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80, and not ready to retire Hanford, Wash., engineer uses old-style tools to invent innovative devices to handle radioactive wastes safely By JOHN STANG The Associated Press RICHLAND, Wash. � Hanford engineer Dick Brown�s 21st-century office looks like it belongs in the 1940s. Walls, shelves and desktops are totally plastered with schematic drawings. A small computer terminal and a small video player are semi-hidden in the paper clutter � the only items in the office that would have looked out of place in Hanford�s World War II days. You�d have to look twice, maybe three times, around the room before you�d spot them. Neither looks like it is used much. They aren�t. Brown works faster without a computer. But he concedes he uses a pocket calculator regularly. Another schematic drawing is unrolled on an old drafting table. There�s no chair because the 80-year-old Brown likes to stand when he thinks, calculates and draws. If Brown isn�t Hanford�s oldest full-time employee, he�s close to it. Brown works full time and beyond at Hanford�s massive 324 Building � a collection of highly contaminated labs and huge hot cells that have to be cleaned out. A hot cell is a chamber where workers stand on the outside and use remote-control arms to handle radioactive materials inside the cell. Brown�s handiwork can be found in Building 324�s ground floor � a small museum of prototypes stored in huge test chambers and the real things in the hot cells. These are indescribable metal objects and gizmos. All custom-made. All designed to help robotic arms remove highly radioactive equipment, junk and dust from the almost inaccessible nooks and crannies of Building 324�s contaminated hot cells. Brown does this work because retirement is boring, he has no interest in golf or bowling, and his thin but solid body just can�t play basketball anymore. "I just enjoy doing the job and working with different people," Brown said. He has retired three times. The last time for five years. That ended in 1989. Brown then joined a Westinghouse Hanford Co. retirees work program, limited to 1,000 hours a year. That translates to working approximately 20-hour weeks. After a couple of years, he joined Battelle, ratcheting up to full-time work before Hanford�s constant corporate musical chairs sent him to B&W Hanford, then to Fluor Hanford. Now, he works on the 324 Building�s B Cell � a three-story-tall chamber that was filled with vast amounts of highly radioactive junk and dirt. A dozen years ago, the cell � located 1� miles from Richland � was so radioactive a person in street clothes could walk into it and receive a fatal dose in less than two seconds. Now, most of the debris has been removed, and B Cell�s radioactivity is a fraction of what it used to be. Right now, Brown is designing equipment to remove pipes beneath the floor of the airlock to B Cell. He just likes designing, building and testing machines for industrial tasks � the mental challenge of it. Brown loves huddling with millwrights, welders, machinists, electricians and engineers to solve problems. To tweak a gizmo that�s not quite perfect. To create a piece of equipment that functions where a human cannot. Brown grew up in Swayzee, a small Indiana farm town. Fascinations with airplanes and mechanical engineering sent the 18-year-old Brown on a Greyhound bus to Glendale, Calif., in 1939 when he enrolled in the Aero Industrial Technical Institute. It was a technical college run by the aircraft industry, which Brown liked because it was heavy on engineering and extremely light on humanities. There, Brown earned a technical bachelor�s degree in aeronautical engineering. He played guard on the school�s basketball team, helping it win the Southern Pacific American Athletic Union championship. Between basketball and the heavy homework load, Brown learned to live on four hours of sleep a night. Today, he still doesn�t need much sleep. Brown worked four months in Burbank, Calif., making equipment to assemble B-17 bombers when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps. "They said they didn�t know which end was up, and asked me to come back in a couple of weeks," Brown said. But in two weeks, the military would not take anyone from the aircraft industry, wanting them to design and build more and better airplanes. In the aircraft industry, Brown worked his way into mechanical engineering and tool engineering jobs, which defined most of his career. In 1945, he married an Indiana girl, Louise. The couple have a son, a daughter and two grandchildren. Shortly after World War II, he finally managed to enlist in the Air Force � ending up playing basketball for much of his short hitch until the postwar reductions in force sent him back to the civilian world. Since then, Brown worked in the aerospace industry in Michigan, Los Angeles, Seattle and Sacramento, Calif. � mostly with Aerojet General Corp. � until a 1965 to 1971 stint at Jackass Flats, Nev. There, he first worked with radioactive material, as he designed remote handling equipment for hot cells. He came to Hanford in 1971 to help design work on the Fast Flux Test Facility. In 1976, he took early retirement from Aerojet and joined Westinghouse to work more on FFTF, retiring again in 1981. He did free-lance engineering work in Kansas until he retired again in 1984. That lasted until 1989. "I rocked in that rocking chair and tried it for five years, and I got tired of it," he said. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.