An Oral History of African-Americans and the Development of Radar Defense Technology at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey 1940-1959

Edited by: Robert Johnson, Jr. Associate Prof. of Communications Framingham State College 100 State Street Framingham, MA 01701

 Mr. Jones' parents were British West Indians.  He was born in New York City in 1915.  His mother was a schoolteacher in the West Indies and his father worked there as the modern-day equivalent of a public health officer.  "My father became interested in becoming a doctor, so he went to Canada to try to enter McGill University.  He arrived in January, a time when nobody is admitted to school.  So he came down to New York City until schools commenced.

 "He met my mother, and a year-and-a-half later they were married.  In 1915 she had twin boys of which I am one. Then two years later she had another boy and then two years after that she had a girl and eventually abandoned his academic hopes.  Don't get married and have a family, when you're at an age when education was still a privilege and finances could be a problem.

 "We lived until I was 14 years old in Manhattan, New York, on 99th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue which, for one block long, was populated only by African-Americans.  Later, on we lived on Convent Avenue at 143rd Street, also in New York City.

 "During our early school years our parents closely followed our education and they applauded when we did well and were not too sympathetic when we didn't do well.  They never punished us for not doing well, but we won as many 'medals' as possible.  'The carrot was better than the stick.'

 "My mother used to sit down and teach us how to do our homework. One day my father came home while she was trying to get something over to us.  We were around the dining room table, complaining that a mathematical problem was too difficult.  My father asked about the candy storeowner, Katzner. 'Can he speak English?'  We responded, 'No, you can hardly understand him when we're in his store.'  'Who makes the highest marks in the class?',  'Well, Katzner's son.'  'Who helps him with his homework?',  'I don't know, I guess he does it himself.'  He turned and said to my mother, 'Amie, they'll do it themselves from now on,' and my mother said, 'You're right.'  After that we did well.

 "I guess the first and very dramatic racial experience I ever had was in junior high school with a history teacher named Brockway.  There were about three or four black fellows in the class of about 35 to 40 students.  We were learning about the history of the Civil War.  He called Eddie, the darkest-skinned black kid in the class, up front and said, 'Sit down here.'  Then, he gave him a fresh ball of cotton and said, 'Pick the seeds out of it.'
 "That poor young fellow--I can think back and cry for him--sat there trying to pick out the cotton seeds.  It must have taken ten minutes to get four seeds out while all the white kids were just grinning and smirking.

 "The teacher then took the ball of cotton and he put it in a little homemade wooden cotton-gin like Ely Whitney made, and as he turned it seeds popped out and were all removed in almost 10 seconds.  He concluded by saying, 'That's why slavery inevitably ended.'

 "It was a very dramatic lesson.  I'm a Civil War buff now and what he touched on is fundamental.  But how he taught it--maybe 20% of the class got the message.  The majority of whites thought it was a big joke about incompetent 'darkies.'  He could have gotten it over to more another way.  You don't have to embarrass and tear some people down to teach.

 "Eddie, after it was over, never wanted to talk about it with any of us African-Americans and warned us not to tell his parents for fear they would most certainly come to school.  We were fully aware that often if a complaint was made about a teacher, the pupil suffered somehow.

 "My brother and I went to Stuyvesant High School, one of the competitive high schools in the City.  We were in school from 8:00 in the morning until 1:15 or 1:30. There were no lunch breaks and they didn't have a football team and didn't have a swimming team.  They had a track team, but with the exception of a few stars, it was more like an intramural one.  It was a commuter school, you took the subway and you came back.  There were no girls, no school dances or things like they have in these modern high schools. Nearly every teacher I had in that school had a Ph.D.   At that time, high school education was a dignified occupation and the competition for teaching jobs was very high.

 "I never had a black school teacher in my life, there just weren't any in the schools I attended.

 "When we got to high school, we had started fixing radio receivers for people.  This was an outgrowth of our tinkering and making 'pushmobiles'.  Before we graduated, we got US Government licenses for amateur radio stations.

 "After graduation, the Great Depression was in force, wages for our parents were very low and it was decided that we attend City College of NY at night and try to get working during the day.
The Works Progress Administration had been created so we registered as radio mechanics at the WPA office in Harlem.

 "The fellow there looked at our forms and sent us to register in downtown New York because the Harlem WPA office was used to obtain only domestic workers and very low level laborers.

 "At the downtown WPA office there were two women social workers who thought we were odd 'colored twins'; interested in science, radio mechanics, and graduates of a very good high school.  They said, 'let's test these kids.'  They gave us a battery of analytical and dexterity tests and when we finished, my twin brother and I had scored in the top 1% of all others who had ever taken the tests.  They said, 'It's a shame that you all have to stop your formal education.  We'll see if we can help you to go to college.'

 "They got in touch with a Wall Street broker.  He put aside some of his own stocks and bonds and pledged the return from them to support us in college.

