Oral History | Uranium Memories Project
October 27, 2025 • 32:06
INTERVIEWER
Megan Vickery
INTERVIEWEE
William Babbel

Megan Vickery 00:03
Okay, now we’re ready, all right. My name is Megan Vickery, it’s October 27, 2025. We’re at the Moab Museum recording this interview and story for the Moab Museum’s Uranium Memories Project. Today, I’m here with Bill Babbel.
Bill Babbel 00:27
Good morning. I’m reading from a script because I don’t have a memory. So my name is William Gordon Babbel, I’m the son of Richard Gordon Babbel, the creator of the Babbel Counter, the first useful, handheld, accurate, lightweight, Geiger counter. Here’s a little history about the amazing man, my father. Going back to the time when my father’s family came to the United States: My grandfather, Richard August Babbel, was born in Eastern Prussia in 1887. He immigrated to the United States and Salt Lake City, Utah with his parents and six brothers and two sisters. I have read that one of the boys stayed in New York, and the rest of them came out West with my grandfather. And all his brothers were tailors, as all clothing was made by hand back then, so there was a lot of tailors around. My father was born January 21, 1915 in Salt Lake, Utah. He was known all his life by Gordon, which is his middle name, because his father was a Richard, and they didn’t want two Richards in the house — it was confusing. And his family called him Gordy. I didn’t learn that until later on, and his brother always addressed him as Gordy, and I found out why that was a family name. He dropped out of school at 15 years old to meet some family requirements to build a homestead in Eastland, Utah. His father wanted to be a farmer, and he drove from Salt Lake to Eastland, Utah with his brother in law on a motorcycle, and I never figured out how they crossed the river. But there were, there were ways, barges and things back then that would have been in the early 1900s.
Bill Babbel 02:42
Eastland, Utah is between Monticello and Dove Creek, Colorado. My dad’s father died in 1932 at the age of 39 from a ruptured appendix. His mother requested an extension from the government to be able to complete the homestead, and she got that extension. And my grandmother, her two sons and daughter, completed the homestead, clearing all the land with no equipment. They received their homestead. My grandmother’s two brothers also homesteaded in the same area, and they were probably helping. The land is still known as the Babbel Homestead. People down there all know where it is, and we’ve been on the property and met the current owners.
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Bill Babbel 03:42
I’ve read stories in the newspaper archives about young Gordon Babbel helping out local homesteaders and farmers repair their machinery while he was living on the homestead. He was a good mechanic at a young age. I have found many stories in the archives that I did not know. My mother as a young girl, wrote a gossip column for the San Juan Register Newspaper, long before she married my father. I understand from relatives that she rode a horse from the homestead area to Monticello to get to a telephone so she could call in her column probably once a week. I have some copies of those columns. There are many in the newspaper archives. My father was married to Bessie Margaret Sly in 1938. They grew up in the same area of Eastland Utah, the Sly family had a homestead on one side of a small Canyon, and the Babbel family had a homestead on the other side of the canyon. That area was called Horse Head Point. The Sly family raised cattle and horses, they called it a ranch. The Babbel family raised beans and wheat, they called it a farm.
Bill Babbel 05:14
There was a lot of demand for uranium in the Moab area. My father and mother moved to Moab in 1939 and he eventually tried a hand at mining and staking claims, but he had no money and no equipment. And I remember hearing one story about sometimes it would take two or three months to fill the truck with ore, so there was no income for two or three months until they could take it to the mill. And then it was a gamble as to what it was worth, but that was the only way you could make a living. He saw some of the miners that had big, heavy Geiger counters, and was told that they were only good to tell you that there was radioactivity in the area, but not where or how much. It was just in the general area, which is useless for a prospector. So he wasn’t satisfied with that, with those Geiger counters. He went to a local radio shop in Moab and asked the owner, Orba Wiggle, if he could teach him electronics. My father had a little bit of ham radio experience from high school, but didn’t really like it [electronics]. He learned all he could from Mr. Wiggle, found some books, studied and eventually built a Geiger counter in a cigar box that was eight inches long, six inches high and two inches deep, and it worked. That Geiger counter weighed three pounds. The existing Geiger counters that were out in the field weighed over 30 pounds.
