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TK: Can you give us a verbal picture of the work environment of the commission office that you were at?

AM: Well, we were in the New Executive Office Building on the ground floor and it was built, I think roughly, in President Kennedy's time. And it's very high ceiling, modern, so it's not ornate, but still kind of grand. And really maybe a little more grand than made sense for the way we had to use it because we really, we had a lot of people in what, in floor space was comparatively modest amount of space, but with these enormously high ceilings, so... (...) the area (had) I would say, probably twice the number of desks it was ever designed to have and you know, most people were in double offices that had probably been originally planned as single offices. So there was a kind of beehive feeling to it. And that was true through most of the time and there was a kind of an electricity of, you know, a lot of activity going on. That I think was true throughout the time. After we issued the reports, there was a period toward the end where everything was a lot quieter, but, particularly until we got the major report done and back from the printer and off to (...) the hands of Congress in very early 1983. I think a beehive is not a bad description of what it was like working there. For instance, I honestly doubt that with a lot of the paper that we got from the archives that we really had a first-class filing system until very far along in this. [Laughs] I mean, things don't come in an orderly fashion, two or three people were all trying to read them at the same time. And luckily I think we, we didn't lose anything, we kept control of it. But there's this sense, that you know, there were boxes in the corner that you had to get through fast and you weren't sure what was there, and you weren't sure quite who read them, by the time another three or four days had gone by, there were usually quite a lot of people who knew what had just come in through the door.

TK: I know a number of staff fluctuated during the years. What was it, about the core number, approximately, of people who actually did most of the work in this?

AM: Well, if, if we count the support staff who were really very important, I think we were in the, probably in the twelve to fifteen range through most of the time. I think that's about right.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.