Katy’s Kitchen: What’s Cookin’ in Oak Ridge

What’s Happening in Oak Ridge, January 5-11, 2012!!!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 6

British String Quartet Concert - January 6

Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra

The Doric String Quartet will perform a special concert at 8pm at the Pollard Auditorium on the campus of Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Oak Ridge.  The Doric String Quartet has been described by Gramophone magazine as “one of the finest young string quartets”, whose members are “musicians with fascinating things to say”.  Tickets cost $25 per adult and $12.50 per student.  For more information, visit www.orcma.org/concerts/special-concert or call 865-483-5569.

“Science in Antarctica is Cool” – Beginning January 6 – March 11

This exhibit explores the Antarctic environment and the working life of scientists on the Earth’s coldest, highest, driest continent.  AMSE Lobby.  For more information, visit www.amse.org or call 865-576-3200.

Open Painting Studio – January 6

Oak Ridge Art Center 

9:30am– 12:00pm

Non-instructed studio time.  Bring all your materials and work at your own pace.  Any media.

For more information visit:  www.oakridgeartcenter.org

Open Fiber Studio – January 6

Oak Ridge Art Center

1:30pm – 4:00pm

Non-instructed studio time for all fiber/textile enthusiasts.  Bring your machine if desired and work with others.

For more information visit:  www.oakridgeartcenter.org

SUNDAY, JANUARY 8                 

“Near and Far:  Selections from the Permanent Collection” – A holiday gift to the region – Last Day!

Oak Ridge Art Center

Henry Matisse, Marc Chagall, Victor Vasarely, Salvador Dali, Richard Jolley, Carl Sublett, Hugh Bailey, and Robert Birdwell – where do these international master artists mix with those from our region?  You can find them in the current exhibition at the Oak Ridge Art Center, on display now through January 8.  The work spans the globe as it incorporates local and international favorites.  Pieces selected for the exhibition represent the breadth of the Art Center’s collection as well as the interests of those benefactors who originally sought and collected them.  For more information, visit www.oakridgeartcenter.org or call 865-482-1441.

MONDAY, JANUARY 9

Ballroom Dancing - Every Monday, 6:30 p.m.

Location:  Wildcat Den Room of the Midtown Community Center.

Come join the Secret City Ballroom Dancers every Monday night at 6:30pm for ballroom dancing.

Fee:  Admission is $6 on live band nights and $3 on regular Mondays.

For more information contact Ann Stuck at 865-482-2658 or Patti at 865-482-3701.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 10

Print Making Studio – January 10

Oak Ridge Art Center 

1:30pm– 3:30pm

Non-instructed studio session. 

For more information visit:  www.oakridgeartcenter.org. 

ONGOING EVENTS:

“Earth from Space” – thru February 19

American Museum of Science and Energy – Lobby

“Earth from Space” poster exhibition explores how satellite imagery is gathered and used to expand mankind’s understanding of life on earth.  This exhibition is prepared by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey.  For more information, visit www.amse.org or call 865-576-3200.

Registration Open for East Tennessee Regional Model Bridge Building Contest – thru March 2

American Museum of Science and Energy

The Model Bridge Building Contest will be on March 10 for students in Grade 7-12.  Contest rules and specifications available online at www.amse.org or come to AMSE for a flyer.  If you have questions, call 865-576-3200.

U.S.  ITER Project – thru May 15

American Museum of Science and Energy – Second Level

This exhibition utilizes audiovisuals and interactives to explain a major international research project with the goal of demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.  The U.S. ITER Project Office is hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, with partners Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey and Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.  For more information, visit www.amse.org or call 865-576-3200.