Bill Babbel 07:08
Then once he developed that first Geiger counter, they went into a mass production type arrangement where my father and Mr. Wiggle started building these Geiger counters in the radio shop in Moab. They were called Babbel Wiggle counters. I recently found out from talking to Orba Wiggle’s son, Jerry. I found his name on the internet, and he lives in Nebraska, and his phone number is on the internet, and I called him. He was 96 years old at the time, probably 98 by now. And he said the real story was they worked in the Wiggle’s basement, not in a radio shop, because there was no radio shop, they owned an appliance store. So, I found out about the radio shop [story], it was from a newspaper, and the newspaper kind of hyped it up a little bit. In 1948, a Life magazine came out talking about the mining in Moab. There was a picture of one of my dad’s friends with one of his Babbel Wiggle counters and that was the national or worldwide debut for the Babbel Wiggle counter. In that magazine they quoted my dad, saying that he had to hire a girl to answer all the mail once that magazine hit the street. At the Legacy Museum, the Atomic [Legacy] Cabin in Grand Junction, there’s an incubator site for businesses on the same compound. One of the owners of one of those businesses has one of the original Babbel Wiggle counters, and they asked him to donate it. He said, “not yet.” He says, “maybe someday, but
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eventually it’ll go to a museum.” My father and his partner, mining partner, Nick Murphy, continued prospecting, trying to make money. Using their new Geiger counter, they were more successful. They discovered Uranium and filed a claim in Seven Mile Canyon, north of Moab, it was called The Seven Mile claim. In 1954, they were sued by a group from out of town, claiming that that was their mine and not my dad’s and Nick Murphy’s. They won that case. They won the challenge and they eventually sold that claim from somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000 a few years later. There’s both records in the newspapers, there’s both numbers, so I don’t know what’s true. There’s some people that said it was over a million dollars, but back then, you didn’t talk about what kind of money you made. Minerals engineering in Grand Junction was at an office in Moab, and they were in the business of buying ore and then reselling to the government. They were like a broker. They started using the Babbel Wiggle Counter to evaluate the ore loads that they were buying, instead of doing a chemical assay, which took a long time and wasn’t real accurate. My father opened a business in 1952 in Grand Junction and started making the Babbel counter. It was no longer Babbel Wiggle Counter. It was the Babbel counter, similar to this one here [refers to counter in front of him]. This is a newer model, but they copied his original model.
Bill Babbel 11:20
He didn’t build Babbel counters for very long, I don’t know why. I was a young man at the time. I didn’t understand why he sold the business. I think he thought that the Uranium boom had peaked and his business would go down. So he wasn’t there very long, and he sold the business, but he did develop it [the counter] to the point where the meter readout would be 98% accurate from what the ore was, which was phenomenal. I mean before it was probably three or 4% accurate.
Bill Babbel 12:05
The Babbel counter was used in all the mills around Monticello, Grand Junction, and Moab to evaluate ore loads, and they’re much more accurate than doing the chemical assays. Around that time, when they started all using a Babbel counter, it’s kind of phenomenal, but Uranium ore in a truck was worth approximately 45 times as much as gold bearing ore in the western United States. Gold had a very low value at the time, and uranium was booming, and all the governments wanted uranium. Foreign countries wanted uranium, so the price was super high for that time. It’s all switched around now, but at the DOE site in Grand Junction where the Atomic Legacy Cabin is, there are test holes back where the mill used to be that you can go in and drop a probe down from your Geiger counter and calibrate your Geiger counter to a number that’s stamped on the brass plate by the hole, those were set in like 1950 by a Babbel counter. And they’re not going to change because uranium has such a long life that the radiation level is going to stay the same for a couple thousand years. So people still go in there. There is mining going on. People go in there to calibrate their Geiger counters.
Bill Babbel 13:54
My dad’s personal Geiger counter and one of his prototypes were donated to this museum, Dan O’Laurie Museum [now known as the Moab Museum], in Moab quite a few years ago. The Babbel Wiggle counter that’s behind me on the wall was actually found in the city dump by a friend of my Aunt Ruth. Ruth Beeson lived here at the time, I came visiting her, and she says, “I’ve got something for you.” And she brought that [Babbel Wiggle counter] out, and she says, “one of my friends found this in the city dump, and he knew it was your dad’s.” There was none of my family left around here, other
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than her side of the family. So the guy brought it to her and then she gave it to me, and I turned it over to Dan O’Laurie. But that was one of the original prototypes, the little silver box up there [referencing the museum wall].
Bill Babbel 15:07
Once my father sold his business, he called it semi-retired. He continued doing projects. At the time, the DOE site in Grand Junction was called the Atomic Energy Commission. Back then, it was a very active site. A lot of government work going on there, and they would have projects and need things built and fabricated and for their government experiments. And any time they couldn’t get it done, they’d call my dad, and he would always do it. He seemed to be the answer man that could fix it when nobody else could.
