Interview of Mike Moore by Ruth Turner, History Professor, Hanover College (1995)

Subject: Experiences at Jefferson Proving Ground.

Ruth Turner:  Before we start could you give me your full name and when you first came to Southern Indiana?

Mike Moore: Michael S. Moore, I was working in New Mexico. Actually, I was on unemployment. Nancy Thurston gave me a call in March of 1974, and  asked me if I was still interested in working for the government. I was working for the Grumman Aerospace Corporation then. I said yep. At that time, Jim Selig was in charge of Data Reduction at JPG and they were hiring mathematicians for a slot that had been open for 9 months. I don’t know why. I guess there was a hiring freeze or something like that, so I said sure.

Ruth Turner: You are a Mathematician?

Mike Moore:  uh Huh.  I was on a contract for Grumman Aerospace at Holloman Air force Base, New Mexico and it had completed and we stayed in New Mexico, like I say I was on unemployment. I had been on unemployment for a couple of months, I guess. I was thinking about staying there in New Mexico. I had honestly never heard of Indiana or Jefferson Proving Ground, So I said sure. It was a GS 9 job, Mathematician. It was paying more than I was making there at Grumman, so it sounded like a good thing. 

I had been trying to get on with the Federal Government for three or four years, because the aerospace business was dying at that time, there were Phd’s driving taxi cabs at that time.  Like I say every year the Office of Personnel would send me a postcard and if I was interested in working for the government, I would check it off and mail it back in.  So after about three years, Nancy Thurston called from the JPG Personnell office called up, I forgot exactly how she said it, something about throwing your hat in the ring, something like that.  I said sure. They did not even interview me.  Jim Selig might have called me, but they did not even have a resume or anything.

Ruth Turner:  His position was Chief of Data Reduction?

Mike Moore: Yes, He was a Mathematician himself. The Data Reduction Branch did a lot of mathematical things on trajectories. As the projectile leaves the muzzle of the weapon it takes on like the same as an airplane or a jet engine, it is a trajectory and you have drag, going against the nose and you have gravity on it and if you know all that stuff you can calculate where it is going to hit on the ground.  That is why you have to be a Mathematician so you can understand all that stuff. An Engineer or Physicist would have been alright too, but then you had to be a programmer too and I had a lot of programming background.

Ruth Turner:  Computer Programming?

Mike Moore: Yes

Ruth Turner:  This was in 74?  So they were doing Computer in 74.

Mike Moore: Oh in the 60’s  the government had big IBM computers and stuff. It was just that we had to punch in every thing in on cards.  We did not have any monitors or terminals, you just wrote your program out on these blank coding forms that had numbers from one through eighty on them. You wrote your code down and then it was somebody’s Job to Key Punch these cards. You would submit your job in a basket to somebody in the computer center. In two or three days they would come back with a run. If you had mistakes in it you would have to correct them, so it took months to write programs in those days.

Ruth Turner:  But the main frame was on Post?

Mike Moore:  uhhuh (yes)

Ruth Turner:  So you came in 74 and what title did you begin with?

Mike Moore:  GS-9 Mathematician. Like I say that was working for Jim Selig.

Ruth Turner: Was that the position that you had throughout your career then?

Mike Moore: For most of the time.  I got into supervisory ranks about 15 years later.

Ruth Turner:  In the same division or the same area?

Mike Moore: Well, I changed over.  Lets see, about 1979 I got to be a GS-11 Mathematician working for the same person.  About 1988 Dale Padgett was the person who used to schedule all the test firings and he retired.  I applied for his job and I got that. I was not a grade raise or anything it just got out of the Mathematician’s job.

Ruth Turner: Oh how interesting and what year was this?

Mike Moore: Some where around 1989 or so.

Ruth Turner: And what title did you have then?

Mike Moore:  Something about Ammunition Specialist, Administrative , but any way what we had to do is they had a daily scheduling meeting and all the supervisors from all the branches would come in the morning about 10:00 and you plan all the guns you were going to fire for the next day.  On Friday you would plan what you were going to do on Monday.  The chief of the Artillery Division would state, (Fielding Jones), "I only have enough people on hand to fire 4 guns".