 "We had planned to go to the City College of New York--the Depression was on.  Even though it was, in effect, a school for 'intellectual elites', and not very many blacks went there, the social workers recommended we go to an Ivy League school and live on campus.

 "We each applied to about four 'ivy league' schools in 1937.  I was admitted to Harvard College and my brother was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania. My parents didn't know very much about the higher educational system in the United States.  My mother thought we should try to go to the same school, so she wrote a former student of hers who was currently living in Boston.  He suggested that we apply to Tufts College because it had an engineering school and a medical school, and we both were admitted.  The people who had given us the scholarships were saddened by our selection, but agreed to support us there.

 "All four years at Tufts were filled with racist experiences.  When I came up from New York to register, our race became evident. I was discouraged from entering the engineering school and they referred me to the college of Liberal Arts, they refused to accept me in the medical program.  It went back and forth between the admissions offices of the medical program and the engineering program, until I finally persuaded the engineering Dean, who warned me that neither he or the school would try to help me in placement, to admit me.

 "Six months later, my father, on his way to buying a newspaper, stepped off the curb and was struck and killed by a taxi.  Our support from home fell to zero.  At the same time, the stock broker, because of the second depression, called the 'recession of '37', had to call in his stocks and bonds to cover other losses.  So my brother and I worked from then on in all kinds of jobs both during the school year and the vacation period to make ends meet.  We did receive token financial aid from the college.

 "Eventually it was '41.  Pearl Harbor hadn't yet occurred, but all the engineering firms were doing defense work and I began to file interviews starting with GE and Westinghouse.  I had some 48 interviews and I was refused by all.

 "I really got very upset when two instances happened.
I went to see a fellow, I forget which company he was with, and he talked to me about employment and said, 'you'll hear from me.'  After about an hour, I went back to add something to my application and he said, 'go ahead.'  I asked him where it was and he showed me it was in the wastepaper basket next to his desk.  I looked at him and he was grinning.  I said, 'I'm going to take the application because the photograph cost me fifty cents.'  He said, 'Go ahead,' and I walked out.  If I had a pistol, I would have used it.  I mean I was never so angry in my life.  You know, when you walked in the other ones and they said, 'We don't hire blacks--good-bye,' that was one thing, but this fellow had encouraged me the he put it in the basket and grinned when he told me about it...well, may God have mercy on his soul.

 "The US Air Corps sent a recruiter to Tufts and all of us who were interested in this big room.  In walks a captain and so he looked around the room.  When he looked my way, he called Dean Burden over and he said something and points to me.  The Dean looked, nods 'okay,' and next thing I know he's walking around the room, up the steps of the lecture hall and sits next to me.  He tells me that the captain said I had to leave the room since the Air Corps didn't admit blacks.  All the students were looking, maybe 50% of the guys are grinning.  I asked the Dean if I could stay until it was over. I didn't want to be humiliated before everyone.  So he walks back down to the captain and he says something, so they talk this over for a couple of minutes and the Dean came back and told me I could stay until the meeting was over.  The occurrence an insult.  You always worry about it.  You go back to your room and you just beat the pillow.

 "Eventually, I received certification as an engineer
from the US Civil Service for a job in the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey and an indication they'd call me.  A family friend, who took an interest in our careers, advised me not to wait but to go down there and see them.  I went down and got to see a captain and showed him my certification. He said, 'you're certified and on the list,' and to have a seat.

 "There was a black fellow next to me named Wayman Mitchell who had graduated from Newark College of Engineering a couple of years before I had from Tufts.  There was also another black fellow by the name of Jess Jetter.  The rest of the group were white.  We all have numbers.

 "There were three classes of civilian vacancies: radio mechanic, RM-1, if you had no college training; engineering aide, SP-1, requiring some college training, and engineer, P-1, requiring a degree.  You could be a physicist or you could be a chemist and still receive the P-1 classification.

 "Wayman was interviewed ahead of me and was given a job as an engineer aide, SP-5.  Then a couple more white fellows went up.  I don't know what they were offered. Then Jess Jetter went up and came back with radio mechanic, RM-2 position.

 "When I went up, the captain stands up and says, 'Tufts, that's in New England.  You had any electronics?'  I told him I had.  He said, 'We have a new department being formed called RPF, Radio Position Finding.  It's an up and coming thing and they want bright young men in there.  The older fellows don't know the new sciences. You go up to Fort Hancock, NJ, here's your job--you're a P-1.'

 "I realized I would have to commute two hours from New York by subway, train, and bus.  I was scheduled to work from eight in the morning to four thirty.  During the first week I met up with Wayman who was not commuting and he told me about a little boarding house in Red Bank.

 "At one time, that coast line from Red Bank to Brielle was a very wealthy area.  The trains that commuted from there to New York City had private cars for lots of bankers, etc. who owned big homes and had servants.

