Oral History of Kenneth (Ken) Mayes

ORAL HISTORY OF KENNETH (KEN) MAYES

Interviewed by Keith McDaniel

July 9, 2017

1

MR. MCDANIEL:This is Keith McDaniel, and today is July 9, 2017, and I'm at my studio here in Oak Ridge with Ken Mayes. Ken, thank you for coming by on a Sunday afternoon to talk to me.
MR. MAYES: Thanks for having me over.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure, absolutely. Now, I know you've not been in Oak Ridge a long time, but we'll get to that, and your work at the American Museum of Science and Energy, but just start out with, tell me where you were born and raised, something about your family.
MR. MAYES: I was born in Winchester, Tennessee. Shortly thereafter moved up to the suburbs of Chicago and lived for about five years, and then moved back down to my grandparents' house in Lincoln County, Tennessee, when I was about five.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that West Tennessee?
MR. MAYES: It's Middle Tennessee. It's just north of Huntsville, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, is that right?
MR. MAYES: Just over the state line. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Brush your ... You've got a twig of hair right in the front. There. There we go. There we go.
MR. MAYES: It might fall back down.
MR. MCDANIEL:That's okay. That's all right. Where'd you say it was? I'm sorry. I was just ...
MR. MAYES: Lincoln County. It's just north of Huntsville, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. I understand.
MR. MAYES: Fayetteville is the county seat. I went through school there and graduated from Lincoln County High School in 1987.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, did you? Okay. All right. Did you have brothers or sisters?
MR. MAYES: I was the only child to a single mom.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, really?
MR. MAYES:I lived with my grandparents up until they passed away. We lived in the family house, which was an older house. It did not have indoor plumbing.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. MAYES: It did not, no. There were times where we didn't even have running water. We actually drew water from the well. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow. Wow. Was it just old, or was it out in the country, or both?
MR. MAYES: Well, both.
MR. MCDANIEL:Both? Yeah.
MR. MAYES: It was out in the country and it was old. Probably the back part of the house was more like a log cabin, but they'd kind of built over it again and added on in sections.
MR. MCDANIEL:What did your mother do?
MR. MAYES: My mother worked for Amana in Fayetteville, Tennessee ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, yeah.
MR. MAYES: And so they made air conditioners and refrigerators, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, when you were in high school ... You said you graduated in '87?
MR. MAYES: '87.
MR. MCDANIEL:'87, so you're a child of the '80s ...
MR. MAYES: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:I would imagine.
MR. MAYES: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:What was it like growing up there?
MR. MAYES: Well, I mean, I would think that it would be probably pretty average. I mean, you know, being the son of a single mom would, probably didn't, you know, lower middle class ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, and that probably was not as, I mean, it wasn't uncommon, but it wasn't, you know, the kind of the rule as a lot of times it is now.
MR. MAYES: Sure, probably not as much as it is now ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, yeah.
MR. MAYES: But I think it was a pretty normal childhood. You know, I got a job when I was 16 to kind of help out and pay my own way and buy my own car and so forth.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure, sure.
MR. MAYES: You know, we lived quite a while, there were a few years that we lived in another county, even though I still went to school where I was, where we owned land, just because of the age of the house and family situations where we were invited to live with a relative.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah. Sure, sure. When you were in high school, did you have any career ideas, or ...
MR. MAYES: You know ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Did you know what you'd be interested in?
MR. MAYES: I did ... I probably saw myself as being a teacher ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, really?
MR. MAYES: More than anything. It's kind of funny. As I was growing up, my mom kept this book, and whenever I was young, I actually participated in it, you know, and there were things that you listed like your best friends ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, yeah.
MR. MAYES:…and what it is you want to be, and so, out of those things, as I look back, and this was probably before I was in fifth grade, you know, there were things like scientist, teacher, and be a baseball player.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, okay.
MR. MAYES: Well, it's kind of funny, because I do informal education. I don't necessarily do formal education, but I've done informal education ever since I've gotten out of college. I now work in a science field, at a science museum, and I play barehanded baseball.
MR. MCDANIEL:You do.
MR. MAYES: I play vintage baseball.
MR. MCDANIEL:You play vintage ba- and I want to talk about that here in a little bit.
MR. MAYES: You know, the circle is complete, I guess.
MR. MCDANIEL:I'm glad you brought that up, because I remember, I've seen pictures of you, you know. As a matter of fact, I've seen you in a film, you know?
MR. MAYES: Oh, really?
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, that, I believe it was you, but we'll talk about that later.
MR. MAYES: Sure.
MR. MCDANIEL:You graduated high school, and then what did you do?
MR. MAYES: Well, I had plans of going to college straight out of high school, but circumstances did not work out that way, you know: a car accident, and wound up having to get another car, and didn't feel like I needed to obligate that to my mom.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. MAYES: I wound up working a year.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, did you?
MR. MAYES: That was my goal, was to work a year, and then the next year, so I graduated in '87, in '88 ...
MR. MCDANIEL:What did you do for that year?
