Interview with Yvette Hayes by Mike Moore

25 April 2007, Building 125, JPG Indiana

(The Last JPG Employee)

Mike Moore: When and where were you born, if you don’t mind saying and who are your parents?

Yvette Hayes: My Mom and Dad are Elsie and Tilford McKay. They live in Bedford Kentucky and I was born in Bedford Kentucky April 24, 1948. 

Mike Moore: What high School did you attend?

Yvette:  I went to Trimble County High School and graduated in 1966.  Then I went to Sullivan Business College in Louisville for a year and obtained an associate’s degree.  I met my husband; he was in the military, so we moved a lot.  I lived away from this area for sixteen years.  My husband and I divorced and I came back to Kentucky in 1987.

I worked at Hanscom Air Force Base in Boston, Massachusetts for a few months before my husband and I split up. I transferred from there to here (JPG). I did not know however, if I was going to get on here. I came to the Personnel Office and put in my application. Rosemary Brown was in the personnel office when I arrived here. They called me two days later for an interview.

She told me after I was hired that as soon as I left the office she went back and told Kendall Bradford, who was in charge of the Recruitment and Placement section of personnel, that this is the woman I want to hire.  So I got the job.  I will always be grateful to Rosemary for that.

Mike Moore: I always thought that you came here right out of high school.  Isn’t that weird?

Yvette: No. I lived away from here for a long time.

Mike Moore: What grade did you come in as?

Yvette: I came in as a GS-3 in March 1987.

Mike Moore: My goodness, you only had one year left before they started closing the place.

Yvette: Yeah. We were notified in 1988. So I was just here a short time. I thought that was a fast career!

Mike Moore: When you hired on, did you figure it was for thirty or so years?

Yvette:  I thought it was a government job and usually they are pretty secure.  I thought that I could stay here for as long as I want to and be able to retire. At the time there was a lot of talk about closure. I think it was like an on and off thing. It had closed a couple of times before.  I think it was in the back of a lot of people’s minds. I never really thought about it, but then we did come out on the closure list in 88 and I thought oh my gosh, what am I going to do now? I am a single parent raising two kids now I am going to have to look for a job again.

Mike Moore: When you came here did your prior government time count?

Yvette: Yes, I was able to count when I worked at Hanscom AFB for four months.  I had worked in the private sector a lot during my marriage. I never really considered getting a Federal job.  Most of the time I was married, I did not work. We were in Hawaii and Germany for several years.  I never really had to work. 

Mike Moore: When you came into personnel, did you have to go to school for training?

Yvette: It was basically a clerical position.  I did not have any real training in personnel actions.  I did take some correspondence courses after I was here for a year to try to get into the actual working of the personnel department. I worked in recruitment for a while then I transferred into the training office which was not so technical.

Mike Moore: Who was your boss then?

Yvette: Steve Ryan was the training officer.  He was the one who hired me for that position.

Mike Moore: So, during Base Closure, was you involved in setting up the classes in the mobile classroom from IVY Tech?

Yvette: Yes, I helped set those classes up and I took a lot of the classes too. A lot of people took those computer classes.  Ray Harsin was the instructor.  He pretty much parked his IVY Tech van out here and left it.

During that time Linda Gordon and I met Senator Richard Lugar and we had our picture taken with him. Col Glover was also in the photo. I thought it was funny that he picked two Kentucky girls to be in the picture with him and we couldn’t even vote for him.

The article and photo appeared in the Madison Courier. 

(In the article Senator Lugar was asked about JPG Closure.  He said, “Our best information is there no news regarding Jefferson Proving Ground”

However, he did say there will be an evaluation at the end of the year of the 5,000 installations throughout the country and there could be some closings.  And Lugar said, “I will be making a strong case for JPG.”)

Mike Moore: We did not have a computer network at JPG.  Those courses helped all employees that were looking for new jobs.

