Writer, editor to speak on ‘Unsung Heroes in Early Oak Ridge History’

Carolyn Krause

Oak Ridge resident Carolyn Krause will present a talk titled, “Unsung Heroes in Early Oak Ridge” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 24, at the Oak Ridge History Museum.

The program is free and open to the public.

The story will include discussion of Al Nier; Virginia Coleman; Stanley Thompson, Glenn Seaborg’s most valuable colleague; J. Robert Oppenheimer; and George Koval, a Soviet spy.

Al Nier with mass spectrometer artifacts.

Krause, a magazine editor and science writer retired for 11 years from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, spends part of her time writing articles as a volunteer journalist for The Oak Ridger, where she worked as a science reporter from 1970 to 1975. She writes about people involved in science, technology, Oak Ridge history and social justice issues. She contributes to D. Ray Smith’s “Historically Speaking” column in the newspaper and does publicity for several organizations and her church. For 25 years she was editor of the award-winning ORNL Review research magazine aimed at a lay readership for which she wrote many articles based on interviews.

On the test ground for the atomic bomb near Almagordo, N.M., Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, University of California physicist, smokes his pipe as he contemplates the site on Sept. 9, 1945.

A fellow of the international Society for Technical Communication, she served as president of STC’s East Tennessee Chapter for a year. She is currently a member of the boards of Friends of ORNL (FORNL) and of the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning (ORICL).

A native of Pittsburgh, Pa., Krause holds a B.A. degree in English from the College of Wooster, an M.A.T. degree from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.S.J. degree from the Medill School of Journalism of Northwestern University. She previously spoke to the Oak Ridge Heritage & Preservation Association on Oak Ridge’s historic mercury contamination problem and the responses of local researchers and others as they sought to understand and deal with it. She and her husband Herb, a retired atomic physicist from ORNL and president of FORNL, have two grown children and two grandchildren.

The Oak Ridge History Museum is at 102 Robertsville Road in Oak Ridge, the former Wildcat Den.

A tour bus stops at the Oak Ridge History Museum.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Unsung Heroes in Early Oak Ridge History by Carolyn Krause