 "Mrs. Robbins, a colored lady, had this house and she used to put up the chauffeurs and the maids of the people who would come and visit in the summer time.  You know, you have a guests at your house, but you had to have accommodations for your quest's chauffeur and maid who would stay at Mrs. Robinns' place.  With the War on, life was changing for the wealthy. So she had vacant rooms and offered them to people like Wayman and me.  So that's where I stayed and took my meals, you couldn't eat anywhere else in Monmouth County.

 "I went to work at a branch of the Signal Corps for an Italian fellow by the name of Marcetti at Fort Hancock who just wanted to make sure this thing would go, he didn't care what kind of people worked on it as long as they were qualified.  He was in charge of part of the new program.  It was a great big, infernal machine with a big 'dish' (a search light-like parabola).  It was kept under wraps in this huge aeroplane-type hangar.  With it, you'd obtain anti-aircraft gun control more accurately than with other models.  I'd never seen anything like it in my life.

 "I was assigned to work with an engineer by the name of Charlie Chung on the receivers portion.  He invited me out to lunch with the rest of the group, two Jews, two Chinese, but I had to decline because I couldn't eat in the restaurant.

 "About five or six o'clock on the first day of work, Marcetti came and told us to knock off, go home, eat, and hurry back.  We did so, working until twelve o'clock the same night.  As the first week went by, I found out from Charlie Chung that they worked this way seven days a week.

 "I was in love, and wanted to see my future bride every weekend, a girl in Mount Vernon, NY.  But it was not going to be possible to see her, even on weekends.

 "This wasn't going to work out, so I went back to the fellow that assigned me and told him about this. So he said, 'Go to work for Art Viewieger.'  (Right about that time the War Department decided to go from seven to six days a week full time, but with no over time.)  So I could go up to New York on Saturdays to see my prospective bride and get the last train back down to Red Bank on Sunday night.

 "I met Bill Gould, a black who had gone to Worcester Polytech in Massachusetts.  He told me that he had been hired as an engineer two years earlier by a graduate of that same school. When he told the interviewer that he had been working in Cuba, the man said, 'Well, that accounts for the good tan you have', and hired him on the spot.  Gould was a fair-skinned fellow, he never denied that he was black, he just went along with the flow.

 "Art Viewieger assigned me to Ed Goodman who assigned me to transportation.  I asked Gould about Goodman and he told me to trust him.  I worked in transportation for about two weeks.  Learned all the procedures, the forms and the vehicle models.  Then Goodman transferred me to Supply.  In a few weeks I knew how the whole Supply system worked.  Then he switched me over to Purchasing.  So I learned what the procurement regulations were, the laws, inspection, forms, and those procedures, in addition to the Laboratory organization.

 "Then they put me in inspection--the date was December 1st, 1941.  We had to test the SCR-268 radio position finders, some of which were out in the field.  The SCR-268 was an anti-aircraft radar for gun and search light control.   Within a week the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  They were detected by radar but the results were ignored by the military command because they didn't trust this 'infernal machine'.    It was decided the Army needed experts to run these 'wonderful' things until the military knew how and trusted the data coming from them.

 "There were about 14 of us in the category of junior engineer.  So Paul Watson, the chief of the radar lab called us all into a room and began to send people to field assignments all over the world.  We were told there was no excuse, we had to leave in three days.

 "He went around the room and he assigned Panama, Iceland, England, Fiji Islands, Hawaii--where they had these units.  Soon everybody was gone but me.  I spoke up, he said, 'Bill, there's no place for you.  You'll have to stay here.'  I was disappointed.  The he said, 'stick with Fort Hancock.  Initially you'll have responsibility for getting these radars ready to defend New York.'
 "So, very sadly, I went up one night to one of the active emplacements.  It was dead winter now and they issued me some cold weather army clothes for work in freezing temperatures.  I began to help in the installations; one cable, number 20, must have had about 50 large conductor wires inside of it and weighed about three pounds per foot.  I had to pull 150 feet of this cable, plus others, up a sand hill to where the antiaircraft guns were buried behind sand dunes.  It must have taken me three hours.  When I got up to the top of that hill and looked down, I felt as though if I were to fall, I'd be impaled on the anti-aircraft guns.  There were so many of them placed deep in this hole, I never looked at so many guns in my life.  If there was an explosion nearby, they wanted to shield them.

 "We finished the installation one night and the next morning began to operate the radar.  They had sent up a corporal to guard it.  The corporal and the one technician stayed with us all night--it was cold as hell.  After 36 hours, we got it working satisfactorily and decided to go get something to eat.  We went into the mess hall too late for a meal, but they still had coffee.  We were sitting down and in came a sergeant. He sees the corporal next to me and begins to cut into him, 'Put that coffee down!'  He put it down.  'You left your post.'  He tells him in a four-letter word how he could be court marshalled for leaving his post while under orders and sends him back out in the cold.  He wouldn't even let the kid finish his coffee.  I decided that the sergeant was right but still, that dampened some of the romance about joining the military.

 "Not long after, they began to bring in the new position finders out of the Radiation Laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  These were named, RADAR--RAdio Detection and Ranging.