Well so that was a given, we are only going to fire 4 tests Monday.  Then a chief named Arbuckle would say, “well we got a shipment of M-735 ammunition and Friday, my folks”, (the ammunition would come in to JPG in parts, so Arbuckle’s folks would have to put it together), so my folks will have 20 rounds ready to fire on Monday in M-735.  So that would take of one gun crew. Then he would say, ‘we have some M-60 mortars, that would take care of another gun crew. Well lets see.  We have some Rocket assisted 155mm”. We would just go on until we fill those 4 gun crews up.

Then Mike Everidge was our safety officer who would be there to make sure that we were going to aim them and shoot in the correct fields.  He would make sure that we would not have any hazardous conditions.
 

The Data Collection folks, Arnold Tilley was the person who would be in charge of the Radar that would trace the projectile out to where it hit on the ground or the cameras. They would set cameras up under the muzzle to take pictures of the projectile as it came out of the muzzle. Arnold would say, “I could cover three of those guns, but I can not cover the fourth.” Then we would say we would shoot something on the fourth gun that does not require cameras or anything like that. So we had to sit down everyday and plan all that out.

You would have to be planning out 35 or 40 people’s work every day. You would just give and take with everybody and my job was to get all these people together and get all these jobs scheduled and publish a firing schedule for the next day. So we would get this all typed up. Then we would make a hundred copies and they would go throughout the whole proving ground, so everybody knew what was going to be fired the next day.

Ruth Turner: How did you like doing this kind of work as compared to your mathematical work?

Mike Moore: Uh. It was uh different. The reason that I wanted to get out of my math job is that I thought I was going to go blind for awhile.  We would sit and read nothing but Radar traces and one mortar program, 81mm Mortar, they would take a photograph of it as it leaves the mortar and you could tell if it was bent or not.  Let me see what was that, Oh I remember, I was measuring the fins to see if they were coming out of the tube straight or if they were cockeyed, or if the projectile was tumbling or not. 

I was in a dark room and I was staring at this film for six months, straight eight hours a day and I got to think my vision was going bad.  I said,  “I don’t want to spend another ten or twelve years doing this” and everything was visual, I mean if it was a radar trace you had to get a ruler out and you had magnifying glasses, we had these magnifying glasses that were attached to your table.  They had lights inside around your magnifying glass.

You would go down and count the number of scan lines on the radar trace.  You could multiply them be a factor and then that would tell you the muzzle velocity of the projectile.  After ten years of doing that I wanted to get into something that my eyeballs were not going to lose their vision.

These folks were pretty loud and sometimes these discussions would get pretty angry. I would hear "Why, I not going to have enough people to fire that".  I’m not going to do this. So you had to mediate between them.  So I traded one kind of headache, visual, for another kind of headache trying to appeal to everybody. I actually was kicked off that job. You can not really fire a civil servant, but I lasted about a year.

We got Major Arthur Alphin in from West Point. He wanted somebody to kick ass to force the guys to schedule what he wanted them to do.  They way we worked at JPG was bottom up. The employees on the lower level decided what we were going to do in effect by what we had on hand you know. 

There would be a little low level supervisor saying well if I don’t have these people coming in, If I don’t have these talents on any certain day I can’t do this job. 

We had laid off and laid off until we only had about one person that was good in any field so if that person was off, then that type of work just did not get done.   Major Alphin wanted top driven down.  He wanted me to schedule certain type of rounds to be fired and then force these guys to do that work and so he pretty much replaced me, actually I ended up getting a promotion.  He sent me over to a GS-11 Operations Research Analyst.  Then by the next year, Bruce Cantwell promoted me into a twelve. 

They replaced me with Mike Warren . Well before that, they got Eric Schrader in for a few months and then he left to go to Washington DC.  Then they got Mike Warren in, but they thought he was more aggressive and would kick ass harder than I was. I was a consensus person. They wanted a military type, “Your going do this on a certain day and we’re going do that on a certain day type of guy”. Since I was not involved with that much anymore and I had enough stuff to worry about, I don’t know how that worked out really.

Ruth Turner:  Interesting story!  In your research analyst job how did you do?

