Robin Ericson and Clayton Nichols

[00:04] ROBIN ERICSON: My name is Robin Ericson and I'm 74 years old, and the date is April 19, 2022. I'm in a storyCorps virtual recording booth, and I'm here with my brother in law, Clayton Nichols.

[00:22] CLAYTON NICHOLS: My name is Clayton Nichols. I am 83 years old. The date is April 19, 2022, and I'm at my home in Sandpoint, Idaho, and I'm here with my brother in law, Robin

[00:41] ROBIN ERICSON: And I'm physically in Fairfax, Virginia. So this is nice, a nice opportunity, Clayton to get to ask you these questions and get it on the record. And so let's just start out. And how did you become an officer in the army?

[00:58] CLAYTON NICHOLS: In the running up to the warmer cold war in the 1950s, it became obvious that the draft was looming for those of us who weren't prepared. So I chose the Army ROTC route at the University of Oklahoma, secured a scholarship to do that, and enjoyed four years of the ROTC program, then another year of engineering before I received my commission. The commission was a surprise, however, because I ended up in signed to air defense artillery instead of field artillery, which the vast majority of Oklahoma graduates attended, right down the road at Fort Sill. And I was going to go to faraway Fort Bliss, Texas, but that's how I got my commission.

[01:57] ROBIN ERICSON: Thank you. And what was it like to go through ROTC when you were at the University of Oklahoma?

[02:10] CLAYTON NICHOLS: It was not a bother. You had a long walk to the drill field every week. But I enjoy history. I'm a history buff, and I especially liked military history. So it was like getting paid to do something that I enjoyed doing and don't remember an unfortunate moment during the four years of ROTC classes.

[02:37] ROBIN ERICSON: So then in the. I didn't go through r two c, but I guess you have to go to summer camp or something like that to learn the ropes.

[02:48] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Ultimately, we had the basic officers training at the end of the four years, but because I was in air defense rather than field artillery, instead of going 50 or 60 miles down the road, got to go to Fort Hood, Texas, and the desert country there with the rattlesnakes, and I liked the desert, so that was all right, too. And that's where I did my basic training.

[03:20] ROBIN ERICSON: Oh, yeah. So, for an Oklahoma boy, you seem to spend a lot of time in Texas. What did you do at Fort Bliss then?

[03:32] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Well, at Fort Bliss, when I came in for the interview to see where I would fit into Fort Bliss, the commanding officer asked me what I like to do, and it's an interview trick I've learned ever since to always ask that question. To begin with. I answered, I like to read and write, ize. I've been writing technical papers since I was 16 with my dad. And so he said, boy, have I got a deal for you. He turned around, opened a space, pulled out a telephone sized book. That was the Fort Bliss basic plan. He opened up a page and he said, read me this and tell me what you think. Well, I'm a speed reader. So about 15 seconds later, I told him, the technical content is great. The English is not so good. And he said, that's exactly the problem we've been struggling with for two years. We've got it refined technically, but not good old plain grammar wise. So he said, your first assignment is to rewrite the Fort Bliss basic plan, which I did in about two months. And in the meantime, a the basic unit there, the 6th Artillery Group, failed their nuclear qualification test for their nuclear warheads, for their Nike Hercules missiles. So as soon as I finished the Fort Bliss basic plan, I got assigned as a second lieutenant to a captain's position in reformatting and restructuring a the six artillery group that provided the air defense for the Fort Bliss area coastline, but also taught basic air Defense Command post operations at the air defense school. So I jumped right into it. And fortunately, I'd known for a year I was going to be assigned to Fort Bliss. So for a full year I studied all the literature on rockets, missiles, air defense tactics, all that sort of thing. So I arrived pretty well primed in the air defense area and began right away teaching Air defense Command post operation at the air defense school.

[06:02] ROBIN ERICSON: And did you do any travel?