 "The Germans had captured SCR-268's and they quickly learned how they worked.  This mechanical gun laying equipment weren't fast enough to compute the position and range of planes very accurately, so the Germans adjusted their strategies accordingly.  This made the old radars useful only for the salvage of their truck wheels.  The new model SCR-584's were supposed to be much improved as radars.

 "As one of the 'bright' young engineers now left in the radar section who was a systems person, I was selected to act as the liaison with the MIT  The efforts at the Signal Corps were 'applied production engineering'.  You took the principles and adapted them to physical problems.  The new techniques required understanding of the new principles, so I periodically came up to MIT and I was introduced to the new theories and operations.  I would go back down to Signal Corps to report on new trends.

 "It was decided that it was necessary to set up test procedures to verify the proper operation of new equipment and we began to do so.  By now, I had reached some kind of prominence in the Signal Corps.  I also began to see well-trained black professionals (men and women) coming in--Townes, Randall, McAfee, White, Tate, etc.

 "The area that became very important was the design of field grade test equipment.  The radars all come out of the factory working well.  But keeping it in working order was another story.  So the emphasis became the tool and test equipment.  Later, it became a department--Tool and Test Equipment for Radar.

 "In my group of nine engineers, I had two blacks, John Carter, and Lincoln Calvin.  There were several engineering aides and radio mechanics.  I used to have two secretaries, one was black.  One must be aware of several things.

 "First, there were not a large number of technically trained African-Americans in the Signal Corps.  Secondly, I didn't want and 'all colored' department.  I could see no advantage in spite of the arguments put forth by the colored who wanted me to do so 'in order that we could show them (the whites) what we can do.'  The powers that were had an active interest in such a department so that they could dump all colored into it and eliminate the need for equal opportunity by saying 'they (the colored) want to be segregated'

 "It is to be noted that many of the most ardent 'segregationist' blacks were not competent and offered to help me get a large department and a promotion in return for a promotion for themselves.

 "I was receiving a promotion on a average of less than one year in the ranks, more rapid than any whites but resisted the move because there was and is no advantage from self-segregation.

 "I began to travel around the country quite a bit visiting other laboratories, government agencies, and contractors.
A government employee couldn't fly in those days, unless you had military priority. It was easier and often faster to just take the train.  By today's standards of short airline hops one, then, went from New York City to Boston by sleeper.  Go to Washington, take a sleeper.  Get in a day's work, take a sleeper that night and wake up in Washington the next day.  At Union Station in Washington, if you stood at the regular taxis stand, where only white drivers were allowed, they wouldn't pick you up.  You had to walk across the street and get in the black-driven taxi.  If there were no white-driven cabs, white passengers would across and try to take a black-driven cab ahead of you.

 "There was a book that listed colored restaurants to eat in and colored hotels to stay in.  Knowledge of it was passed around.  Many of the hotels were just red-light places.  I'd stay there one night and leave the next morning.  Sometimes you'd have to hang your clothes on a hook to keep them away from the roaches.  If possible, you just stayed with friends.

 "By accident, I was at MIT Radiation laboratory, when a call was received from a representative of the then US Joint Chiefs of Staff requesting that MIT come to a meeting in Washington and asked for US Armed Services representatives to come along too.

 "The MIT people invited me to go along with them as the Signal Corps representative.  I had no knowledge of the purpose of the meeting.  I called my supervisor at Fort Monmouth who said, 'go ahead--do what's necessary.'

 "It turned out that an 'ad-hoc' committee on test equipment and maintenance procedures and standards was being organized.  Each major branch of the US services plus Canadian, and from time to time, British groups, were to participate.

 "The Navy had two representatives, Bureau of Ships and Bureau of Aeronautics.  The Radiation Lab of MIT's representative was Dr. Floyd Banks, a black physicist from Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.  He has since died.  He was one of four scientists who influenced my career.  The other three were also black: Walter McAfee, Henry Hill, and Warren Henry.  They were all Nobel Laureate material--logical, competent, etc.  I want to emphasize that I was meeting great white scientists, too, but those four were superior to all.

 "We used to meet with the staff and full members (from time-to-time) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff regularly.  In these meetings we would try to work out technical problems, for example, which frequencies the services would communicate on and for what.  The type of radar and proper placement, or radios, whatever, might cross interfere with the landing invasions.  Problems and questions also came up from MIT’s Radiation Lab, Harvard, and elsewhere.
 "The Washington meetings were at the Anderson House, an old mansion on Dupont Circle.  I had to stay at a dormitory at Howard University because I couldn't get a room anywhere.  There was the White Law Hotel, however, it was almost a house of ill repute.  One night, Dr. Banks and I stopped there to leave my bag and return to the office.  As I pulled over the sheets--roaches.  Banks, always the quiet wit said, 'tell them to move over, you're coming in.'
We had to get to the meetings on time. Things would start right at 9:00 AM and they would leave at 9:00 PM.  The two of us were the only blacks.

