Passing Through a Century: John Keller

By Tom Beales

It’s a beautiful day in Lafayette as I drive to interview LBNL’s oldest retiree. I drive past his house and as I make a U-turn, I encounter a neighbor cutting flowers in front of her house. I roll down my window and ask where John Keller lives. I explain I am here to interview him and that I worked with him at the Lab. This seems to overcome her initial suspicion and she engages me in conversation about the Lab and John. She tells me about the big celebration a couple of weeks ago for John’s 100th birthday and directs me to the barn-red house down the block.
I am greeted by John’s caregiver who escorts me to the living room. I immediately recognize John as someone I used to see around the Lab when I worked in Bldg 7. We chat about how he thinks he recognizes me and how he worked in nearby Bldg. 14.

John is sitting in his recliner, sharply dressed and alert. I can see that here is an individual that still has all his facilities and that we are in for a lively interview. His eyes light up as he recites his tales and answers my questions. We start by looking over some of the mementos and recognitions he received for his birthday that are laid out on the dining room table. There’s one from George and Laura Bush, Governor Schwarzenegger, a County Supervisor, a proclamation from the City of Lafayette, and numerous other tributes.

The Lafayette proclamation gives me some of the facts with which I wanted to start the interview. He was born April 2, 1908 in Petaluma California and lived there until he was four years old. The family moved to Ukiah where he went to school through the seventh grade, then back to Petaluma for a year and then to San Francisco where he graduated from Polytechnic High School. He continued studies in electronics with help from Dr. Reukama of U. C. Berkeley and worked in the family business of Madden and Keller selling radios and doing radio repair.

He married “the apple of his eye”, his childhood sweetheart, Laura, and they had a son Edward John. When the Second World War came along the business had to sell out because all the young men who worked there went off to the war. He went into the Citizens Signal Corps as a Radio Engineer. His job entailed taking care of the radar systems up and down the west coast that were used for spotting approaching ships. He traveled from San Diego, to Los Angeles harbor, Montaro, the S. F. Presidio, and up the coast to Portland and Seattle servicing the radar units. One time he had to climb a 100 foot high tower to diagnose why the radar screen showed two blips even though there was only one ship. It turned out that the Signal Corps had installed a new type of Navy antenna but it didn’t work as well as the old design so he recommended they go back to the old version.

During this time, John taught courses to military personnel on basic electronics and radar. At several points he himself was taking classes from local professors so he could keep a week ahead of the class discussions. The courses lasted three months and were taught in two sessions from 6:00 AM till 6:00 PM.

The first radars were huge 600 MC systems but they were replaced by much more compact 25,000 MC systems as time went on. They were part of the IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) system used to track ships in the area. A signal would be sent to the ship and the ship returned a secret code to identify itself. He wrote field instructions and training courses on how to operate and maintain the systems. After the war he taught at the Western College of Radar in San Francisco, and at night at what was then San Francisco Junior College.

In 1950, a friend suggested he apply for a job at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. He applied, was accepted and was assigned to work under Hilmer Larson for a six month trial period. Needless to say, he proved himself in short order. He demonstrated his skills by taking an inoperative $4,000 leak detector, and showed that by replacing resistors that had changed in value due to age with new Erie resistors, he could make the unit work again. He continued to work in what was then called the Instrument Shop under Hilmer Larson who was head of all electronic maintenance. When Hilmar retired, John became head of the shop with a crew of ten individuals, including Don Low and Dick Johnson.

John was friendly and well-liked by everyone. He had a reputation for fixing anything. John tells many stories about how he solved unusual problems for Lab personnel. Dr. Sahduce was building a magnet for a cyclotron that was to be sent to Japan but was getting strange signals on his oscilloscope. John discovered that when the door to the building was opened, the wind blew some wires in range of the magnet causing spurious signals. Another time he was called by Lawrence’s secretary to come quickly to fix the office TV set so Lawrence could watch an important program. When John examined the set, he “fixed” the problem by just flipping the switch between the phonograph and TV settings.

Lawrence would come by the shops and talk to the employees about what they were doing and to keep in touch. One time John watched as Lawrence went to Building 6 to get some heavy water from the tank located there. As Lawrence walked past two employees who had been standing around talking for a long time he asked “does it take two of you to get your work done?” One individual replied (obviously not recognizing Lawrence) “it sure as hell doesn’t take three”. The next day the two didn’t work at the Lab any longer.

When I asked him what his happiest recollections from the Lab were he said he enjoyed every minute he had up there. He even enjoyed dealing with the graduate students who often did not know what exactly what they wanted him to build for them.

John had moved to Lafayette in 1953, and after he retired in 1972, he and his wife settled into enjoying their home more fully. They were both avid gardeners. Laura raised beautiful flowers and John took care of the corn, squash, and other vegetables. They had many fruit trees in their yard and enjoyed the bounty. They periodically went to their 280 acre ranch east of Laytonville where John built a cabin. He enjoyed hunting in the area and he and Laura worked to help establish the Mendocino County museum. It has a working steam engine that runs around a loop in Willits, through the Skunk train station and back to the museum roundhouse.

John has authored and published several books and booklets relating to the Mendocino area. One of his first, published in 1979 (295 pages), “Anna Morrison Reed, 1849 – 1921” chronicles his maternal grandmother who edited three newspapers in Mendocino county, a very unusual job for a woman in those times. A more recent book was the 100 page paperback (2002) “As I Remember Ukiah (History, Stories and Memories)”. It contains stories, detailed descriptions and floor plans of many of the historic buildings in the area. With some help from his grand nephew Ted Hittell, he learned how to operate a personal computer and continues to use it to this day to record his memoirs.

When asked what he attributes his longevity to, he smiles and replies “a little bit of wine before dinner doesn’t hurt you”. I invited John to be our honored guest at the next EX-Ls luncheon meeting, with Ted doing the driving. With a little luck we’ll see him there on May 15, 2008.