[06:05] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yes, we had constant NORAD Air defense exercises where planes would simulate an attack and we would cooperate with the air force at Roswell Air Force Base in the defense of the area. And I was often sent to Roswell to be the liaison officer with the air force in coordinating our joint air defense and Air force fighter defenses. An unusual aspect of that was that they didn't have barracks for visiting officers, so I was always quartered in the nurses quarters at Roswell. That was all right. I behaved myself, and they did, too.

[06:55] ROBIN ERICSON: And they were at that time, they were all female, I guess.

[06:58] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Oh, yes, but no, that was quite a. It taught me a lot about the air force. And, you know, it began my cross cultural education with the other military services later in my career, after the army, I ended up working extensively with the navy and the air force. So that was good training. Yeah, that experience.

[07:26] ROBIN ERICSON: Well, that'll be that. We'll get into that a little bit, I think, in a few minutes. But I think you said that you had. I heard one time that you had left when you left the army. You were in the army reserves?

[07:38] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yes.

[07:38] ROBIN ERICSON: Did you spend, like, three years or four years in the army, and then you went.

[07:43] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I spent two years on active duty and then went into five years of reserves and had the opportunity, the offer, to go regular army, which I would have taken, except my dad was waiting for me to come back to Oklahoma and help him with his company. But I enjoyed the military life well enough that, except for the fact I had another job waiting for me, I think I would have been tempted to have taken the RA commission at the end of those first two years.

[08:17] ROBIN ERICSON: What was. What was your father's business that you worked in?

[08:23] CLAYTON NICHOLS: He was an inventor that's sometimes credited with bringing the rotary drilling business, the oil business, into the modern era. He invented so many of the tools that regulated, automated the drilling, so it was a technical background, and he started teaching me that business when I was ten years old. So by the time I went into air defense, I'd had a pretty extensive career in engineering already.

[08:52] ROBIN ERICSON: Oh, interesting. And then, well, so you were in the reserve. So then you had to do summer, like you were doing 90 days or 30 days or something like that.

[09:03] CLAYTON NICHOLS: It was just a couple of weeks.

[09:05] ROBIN ERICSON: Okay.

[09:07] CLAYTON NICHOLS: And I'm almost embarrassed to tell you what I did in my summer camp.

[09:13] ROBIN ERICSON: Okay, we want to hear.

[09:17] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I was a communications officer in the regular reserve unit. But at summer camp, somehow they found out that I had extensive training as a pitcher, a baseball pitcher. My next door neighbor when I was growing up was a minor league baseball pitcher. And so I spent a lot of my time learning pitching. And when I got to summer camp and I somehow let that slip, I should have kept my mouth shut. I ended up for my years in summer camp being the Fort bliss or the Fort Polk. It was Fort Polk, Louisiana, training. I was the pitcher on the Fort Polk, Louisiana baseball team from my reserve.

[10:03] ROBIN ERICSON: I don't think a lot of veterans can say that.

[10:07] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Well, maybe they shouldn't.

[10:11] ROBIN ERICSON: Well, that's really interesting. And then let's see you. And then how long did you stay with your father's business? Then you went on to school, right?

[10:22] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yeah, I went. I came out of the army, reported into him, traded my army bosses for my dad, and nine months. For nine months, I climbed oral wells, did normal engineering sort of stuff in the oil business. And then he had an offer to buy out his company, a very good offer, and retire on the condition that everybody in the business and family get out of it. So he apologized to me, asked me to sell the company. I did. Then I went back to Oklahoma University for graduate work and ended up there for quite a few years, long enough that I actually ended up being on faculty there as a visiting assistant professor. But it was in geothermal geology, volcanology, renewable energy. And I had worked for the atomic Energy Commission as a consultant in the meantime, because they were getting out of the nuclear bomb business and into other energy business. So I worked for them as a consultant, and when they took over the Department of Energy role, they hired me to organize their renewable energy activities. So I got to organize the geothermal program, electric vehicle programs, battery programs, things of that. In the initial transition from the AEC to IRTA, that was a fun three years in Washington doing that.