 "The top military brass would sit down in these armchairs around this very large table and we would sit in the second row.  At these conferences, we in the second row would have to lean over and listen and whisper to one another, to prompt those in the first row.

 "There would, for example be a very simple question, 'What size wheels does this new radar use?' '950 x 18'  'How many holes in the rim?'  'Five.'  'What about the size and number of holes in our current model or other vehicles?'  '875 x 17, and six.'

 "This would be a problem because they didn't want to mix things. If a soldier couldn't replace tires with those of another vehicle there could be unnecessary delays or abandonment of the equipment.  You know, simple things, but it makes a difference--for the want of a nail a shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe a horse was lost, etc. In one case, a radar had to be disqualified because we had revealed that one component could not be passed through the loading hatch.

 "So that was our job for the JCS, see that the technical details made the systems compatible as much as possible.

 "We tried to be prepared for each session but often when we got to Washington the staff might tell us, 'a new item been added to the agenda for tomorrow and you better be prepared to talk about it.'  So, we would start working.
 "At a memorable occasion, one or two of us had come in on the 'Red Eye Express' from San Francisco.  Banks had been elected secretary because he volunteered.  It turned out to be the most important position.  we all started to work, some stopped at 9 PM other at 12 midnight. I pulled out at 3 AM.  Banks said he would stay and asked me to bring a razor when I came at 7:30 AM.  He stayed all night working on the minutes.  When I arrived, he hastened to the men's room, shaved and was sitting in his regular second row seat when the meeting started.

 "A flag officer from Canada asked a question of the military one-star officer in the front row.  He says, 'What about such and such?'  This one-star refers to Dr. Banks.  Banks, sitting on the second row answers, 'A, B, C.'  The flag officer asks another question, and again Banks has to answer.  After about four questions, the flag officer says, 'Wait a minute.  Every time we ask a question, you lean back and you talk to someone, who are you talking to?'  And the officer says, 'I'm talking to Dr. Banks.'  He says, 'the two of you in the front row move apart and let Dr. Banks come in here so we can speak directly.'  Dr. Banks comes forward and sits in the front row.  First time they realize  that not everyone in the room is white.  Dr. Banks is black and there is another one, me.  'Well, good morning, Dr. Banks, welcome.  Will you give us a short briefing on this issue.'

 "Banks says, 'I've prepared a little monograph on this,' and he reads.  Banks, having volunteered to take minutes, had studied the Joint Chief of Staff's handbook on minutes and brief preparation.  He could write the minutes succinctly, cut out all the unnecessary words and get it down to one clear page of perfect English.  The Chairman of the JCS says, 'Boy, that's excellent.  How long you been at this job?'  Banks replied, 'Well, I've been writing the minutes for some time.'  'We', the Chairman says, 'have noticed how good the minutes were.  Can we do anything more, got any recommendations?'  Finally, the Chairman says to one of the others, 'send something up to MIT, telling them Banks is doing a fine job.'  That second I learned from Banks, don't quit anything until it is finished.

 "It was not always a bed of roses.  The phone rings and you'd hear one of the JCS say, 'Let one of the niggers get the phone.'  All the military kitchen and menial support staff were black guys and you'd hear things like that all the time.  When we broke for lunch, Banks and I went out to buy something off a fruit stand because you couldn't eat with the staff in the cafeteria or in public restaurants.  You could eat at the bar of a restaurant or at a counter, but you couldn't eat in the dining room.

 "At the end of the hostilities, Banks left for MIT and somebody had to be secretary for future meetings and I was encouraged to take the job.  The 'ad-hoc' label was not removed for at least three years.

 "I used to come home on Friday nights, say hello to my wife and I would say good-bye on Monday morning and I would be in my little room in New Jersey writing, paring, and editing almost the whole weekend until the next meeting weekend.
__________

 "One day, our JCS staff representative came to me and said, 'Bill, we've met at every place except Fort Monmouth.  Let's go to Fort Monmouth.  We'd like to see some of the equipment.'  I purposely had not ever invited them to come because I wanted my efforts to be low key.  I was diligent in representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Signal Corps and the Signal Corps at the JCS.  I didn't want any competition from Signal Corps people.  I'd make it my business to find out, even if it wasn't in my immediate area, all necessary data, concerns, etc.  I was always aware that somebody might try to cut my throat to get that job.

 "I called and I got a secure meeting room and took care of all details such as sending out a list of hotels, etc.  The first thing I heard was that the general at Fort Monmouth is raising hell and called my boss and told him to get my tail up there.  When we met, he greeted me with, 'what is this business?  The Joint Chiefs of Staff are coming here?  Who the hell are you?'  I mean he was livid.  'A goddamn four-star general is calling me and I say I don't know anything about what's going on!'  He calls up my boss.  I had all the bases covered.  He and other knew that I'd been on this committee for four and a half years. 'Well, what the hell is a civilian doing on this?  I don't want any goddamn civilians, I want military officers.  Get at least a colonel here.'  So he tells me, 'you get the hell off that thing, the colonel is replacing you tomorrow.'