Bill Babbel 15:57
One time when I came home on leave from the Air Force, he said, “he had a job to look at.” And we went out south of Grand Junction, and there was a large factory there. At the time, there was a uranium mill, active uranium mill processing, and there was a big factory that made steel drums to store the yellow cake that came out of the mills. They had jammed up a big machine that made the lids for the steel drums. That company called, the company that built the machine, and they came in and they couldn’t fix it, so it was jammed, and they had to shut down. I don’t know how or when, but they, they contacted my dad and I happened to come home at that time. We went out there [and] in about a half or [for] about half a day we fixed the machine and got it running again when the guys that built it couldn’t fix it. So he always had a way to fix things.
Bill Babbel 17:10
In the mid 1950s, I’m not sure what year it was, my dad was retired. A group of like minded uranium people formed a group called the Uranium World Tour. That group of men took a trip around the world to every country in the world that mined uranium. They wanted to see how it was done and learn from the other countries. At that time, there’s no digital, so he, he took a lot of pictures, brought back thousands of slides. Quite a few years ago I had those slides digitized, and I made a CD, mainly for my sisters and family. It’s not real entertaining, but it just, it’s just a record of that trip.
Bill Babbel 18:16
Some of this personal things about growing up with my dad was, he wasn’t a real what you call a family man, but probably because he was very busy and he was always working, always thinking of something. But he was a private pilot, and when he still lived here in Moab and was still prospecting he bought a Piper Cub [single engine airplane] for, I think, $250 and he would use that to prospect. And he’d mainly fly out through the canyons around the area. You go down through a canyon, you get to see the strata, the strata of the earth, so you know the layers. He knew what layers uranium was and he would go out and prospect with his plane, his little Piper Cub. And sometimes he’d get out too late, come home in the dark, and he would buzz the town a few times, and all the friends would go out and light up the runway for him, because there’s no lights. The airport was south of town, it was just a dirt strip. They would light up the runway with their cars and trucks so he could land. That airport was kind of like entertainment for a lot of townspeople because the road that run alongside the airport was a lot of ups and downs, like a roller coaster. People would go out there, mainly on Sunday evening and run
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down that road as fast they could, and whoever’s in the back seat is going to fly off the seat when they go over the bumps. It was like a cheap carnival ride for Moab in the 1940s and everybody did it. I mean, it was a common thing to do.
Bill Babbel 20:28
Another story about the way my dad thought and his personality, I guess, is: he was retired, living in Grand Junction, and I was gone. But this was related [relayed] by one of my sisters that lived there, that the newspaper up there, The Daily Sentinel, called him and wanted to do an interview about mine tailings that were being used as landfill in Grand Junction. They were taking all the tailings from the Grand Junction mill and using it for landfill, building subdivisions, they built main street downtown on top of that, those tailings. There was a big to do from the government saying, “that’s radioactive, you can’t do that, so you got to dig all that stuff up.” So it was a very big deal in Grand Junction at the time. It created a lot of money for people and created a lot of crooks. But anyway, they came out to my dad’s house to do an interview. My dad called my sister and says, “I want you to be here to referee. I don’t want to get in trouble.” So my sister went out there [Bill laughs]. The reporter asked him about all this, and he [Bill’s Dad] says, “I really don’t know what the big deal is, it’s free heat.” And that’s the way he thought. In realistically, an honest geologist would tell you, “there’s no threat from those tailings, it has radioactivity, but not enough to do any harm.” But there’s another story in the news, there’s, there’s a really [?] site, a Utah newspaper archive site that has all the newspapers in the state of Utah. I am in that site a lot looking to learn about my family, the stuff that I didn’t know. But there was one story that said that my dad was out of work and found a job as an armed guard at a temporarily closed mine in the area called Dry Valley. They would shut, the miners would shut the mines down when the price of uranium was down. They didn’t want to sell when it was low, so they’d close their mine, wait for the price to go back up. Just like playing the stock market. And he found this job as a guard, an armed guard, out at this mine, and pitched a tent and took his family out there. I don’t think I was born yet. I think I had two older sisters, and I think they were young children at the time, but I don’t, I don’t think I was around. It was before 1943. So he was a guard out there. Then the next day in the archives, the next column down was a story that said that my mother’s dad and mom lived here in Moab. They were the Slys, Ida and Clint Sly. They went out to Dry Valley for Thanksgiving dinner with my dad and mother and kids, and I’m quite sure that grandma and grandpa brought the food, because there probably wasn’t any Thanksgiving food out there at the mine, [because we were] living in a tent. But I could just, I can picture that [Bill laughs], you know, Thanksgiving dinner in a tent at the mine. But I learned also from my Aunt Ruth, that used to live right down the road here, that when things got tough, my dad would always, he was a good mechanic, he’d always go out to the Thompson truck stop. There was a big truck stop out on, it was, it was [interstate] 50 back then, not [interstate] 70, and [my dad would] get a job as a mechanic. The problem was he was highly allergic to all petroleum products, so he would come home from work every day with welts all over his arms and hands, wherever he’d come in contact with gas or oil. But he had to work.