Aqua Power Classes at Oak Ridge Civic Center – Mondays and Wednesdays

Want the benefits of a water workout without the expense and commitment of a gym membership?  Aqua Power classes are being held at the Oak Ridge Civic Center Pool.  Janice Green Wood, who holds numerous fitness instruction certifications, will be instructing this program geared toward participants who wish to receive a workout in the water.  Individuals will be encouraged to work at their own pace.  Participants do not have to be able to swim, and do not have to get their hair wet.  Classes will be held Mondays and Wednesdays from 7:30-8:30pm.  Cost is $5 per class, or $42 for a 6-week session.  Call Civic Center for details and holiday closings at 865-425-3450.

Sports in Oak Ridge

If you are looking for sports activities in Oak Ridge, check out the Oak Ridge Recreation and Parks Department webpage, www.orrecparks.org.  Many different sports are played throughout the year for adults and children, (men and women’s softball, soccer, basketball, swimming, tennis, volleyball, etc.)  You will find the schedules for team sign-ups, and the dates and times that each sport is played on their webpage.  You can also contact them at 865-425-3450. 

Upcoming Events:

Robin Hood – Oak Ridge Playhouse – January 21-22

Junior Playhouse

Adventure and excitement abound in 12^th century England when the dashing rascal Robin Hood and his band of merry thieves stand up against a tyrannical King and the crooked Sherriff on behalf of the people of Nottingham.  From their headquarters deep in Sherwood Forrest, the outlaws scheme to help those in need by robbing from the rich in order to give to the poor, while vowing to protect the good and to never hurt women or children.  For more information, visit www.orplayhouse.com or call 865-482-9999.

Un-Clutter Your Mind after the Holidays - January 28

Oak Ridge Public Library – 3pm – 4pm

Professional Organizer, Mary Pankiewicz, will be discussing ways to clear the clutter, and therefore the stress, from your mind.  She has been a speaker, author, and professional organizer since 1995.  In addition, she is the owner of “Exceptional Productivity Now!” and “Clutter-free & Organized” and teaches organization courses at The University of Tennessee.  She has special training for working with ADD clients and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Readers Digest and on WBIR-NBC.  Her latest book is “Fast, Easy Organizing Solutions for Paper Piles and Your Office”.  This program will take place in the library auditorium.  For more information about this FREE program, please contact the library at 865-425-3455 or CircLib@cortn.org .

Oak Ridge Chamber Players – January 28 – 8pm

Pollard Auditorium – 210 Badger Avenue, Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra violinists Karen Kartal and Sue Eddlemon, violist Jennifer Bloch, and cellists Ihsan Kartal and Dan Allcott (ORSO conductor) will perform Schubert’s ‘Quintet in C Major’, the composer’s final instrumental work composed two months before his death in 1828.  For more information, visit www.orcma.org or call 865-483-5569.

ORCMA to present Children’s Opera ‘Brundibar’ – February 11

Oak Ridge Civic Music Association

A children’s opera first performed under tragic conditions by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1943.  The thinly veiled plot concerns a bully eventually overthrown through song.  Location:  Oak Ridge High School Performing Arts Center at 8pm.  For more information, visit www.orcma.org or call 865-483-5569.

Brighton Beach Memoirs – February 17 – March 4

Oak Ridge Playhouse – Mainstage

Part one of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy.  The poignant and funny memoir captures the life of a struggling pre-war Jewish family living in a crowded, lower middle-class Brooklyn home.  Adolescent Eugene Jerome, dreaming of baseball and girls, must somehow cope with the mundane existence of his family life; a formidable mother, overworked father, and his worldly older brother.  Add in his widowed Aunt Blanche, her two rapidly aging young daughters, and Grandpa the Socialist and you have a recipe for hilarity, served up Simon-style.  Show times are:  2/17 and 18 at 8pm; 2/23-25 at 8pm; 2/26 at 2pm; March 2-3 at 8pm and 2/4 at 2pm.  For more information, visit www.orplayhouse.com or call 865-482-9999.

International Festival – February 18

Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge 10am – 4pm

This annual festival showcases the world’s cultures through international performances, food, crafts, children’s activities and more than two dozen booths highlighting countries and regions of the world.  The featured performers will be Coyote Run with additional entertainment provided by Brandon Beavers and Kukuly Uriarte, Tenpenny Rappers Sword Dancers, Chinese dancers and classical Indian folk dancers.  For more information, call 865-482-1074 or visit www.childrensmuseumofoakridge.org .

