Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Harry Boston and I believe anything is possible.
Welcome to Anything is Possible. I'm Hal Oren Hilton Hill.
It is such an honor to be with you again.
These are great stories about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.
I've been doing this show for quite a while and what I love is just sitting in front of great people and learning.
I have never been let down when somebody says to me, you got to meet, dot, dot, dot.
For the last several years, all sorts of people have been saying, have you met Harry Boston?
I'm like, I think I've come a...you got to meet Harry Boston.
This came to me over and over again and then we were at an event and our dear friend Stephen Davis said, wait a minute, you got to...
here he is and connected us and so I am so happy to have you here today.
Well, I feel exactly the same way. So it was so nice meeting you finally and it should be fun.
Harry, where'd you grow up?
I was born in Brooklyn, New York and then grew up largely on Long Island.
What was that like?
Interesting. It was interesting times.
There was a real change from being in the city in nice part of Brooklyn but then going out to Long Island and being in a mostly white town
and dealing with that growing up back in the 60s.
Tell me about your parents and what took you to Long Island?
Yeah, my father was a dentist. Mother was primarily a homemaker.
So my father, let's see, he was born in South Carolina and got himself through Howard
and so he graduated from Howard in the 40s and started his dental practice not long after.
What did he run into?
Well, probably everything.
Moving into Long Island because that was a...
Yeah, it probably was a lot more before that but moving to Long Island was an interesting place.
It was a nice community. Of course, there was racism, there were petitions.
We don't want these folks in this community and this and that.
And I always tell people, light-skinned as I am, when you're the only one, you get to experience firsthand what it's like.
So I've been there and experienced it.
Is it kind of like light-skinned, black, if you're the only black, you're as dark as the time is going to be?
You're as dark as they know. That's right.
You're 100% right. Yeah, that's it.
I didn't get to deal with it but it's interesting.
It just made it part of an interesting journey.
So you're growing up in Long Island. Where'd you go to school?
A place called Siocet, little town on Long Island.
What kind of student were you?
Oh, I should tell you. I was a terrible student.
I was, you know, he had my father who graduated top of the class at Howard University.
He put himself, my grandfather was a dentist.
Oh, really?
He graduated from Mahari in 1909.
So yeah, right, right.
So I come from a line of distinguished, no, I was not distinguished.
I was distinguishable, indistinguishable.
But I had no idea what I wanted to do.
So you hadn't imagined the possibility?
No, not at all.
Not at all.
Matter of fact, I went to, when I interviewed for college, I talked to this dean and he said,
what do you want to do? I said, I want to be a wildlife biologist.
And he said, okay, he said, well, tell me, did you grow up in the country?
I said, no, not really, no.
Well, do you hike and camp a lot?
No.
Why do you want to be a wildlife biologist, son?
I said, I like to watch those wild kingdom type shows.
You got guys in khaki clothes and jeeps and nobody I knew
wrote around the jeep and khaki clothes.
And it was like, okay, I can do this.
Now, it turns out I never took a class in wildlife biology.
But it was that crazy.
It's just my whole life has been sort of that crazy.
You know, I was going to say, I've been a teacher and a scientist and a manager.
I've been an executive with the government.
I've been an executive with industry.
Started my own company.
And who would have guessed?
You know, who would have guessed?
It was no plan.
It was just taking advantage of opportunities that were in front of me.
You know, some kids know exactly what they want.
I just, when I came to Forks and the Road, I took them.
So what did you land on in college?
Oh, good, good.
I ended up getting interested in water chemistry.
So I really became somewhat of a water chemist.
What did you say, water chemist?
I have a degree in plant physiology.
But what I came down here in 1985 to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
as a biogeochemist, which no one knows what that means.
We're studying acid rain.
So as the acid rain falls on the ground, chemistry changes as it goes into streams and rivers.
And that changes the impact it has on the environment.
So I was studying the movement of materials through the environment
and how aquatic systems affect water quality and affect the aquatic life.
And then when the Department of Energy got interested in cleaning up the Oak Ridge site
and chasing radio nuclides, I remember they asked me, you know,
I gotta stop you right here.
You know I'm gonna stop you right here.
That's okay.
Let me tell you why.
Yeah.
Your cover is blown.
What is that?
All shucks.
I'm not the smart one in the family.
No, I'm not.
Dude, are you listening to yourself right now?
No, it's just all by happenstance.
All by happenstance.
You don't become this kind of a brain by happenstance.
But I'll let you continue the story.
No, I am fortunate.
Your water, your water, water chemist.
Water chemist.
You're at Oak Ridge.
You're studying acid rain.
I'll let you pick up.
I just want you to know, my dear friend, your cover is blown.
We're gonna challenge you before we're done.
I have had the fortune of working with brilliant people.
I'm a good integrator.
I'm good at bringing things together and bringing people together and developing solutions.
I think that's really been my talent.
But to get back to our story, some were chasing materials through the environment, aluminum
and things that affected aquatic life.
And they asked me, could I help them find where the radionuclides were coming?
The radioactive contamination.
What is a radionuclide?
Radioactive elements.
When we talk about the radioactive materials having to do with like strontium 90 or CZ
and 137, so they're elements that are not stable, elements that decay and give off materials,
either give off radiation or particles that could concern us, that could be health problems.
And that's why we're concerned with radioactive waste and radioactive contamination.
And so they asked me, could I chase these things and find them in the environment and
help them cut them off?
I said, yes, easy to find them because they're radioactive.
It's a lot easier to find them.
So we did that for a while and ended up running the cleanup program for the Oak Ridge National
Lab, which is different because I went down there as a basic scientist.
I was doing basic research.
Now all of a sudden I'm running cleanup and we're digging things up, building buildings,
doing all sorts of interesting stuff.
