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60th Anniversary
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| Ted Robinson's 52-Plus Years at Y-12 Sets Record for Service |
Elvis was just a teenager, Hank Williams was still three years away from that long ride to Canton and no one had even heard of "reality television" when Ted Robinson came to work at Y-12.
 With fifty-two and one-half years under his belt and still going strong, Robinson holds the distinction of having the most years of company service at Y-12 for an active employee. In fact, Robinson holds the record for the most number of years by an employee at Y-12. In a kind of roundabout way, he's actually been at Y-12 since 1943, but time in the United States Marines and the United States Army and three colleges, meant that he did not come to Y-12 full-time until 1950.
Y-12 was not at its peak when Robinson punched the clocked for the first time. With the war over and the plant's original uranium enrichment mission ended, employment had fallen to about 1,500. His parents worked at Y-12, his mother was a doctor in the dispensary, and his father worked in the plant as a department head during the start-up of Alpha Buildings 1, 2 and 3, prior to being assigned to the plant manager's staff. With both his parents working at Y-12, he said, "one of the first things I had to learn was to be myself. Both my parents were highly regarded, so I thought I had to make my own reputation-and I did. I was lucky enough to learn, with some good advice from Roy Williams, who was assistant plant manager, that I had something to contribute, and I believe I still can contribute." "One of the things working at Y-12 has taught me is that you have to be able to adapt to new things. College is where you go to learn how to learn-to find out where to go look for things," Robinson said. During his years at Y-12, Robinson has worked on a number of processes, some of them totally new when they were introduced. Today he works in Dimensional Metrology as part of the Quality Assurance organization. Technology at the plant today, he said, is so much beyond what it was in the early years. "Technology has fostered many of the changes at Y-12. But you still have to want to know things. You still have think. And one of the things you have to think about is change. You have to be ready for it and accept it-even if you've fought it for years." Even though he has more than five decades of coming through the portals of the site every day to his credit, and eight grandchildren and six great grandchildren dropping by his home in Oak Ridge, Robinson, said he's not ready for retirement just yet. "I have friends that are retired from ORNL and K-25 and Y-12, and they all tell me that I should not retire until my mind is ready to retire. They say you have to get your mind right. Well, my mind is not ready to do that yet." |
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