In The Area:

2012 Norris Dam Challenge 12K – January 14

Oak Ridge Track Club

Date:  Saturday, January 14, 2012

Address:  125 Village Green Circle, Lake City, Tennessee

Registration Closing Date:  Saturday, January 7, 2012 @ 11:59pm

Description:  The Norris Dam Challenge 12K is part of the Tennessee State Parks Running tour.  The Norris Dam 12K represents one of the more demanding races in the series.  The race has a scenic and challenging out and back course with the start/finish at the park headquarters of Norris Dam State park.  Runners will descent approx. 350 feet in elevation to the dam, cross the dam, circle up through the cabin area and back the same way.  Afterwards, enjoy some hot chili and be sure to vote for your favorite recipe.  Chili competition is open to all runners, volunteers, spouses, etc.  Bring a crockpot and we will plug it in.  For more information, visit www.state.tn.us/environment/parks/RunningTour/ . 

Fisk Jubilee Singers – February 24

Museum of Appalachia

This information brought to you by the Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau – 102 Robertsville Road, Suite C, Oak Ridge, TN  37830.  You can contact us at 865-482-7821 or by visiting our webpage at www.oakridgevisitor.com .   The above event dates and times are the latest available at the time of this publication.  If you have an event that you would like posted on this publication, please contact Debi Boody at debi@oakridgevisitor.com .

| January 5th, 2012

Atomic Age: The world (and some cattle) never the same again

| February 23rd, 2010

Oak Ridge’s Role in the Manhattan Project

Oak Ridge’s Role in the Manhattan Project
William J. (Bill) Wilcox Jr. - Oak Ridge City Historian, Retired Technical Director for the Oak Ridge Y-12 & K-25 Plants, Manhattan Project Jr. Chemist, Y-12 Plant

What a colossal accomplishment that WWII Manhattan Project was! In an incredibly short 2 ½ years, it accomplished 3 missions, none ever before done anywhere: separation of the uranium isotopes (Oak Ridge), production of the element plutonium in large nuclear reactors (Hanford, WA), and learning how to put these materials together to make bombs (Los Alamos, NM). Ours was the costliest part of that project, and by far the largest in terms of the number of people required. Of the Project’s $2.2 billion cost ($26B or more 2008!), 60 cents of every dollar was spent here at Oak Ridge. 21 cents was spent at Hanford, 4 cents at Los Alamos. The scientific and engineering problems we faced here were forbidding not only in number, but in their complexity, and required inventions by scientists and engineers on a scale even now, hard to believe. In WWII, 22,000 people worked at Y-12, and cost of the isotope separation plants was $1B. The problem with depicting our efforts on a video for today’s public is our lack of drama, just a dogged day after day effort solving one new set of problems after another for 2.5 years with never a single day event as exciting or well-filmed for posterity as the marvelous Trinity test at Alamagordo!

Our 12-mile long, 6-to7 mile wide reservation here in East Tennessee was selected for the whole project 60 years ago just last month! Its code name during the war was Clinton Engineer Works, the name Oak Ridge was not widely used till after the war. The entire MP all over the country was administered from here, by Col. K. D. Nichols, the COO of the MP, who reported to Gen Leslie Groves who kept his office in Washington.

The number one mission for Oak Ridge was to separate the uranium isotopes – the two forms of uranium with slightly different weights that occur in nature. Back in 1939 when Hitler started WWII by invading Poland, scientists began kicking around the possibility that an atomic bomb with awesome power might be built if someone could just figure out a way to get a lot of nearly pure U-235, the lighter of the two forms of uranium that occur in nature. The heavier one is U-238, very little heavier. Isotopes can’t be separated like you separate iron from iron ore; they behave identically in all chemical reactions. You have to work with their trivial difference in weight, and that’s pretty small. Suppose we use two basketballs to represent uranium atoms, then the heavier U238 one will be identical except that it weighs the amount more that it will if you tape a five-cent piece to it! And then if separating them isn’t hard enough, U- 235 is scarce as hen’s teeth! In every 1000 pounds of uranium you dig out of the ground, there are only 7 lbs of 235 along with 993 lbs of U-238 –intimately mixed.