Yvette:  Oh we didn’t even have email. The fax machine or the telephone was the basic form of communication. We did have a personnel system ACPERS called.  I couldn’t tell what the letters stand for now.  That was the personnel computer system that generated all the personnel actions. Every time someone would resign or we would hire someone, we would have to poke in all these codes and get 50’s printed out. We had take training and the Army sent an instructor to JPG . We had the whole week of training on that computer system.  It was a bear. Nobody liked it. 

Mike Moore: Was that using punched cards?

Yvette: No, they were not punched cards; you actually typed codes into the ACPERS system.  You looked in a book and then you typed codes in. Then those codes spit out the English version of what the codes meant. 

Mike Moore:  Could you list some of your co-workers?

Yvette:  When I first came in there was Rosemary Brown, Dennis Jerrell, Kendall Bradford, and myself. We were in the Recruitment and Placement Section. Then Dora Lee was the secretary for the Personnel Officer.  Margurite Ligon left on a Friday and I came in on a following Monday after she retired.  I never worked for her.  I think the acting Personnel Officer was Jim Adams. I believe that was who it was, because they hadn’t hired anyone yet.  Shortly thereafter they hired Russell Shorten to be Chief Personnel Officer (CPO).  Then there was Sue Anderson, Roseann Dalglish, Etta Bickers, Janice Bradley, Wanda Klopp, and Kathy Andres.  Eric Shrader was the training officer when I first started here.  Steve Ryan was the training officer later.

Towards the end, before we did close, we did not have a training office.  As people would leave we kind of merged into one office and everyone did everything.   That is when I started counseling people on retirement and PCS moves.  We did all the job searches.  We put their name in the computer to be picked up at other agencies.  They called that the “stopper list”.

Mike Moore:  Did you ever go on the “stopper list”?

Yvette:  I went on the “stopper list” for this job and I was picked for the Corps, but I turned it down. You just had one chance. I did not want to leave, because my kids were getting close to being out of school. I didn’t want to move and drag them somewhere else so I stayed here.  But that didn’t happen until after I started in my current position.

Mike Moore: Were you here on the last day?

Yvette: I was here when they locked the gate.  No ceremony was conducted as far as locking the gate. There were three of us chosen to stay on.  Ken Knouf, Phil Mann and myself. My appointment was for six months and Ken and Phil’s was a one year appointment.  They, TECOM, said that was all the longer we were going to be needed. On the last day we were working in personnel until the last minute.  I mean we were still processing paperwork.  We were getting calls for people getting picked up for different jobs.  I was doing travel orders and trying get things wrapped up. We worked up until 4:00 that afternoon.  Most of the other offices had moved their furniture out and they were just closed down.  They were just mingling with each other saying their good byes. We were working!  Then we said our goodbyes and went home. Everybody was crying. We went out the gate and that was it. 

The commander, Col Weekly, lived here on post. He was living in a camper that was parked right outside of building 125.  When everyone was gone he locked the gate.  There was not any ceremony. I think there was another employee taking pictures of him locking the gate and I think it was Debbie Moreland.  At least that was what Col Weekly told me the next day when I saw him.

The three us had keys to the gate.  That was on a Friday and that next Monday we came in to work.  We had to unlock the gate and come in.  Col Weekly was in here in the whole proving ground all by himself in his little camper.  He said it was so quite out here he couldn’t stand it. His wife had already moved to Florida.  He was getting ready to retire from the military, so he had to stick around and do his retirement physical and out processing at Fort Knox.  He stayed here about a month. 

Yeah, we came in the next work day and unlocked the gate and locked the gate behind us.  There were Joy Eaglin and Richard Herring and maybe a couple of other people working in Building 108 getting things shipped out that were supposed to be going to Yuma.  I think there were a couple of people from TECOM there helping them.  They were here about 2 or 3 weeks.  There is a button underneath the desk in the guard house and if you leave the gate unlocked, but shut, you could push that button and it would open.  There was a call box out there and we had one put in the office.  Whenever some one came to the gate and pushed that button it would buzz in here and we would tell them how to get in the gate, rather than us having to run out there every time a truck came in.

