kellermann: 46:48

Yeah.

Spargo: 46:48

Yeah.

Kellermann: 46:49

Why don't you explain that?

Spargo: 46:50

Well, we had this guy by the name of Dave Coombs. And Howard, of course, had transferred from the 140 foot to the cryogenics division in Green Bank. And we had started buying these CTI cryogenics from the outfit in Waltham. And the best they could do was about 5,000 hours of operation before the thing would fail, and they'd have to clean it and do all kinds of stuff. And just with some good old-fashioned hillbilly tinkering by putting a few pieces of pipe and valves in the compressor and on the refrigerator, he went from 5,000 to 50,000 hours. And I mean, it was just-- and in fact, they had to take CTI to court to make them manufacture those cryo systems to our specifications there was a court battle over that, and we won. Anyway, out here--

Kellermann: 48:15

As I recall, the legal issue was not just that, but obviously, CTI wanted to implement this modification in stuff that they sold to other customers. And who had the right-- I believe there was an agreement to quid pro quo.

Spargo: 48:46

Yeah. But I did know there was a court case over it. Yeah. Anyway, out here, there was-- trying to think of the guy's last name. Dave is his first name.

Kellermann: 48:59

Williams?

Spargo: 48:59

No. No, no, no. This was the guy-- this was the guy they had hired specifically to do cryogenics at the VLA.

Kellermann: 49:07

Okay. But going back to the cryogenics group in Green Bank.

Spargo: 49:11

Yeah. Dave Williams went from operator over to there.

Kellermann: 49:14

So I thought it was he who played a significant role in this modification in addition to Howard.

Spargo: 49:23

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Dave Coombs was the guy's name. He had decided that the VLA receivers would be using a refrigerator made by a company called Cryotech. They were in New York State somewhere. And these things turned out to be horribly unreliable. I mean, really bad. And they wouldn't last very long at all. And Dave had some issues with his personal life that I won't go into. But anyway, one thing led to another, and finally, they decided that they would get rid of Dave and bring Howard out here. And Howard lived in the house right across the street from us here. And Howard installed the CTI systems, trained Rudy Latasa to be the head technician, and the rest is history. I mean, these things have just been--  Funny CTI story. On the antennas at particularly a 300 foot at Green Bank, we had an ability to listen. We had audio monitor up in the focal cabin. And you could hear the CTI, pssh, pssh, pssh. There was a subtle change in sound to the CTI when it was going to fail. And long before you saw any deviation on the current meter on the console.

Spargo: 51:07

And we got to the point where we could say we would call up the cryogenics department and say, "Hey, the unit on the 21-centimeter thing is about to go bad." And they'd say, "How do you know?" And I said, "Well, we can hear it." [laughter] And they would have come down, and sure enough, they'd swap out the unit and take it back and find that it had some contamination in it. Well, years later, years and years later, out here, they did, yeah, an MRI on my knee. And they put me in the big machine, right? And I'm in the machine, and of course, you can't move. You've got to lay there and be stock still. And I could hear the machine working. And I said, "I know what that is." And this lady rolled me out, and I said, "Are you using a CTI 1020?” "How did you know?" But I mean, the sound was all that familiar. I knew exactly what it was. Anyway. So I don't know what they're going to use for the ngVLA. I don't know if it's-- I think they're using a different unit. I'm not sure.

Kellermann: 52:30

I'm not sure if they're cooled. I think they've gotten [crosstalk]--

Spargo: 52:37

[crosstalk] may be right. Yeah.

Kellermann: 52:37

--[crosstalk] temperature down. [inaudible] room temperature device is so low. I'm not sure of that, though. Well, no. I mean, yeah, that must be wrong because the ngVLA operates at these high frequencies that [crosstalk] have to be cooled.

Spargo: 53:03

I'll have to ask Jim Jackson. Jim Jackson is a really good friend of mine. We're co-model railroaders. But Jim and I have been friends forever since he showed up here. I was going to tell you another Howard Brown story. Do you remember Herb Haynes?

Kellermann: 53:20

Sure. Big guy.

Spargo: 53:21

Big guy. [crosstalk].

Kellermann: 53:21

Oh, yeah. Of course. He took care of my cars. Volkswagen. Yeah.

Spargo: 53:26

Yeah. One--

Kellermann: 53:28

Good friend, yes.

Spargo: 53:29

One day, it had snowed in Green Bank, and the 140 foot was full of snow. And so whoever the operator was had tipped the dish all the way over to the service position, hoping the snow would slide out of the dish, right? They used to go out and throw snowballs at it.

Kellermann: 53:48

I spent many a night doing that, [crosstalk]. And mallets. And yeah.

Spargo: 53:54

Yeah. So anyway, they had done that. It was during the day. There was a whole crew down there, including Herb Hanes, and they were standing there. And Howard, stupidly, walked out from underneath the dish and the whole thing dumped on him. And the only thing that saved him was Herb Haynes saw exactly where he got buried, ran over and plunged his hands into the snowdrift and yanked Howard out.