MR. MAYES: I worked at a grocery store.
MR. MCDANIEL:Did you?
MR. MAYES: I worked at, it was called Red Foods ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, yeah.
MR. MAYES: It was a Chattanooga chain.
MR. MCDANIEL:I remember Red Food.
MR. MAYES: Later, it was bought out and became BI-LO, but there was ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Then it became Food City or something. I think somebody ...
MR. MAYES: Yeah, I think so. I think so. There was a Red Food store there in Lincoln County, in Fayetteville, and I worked there during high school. When I graduated high school, like I said, my original intent was to go to college. I had everything kind of filled out, and then, you know, financially, it was like, well, this isn't really going to work out.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. MAYES: I decided I would work a year, and I got transferred up to the Shelbyville store as the assistant produce manager.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: I worked for a year, and decided that it was time for me to go to school, and so I moved to Knoxville in the summer of '88.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: This will be an interesting story that you don't know.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay, good.
MR. MAYES: I moved up here by myself, signed up to take two classes on my own ...
MR. MCDANIEL:At UT [University of Tennessee].
MR. MAYES: At UT. On September the 30th of 1988, I went hiking in the Chimneys.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: I was supposed to go with a coworker, and at the last minute, he backed out.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: I said, "Well, I can do this, right?"
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. MAYES: Never been up there before. I went up to the top of the Chimneys, I got up there, and I was like, "Oh, this is beautiful." My hair was a little bit longer back then, and I'm sitting up there, and, you know, and there's a bird flying. It's like that Native American on the cliff top ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, yeah, sure.
MR. MAYES: You know, and the hair, and the wind blowing through his hair. My coworker had told me about an unmarked back trail ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: And I decided, "I can do this," you know? As a matter of fact, on that day, I had planned on making it back in time to pay my rent, because I had my rent in cash in my back pocket, but this was the first time hiking, really, of this sort. Even though I'd grown up in the, you know, kind of in the country, I'd kind of gone out in the woods, but I knew my way home.
MR. MCDANIEL:September 30th, 1988.
MR. MAYES: September 30th, 1988.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: I wound up falling, losing my way, falling off of this kind of embankment, probably about 40 feet. Slid down it, really.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, yeah.
MR. MAYES: Wound up tumbling, hit my femur on something hard, and broke my femur.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. MAYES: This was on a Friday. I laid there Friday and Saturday, and on Sunday, these guys were coming up this back trail, and they heard me yelling for help.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. MAYES: They found me. Yes, and so I laid there for two days ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, man.
MR. MAYES:…before I was found. I spent basically '89 recovering. Wait, let me make sure.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, that would ...
MR. MAYES: Would have been, yeah, that would have been, I think that's right. Then ...
MR. MCDANIEL:That's like that movie 127 Hours, where the guy had to cut off his arm ...
MR. MAYES: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:It wasn't that bad, though.
MR. MAYES: It wasn't that bad, but it came close, because, you know, I broke my right femur, and you know, I thought, "Well, I'll get up," and then you realize you can't move your knee because you don't have any leverage, and so I scooted my way around. I came to another kind of drop-off, and there was a tree going down, and I thought, "Well, I need to get around this tree." I was going to try to get up on it and scoot down the tree. Well, then, as you approach it, excuse me, you have to make the decision, are you going to throw your broken leg over it, or are you going to try to, you know, get enough leverage to throw your good leg over it? I decided that it was probably going to be best if I got up and tried to throw my broken leg over it.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. MAYES: As I got up close to it, my hip fell underneath the tree that I was trying to get on, and then at that point, I was too far under it to get any leverage.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, man.
MR. MAYES: Luckily, that probably saved me. I say that. I only laid up there for two days, but ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. MAYES: That night, as it got cool, I could pull, I pulled off big pieces of bark from that tree and laid over me ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. MAYES: To protect me from the elements.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. MAYES: Then, it was rotten wood, so eventually, it kind of fell apart, but you know, I kind of used that as kind of, you know, I need to pull stuff around and kind of keep myself warm, because it was kind of cool.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, sure.
MR. MAYES: On that Saturday night, it rained on me.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, man.
MR. MAYES: You know, I definitely had a little bit of mild hypothermia whenever they found me on Sunday. The guys thought that I was probably 20 years older than I really was, they said, whenever they found me. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. MAYES: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow.
MR. MAYES: You know, when you're laying up there, there's some crazy things go through your mind.
MR. MCDANIEL:I'm sure.
MR. MAYES: There was that song by The Escape Club called “Wild, Wild West.” For some reason, I just remember that song was going through my mind a lot. I remember thinking of the Flintstones, and you know, and ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Well, I mean, you were probably, you know, you had nerve things going on, you know. You weren't bleeding, though, were you?