 "He was right of course, out of the blue a four-star general form the J.C.S. calls his office and asks where are the golf courses.  I mean, how the hell could I have foreseen that the Joint Chiefs wanted to bring their wives along to the seashore and golf the immediate weekend before the Monday meeting.  I should have made it on Wednesday, in between two emergency meetings in Washington.  They'd fly in and fly out and no one would have been the wiser.

 "So the colonel comes over, he says, 'I want all your files.'   He's got a real attitude, '...you (pause) "civilians" think that you run the army.'   My mother didn't raise any fool, I stalled.  He's looking at his watch and I'm dropping papers by the ream and checking files for old reports.  Finally, he says, 'give me anything you can give me right away.'  So I gave him everything that was critical.  I know what's on the agenda.  'Here's what may be in it,' I say, 'but no guarantees' even though I was pretty certain that if the colonel did his homework, without his attitude, he could get by, but I had the distinct feeling the he felt that if a black did the job, he could do much better

 "I never knew what happened after that.  I think that committee disbanded within three months as part of the general shutdown of war-based activity.

__________
 

 "By this time, captured V-2 ballistic missiles were being tested out at Alamagordo, New Mexico.  Too many of them were going up 10 to 20 miles and were blowing up.  One of them went over and landed in Mexico.  The base scientists, including Werner von Braun were trying to find out why.  Hy Yamins, chief scientist at the Labs wanted to know if we could do any field-testing. He had gone out to New Mexico and had taken some measurements with unsatisfactory results. So I went out there a couple of times and realized that we couldn't check anything from the ground, we had to go up in the air and see if we could get some additional data.

 "I stayed on this B-29 training base because I could find nowhere to stay in the town of Alamagordo--a civilian in a real Jim Crow army and area.  The training route for the pilots during WW II was up and down the west coast of South American because it was neutral territory.  It was also safer than flying over to Hawaii because some guys would go to sleep and fly right over the islands and crash.

 "There was this Jewish fellow there in the Bachelor Officers Quarters (B.O.Q.) where they put me.  He was ostentatious, but he was fair and because of his religion, they didn't like him a bit.  He said to me, 'Bill, I want you to do a good job because, you know, all hell broke loose when they found out it was a colored fellow coming.'

 "I took a chart paper, electrical recorder (adapted it to battery power) and put it in the fighter bomber airplane.  It's got an ink pen and well, as soon as we get altitude, the internal pressure of the ink well forces all the ink to spread all over the paper.  We came back down. There was a cracker Lieutenant who came up to me afterwards and said, 'Mr. Jones, you ain't never been to flight school or nothing before or you would have known it was going to happen.  We're going to help you out.  You don't go into a military plane without instruction.'

 "He gave me a crash course on safety, aircraft operation and then high altitude conditions.

 "One day I was driving a sedan around the base with him as a passenger and he said, 'you ain't never learned to observe while driving .  You want to come back down home where we have the stock car races and I'll show you how to make a turn.  Move over.'  So I got out and this cracker Lieutenant gets in the driver's seat.  'I want you to lay this thing into that curb, lay it into that thing and just hold it, and if you get to tight, just veer off a little bit.'  So two or three runs and I've learn how to go around a corner and stay in one lane at high speeds. I listened to this fellow, he helped me to improve my driving habits.

 "Then, I flew up over the Rio Grande Mountains--it's called the Golden Mountain Top, and they fired a missile out of the valley and it exploded when it came out of the bowl.  I was listening to the frequency set aside for emergency detonation in case something went wrong with the missile, and I hear, "car 253, proceed to such and such.'  It's Salem, Oregon, police station.  A little bit later I hear, FM stations playing in the East.  On the ground, in the valley, the launch people listen to a frequency, hear nothing, and set the detonation equipment to that frequency.

 "The missile comes up out of the valley--the spurious radio frequency waves are received and all the detonating channels get the signal to blow.  Heavyside layer trapping, a propagation phenomena, is causing radio waves from up to thousands of miles away to be propagated through the missile's flight path.

 "I went back down and Werner Von Brown was there with his German equipment including a wire recorder.  So I learned how to operate this wire recorder and I put it in the plane and up we went. I called out our altitude, then checked the detonation channel.  The music comes roaring in.  So when we come back down and played it for the launch chief, he said, 'Goddamn.  I never heard that.'

 "We had a meeting with the concerned people.  A General Homer was there and I played the tape.  'What the hell is that?'  'That's Salem police, FM stations out of Georgia, amateur radio stations and everything else.  You're on the wrong channel.  It will kill your missile every time by jamming the channel.'  'Well, get these people off that channel,' says the General.  A colonel puts his hand over his eagles and says, 'I'm a ham radio operator.  You're not going to put me off the frequency.  Amateur radio stations don't know or care anything about your problems.'  He, of course, was playing the role of devil's advocate.