[12:09] ROBIN ERICSON: So what kind of timeframe are we talking about? It sounds like you were kind of ahead in the game of alternative energy kind of thing.

[12:17] CLAYTON NICHOLS: It was 1975, and it was during a gasoline crisis, very similar to high priced gasoline today. So it wasn't just geothermal energy, which was my expertise. I had done my dissertation on volcanoes in Mexico and volcanoes as a source of alternative energy, but the work in IRTA, the energy research and Development Administration, focused heavily on the whole suite of renewable energies and alternative energies. And so I got to run the first electric vehicle programs and battery research and things of that sort way back in 1975.

[13:03] ROBIN ERICSON: So wait a minute. So volcanology study in Mexico. So did you, like, literally go to, to Mexico, or could you do this kind of thing by satellite?

[13:16] CLAYTON NICHOLS: That was probably one of the most enjoyable episodes of my life, was the remote field work, living with the native Mexicans in their villages, doing field work on mexican volcanoes. And ultimately the government gave me a helicopter. The mexican government gave me a helicopter, and I got to pretty well survey Mexico in terms of volcanic activity and led to a lifelong interest on my part in volcanoes.

[13:51] ROBIN ERICSON: And no, hanging around a volcano strikes me as a dangerous thing to do. Were you ever in danger?

[13:59] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Well, yeah, I had an experience in the Aleutians on top of active volcano, where I had a russian partner going down in the volcano, rappelling down, wearing scuba gear to protect him from the poison gas and sampling below the air level. And a storm came up, and we'd gotten there by helicopter, but the helicopter had to leave and left the russian and I on top of the volcano. So we got to experience an aleutian storm on top of McCushin volcano, which was interesting.

[14:42] ROBIN ERICSON: So, like, snowstorm or rain, windstorm, windstorm, okay.

[14:48] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yeah, summertime. So that we climbed down below the ice level, got under the vegetation and weathered it, but no harm done.

[15:00] ROBIN ERICSON: So how did the army experience kind of inform your, your next career in alternative energy and other things like that?

[15:13] CLAYTON NICHOLS: My education as a run of the mill engineer covered civil engineering, petroleum engineering, all the conventional engineering forms, but at ou, it did not cover nuclear engineering. I ended up taking a lot of thermodynamics and advanced physical chemistry, but in the armed services, running a nuclear rocketry operation, and it's experimental at that. At that time, there was not a mid range surface to surface nuclear weapon in the us arsenal. So one of my jobs was seeing if the Nike Hercules missile was robust enough to run around the desert and fire in a battlefield situation, surface to surface. And it turned out that it was. But in the course of doing that, I had to learn a lot of nuclear stuff, and that filled a hole in my education in engineering. At one point, I finally passed a nuclear engineering accreditation test as a nuclear engineer. So I expanded my petroleum engineering, geologic engineering to include nuclear engineering, which turned out to be very useful in the cleanup phase of our country's post war activities.

[16:54] ROBIN ERICSON: Well, tell us about your work in the cleanup of nuclear materials.

[17:00] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Well, my first assignment was at Grand Junction, Colorado, which had been our uranium purchasing office during our whole nuclear period. And they had used uranium mill tailings, the refuse from the uranium separation in everything where you could use soil. It was under foundations, under school buildings, under sidewalks. And somebody decided that maybe that wasn't a good idea. So I was sent to grand junction to manage the cleanup program for the uranium mill tailings. When I learned how to do that, they decided there were a lot of other DOE sites that needed cleaning up. And so I gradually got transitioned from cleaning up uranium milk tailings and other messes to higher level nuclear waste and ended up getting the assignment to clean up the, the rocky flask waste stored underground in the soil. At the Idaho National Engineering lab, I also worked with the navy in the processing of their storage and, and handling of their submarine reactor fuel waste, which was quite a big operation. So I, that's how I first got involved in the navy. It ended up doing all sorts of different things with the Navy, including innovative submarine propulsion system work and other things that are classified. But it was just a nice relationship with the navy. And again, it was the nuclear work with the army that prepared me for that. So I deal with Rickover's people and know what I'm saying.