When the Manhattan Project started in the summer of 1942, Gen. Groves had three universities that had been researching separation methods for the last two years telling him: “Well, we think we know a way you might be able do it”. He was horrified by the uncertainty. By December 1942 he and his advisors reduced the field from three to two by stopping all work on one of the three ideas - the gas centrifuge (which interestingly 60 years later in 2002 is now the process of choice in the U.S.!). The scientists could still not assure him of the success of either of the other two: the electromagnetic approach and gaseous diffusion, so Groves decided they would have to go ahead and build both. The fear that the Germans might succeed with their efforts was the major driver.

Ground breaking for the first U-235 separation plant called Y-12 was in February 1943, and it was running in January 1944. Y-12 used over a thousand big devices called Calutrons in nine big buildings that produced separation when the uranium isotope mixture was driven through a very strong electro-magnetic field. After each had run a week or so it ran out of feed and had to be stopped, the little bit of product removed, recharged and restarted. The product was only partly enriched, so it had to be put through the process again to get bomb grade fuel and that’s where they needed hundreds of chemists like me. Those calutron magnets were enormous, and copper to wind their electrical coils with was in very short supply, so Y-12 borrowed silver from the U.S.Treasury to use instead of copper. They borrowed 14,000 tons of silver ingots worth more than $300 million to make the magnets, and after the war it was stripped it out and given back to the Treasury! The magnetic field was so strong it would jerk an ordinary wrench right out of your hand, or wreck the mainspring in your watch if you walked within a few feet of the machines!

Though almost all of Oak Ridge’s effort was spent on making U-235 for the first atomic bomb, code named Little Boy, we do have a tie with the Nagasaki plutonium bomb, Fat Man. The tie is through the Graphite Reactor, the world’s first real nuclear reactor, built out in Bethel Valley here and started up in November 1943. It’s purpose was to make small quantities of the new element plutonium so that chemists could find ways to handle it when they got the big production reactors running at Hanford.

Because Y-12 was not a sure-fire bet, Groves kept the heat on for the construction of a back up, another entirely new technology, and another $500 million plant called K-25 that employed a very different approach called gaseous diffusion. It sure sounded easy: all one needed to do was to make some gaseous form of uranium seep or diffuse through a porous, sieve-like membrane or barrier, and because U-235 molecules are a little lighter, they zip around a little faster than the U-238s so the diffused stream is slightly enriched. But the secret of how to make a really workable porous barrier had eluded scientists at Columbia Univ. who started working on starting in 1940! For one thing, all the holes in the membrane had to be microscopically small, so small that there could be hundreds of millions of holes in a sq. cm. (the size of your thumbnail) and they had to be all the same size, not too big, not too small or you get no separation. But even if you can make the perfect barrier, you get such a little separation each time it diffuses that you have to pump up the gas again and pass it through another barrier almost 3,000 times to get the purity of U-235 you need! That means we’re talking “big”. The gigantic K-25 building was 400 feet wide, a mile long, with 40 acres under roof- at that time the largest single process building in the world. It was chuck full of vacuum-tight pipes, pumps and tanks to hold the barrier, and is located out in the western end of our reservation.

K-25 started up in February 1945, a full year after Y-12 and it was to be months before useful enrichments would be reached, so K-25 contributed only in a minor way to ending WWII, but during the postwar arms race the plant was expanded again and again and continued to work superbly for many decades, not being finally shut down until 1985.