Kellermann: 54:17

I hadn't heard about that.

Spargo: 54:21

There was another famous story. Earlier, we were talking about interference in pass through times. I was trying to remember this guy's last name. He was an operator at the 300 foot at the time. His first name was Ralph, and I don't remember his last name. Anyway, Ralph had the dumbest old jalopy of a pickup truck that you could-- I don't know how he even managed to drive that thing. But that thing was a roving interference generator. And when Ralph would come on shift, you could go over to the spectrum analyzer in the back end thing, and it had a very distinctive pattern. And you could go over and look, "Oh, here comes Ralph." Ralph would drive in, and then later when he would leave-- same pattern, right, and everything. And this became kind of a joke. "Oh, yeah. Ralph's coming you know,everything." So one evening, I had just taken over on the evening shift at the 300 foot. And a couple of the technicians and Bob Viers was standing there. And Ralph had left a half hour, hour ago. We looked up at the spectrum analyzer, and there was Ralph's pattern. And somebody said, "Oh, shit, here comes Ralph." And I forget, maybe it was Troy Henderson or somebody. We walked over to the front door and opened it up. Sure enough, down the road came Ralph riding a bicycle. True story. Here he came. Pattern on the analyzer. Ralph's riding a bicycle.

Kellermann: 56:13

Yeah. So--

Spargo: 56:14

So that caused us a little commotion for a while. Finally, Ralph explained he'd loaned his truck to somebody and they were driving down the Cass Road.

Kellermann: 56:27

That far away.

Spargo: 56:28

Yeah. So anyway.

Kellermann: 56:36

So you were safety officer here until you retired?

Spargo: 56:40

Right. And then I took over when I started working for the [locomotive?], I took over a safety officer up there and did that. I've only recently given up that post because I just-- was getting to be too much. Anyway. Some stories.

Kellermann: 57:02

Anything else you want to cover or?

Spargo: 57:05

Well, I don't know whether you want-- you probably know most of the stories associated with the technical side of everything. Most of my stories have to do with various people. But there are some stories on here. There was a famous one about [Mikio Ogai?]. Remember [Mikio Ogai?]? He was the Japanese engineer that came with the waveguides?

Kellermann: 57:33

No. I wouldn't have had any contact with that.

Spargo: 57:36

Yeah. Well, Miki brought his family. Anyway, two things about that. His wife and daughters were with him, and she came here as a very proper Japanese wife. And the women here immediately transformed her into an American wife, much to Mikio's chagrin. But anyway, Louis Torres and his crew were laying the first sections of the waveguide out along the west arm. And that fine sand and grit would-- one of the interesting things about the waveguide is that when it was manufactured, the couplers were made of machine thread and not pipe thread.

Kellermann: 58:31

I'm sorry. What--

Spargo: 58:32

Well, the difference is the machine threads are very much smaller and closer together. And I gather for the couplings. They were worried about the alignment, and that's why they chose machine treads. But that fine dirt, dust, and grit would get into these machines, and you'd start putting on a coupler. And once it got into that dust, you couldn't get it on. You couldn't get it off. So they had to modify their plans. Well, the first time they tried coupling two of those 16-foot sections in the trench on the west arm, they got this coupler hung up. And they probably messed with it for the better part of an hour and decided they just couldn't get it off. So Pat Lewis, who was the supervisor back then, said, "Well, there's only one way to do this, and that's just cut the damn thing out." All right. We're going to ruin a piece of waveguide, but that's all we can do. So they went and got a hacksaw.

Spargo: 59:45

And Louis Torres is down in the ditch going at it with a hacksaw, right? And [Mikio Ogai?] comes along in a pickup truck, and he pulls up and parks and sees what they're doing in the pit and gets out and screaming, runs to them, says, "Dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy [foreign]," which in Japanese means stop. Well, they all thought they were being called dummies. So Mikio came about that close to getting thumped. But they finally figured out a way to put those couplers on without getting all the grit and stuff in them. And I remember there was-- I'm trying to remember the details of it. It appeared that there was a piece of waveguide on the west arm just west of the assembly building that apparently was-- they had somehow figured out that this waveguide, something was wrong with it. And they were getting more losses than they wanted.

Kellermann: 01:01:00

Yeah. I remember that. Right.

Spargo: 01:01:02

Yeah. So they excavated down to it. They were going to replace it, right? In the process, they had laid these wires coated with zinc above the waveguide in the trench for cathodic protection. And so as they dug down, they found out that the zinc was gone. It was just wire there. There was no zinc. So that told them that the voltage potential in the soil was much higher than they thought it was going to be. And that led to the design of the anode beds where, every so far along the arms, they would have a power supply and carbon electrodes buried in the ground next to the waveguide. And they would impress a voltage on that and sacrifice the carbon anodes as opposed to the steel in the waveguide. So one of the coveted positions among the maintenance workers out there was the duty to go water the anode beds.

Kellermann: 01:02:08

That's interesting. Okay. Well, thank you, Jon.

Spargo: 01:02:15

There's more, but I'll probably….