Mike Moore: When those six months was up, what did they say?

Yvette:  Well, having worked in personnel, I knew I had better contact someone and find out what was going on. Whether they were going to extend my position or what they were going to do with me.  They found out that they needed me longer. So they extended my appointment another six months, which brought me up to a year, which equaled Ken and Phil’s time too.  When the year was up we had to be extended.   They made us temporary employees, but we got to keep our sick leave and annual leave and all of our other benefits.  We did not lose any benefits whatsoever, because we did not have a break in service. 

Mike Moore:  So that now would be 1996 and this is 2007.  That would be twelve years later?

Yvette:  Yeah and it was only going to be a six month appointment. Everyone that we talked to before we closed said that we would be able to retire here.  I thought I don’t know about that.

Mike Moore:  I always thought that they would never get the ammunition thing settled.  I did not think they could sell it to Dean Ford, but somehow they did.

Mike Moore:  Did they keep extending you every year?

Yvette:  You can only be a temporary employee for four years.  After that they have to let you go or hire you as a permanent employee.  OPM several years ago came out with a regulation that you could not just keep an employee on temporary forever because they weren’t getting any benefits. It wasn’t really fair to that employee.  If you need them beyond four years then you need to make them permanent.

Mike Moore:  Do you know how long you will be here now, or what does you current appointment goes out to?

Yvette: We don’t have a date, because we are permanent employees.  We do not have a not to exceed date. 

Mike Moore:   So far Phil has retired, Ken is thinking about retiring and are you thinking about retiring here?

Yvette:  Well, I am thinking about retiring when they tell me I have to. 

Mike Moore:  So you will work as long as the let you work?

Yvette:  Pretty much.  I could go out next year on an early out if I have to, but I would like to stay until 2010. That’s not too far away.

Mike Moore:  Is there anyway to average your twelve years here and say kind of what you have done?  How have you managed to pass the time away here for twelve years?

Yvette: It has been boring at times.  But other times we are real busy.  We are on call!  We are like the Maytag repair people, something breaks, and we go fix it. If someone from headquarters calls and says something needs done, we do it.   We get that done and something else may pop up. 

Mike Moore:  Do you remember when the Secretary of the Army visited JPG?

Yvette:  Yes, I looked it up in the files and it was October 24, 1996.  The then Secretary of the Army, Togo West came to visit.  All the years of JPG’s operation, the Secretary had never once been here as far as I know and then a year after we closed he comes to visit.  He was here to meet Dean Ford, because Dean had already won the bid to purchase part of JPG.  He was also here to talk about the 120 acre Krueger Lake parcel, about it being signed over to the county.

It was interesting meeting him. There were a lot of hoops to jump through before he got here.  I did not realize, I mean the Secretary of the Army I know is an important person, but I did not know he was as important as all that. Secret Service people showed up and were talking to all of us and checking out the building, finding out who was going to be attending this meeting with the Secretary.   

I do have kind of a funny story to tell you about the secret service people.  Paul Cloud and Mike Early were TECOM employees at the time and they were involved in the closure process at JPG they were here.  The secret service people had come in to check out the building. Well, we needed some chairs for the visitors to sit on for the meeting. The only person we knew that had extra chairs was Cathy Hale, who had bought a building from the Army for the Madison Railroad.  She had received all the chairs that used to be set up in the gymnasium when we had our public meetings. We were getting those chairs from her. The people that delivered the chairs here were from the Madison Department of Corrections.  The secret service people were here and Paul Cloud is going around having a panic attack, because we had prisoners delivering chairs and the Secretary of the Army is on his way in.  It was just too funny watching Paul.  He was definitely in a panic mode that day.  I still remind him of that day every once in a while and we laugh.  That was a very interesting day.

The three of us were given coins from the Secretary.  It had the Secretary’s seal and his name on it, Togo D. West, Jr.

Mike Moore: Did you get your picture in the paper this time?