Mike Moore:  We were trying to modernize JPG. I created the survey.  We had this Lt. Colonel Watson, I can not remember his first name he was a real nervous type of guy.  He always wanted to make sure that he was not getting into any kind of trouble. He would kind of stay in his office and not really get involved in a lot of the work. I created a survey with a lot of questions to give to the Ammo supply people and the field artillery people on just what did they think it would take to modernize the place.  It had been built in 1941, all the buildings were the same, all the procedures were the same, all the equipment was the same.  We had 200 pound shells that it would take four people two on each side of this crate, it was a metal crate that the shell would fit in, with four handles. So four men in their fifties, our age group out there was pretty high, there were no young people. Anyway it was fifty five year old men out there lifting this 200 pound shell into the back of a howitzer and then they would pull a lanyard or push a button and it would fire. 

The army was coming out with these vehicles that would resupply ammunition to the front.  They were tracked vehicles that had conveyor belts where you could bring the shells out and stuff like that.  We were working on a way to modernize the firing line so that we could use conveyors. 

I had looked into  purchasing this piece of equipment that they used in timbers and logging where they would take a huge timber lying on the ground.  You would have this machine with these wheels on the side (wide axle) and you would just drive this timber tractor over the timber, attach it to the vehicle and then drive the timber where ever they wanted to  saw it up. I was thinking that we could use this for cannon tubes. Rather than just throwing it in the back of a truck and using a winch to change gun tubes.

Sometimes you used a worn out tube, a mid wear tube and a new tube all on the same test. The ammunition had to work in all tubes. In war time you would wear your gun tube completely out and still you had to keep on firing. In one day of firing you might change three tubes in one gun. We would just stick them in the back of a truck and then winch them in and winch them out.
 

I was going out and looking for these big timber haulers.  I don’t even remember what they called them.  I thought they could straddle this gun tube and drive it from the warehouse to the firing line and just drive it up and just slide it into the weapon.  I was looking into all kinds of conveyer systems and all kinds of these things like that.

Ruth Turner: What year did you start doing this kind of work?

Mike Moore: Well we stopped doing any planning for modernization in December 1988.  That is when we got the notice that we were going to close. The Modernization program was some where from 84 to 88.

Ruth Turner: The idea of Modernization is this the bottom up that you felt you were doing 1940’s technology and you were the initiator of this kind of thinking for?

Mike Moore: Well, I think I was given the job of studying the thing.  Somebody else had the idea.  Arnold Tilley was always pretty forward in his thinking out there on improving ways. Like I say, LtCol. Watson and when Major Alphin got there he was pretty convinced that we were backwards.  Part of his work was thinking of ways to modernize the place.  His ideas were not always practical at the proving Ground, because he wanted to do it like you were in the field artillery combat situation and it really was not conducive to testing. You have to be scientific about this testing. You can not just do it—One of his ideas was to go to Fort Knox and bring in these ex sergeants and gunnery folks that used to drive tanks and stuff like that.  We hired a few folks like that, but they weren’t really technical types , they could shoot the weapon, but they really did not understand the dynamics (testing and measuring ) of the shell going out.  I would say that the fact that those folks coming in from the outside looking in we were pretty containerized.  It was hard for new ideas to come in to JPG because most of the folks said, “ this is the way we have been doing it and there is no other way”.  That’s it.

Ruth Turner: in 88 when you ceased future thinking did your job change in 88. 

Pause:

Mike Moore:  It really did change because that’s when we went into fighting to save the Proving Ground.

Ruth Turner:  and that was part of your job?

Mike Moore: No it really was not. (not officially)

Ruth Turner: I must have misunderstood.

Mike Moore:  All that stuff that we did to save the proving ground was not looked on favorably by the Army.  It was not an Army sponsored thing.  It was kind of our commander kinda just did not see what we were doing.  He had to follow orders, even if his heart wanted the place to stay open, he had to close it.  He let us go ahead and let us do all the stuff like make trips to Washington to brief Lee Hamilton, Senator Coates was really big in those days, Morris Wooden was a real big fighter for keeping JPG open. 

     (Note the employees that went to Washington used their vacation time and paid their own expenses-i.e all the meetings and efforts to stay open were on the employees own time.)
 