So much for what we did at the plants. What was life like after work? Believe me Oak Ridge in the fall of 1944 looked entirely different than it does now. Today our little city of 27,000 is a sleepy little town compared to the city of 75,000 that then ran full-throttle all night as well as all day. Our town then looked just like what it was – a big, brand new army base, built fast to do a particular job, not to last much past the war. The army engineers built miles of fences, guard posts, nearly 10,000 homes for families; 90 two story dormitories for 13,000 singles like me; 5,000 trailers, 16,000 hutments and barracks spaces for construction workers and soldiers, 2 Chapels (St. Stephen’s used each at one time or the other), 9 neighborhood schools, a hospital, rec halls, a dozen shopping centers, the eighth biggest bus system in the U.S.A., and all the rest. In addition to 75,000 residents in town, we had thousands of commuters and construction workers who came in for their three shifts.

One thing about our life any survivor will tell you about is what happened when it rained. Those things Tennesseans called “frog-stranglers” turned our thinly graveled roads into seas of sticky, slimy, slippery, shoe-sucking-off mud! And that accounted for one unusual feature of our town – its miles of boardwalks instead of sidewalks! At Y-12 I had to keep a clean pair of shoes to change to from the galoshes I wore in wet weather before going into the chemistry building.

And another memorable feature came from the fact that the land the Army bought here lies in two Tennessee counties that had “bone-dry” laws, meaning it was against the law to have any alcohol here! All we could buy was an almost nonalcoholic substitute called Barbarossa Beer! We had to smuggle booze in. There were shortages of whatever you really wanted, ration books, and long lines for everything! We singles went to all the movies at the Center Theater where the playhouse is now, and that meant four times a week, and went afterwards to the rec halls to jitterbug to big band records.

And always, in our plants and in town, there was an ever-present insistence on very tight security – don’t talk about what’s going on here! Keeping a secrecy rein on the people here was a real challenge. We routinely had security briefings at the plants and keep quiet slogans on all the billboards, but aggravating the problem was our short 13 miles to Knoxville where Ridgers fled to shop as often as they could. Ridgers outside the fence could be easily spotted from our muddy shoes, and you’d often get quizzed by friendly but so curious Southerners with questions along this line: “Gosh, that’s a huge operation out there, whatever are you guys making?” We got pretty creative in our answers. Some I remember were: ––“Oh, we’re just building a bunch of homes for all the officers to come retire in after the war.” ––“Hey, we’re making the front ends of horses to send up to Washington!” I heard that one guy said: “Shoot, I don’t mind telling you what I’m making out there– it’s $1.17/hour.” My favorite was the good ol’ Tennessee maintenance man at Y-12 who said: “Well, frankly I don’t know what they’se makin’, but I’ll tell you this much – the govmint could sure as hell go buy it somm’ers else a whole lot cheaper!”

I’m afraid none of our townspeople would have judged the huge Y-12 plant was a great success if they had been told that all of its product could be hand carried out by a couple of lieutenants each week! It was a relatively small amount, that highly pure U-235!

We made none of the Little Boy bomb parts here. All of Y-12’s wartime product was shipped out to Los Alamos in the form of fine crystals of U-235 tetrafluoride, a pretty blue-green powder! No, it does not glow in the dark! Its radioactivity will not penetrate the skin, so you can safely hold several pounds in your hand, but it sure was precious. It had cost about 250 thousand dollars an ounce to make it! We packed it into a container about the size of a coffee cup made out of nickel and heavily plated with gold on the inside so the costly green powder would not get contaminated and then have to be re-purified by Los Alamos. After putting on covers, two of these cans were packed in a wooden frame in a very ordinary looking leather attaché bag like businessmen carried in 1945. This super valuable briefcase was then chained to the wrist of a lieutenant in military security wearing civilian clothes and off he went off with armed escorts by train to Chicago and then took the Santa-Fe Chief out to New Mexico where they carefully made it into one of the two bombs that helped end WWII in August 1945. In the early spring of 1945 Y-12 was finally operating smoothly like everyone had hoped it could, finally sending nearly pure U-235 to Los Alamos. They experimented with it and over the next months accumulated enough to make the metal parts for the gun-type atomic bomb – where a uranium bullet was fired down a gun barrel into a uranium target, very rapidly creating a supercritical mass that resulted in the chain reaction and atomic explosion. The last parts were finished in July and carried out to Tinian Island in the Pacific, where the bomb was assembled and ready by August 1st, meeting Groves near impossible target. Weather kept it from being dropped till August 6th.