 "Then they asked me what could be done and I said, 'make the systems 'jam proof'.  If the Russians know that you're on, say, 28 megahertz, then they'll just broadcast on 28.  You move it to 94, they'll move. The project should be to make our missiles 'jam proof'.  'Put that in your recommendation, Mr. Jones,' so I put it in.

 "They changed the frequencies immediately from those that were the greatest hazards and then began to work on appropriate electronics. They had other problems, however.  For example, they put a camera in one of the tails, pointing down.  For weight and balance reasons, they put the batteries up in the nose, and had the wires running down inside the body of the missile.  I figured our that it could create interference with other internal electronics and blow up the missile.  Tests indicated this could occur.  So they had to either shield the cable or they had to use a motor that was spark proof.

 "They wrote up a citation in for my Civil Service 201 file and I got another promotion.  I was now a P-6.  The position of Frequency Coordinator in Alamagordo was created and a small department authorized.  I was offered the position.
__________

 "But you had to live out there in the desert in a real Jim Crow existence that was really bad--remember, Truman has not yet integrated the armed services.  True, I had a chance to eat at lunch in the officer's quarters, but that was all.  Earlier, when I went there, the sergeant at the door would always ask, 'are you authorized to eat in here?'  'Yes, sergeant.'  'Let me see your badge--well, go ahead.'  I came back the next three days and he asked me the same thing each time.  One day I looked up and who do I see but General Homer. I walked over and said 'hello'.  He was probably having a business lunch there but invited me to sit with him but I declined.  'I did want to tell you something,' I said, and pointed toward the doorway, so there was no doubt in the sergeant's mind that I was talking about him.  'Every time I come in here, he gives me a hard time--he's insulting.'

 The general told me to go over to where the sergeant is and then walks over a few moments later.  The sergeant snaps to.  The general says, 'Look, this gentleman is a guest of this base and my personal guest.  I don't want to hear again from him that you challenged him in any way, shape, or form.  Do you understand?'  The guy is sweating now, people are looking.  He says, 'Yes, sir.'  The General says, 'Don't forget that,' and turns to me and says, 'any time you are free Bill, why don't you drop by the office?'  I know he didn't want me to come by his office, that was just a statement to make in front of everybody.  You have to know how to read these people.  General Homer could not help me off base in Alamagordo, El Paso or any other part of New Mexico or Texas.

 "If you want to hear stories about racial discrimination at the Laboratories and in Monmouth County I can tell you from A to Z about how they treated black people, how they treated white people.

 "The administration building at Camp Evans, before the Signal Corps took it over, used to be the headquarters of the Nazi party for Monmouth and Lakewood counties and surroundings.  They had the Bundt meetings there.  These were American Nazis--the place was rampant with this kind of people.  And what bothered most of them down there was that, because professionally trained Jews and blacks couldn't easily get jobs in industry, they found jobs in the Signal Corps.  And they were also moving up through the ranks faster than the local white Christians.

 "The War was finally over and a peace-time operation had settled in, it's 1950-'51 and the colonels and majors are resigning and taking over top civilian jobs.  In addition, the Laboratories were laying off people across the board.

 "McCarthy is also coming up and the first thing I know, I am up on charges that I permitted communism to be praised,  I permitted people to bring copies of The Daily Worker into my office and read them, and I sat by quietly as the Russian form of government was praised.

 "I'm suspended as a security risk and escorted out in the street.  It was never said I was a communist.  I had a hearing, not a trial, and a lawyer who's fee cost me $5,000.00. I was found guilty and then fired.  I was escorted out of the building again and off the base.  I couldn't get a job while I was suspended, nor would anybody hire me because of the McCarthy scare.  My wife went to work to support the two children and me.  Soon after I was fired, we moved in with my mother.

 "I got a copy of the complete trial transcript and read it. I guess working on the Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings helped me because I read it a several more times and found there were questions that were inconsistent in that they came in randomly. I figured out that they were based on the informant's data.  They wouldn't let you confront your informant.  Certain questions were asked and answered at the hearing and from the description of the office routine, it had to come from informants. It could only be one of three people.

 I had gone down a list of every fellow that worked for me and gotten affidavits, except for three, that they had never witnessed the charges. One, I recorded over the phone and the guy said he never saw anything like what they had charged. The other one was a cracker technician that worked for me.  My twin brother had been commissioned as an officer in the Navy and came to visit me in full uniform. I introduced him to the fellows and this guy refused to shake his hand.  I learned that he had been an old Navy guy and later said he 'wasn't going to shake hands with any nigger'.  I wanted to call him to be a witness.  I called the base and learned that he had been granted 'administrative leave' for two weeks at the time of my trial--administrative leave, meaning that he was given it by special dispensation by someone up top.  At that time, administrative leave could only be granted by the front office.