     Note: When Base Closure was announced nationwide, reporters from all the news media descended upon JPG.  Gary Stegner was the official JPG Public Affairs Officer. On the times when multiple news media teams were on the post simultaneously, Gary would ask me to take reporters on tour.  These accounts would get into the media and then folks started asking to interview me.  Congress established an Environmental Panel to study the environmental problems associated with Base Closure.  If a media person wanted a story on pollution, the panel would point them in the direction of JPG.  They used JPG for an example of the site of the largest pollution of the land in the United States. Sometimes I officially represented the Army and sometimes I represented the employees.  It all blended in together.  Mike Moore 2007)

further Interview:
Ruth Turner: Morris Wooden, He was Mayor of Madison?

Mike Moore: Yes.  The Jefferson County Realtors gave us $10,000 dollars.

Ruth Turner:  Oh! How interesting!

Mike Moore:  The JPG Survival Committee consisted of Robert Hudson and Ken Knouf as Co-Chairmen.  Then of course the Union was a big player, because it represented quite a few employees and stuff like that.

Ruth Turner: What Union was that?

Mike Moore:  The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).  The president.  Russel Moratara was the first President that I dealt with.  We went to Washington one time and then other Presidents came along.  I can’t remember his name but they called him Radio Bob.  He was the next President, because Russel quit.  Right in the middle of the beginning of the battle Russell quit and began selling cars in Milan.  He was a very calm smooth person.  They next person was “Radio Bob”.  We did a lot of informational picketing.  We went to Indianapolis and the State Capitol and we walked around the Capitol with signs saying It will cost five billion dollars to clean up Jefferson Proving Ground.  Unexploded Ordnance all over the Place.  All that stuff was not looked on with favor with the Army.  In fact I was glad to get out of there. When I went to work for the Air Force I said I am going to be low key.  I am not going to do anything  to go on Television.  I am not going to worry about what I am going to have to say.  It is going to be a total divorcement from all my activities at JPG. 

Ruth Turner:  How long did you work on this at JPG, Or when did you leave?

Mike Moore:  I left in February of 1994.  About a year before it officially closed.  Lee Hamilton along with Senator Coates got $500,000 down to educate us, so that we could go out for other jobs. Ivy Tech came in there and brought their mobile van and so we were in there taking computer classes.

Ruth Turner: Did you do this?

Mike Moore:  Yes.  During the work day.  I’ve spent three hours in that trailer learning how to do spread sheets.  I think it was something like Excel.  Lotus was what it was.  Word Perfect, the DOS, that was before al the windows stuff.  The Army released us so that we could go on what they called a priority placement list.  All our names went out all over the United States.  I knew that I was not going to move, so I put a 200 mile limit on my placement list search and I got one search from Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.  Russell Shorten, who was running our Personnel office came down and he said, I don’t think You are qualified to do that.  Now you could not refuse the job or you would go out of the computer system. You had one choice and that was it. He said if write a letter to Scott, see you had 90 days to become proficient in the job.

We read this god awful job description and I did not want to go to Scott anyway. I investigated a little bit.  It is just outside St. Louis, man that was terrible, I did not want any part of that. I did not tell Russell that I did not want any part of that, because that meant that I would be kicked out of the computer system.  (I could not refuse to go.)He just did not think that I could do that job, now I don’t know why he didn’t think so.  He wrote them a letter saying he did not think I was qualified and then that let my name stay in the system.

The odd thing was, I got this job offer at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, practically the same thing. Russell was still not convinced that I could do that job. So he called the person at Wright Patt., told them about all the classes that I was taking at IVY TECH, so we copied off all my transcripts and I sent them over there.  They guy said yeah, I think you will do alright over here.  I went on over to Wright Patt.

Ruth Turner:  That is about 200 miles from here.

Mike Moore:  No it is just at 120 miles from Madison. I could have gone to Fort Knox, or the Corps of Engineers in Louisville, or Indianapolis.  Everything is closing in Indianapolis.  There was not much hope of staying in Indiana.

Ruth Turner: So I am not quite clear about what you did once you knew the closing was coming.