Yvette: No.  The Secretary’s picture was in the paper though.  It was in the Madison Courier the next day.

Mike Moore:  Did you join the Federal Woman’s Program and other organizations?

Yvette:  I was in the Federal Women’s Program for several years. I was chairperson for a year. We brought speakers in and had other projects.  We sponsored annual lunches during FWP month. We also honored two employees for outstanding work during the year; I think you were one of the people recognized.

Mike Moore: What was it like being a woman working out here?

Yvette:  It did not seem any differently than any other place. I worked in an office that is the kind of setting I was used to. There was a mixture of men and women. Even then the men were more of the management type and the women were more of the clerical type. That’s just the way it has been for as long as I can remember.  I don’t know what the setting was in the other buildings. The Federal Women Program was to recognize women’s contributions.  That was how we got where we are today, by the past contributions of women to the mission.  I guess we’ve come a long way, but it’s still a man’s world!

Mike Moore:  Tell me about your new job, the one where you go bail water. How are you going to do that when Ken leaves?

Yvette: Yes, I could do that or they could send in the contractor a week early and let them do it and spend gobs more money. The contractor would have to be here for two weeks instead of one week.  They are Depleted Uranium (DU) monitoring wells. Basically they are around the outer perimeter of the DU area, but there are a couple of wells inside the DU area and they are just off the road.  You don’t have to go into the wooded area. We take bailers which hold one liter of water each.  You drop them down into these small, I don’t know, I guess the diameter for the holes of the wells are about four inches. 

They are ground water wells and they do have locking tops on them, so no one can put anything down in them. We unlock them and bail out however much we can to empty the well so when the contractor comes in the next week to sample the water; he can get a true reading.  When we empty it, we hope that a week later the well will be recharged with ground water so they can get good samples to find out if there is any DU leaking into the water system that comes through the Proving Ground. 

Some of the wells you can empty in 15 bails.  Some are not empty when you have done 60 bails.  We pour that water into blue barrels that sit next to each well.   When those barrels are full the contractor will check the water and if it checks out OK then basically the water is dumped out onto the ground.  That is done once a year. It takes a while to fill them up.  They are 55 gallon barrels.  The contractors come in and sample twice a year, so that is how often we would have to bail the wells. It is kind of interesting.

Mike Moore: As you are probably the last person to work at JPG, that makes you kind of a celebrity.  Are there any real interesting things that you would like for future generations to know?  Does it strike you as odd being the last person or can you figure out why you are the last person?

Yvette: I don’t really feel like I am a celebrity.   It is kind of interesting that I could possibly end up the last person here. I don’t know, I really don’t have any words of wisdom. I have enjoyed it and I feel very, very fortunate that I got to stay.  I love this place, it seems like home to me!

Mike Moore:  Did you put in for the job?

Yvette:  No, the list of qualified employees came from the “stopper list”.  They needed a personnel type person.  Kathy Andres, I thought would have been the perfect person to stay.  She had been in personnel a lot longer than I had. She had been doing the work that needed to be done in this office.  The “stopper list” continued on after closure and there were still people waiting for jobs.  Job offers were still coming in. Travel orders still had to be done.  There were some personnel actions to be done and pay problems that needed to be fixed.  There was lot of pay problems when we closed.  People were not getting paid for some reason and I worked with DFAS at Charlestown, SC to help get our people paid.

Well, Kathy decided that she did not want the job.  I think she thought it would be too boring and there would not be enough for her to do, she always liked keeping busy and solving problems.  She told Col Weekly and Bob Hudson she was not interested in staying.  They had to have a person that was familiar with all that had to be done. I was the only person left in the personnel office that wanted/needed to stay.  There was a list and the commander was the selecting official.  It was the same thing for Ken’s job and Phil’s job.

The first Monday after closure I brought in a loaf of Amish Friendship Bread for us, the Site Management Team and Col Weekly.  On my last day I will bring another loaf only I won’t have any JPG friends to share it with and that will be sad.