[19:04] ROBIN ERICSON: Wait a minute, Rickover's people? What is that all about? Remember him?

[19:11] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Admiral Rickover, of course, was the guardian angel and the terror of the nuclear navy. And his training base at the time was the Idaho National Engineering lab. And I ended up being head of engineering and head of research at the Idaho National Engineering lab and head of worrying about natural phenomena, earthquakes and floods and that sort of thing. So Rickover's navy people were my customers, and they are a tough customer. But I like the fact that they demanded expertise, and I had to learn to calculate earthquake risks and all manner of things like that to make sure my nuclear. My navy customers were well taken care of.

[20:06] ROBIN ERICSON: And they were, I guess, officers on their way to nuclear submarines or.

[20:11] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yes.

[20:11] ROBIN ERICSON: Yeah.

[20:12] CLAYTON NICHOLS: And the whole crews. Yeah, yeah. So they had mock ups. They had large tanks, submarine sized tanks. They trained them there in the middle of the Idaho desert for their submarine duty, which is.

[20:27] ROBIN ERICSON: Well, see, as a meteorologist, you have proven to me what I've. What I've learned and always thought, and that is that geologists can do anything. And you're certainly an example.

[20:45] CLAYTON NICHOLS: The air force really impressed me. We did a lot of work with the air Force in software. Early development of software. You know, the cockpit systems for pilot assists artificial intelligence for making decision. It was a transfer of artificial intelligence work we had done in reactor safety. When you're running a nuclear reactor and you suddenly have 32 warning lights go off, you can't normally decide what to do first. We developed artificial intelligence for decision making like that. And that same artificial intelligence was applicable to the kinds of decisions that fighter pilots have to make. So we got in on the ground floor of that. And ultimately, artificial intelligence applied to planning Air Force tactical missions. We developed that in a classified office beneath my office in Idaho. The general, when he reviewed that package, said, I told you, Nichols, to develop a package so simple that the greenest second lieutenant could sit down and develop a fire command. You did me one better. You did one so easy that even a geologist could do.

[22:12] ROBIN ERICSON: Oh, that's clever. Yeah. Oh, that's neat. So who. What are the. Have you met? Did you meet any interesting people in the army or in your career later?

[22:27] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Well, Teller was an interesting character. Ed Teller ended the father of the hydrogen bomb. The government lost a lot of its plutonium expertise, and we ended up talking to people like Teller to try to make sure that we did the cleanup and understood plutonium. And I got to work with Teller in looking for surrogates for plutonium. Wish there weren't any because of its unusual chemistry. But he was certainly one interesting individual. That I got to work with. There were many others. Ernie Moniz, who developed the Iran negotiation. Ernie was a close associate. He was my boss for three or four years. So there were the defense work that I really can't talk about. I worked on things as varied as the Abrams tank armament package, the Star wars laser technology, the, like, the hydrodynamic submarine propulsion system work. It was just a great opportunity for a researcher to have an interesting career. And again, it was that early army work where I learned to work with diverse groups of people and cultures. Any Okie that can learn to work with Texas Aggies, you know, has to get so, a lot of learning experience.

[24:12] ROBIN ERICSON: So I thought maybe that general would have said, you did better than the green. You were able to teach at Texas. I did my meteorology at Texas A and M, so. Oh, be careful about how you talk about aggies.