Mike Moore:  As I said the Real Estate Folks gave us $10,000 so that is when we became lobbyists.

Ruth Turner: Yes, I am very interested in that part of the story, but for your employment purposes what did you do.

Mike Moore:  Well that is what we did for our employment. 

It wasn’t recognized by the Army, but that is what we did.  I wrote articles, We were inundated by press from newspapers, I was on television, I could go up to any store in town, and start to write a check and they would already know my name. 

Ruth Turner:  Did you find that all your training at IVY TECH help you in your work at Wright Patt.

Mike Moore:  yes, because at JPG we weren’t really on top of the line at JPG as far as computers go.  We had a big main frame computer and we had graduated from punched cards into a terminal that you could type it in, but we did not have a network.  We did not have e-mail.  In fact if someone sent an e-mail to me at JPG, I would have to walk down to the Computer Center  and pick up a printed copy of my e-mail then walk back up to headquarters building.  So we weren’t what I call computer literate as opposed to what the rest of the world thought.  Wright Patterson was the most technologically advanced governmental agency in the nation, I think.  I mean I went from people working like they did in the Fifties to people working like they would in the future.  It was kind of a culture schock.  The courses that I took at IVY TECH at least let me walk in equipped to work in a modern technical office environment.

Ruth Turner:  How interesting!  You have so many perspectives, I am courious about the training that you received for each of the positions that you held.  I understand that you had the Mathematical background, but

Mike Moore:  The way that I got shifted over in to the scheduling of firing missions and being placed into the Operations Research analyst position is I also went down to Louisville and got an MBA.  I worked on my MBA from 74 until 78.  I took two courses per semester.  I would drive down there. And they had it to where I could go Saturday from 8 to 12 and pick up 6 hours.  My bosses would let me rearrange my schedule where I could come in at 6:00am and leave at 2:00pm.

Ruth Turner:   You began a new Job and an Academic program in 74. Wow a busy person!

Mike Moore:  Yes, I had the GI Bill, I was stationed in the Army, I was in the Army three years, I had the GI Bill sitting there, so it did not cost me anything except the travel back and forth. It was pretty gruelling.  It was tough on my family. My wife Ann had to take care of our kids.  I did not get to see them very often, I did not see any of the Dadgum Regattas, because I was studying and she would take them down to watch that, but it paid off in letting me shift from being a mathematician over into administrative stuff.  It has been a great help to me at Wright Patt.  They recognize a Master’s Degree more than JPG did.  At JPG they did not recognize the Master’s degree in itself, just the course work that I was in.  They recognized that I was capable in doing that kind of work, but they didn’t really recognize, Like some companies would give their employees a bonus when they got a Master’s degree, well we did not get that in the government.  As soon as I walked over to Wright Patt, then a Master’s degree meant a lot.  That was respected and stuff like that.

Ruth Turner:  So when you came with your mathematical background, What kind of training did you receive on a projectile analysis?

Mike Moore:  Well you just get on the Job Training.  I knew all the Math formulas, so you just get on the job training.  Now I didn’t know a lot about Statistics.  The way they accept amunition is they take a random sample of 10 out of 300,000 rounds.  There are inspectors in the plants and by some random plan they go pick out a shell and they send that to JPG for test.  I had to go to Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois to a school called AMETA.  The Army Management Engineering Training Activity.  It was a classroom where they taught courses for the Army.  They taught me basic statistics, statistical Inference, where you take statistical data and you infer things to it.  And then you can determine populations.  You say okay these ten rounds represent 300,000 rounds.  How many failures can you take out of that ten sample rounds, before you reject the ammunition.

 

One of the pressure points out there is that the ammunition manufactures were always hiring these EX Generals, who would call you up and say, “I know you all are firing lot so and so last week.  You failed that lot.  “Hey what the Hell you guys doing?”  Don’t you know—What math formulas did you use. “Don’t you guys know what the hell you are doing down there.  So we took a lot of flack like that.  It was probably the wrong thing for them to do, because it just set you in the mode that you weren’t going to change you mind at all. 