 "One was the secretary who had been working for Harold Zahl, then chief scientist.  He fired her by transfer and the only slot they could find was in my section.  So when she first came down there, I asked her why she wasn't working for Zahl and she said the pressure was too tough.  'Everything he wanted, you had to do right away and you had to deal with all these people.  At the rate I was going, the first thing I know is, I'll be back in Marlborough with my brother.'  Marlborough is a state insane asylum.  When I told my lawyer, he thought she must be seeing communists under the bed.

 "We filed an appeal.  But we had to find the secretary.  The asylum had no record of a '______.'  The lawyer said that her name would be different if she had been married so I went down the streets of Long Beach, looking for someone who knew her maiden name.

 "Pretending to deliver a package I eventually knocked on one door and said, 'there used to be so-and-so living around here,' and he said, 'yes, she's moved.  I don't know where she's gone.'  I said, 'gosh, she had a brother who was up in the hospital.'  'Oh, Fred.'  I said, 'What was his last name?'  'Smith, that's right.  Fred Smith.'  I said, Well, I'll get in touch with her through him.'  Now I know her maiden name.  I called up the state mental hospital at Marlborough and asked to speak with her but they wouldn't let me.  Then I asked if I would be able to send mail to her at that address.  They said yes, but that I couldn't speak to her.  Okay, that's enough so she's back in the insane asylum under her maiden name.

 "We now had these three critical pieces of evidence:  the guy who refused to shake my brother's hand and therefore is a racist, the tape recording from one of the men who worked for me saying he never saw any of this stuff happen, and the evidence that this woman was insane.  We went to the Pentagon in Washington.  The chief hearing officer, 'we cannot put the tape into the record, but we'll play it.'  They reviewed the rest of the documents we had and three months later, I was cleared.

 "So I go back to the Signal Corps and they don't put me in my old job.  They had promoted a fellow into my slot and they didn't want to disturb it. They put me over in thermionics testing vacuum tubes.  I went back down to Washington and talked to a friend from the JCS days who told me that they have to give me my old job back and who in Washington will enforce it.  I returned to Fort Monmouth and they gave me back the job.  When I walked into the room, all the people that worked for me were there, but there were many others around the laboratory who came up and said, 'Bill, you know, I was for you, but...'  I ignored them.  I had decided to quit anyway, I just wanted to re-establish my position.

 "One day, shortly afterwards, the phone rang and one of the fellows I had worked with at the MIT Rad Lab asked me if I could to come to work at the University of Michigan where he was situated.   They had a house, got everything all set.  So we decided to say farewell to all the friends we had in the East.  I came up to Boston to say goodbye and ran into one of the fellows over at MIT  He offered me a job there and I picked up the phone, called Michigan, told them we're coming to Boston instead because our families were 5 hours away in New York City compared to 36 hours from Ann Arbor.

 "My bride's been tremendous.  We've had some pretty good experiences here.  I first worked for Lincoln Lab at MIT  Then MIT and Harvard were planning to make an 'atom smasher' up at Harvard and MIT offered me the job of being the chief electrical engineer on it.  As I was leaving, a co-worker said, 'Look, Bill, there's only one kind of person at MIT, people.  At Harvard it's the faculty and the rest.'  Another fellow said, 'Bill, who won the Indianapolis 500?'  'Al Unger.'  'Who was his pit man?'  'I don't know.'  'You think he would have won the race without the pit man?'  'No, his pit man makes the car go.'  'Remember, when you go up among physicists, you're a pit man.  You're an engineer, you're never going to be a driver and they're going to resent you if you try to climb in that seat with them.  When they're taking the pictures and pouring the champagne, don't be in the picture.  If you want any medals or anything, then you go into your own engineering field and get your medals there, but don't try to compete with the physicists.'

 'I got up to Harvard, my appointment was in the Physics Department,  and I looked around and found out that at that time it was so, 'the faculty and the rest.'   So I ran my fingers through the catalogue and I found a couple of courses I thought I could teach and wheeled and dealed and studied and worked very hard, and ended up a Lecturer on Physics.  I had taught for about four years before they gave me a formal appointment.  I don't have a Ph.D., but I taught what I could teach and they were satisfied for a about 8 years before  I went back down to MIT and became a member of the Energy Lab and I was there for 15 years before I formally retired.   I have, since then, received an appointment at MIT as a research affiliate with somewhat minor duties and, I must add, with no stipend but consulting privileges.

__________

 "90% of my success was by accident, I was in the right place at the right time.  Two weeks later or half a day earlier, it wouldn't have happened.  Anything I've ever worked on, I tried to be in charge of.  You have to be good, but you also have to have a chance and you had to have some nice people around you once in a while.  I think there were some decent people.  I would be less than honest if I said they were all racist, but I can say for every good person, there were three racists then, and about 2 1/2 now but they are not as outspoken.

Page updated December 31, 2003   page created February 10, 2001
Content copyright Professor Robert Johnson Jr. used with permission