Blast from the past: Richland shares its historical Hanford connection at Atomic Frontier Day
Jim Boak remembers a Richland before there was an uptown.
He was in his early 20s and had just finished a tour of duty in the Pacific as a U.S. Marine when he landed in Richland in 1946.
“It was really different,” he said. “I was single and they had barracks. That’s where I stayed.”
The former Hanford firefighter turned reactor operator said he could have spent a day telling stories about what Richland was like at the time. He spent a career at the Hanford site and a lifetime in Richland. He remembered the last time floats rolled through Richland to celebrate Atomic Frontier Days.
When it returned on Saturday afternoon, his great-grandson Soren Snell said Boak couldn’t have been more excited. He was one of thousands of people remembering the 75th anniversary of the Manhattan Project and the city’s unusual history.
Stories from the past
Stories were everywhere in the park.
There was the person whose father stuck him in the trunk while driving onto the Hanford site. He still remembers his father killing a deer along the road and throwing the remains in the trunk.
Then there was the person whose parents met while they were working on the project. The daughter who remembered her parents participating in the lottery to get a spot in the alphabet homes.
Jillian Gardner-Andrews, WSU Tri-Cities’ Hanford History Project, was happy to bring the event back to Richland. It is an event that brought people from across the country to Richland to celebrate their accomplishments.
“To be able to re-create it with the city is just fantastic,” she said. “People are so excited that we’re doing this because they got to experience the parade and the booths and the games, and now that we’re bringing it back they can show their grandkids.”
Families got a chance to peek into a model of one of the alphabet homes, see a bus that brought workers from the Pasco train station to the worksite and got to see other pieces of history from the period.
Inside the community center, Northwest Public Broadcasting was collecting 10 minute oral histories from people who remembered what Hanford and Richland was like.
“It’s such a celebration of the community, because we’re such a unique city,” Gardner-Andrews said. “Richland was a government city until 1958, and there’s not many places in the world that had that experience.”
Sharing the region’s history
It’s important to share the history of Hanford and Richland with people who know the stories, and with the people who don’t.
For Richland Mayor Bob Thompson, the celebration gave him a chance to tell his story about growing up just blocks from Howard Amon Park before he read a proclamation renaming it Riverside Park for the day.
The event gave him a chance to celebrate the city’s past and what made it special.
“Sometimes we lose sight of how important that framework is to success,” he said. “So this is yet another example of Richland having a great opportunity that wouldn’t have been possible without our forefathers, really.”
This story was originally published September 14, 2019 at 6:02 PM.