Contractors were always trying to get you to shade this or they would argue with you, because they sent a representative out to each firing.  If you were testing fuzes, Bulova would have a man standing right there watching you test.  Ever single shell that Bulova made they would have a representative watch it.  If you rejected that lot, he would complain and he would say that you had done something wrong and stuff like that.  By the time I spent twenty years here, I pretty much hated any contractor in the abstract.  ( Some of the local Madison folks that were contractors were nice, but you still had to be careful.  Their duty was to the Company, not the government). 

I had been a contractor for Grumman Aerospace for five years before I went to work for the government so that is why I could see both sides I guess.  When I went to Wright Patt.  The Air force treats contractors like part of a team.  They hire them to do work for the government.  At JPG we treated them like the enemy.  The Air Force could not get along with out them.  I had a cultural thing to contend with.  I had to work side by side with contractors that I really enjoyed and liked, but it took me awhile to get over that feeling that they were blood suckers, you know, etc. 

Ruth Turner: So when you had your MBA and you went into supervision, this is the real work of the proving ground did you receive training?

Mike Moore:  Well yeah!  When you become a supervisor in the government, you have to go to school on supervision.  I think they call it leadership.  There used to be a school down in Memphis Tennesse that would teach leadership to supervisors.  I went down there for, I can’t remember for one or two weeks.  Thats when I became a fan of Elvis.  I went to see Graceland and I got to eat Barbeque ribs all that kind of stuff.  It must have been two weeks and I went to Graceland on the weekend in between.  But I did not know how a supervisor rated people.  You know a supervisor every year has to rate his employee’s performance.  I did not know how to do that.  I did not know how to counsel your employees.  I was unfamiliar with the rules on what you are supposed to do when your employees don’t get along, or if they don’t get their job done and that kind of stuff, Yeah, I took that class even though I had a little of that in MBA training.

 

Ruth Turner: Were there people on Post that you could turn to for advice on a particular problem, other supervisors? 

Mike Moore:  I think I went to every supervisor for advice.  When I was the Operations Research Analyst, I would go and talk to Fielden Jones about artillery weapons. Usually, he would say that our ideas were foolish and not worthy, but I went and asked him anyway.  If it was something different than what he had been doing for twenty five years then it was not worth doing. So I would listen to that, but I was under orders to plan for modernization the place anyway, even though I would listen to him.  Oh another thing too.

 They had these huge log books where every round that was fired in what tube on what date it was fired.  Oh gosh His name was Wilbur Smith, in Artillery Repair.  He would write these things down.  I would say, why don’t we computerize  these things.  Why in the world do you  still keep writing these things in these huge books and spend all this time.  After I got through listening to him, I felt we could go ahead and computerize this, but we had better keep those books too. In those days a computer would crash on you a lot more that they do now. 

A few of the mistakes we made in modernization were to stop doing the old way, go to the computer and then when it crashed or something you were just totally dead. It is like when the computer in Kroger’s down, nobody knows how to sell you anything. In some ways he was always right, he could always go back to his books.

Ruth Turner:  where do you think those are today?

Mike Moore: I don’t know.  They were to big and to heavy for anyone to want to carry them home. They could always go back.  We had firing records all the way back to the Fifties we had to keep those on file, because foreign countries were still using weapons and ammunition that we had discarded thirty years ago.  They kept wanting to get rid of those firing records.  Bob Hudson was one person who just would not give away the firing records, but one colonel came in and He was going to put them all on microfilm, so he hired a couple of kids from school during one summer and they just set there and micro-filmed the tar out of that stuff.  We pulled those things out later trying to find data and you couldn’t read half of them.  It was pretty horrible.  You know if they had gotten somebody that was reliable and did a quality control it might have been okay.

Ruth Turner:  Have you been following Nicholson Baker, who is arguing against libraries going virtual because  he wants to hang on to the actual newspapers.

Mike Moore: No I have not been following that, but I am the only guy at work (Wright Patt) that prints out my e-mail and then reads it.  I don’t read that damn stuff from the screen.  I don’t have a sympathetic ear to somebody that wants to computerize their library, but one thing I get a head ache reading .  I could not even think about reading a book off the screen. There is no way they could focus it where I would be comfortable. Now one thing I should do is get computer glasses. You can tell a guy is a fool if the first thing he says, “when we get new equipment, we can throw all this stuff a way.  That guy is a fool right there.