Bill Babbel 24:56
It reminds me of another story that I read in the archives. He was fined by the city of Moab because he was 85 cents delinquent on his water bill. And then the newspaper kept track of everybody’s water bills, and he was fined by the city. I don’t remember what the fine was, but he didn’t have the 85 cents to pay the water bill.
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Bill Babbel 25:32
A few years ago we came down here and I wanted to search for my old childhood friend, [he] was Keith Holyoak. And it’s kind of [a] funny small town, Moab. It’s still a small town, Moab. We went to the newspaper office, because I had some dealings with them before. I asked if they knew where he [Keith Holyoak] lived, and they didn’t. But they says, “go around the block to the post office. They’ll tell you.” I went around the block. The post office gave me his address, his phone number and everything, which they can’t do, but in Moab, they did. So I had his address. So we went down and saw him for a little while, and he told me he still lives in the same house. He says my [Bill’s] old house is still there that I lived in. The street name has changed. When I was a little boy, it was called Shady Lane, and they’ve changed the name. There was a big arroyo down there that they filled.
Bill Babbel 26:41
He told me something I didn’t know. I’ve lost a lot of my memory from heart surgery, but he said that my dad had built a wood jungle gym apparatus in the front yard of our house. He still remembered, he says, “every kid in town came down there to play.” I don’t remember that, something that just didn’t stick in my mind. But this was, would have been around 1950, population was 1300 at the time. So that probably wasn’t a lot of kids, but, but he said all the kids in town would come down there and play on the jungle gym. And that’s about the same time that I learned that I was poor. I was a Cub Scout, we made wood toys at the Scout Masters’. Christmas Eve, we delivered all the wood toys to the poor people in town. They came to my house, and then I found out I was poor.
Bill Babbel 27:57
Last thing I’ve got is kind of a, what I call disputed history. Around 1940, my dad and Nick Murphy, his prospecting partner, were prospecting north of Moab, and they found a big sandstone arch. They’d never seen it before and they asked around. Nobody had never seen it before. My dad, at some time later, called the BLM in Salt Lake. That was the only office in the state, at the time, the only BLM office, and [he] asked if they knew about the arch. And they said, “No, we don’t. We’ve never heard of it.” He gave them the location for it. They came down and marked it. And at the time, they put up a sign that said the arch was discovered by Gordon Babbel and Nick Murphy. They’ve now changed the sign to say that Gordon Babbel and Nick Murphy were near here. They don’t say anything about discovering, they don’t want to, like, let any private citizens lay claim to anything that’s BLM.
Context 29:14
[Bill’s wife, Doris, gestures at him from behind the camera]
Bill Babbel 29:28
Oh, I don’t know if we want to record that or not. Yeah, my dad, my dad, was raised a Mormon. His grandparents were “mormonized,” or whatever you call it, in Prussia, and that’s one of the reasons they came to this country and went right to Salt Lake. They were Mormons. He was raised as a Mormon and living here in Moab he was a Mormon, and going to church and paying his tithings and everything, and it got to where he couldn’t feed his family, but they [the church] kept coming, asking for their money. He didn’t have any money. He was maybe an extremist, but he got in his dump truck, two and a half ton dump truck, drove from Moab to Salt Lake, drove up the steps of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake
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City and the truck stalled about halfway up. He got out and he went in and it happened to be the day of the annual, whatever you call it, leaders meeting. It was the biggest meeting of the year and he walked in and basically cussed them out and told him he can’t pay his tithings, and they should quit trying to starve his family to death. But that was in the paper in Moab and Grand Junction and Salt Lake. And my side, my dad’s side — the Babbel family — was excommunicated from the church. I’ve been told that, I’ve had relatives over the years [tell me], there’s many, many Babbels with all those brothers — I’ve had relatives that I didn’t know call, and they always had to tell me that story, in case I didn’t hear it. That’s about all I got.
Bill Babbel 30:18
I can’t see you Doris
Doris 30:47
Your dad going to the Mormon Tabernacle?
Megan Vickery 31:34
That was lovely. Thank you for sharing.
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