158 Dahlgren 



biggest expansion in professional personnel took place when Johnny Chase was 

 Commander. He gave me carte blanche. Steve Anastasion* also saw what 

 needed to be done, but he more nearly wanted to do it himself, but that's 

 alright. Well, 1 would say they were the two most outstanding ones. 



What were your feelings in the 1960's concerning civilians being housed on the Station? 

 That makes sense. It still does. 



To have them housed on the Station? 



The experience I had was that employees who live on the Station somehow 

 get much more interested in their work. I'm talking more of professionals. I ex- 

 pect a professional to believe in his job and believe in what he's doing and want 

 to do it. It's a convenience to live on the Station when you're working on a prob- 

 lem, a challenging problem, if you want to come back after dinner. In those 

 years, we were getting a tremendous amount of effort the government never 

 paid for just because the men were interested. I don't know whether it led to 

 happy homes or not. Maybe it didn't. During some of those years in the I960's 

 and the early 1970's, you could go to those labs after dinner and be astonished 

 at how many people were working there that never put in for overtime. Most of 

 the professionals were doing what they really wanted to do, and we were grad- 

 ually getting rid of those who were just taking a salary. You don't go very far in 

 an organization, especially in an R&D organization, when you have too many 

 people like that. They put in their 40 hours. They know what the minimum is. 

 They study the regulations to make sure what the minimum is going to be, just 

 sweating it out until retirement time. We encouraged a lot of early retirements 

 to get them out. We probably had less than our fair share at Dahlgren. 



What did you see happening at the Laboratory after the Civil Rights Bill was passed in 

 1964? What impact did this have on the environment at Dahlgren? 



Practically none because we had started all this long before. I was real lucky in 

 that Mike Sellars, the Commander that hired me, and one of his predecessors 

 had pointed out to the residents of this county that the growth of Dahlgren is 

 beneficial and that the Station couldn't grow if it couldn't receive anybody, 

 black or white, in the local restaurants, in the motels — they had to be integrated. 

 This was long before the civil rights business came. When I arrived, anybody of 

 any race or color could go to any place here, at any restaurant, any motel, and it 

 wasn't any problem. What we did was to use every part of the civil rights 

 movement that was favorable to build up the personnel and morale among the 



*Captain Steven N. Anastasion was Commanding Officer at Dahlgren from July 1969 until 

 January 1972. 