Ruth Turner:  It seems to be in part you participate in this culture that you describe to me as “We have always done it this way and this is the way to do it.”

Mike Moore:  Gosh yes and I did not like that either.

Ruth Turner:  That was the first time somebody described it that way, but it makes perfect sense to me that this would be the case.

Mike Moore: Some one would say that everyday at the proving ground. We were a real insulated society where Grampa, Son, Grandson, wife, Husband ,Cousin all worked out there.  I have never been in a place like that.  Occasionally they would hire guys like me from the outside.  If you had to have a special degree or something. 

Ruth Turner:  I understand what you are saying perfectly, but are there other ways to describe the work environment.

Mike Moore:  I want to balance this with everybody out there, I love them to death and everything like that.  I don’t want to sound anyway that I am deprecating them  in anyway, but I am from the outside and I can see it in a different light than people that grew up here.  We weren’t too respected by the East Coast folks.  Our headquarters was the Aberdeen Proving Ground and those folks were used to doing things East Coast style.  They ran at more rapid pace than we did out here. We didn’t give them the respect that they thought they deserved when they came out here.
 

Ruth Turner:  Were these civilians?

Mike Moore:  Yeah. I think partly that was the reason that we were closed. We did not cooperate with them unless we just had to.  An odd thing was that we had orders not to computerize.  We were not supposed to put computers in, because we were a Test and Evaluation outfit, not a research out fit.  If you are not a R&D outfit it makes a big difference in funding. The Army felt that only the research facilities needed computers, not just the testers.  Our colonel that did put a computer out there had to call it other things.  There was a lot of book work in calling things like a controlling system for a computer.  He would order an IBM 366 controlling activating device which was a computer.  In the 60’s and 70’s that was the only way we could get modernized is by getting our computers by calling them test equipment and stuff like that.  It was a real rigid thing.  It was almost like the cards were stacked against us to ever modernize in the first place.

Ruth Turner:  This was before the 88 time frame.

Mike Moore:    Yeah back in the 70’s early 80’s.     End of Tape 1

 Tape Two

Mike Moore: Each person thought their job was important, because they were saving some ones life. 

Ruth Turner:  I have read historically about how proving grounds have not always existed. What a difference it made when Proving grounds tested Ammunition.  A number of soldiers would die from what they referred to as “Friendly fire”.

Mike Moore: Our test crews were behind concrete bunkers.  There would be a little hole bored through the concrete with a rope and they would pull that rope to fire the weapon.  And they had roofs that were constructed where the bombs would roll off if they went up and landed, so we were really safety conscious for our employees.  You can imagine what it would be like to just stand by the gun unprotected.  You have to depend on the shell being perfectly accurate and safe. 

I did not really appreciate the retired generals calling up to complain about rejected lots.  One time I had to copy the math formulas out of a text book to mail to the contractor, because, I had written a program using these math formulas to reduce the data.  They went through the formulas to see if our models were correct.

I don’t know if you are interested in this. It is when the last round was fired. Bob Congleton was the Test Director.  George Miller came out there.  Of course he had been affiliated with JPG since World War II.

Ruth Turner:  Oh!  I did not know that.

Mike Moore: Oh yeah, he worked out here as a observer.  Up in the Bomb field, a plane would come over and drop a bomb and he would be recording it.  Before the war.  If you worked for the Proving ground, you could not be drafted.  George tried for a couple of years to get in the service and finally they let him go. He joined the Navy.  He was an officer in the Navy. He served down in New Guinea.  I corresponded with George and he would print stories about the Proving Ground in the paper.  He was an invited guest on the last day of the firing.  So we went out and had this picture taken.  Then Bob died just a few years ago.  He was so young.

Ruth Turner:  Who was the third guy?

Mike Moore: That is me.  I took a picture just before that.  It was unbelievable.  I actually got a picture of the shell.  There is trick to doing that.  What you do is you put your camera centered on the muzzle of the gun, then you press the shutter down half way.  The concussion of the shot forces you to push down on the shutter and you take the picture. The shell was going pretty slow for it was a small charge in the breech. That was September 30^th 1994.