I’ve often been asked, “Why was the Manhattan project so successful?” First on my list is the fortunate selection of the tough, brilliant Gen. Leslie R. Groves to run it and our government’s wise decision to put the entire mission, scientists and plant building and operation under him. Second, Groves’ enlistment of the very best companies to design, build and operate the never before heard-of giant facilities. And other key factors in success were the availability of money (almost a blank check); the top wartime AAA priority Groves finagled so they could get the things they needed in the wartime when every thing was in short supply; and then the great emphasis on secrecy that worked to speed things up – no-one had to spend anytime briefing Congress, each other, the public or any other stakeholders.

But, you know, I believe the most important reason so much got done so fast was that everyone from Gen. Groves on down to the operators on all three shifts had a common purpose – to do whatever each could seven days a week to help end the war. Nobody ordered us to work extra long and extra hard; we instilled that in ourselves by reading the papers each day and hearing on the radio every night of the atrocities and the killing of our countrymen and allies in North Africa, on the beaches in Normandy, on the infamous Bataan Death march in the Philippines, in the jungles of Burma, and on islands in the Pacific whose names we had never heard before, and now can never forget. This is what is so hard to get across to the next generation. I’ve had a hard time describing it to my own kids– that patriotism that made you work so hard, keep secrets, put up with the shortages, and live with rules you often did not understand. Everyone wanted “to help win the War”.

Our country glimpsed a kindred spirit in a few weeks following the horrific attacks of September 11, last year, an outpouring of that patriotic feeling: “What can I do to help?” But during WWII we read about awful horrors somewhere week after week for six long years. (1939 to 1945) A million American boys were killed or wounded in the three years and nine months our Nation was at war. I lost my best boyhood friend who was piloting a bomber over Germany; both of my wife’s brothers were in the Services, almost everyone you worked with knew someone who had lost family members.

So how did we here in Oak Ridge react when we heard about those two atomic bombings that marked the success of the Manhattan Project? Well with the same incredible surprise of the rest of our country! Nobody I knew felt any glory in the deaths of the 100,000 Japanese at Hiroshima any more than we gloried in the deaths of about that same number in the fire-bombing of Tokyo a few months before on the night of March 9/10th––a bombing that burned out 16 square miles of Tokyo, 4 times the area burned out at Hiroshima. No, what we did take pride in was that the shock of the Manhattan Project’s success had finally caused their reluctant Emperor to stand up to his die-hard militarists and insist on bringing to an end the War they started against us at Pearl Harbor. And that great pride in the success of our efforts turned to exuberant joy a week later when we Oak Ridgers awoke the morning of August 14th to see the headline in our Knoxville newspaper. That landmark edition was printed on red paper and carried an 8-inch tall banner headline: P E A C E !

That six year World War that we helped stop had involved a nearly incomprehensible total of 54 million people killed by other humans, and the blessed peace all of us had worked and prayed so long and so hard for was at last a reality!

Shortly after the war, I’m proud to say Oak Ridge led the way in making peaceful applications of atomic science using our Calutrons and our Graphite Reactor to produce radioactive and stable isotopes that have brought the world so many benefits in medicine, agriculture, and industry; benefits we still enjoy today. And later Oak Ridge again led the way in giving to the world nuclear research reactors and then nuclear power plants whose clean electric power - though not yet embraced by the public in this country - has been welcomed and beneficial to so many countries of the world including Japan, our war-time enemy but for a half century since, good friends. These peaceful uses of atomic energy together with the blessed freedom from WWIII for well over half a century, – these are our rich legacies of the Manhattan Project.

| December 14th, 2009

A History Lesson: The beginnings of the Y-12 Development Division

| November 16th, 2009

Great Article: Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge

The Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge was featured in the Knoxville News Sentinel today. Check it out here.