[24:30] CLAYTON NICHOLS: When. When I did my basic training at Fort Hood, I was assigned to a group of 29 Texas Aggies. I was the only okie there. And they considered me a feral individual. You know, I just. I wasn't cultured. I didn't have the baggy culture. I couldn't polish boots. I couldn't do the Queen Anne's drill. And they took me by the hand and turned me into a soldier. So I credit the. Was a much better shop than they were. Having grown up the woods in Oklahoma, I could outdo them any day on the rifle range. And I practiced unconventional tactics because I was a student of military history. And we beat the regular army in some exercises that they had never been beaten in before in our maneuvers.

[25:36] ROBIN ERICSON: So there is this kind of generalization that the Oklahoma and Texas are always, I guess, in football, it's a big rivalry.

[25:53] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I should not admit it, but I can tell you a Texas Aggie joke appropriate to almost any situation you can imagine.

[26:03] ROBIN ERICSON: Oh, be careful there. So I think we'll move on. So now you got your doctorate, right? And when did you do that and where?

[26:21] CLAYTON NICHOLS: In 1975. And I immediately went to work, of all places, Boise state in Idaho, because it was next door to Yellowstone National park, where volcanologists like to roam. And so I also got hired, rather immediately by the National Park Service to summer to serve as a summer ranger naturalist at old faithful. Now, what better job can you get? Oh, I spent 13 summers in Yellowstone leading courses and teaching geothermal geology.

[27:04] ROBIN ERICSON: So I remember seeing this cup, coffee cup that was to the hot foot. Well, tell me about that.

[27:15] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I gave a safety talk to the big, the high ups, the park superintendent, the others at Yellowstone and afterwards, the superintendent said, why don't we pull this old pipe out of this hot spring? It was behind old faithful in the woods and I was the last one on the pipe and it broke. I went stumbling backwards and both feet went into hot pots. And so I got my skin burned off, you know, up above the ankles. But it turned out again to be a fortunate thing because I spent a month in burn recovery in the Yellowstone burn clinic. And that whole month they hauled out the Yellowstone library for me. And I became probably the world's leading expert on the history of Yellowstone speed reader. And I did the project of identifying the sites that ought to be on the historic register for Yellowstone. And while I was laid up for a month, I got to do that. Otherwise I would not have had the opportunity to read all the archives of Yellowstone National park.

[28:34] ROBIN ERICSON: Wow. So I guess it could have been worse.

[28:38] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yeah, it makes me eternally great. Sympathetic for anybody that gets a bad burn.

[28:48] ROBIN ERICSON: Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like that's a case where something bad happened and you made it, you took advantage of it. Have you ever had any other cases like that?

[29:02] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Well, I got my normal life interrupted by an assignment once from DoE headquarters to tell them how much contamination had landed in the western United States due to nuclear processing. And it turned out that the way to do that was to look at the glaciers in the Wind river range, which recorded all the fallout. And although I didn't like that assignment, it turned out to be one of the most fortunate things in my career. After we successfully quantified the radiation that had fallen in the wind river range, it attracted the attention of everybody from Norway to Russia. And I had the offer to organize a ice core drilling project in Kyrgyzstan overlooking the chinese nuclear test flats. Went back to Washington, said, is this okay? They said, oh, the Chinese know. We know what they're doing. So, sure, go ahead and do it. And so, with russian high altitude helicopter support, we did a ice coring project overlooking Mongolia, high, 16,000ft in the mountains there, and ended up with a wonderful record of everything that's contaminated snow for the last several thousand years. So gold processing in them and it turned out projects. I was invited to go back to Washington then and present the results to Al Gore, who was working on his movie at the time. But he didn't understand natural climate change. And so the ice core record that we got made him aware that there is natural climate change in addition to human induced climate change. So I got to spend a fun time back there on St. Patrick's Day with the luncheon in the White House and hobnobbing with them.

[31:26] ROBIN ERICSON: So, look, I think you're retired now. It's hard to tell sometimes. So what do you do to stay active in retirement?