MR. MAYES: No, I wasn't bleeding. No, it was ...
MR. MCDANIEL:That's a good thing.
MR. MAYES: It was a clean break, but it did not penetrate the skin.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. How'd they get you down? Did they ...
MR. MAYES: They had to cut a new trail.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, did they really?
MR. MAYES: Yeah. These guys, one of them stayed with me. The other one went down to the park rangers.The park rangers pretty much worked the rest of the day getting me out of the, off the Chimney Top area.
MR. MCDANIEL:Now, how far was it from where you could get into a vehicle?
MR. MAYES: You know, it was a long way. I don't know for sure, but it was a long way.
MR. MCDANIEL:Several miles?
MR. MAYES: Several miles, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, wow.
MR. MAYES: Yeah, yeah, because I wasn't probably, you know, too far from the top. I was probably maybe halfway down the mountain ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay. Yeah.
MR. MAYES: But you know, there's not a lot of roads going through there, either.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, sure, sure.
MR. MAYES: Then I got to do LIFESTAR.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, did you?
MR. MAYES: Yeah, yeah. They got me down, took me into Gatlinburg, Sevierville Pigeon Forge area. Got to do LIFESTAR back up to UT Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow. You said it took you, how long did it take you to recover?
MR. MAYES: I was in the hospital for about a week. They wanted to build me back up before they did surgery. They did surgery. They put a rod in my leg. My right lung was something like 20% collapsed, so they put a tube in it to kind of get the fluid around it so it could build back up. I spent the next year working. Well, I took about three months off to recover from the broken leg, but then 1989, I spent recovering. During that time period, I decided I would enlist in the Army ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: But I had to have the rod removed before I could go in the Army, so I went back in and had surgery sometime later that year, and then in 1990, the beginning of 1990, I went into the military.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, is that right?
MR. MAYES: Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow.
MR. MAYES: I spent four years in the Army, stationed up at Fort Drum, New York.
MR. MCDANIEL:What did you do?
MR. MAYES: I was an 11 Charlie, which was a mortar man.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh.
MR. MAYES: We were light infantry, so we carried a 60 millimeter mortar.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, really?
MR. MAYES: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow.
MR. MAYES: I carried backpacks probably, I'm a little guy, so I carried backpacks that weigh probably as much as I do.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh my goodness. Wow. Goodness gracious.
MR. MAYES: Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL:When you got out of the service, did you know what you wanted to do?
MR. MAYES: I still didn't, but I knew that college, you know, one of the reasons why I went in the military was because ...
MR. MCDANIEL:You could get college paid for.
MR. MAYES: Right, right. I picked the MOS [Military Occupational Specialty], the job that would give me the most money for college, and so that's why I was 11 Charlie.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. MAYES: When I got out, I had the Army College Fund, plus there was a ... I'm trying to remember. There was another bonus program that was involved with it.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. MAYES: I decided I was going to come back to Knoxville and go to school. I had met my first wife while I was in the military.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. MAYES: We got married and had a little child while we were up in Fort Drum, New York.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: Moved to Knoxville, she got a job at US Cellular, and I spent my first semester at Pellissippi, my first two years at Pellissippi going to school.
MR. MCDANIEL:Did you?
MR. MAYES: Two years later, went to UT. Graduated with a bachelor of science in biology, with a minor in botany.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. MAYES: During that time period, I wound up, my first semester, I worked at the UT Planet and Solar Science Division, and then the next summer, I got a job at a summer camp.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: It was Tate's, Tate's Day Camp, located in west Knoxville, just off Cedar Bluff.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure.
MR. MAYES: There's a private school, too, Tate's School of Discovery.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right, right.
MR. MAYES: I wound up working there every summer since, while I was in college, and then whenever I graduated college.One of their directors had decided that he was, got a calling to go into ministry, and was going to go to school for that.So that left a job opening, and they offered me a position.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. MAYES: I worked in informal education, as I said before, from then until 2004.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right? Wow, so you worked at Tate's.
MR. MAYES: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL:Now, how many students did they have, and what age were they?
MR. MAYES: They had a preschool program, and went up through fifth grade.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. MAYES: Actually, it just started the fifth grade while I was there. They originally only went up to fourth, but added the fifth grade while I was there. During the school year, I did the after school program, and then in the summer, I was the assistant program, the assistant manager for the older kids.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, the older kids.
MR. MAYES: Yeah. With the older kids, they went all the way up through 13.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh.
MR. MAYES: Actually, they went, they had a CIT [Counselor in Training] program as well that would actually lead you right into getting employed whenever you're 16.