It’s an awesome place to take kids of all ages. Lots of cool events, a child-size doll house, a wonderfully nostalgic look back on life in Oak Ridge during the war and much, much more. Visit www.ChildrensMuseumofOakRidge.org for more information.

| October 27th, 2008

Back in the Saddle…

Well kids I’m back from Boise…land of potatos, of which I ate…NONE! But I did get some wonderful ideas from the International Festivals and Events conference, and brought home a sweet award that I am keeping under wraps until the time is right to share! Thanks to Nicky and Anne for holding down the blogging front while I was away….great things happened here with some big awards thrown our way!

Anyhoo, great event, fun people to hang with and share ideas about successful events too. The best part of the trip, meeting the nicest woman, who also happens to be THE REASON that NBC decided to air the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I couldn’t contain myself. It is the biggest tradition that I have at my house year after year. To the point that I tivo it…(is that dumb?). Oh well, I love it and it makes me sing show tunes all day long after putting the leftover turkey away.

So Happy Monday everyone! Off to attack a giant list of emails!

kb

| September 15th, 2008

We’re the Top!!

The Secret City Festival has received one of the most coveted awards in the tourism industry this week.  The American Bus Association (ABA) has named it as one of the Top 100 Events in North America for 2009.  This is a HUGE award for the Festival as well as for the Oak Ridge area.  Some additional  ’09 Top 100 events include Calaveras (CA) County Fair & Frog Jumping Competition, Jackson Hole, Wyoming’s Grand Teton Music Festival, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Pigeon Forge Winterfest.  Those are some well-known destinations, and for Oak Ridge and the Secret City Festival to be included with them speaks very highly of the Festival, Oak Ridge and the surrounding area.

| September 11th, 2008

$15,000 Grant Awarded to ORCVB

Just got the word that the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development has granted us with $15,000.00 to assist in enhancing our advertising plan for the 2008 - 09 year! So exciting!

Today in history -

September 4, 2008 – First issue of the Army Newspaper for residents “not to be mailed off area” called the “Oak Ridge Journal.”  It was mimeographed and 4 pages long – and later grew to 12 pages.

| September 4th, 2008

Kansas City, Kansas City Here I Come…and Boise too

Our Director of Communications is in Kansas City this week promoting Oak Ridge, Tennessee to Travel Writers. Good luck Nicky! Can’t wait to hear about your progress when you return.

I’ll be traveling to Boise next week to attend the International Festival & Events Association conference, and to pick up an award for the Secret City Festival.  Don’t know yet what we have received but are excited about the prospect of it!  Lots of excitement coming through for the Festival this year! We have already started our planning! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Well, we have and it is going to be another great one.

| September 4th, 2008

AMSE & OR Children’s Museum ranked in top 50!

Congratulations to the American Museum of Science and Energy  and to the Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge - voted to the Top Fifty Favorite places in Tennessee by the TN AARP! See the link in the Chattanooga Times…

Speaking of AMSE and the Childrens Museum …ever wonder what to do on a rainy day like today? This is a great spot in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to discover the history of our wonderful city, among many other things!

Here are some new things you can see at AMSE, not to mention the wonderfully done Oak Ridge Story Room :

For a real treat for both young and old (don’t let the name fool you), another great rainy day activity is the Childrens Museum of Oak Ridge.  The museum has just recently updated it’s Appalachian Heritage area, and shows a wonderful representation of life in Oak Ridge during the war, among many other fascinating exhibits. Stop in soon to visit  a child-size dollhouse, the Rainforest Room, an impressive display of Model Trains, complete with an outdoor Train Garden and much more.

| August 25th, 2008