[31:38] CLAYTON NICHOLS: The National Academy of Science occupied my time as soon as I retired, and I became the committee member in charge of a natural resources committee and then served on the board for six years, the national Academy. And my time was up. I retired again. But still today, early in the mornings, I call or get called from the National Academy and discuss policy issues related to geosciences.

[32:15] ROBIN ERICSON: So, yes, so you're 3 hours difference from us. So what time are they calling you in the morning?

[32:23] CLAYTON NICHOLS: We have 05:00 but since I get up at four, that's not a. Oh, my goodness. But the other thing that I did that really occupied my time was community service, because I found out that community service organizations were doing a lot of things that were interesting. And just like your campaign here with the corps needed some help in getting not for profit designations. So I've worked for art museums and wildlife refuges and coral groups and theater groups in securing not for profit designations and helping them.

[33:14] ROBIN ERICSON: Oh, that's great. And as I recall, you were in a singing group.

[33:21] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yes.

[33:23] ROBIN ERICSON: Because I think you did a lot. Did singing in high school and college.

[33:27] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been in a lot of plays, wind and the Willows and the reluctant dragon and other plays, too, that were musicals. I enjoyed singing at 83. My voice is not what it used to be. I still enjoy good music.

[33:53] ROBIN ERICSON: And so back to how we started this conversation, back to the army. Just thinking about it was an interesting experience for you, and it led to a really wonderful civilian career. But what would you tell your grandchildren if they were thinking about joining the army?

[34:20] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I've told them that they ought to consider all three armed services.

[34:24] ROBIN ERICSON: There you go.

[34:26] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I saw enough of the Air Force Force culture as the liaison officer to the air force on NORAD exercise to be impressed with them. And in spite of, spite of the difficulty of dealing with Admiral Rickover, I really have a lot of respect for the Navy. And so what I tell my grandchildren is that in looking at careers, education today is very expensive. The academies provide a great opportunity for a top quality education, paid for if you have the moxie and the physique and the stamina to do it. And so I have recommended that to all of them. There's nothing wrong with the non technical votec sort of the education that you get in the. I knew so little about automobiles when I went into the army. That the fact that I ended up in charge of major motor pools was a real education.

[35:34] ROBIN ERICSON: And let's see. One last thing I'd like to ask, and that would be, what was your best assignment, your best job in the army or afterwards? What would you. What would you say is the most highlight? I guess.

[35:48] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I don't know. I think that Yellowstone tours of duty as a naturalist was probably the most enjoyable. I think that that ice coring work around the world probably was the most beneficial. You know, if it made Al Gore aware that there was natural climate change, that's worth something. But there have just been so many things. The Abrams tank work was worthwhile.

[36:22] ROBIN ERICSON: And that was after you got out of the army?

[36:25] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Yes.

[36:25] ROBIN ERICSON: Yeah. When you were in Idaho?

[36:27] CLAYTON NICHOLS: I was running the research at the Idaho National Engineering lab.

[36:31] ROBIN ERICSON: Wow.

[36:32] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Well, teller was an experience, too, in plutonium.

[36:37] ROBIN ERICSON: Yeah. Well, that's interesting. And. And again, maybe it. Maybe it's just you, but my thinking is geologists. I mean, they can do anything and they can do it well. So it's pretty impressive.

[36:55] CLAYTON NICHOLS: No? My mentor, Charlie Manken at Oklahoma force, fed his students not just geology. He made them do thermodynamics, advanced math, physics, physical chemistry. And so we were prepared for the sciences and engineering, not just geology. And I think that was secret.

[37:18] ROBIN ERICSON: Yeah. Well, this has been just a delightful time, Clayton and I'm glad to hear your story and glad it will be on the record now.

[37:31] CLAYTON NICHOLS: Thank you for the chance to share it. I just would encourage anybody to consider the armed services as at least a jump start to their career in many, many areas.

[37:43] ROBIN ERICSON: All right. Okay. Well, thanks again. I.