Friday, Oct. 09, 2009

Hanford photos: Turning up a face from the past

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

The two photos from 1944 appear to show a face I haven’t seen since 1965. And that face apparently belonged to a man who wouldn’t meet me for four years.

After all, I was born in 1948.

Sound mysterious? It’s really more of an intriguing coincidence for me.

Probably hundreds of Tri-Citians have clicked through the 60 photos from World War II titled, “Gallery: Hanford Work in 1944,” since we posted them on our website a few weeks ago.

And I doubt most folks gave much thought to the two photos that struck me. After all, they show a pretty routine scene of a busy office, where a clerical staff of mostly women stands behind an L-shaped counter. On the other side, a crowd of men in hats, topcoats or work jackets is clustered.

Perhaps they were there to buy the war bonds advertised on one wall. Or maybe it was payday or a massive hiring effort was under way. There’s not much obvious history to it.

Still, a man in the two photos’ lower lefthand corner stopped me. It was the way his hat perched on his crossed left knee and how his thumb curled around the brim.

“That guy holds his hat just like Grandpa Anderson,” I thought, trying to recall what my grandfather, who died in 1965, looked like in old family photos.

Then I realized the dates were right for him to have been at Hanford among the 40,000-plus workers who helped build the installations that created the world’s first nuclear weapon.

My mother’s parents talked often about living in a tiny trailer on the Kennewick side of what then was the only bridge across the Columbia River. It was the old green bridge, which was just east of today’s cable bridge.

Gilbert O. Anderson proudly claimed he was a founding member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He used to joke he had wired everything from Grand Coulee Dam in the late 1930s to tribal teepees in northeastern Montana in the mid-1950s.

He was at Hanford from about 1943-46, after his work at Grand Coulee ended. He moved to Spokane after the war, perhaps to work at the Kaiser Aluminum complex. My first memory of my grandparents is a visit to their Spokane home, probably in the early 1950s.

Despite the possibilities, I was skeptical the photos were of him. After all, there were thousands of workers at Hanford during the war, and turnover was a serious problem because the “termination winds” regularly kicked up fierce dust storms that sent scores of families packing.

In 1944, my grandfather would have been 56, but he always looked younger than his age. His hair grayed slowly and stayed until his death. The man in the Hanford photos shows nary a gray hair.

The family photos I have, though taken five to 10 years after the Hanford photo, show some striking similarities to the man in the World War II photos labeled D 1132 and D 1133.

The man’s ears, nose, long upper lip, squarish chin and vertical lines on his cheeks match the family photos. The hair of the man in the Hanford photos indicates he has a slight double peak to the left of center in his hairline — which is matched in the family pictures.

And the dark patches under his eyes are in exactly the same place in both sets of photos — close to his nose under the right eye, about at the center under the left eye.

And there’s a slight bright spot on the lower eyelid of his right eye in both Hanford photos at the exact same spot where the family photos show a small, light-colored mole.

Those who grew up with 35 mm cameras might doubt an old photo would show such detail, but the cameras used at Hanford back then likely were the old Speed Graphics. Those used 4-inch by 5-inch sheets of film that captured incredible detail, which iPhoto software helped reveal in the digital copies I downloaded from a Department of Energy website.

So am I positive? Not yet. My older brother Bud, who lives in Great Falls, Mont., looked the two photos over after I e-mailed them to him. He said the man looks more like my Uncle Gilbert — my grandfather’s oldest son. But my uncle had a lot less hair than his dad and spent much of the war in Hawaii, working to raise and repair the ships the Japanese sank at Pearl Harbor.

And, my brother added, the ears “sure look like Grampa Anderson’s.”

I guess we’ll keep digging for 1940s photos.

Meanwhile, if your relatives worked at Hanford, you might want to check out that photo gallery at tri-cityherald.com/historicalphotos/ or an earlier Hanford gallery, also at tri-cityherald.com/historicalphotos/.

You might get a surprise as well.

w Ken Robertson: 582-1520; krobertson@tricityherald.com

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