And the next thing I know, I'm building projects and running big sites for Lockheed Martin.
And I ended up with the Department of Energy, which was exciting.
And ran one of their biggest sites.
What is that hand for?
Possibility powered by Covenant Health, Home Federal, and the Knoxville News Sentinel.
What is Hanford?
Hanford is one of the original Manhattan Project sites.
So everybody's seen the Oppenheimer movie and all now.
So back in the 40s, as part of America's making of the atomic bomb, they founded three sites,
Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford.
And Hanford had a bunch of reactors along the Columbia River that produced plutonium
for the second bomb.
Now all these years later, making all that plutonium for the weapons programs, there's
a lot of nasty stuff out there.
And I went out there with the goal of let's clean up this stuff so we can protect the
Columbia River and protect the people out there.
And it's a tremendous challenge.
Take me into the world of that kind of engineering because if I were assigned that kind of project,
I wouldn't know how to even begin to approach it.
So you approach it humbly.
It takes a whole family.
It takes like a village of scientists and engineers to figure out these problems.
How did we get here?
What happened?
What were the processes that created these materials?
What are they and where are they?
How do they move?
And if we want to extract them or get them in a position where we can treat them, mobilize
them, and dispose of them so they're safe, then what do you have to do?
To do that.
What did you have to do?
Well, we brought a couple of great companies together, big engineering firms that understood
how to build facilities that could have mobilized those materials.
And that project is still going on and will go on for some time.
But some of the near term things were just dealing with tanks that had so much radioactivity
in them they were boiling.
There was so much heat being given off the tanks for boiling.
And so we had to dilute those so they wouldn't boil any longer.
So plutonium is what you were dealing with though?
Yes.
Some plutonium, but a lot of the byproducts of plutonium production.
The way they make plutonium, this is fascinating, is they take uranium and enrich it and run
it through a nuclear reactor and actually turn it into plutonium.
And as you do that, your uranium splitting and you're creating all sorts of strontium
and cesium and cobalt, what they call fission products, and those are the highly radioactive
things that give off all this heat.
How do you neutralize those things?
Well, the thing is to keep them from moving.
And so there's different ways of using cement type material.
And our mission was to get that waste out of those tanks and turn it into glass so it
wouldn't go anywhere because glass lasts about as long as anything.
So the idea was to build a big glass plant and turn these materials into glass so they
could not move and could not get into a river.
That is fascinating.
So we were going to build the largest glass plant or radiochemical processing plant in
the world.
And it just took all sorts of scientists, engineers, folks working together to understand
environmental folks, working with the communities so that the native tribes out there and the
local communities, even in a tri-state area, people understood the problem at least as
well as we did, understood what we were going to try to do about it and could be part of
it.
How long were you at Hanford?
I was about six years.
Six years, yeah.
What came after?
Okay, after that I went into industry because I thought, yeah, in the government, there's
changes in administration and especially if you're in those leadership roles, they decide,
well, we need something different.
So I wasn't looking for a job when I found that one.
So off I went on another fork and I said, I'm going to go work for some big firms like
Jacobs and Shaw and run their DOE business, run all their projects with the Department
of Energy DOE around the country.
So I had offices all over the country and I'd fly around working on projects, hiring
people, solving problems.
And it was fun.
It was different.
It wasn't quite what I expected it to be.
And so in 2007 I was working for Shaw and at the time Shaw, they bought part of Westinghouse.
Everybody remembers Westinghouse Nuclear and they said, we're going to change what we do,
Harry.
So do you want to do job A or would you like a buyout to go do something else?
Again, a fork in the road.
I said, well, yeah, I'm going to try something else for a while.
So I took a buyout and I thought I was going to go work for another big engineering firm.
And instead I started consulting.
I found people that were interested in things I could help with.
Like, how do I build a strategic plan for this business?
How do I learn how to work with government agencies?
Or just better, how do I improve the performance of my business?
And I started consulting and I said, hey, I can make a living doing this.
I'm making good money and I don't have to get on a plane every Monday.
And I had kids that were in middle school getting ready for high school.
And they said, I can be here, I can be here for every soccer game and every football game.
And so in 2007, I bought an old farmhouse on the Clinch River and Boston Government Services
was born.
So I was crazy.
I had to be out of my mind to think I'm just going to at 50 or so years old, I'm going
to start some business and take all the family money, put their college money aside, but
everything else went in there and rolled the dice and we're going to grow a business and
make a living doing this.
And you did.
It worked out.
See, it just goes to show it's better to be lucky than good, that's what they say.
I'm amazed at, I don't know another way to frame it other than to call it faith, because
if there's a fork in the road and you take it, you have to believe in adventure or you
have to believe that, okay, let's see where this goes.
There's not a sense of dread, but a sense of adventure.
Little of both, some sense of dread, but a sense of, you know, this is an opportunity
and I think I can do this.
Who taught you to be that way?
I wish I could tell you.
I think I always attribute it to bad judgment, but just that idea that, trust me, I'm not
super confident by any means.
I don't mind climbing mountains or jumping out of planes or doing things.
But would you explain, your life has been on paper, right?
I understand this success is a very subjective thing.
But on paper, as the old folks down south would say, you've done good.
I've had a lot of fun.
I've been lucky.
I've had a lot of help.
I've had good mentors and friends.
But again, you find that you learn as much as you can.
Work hard.
Because I always tell people when they say, how did you get this down to that time?
You can't be the fastest or the smartest or the prettiest, but you can outwork them.
And if you get focused on what you want to do and work hard and get help from your friends
and have some faith, more often than not, it's worked out well.
Does success have a code?
I think some aspects.
I mean, there's a lot of position and luck.
And some people are just smart.
And they have brilliant ideas.
And that carries them a long way.
But most of us, it's mostly hard work.
And it's a matter of thinking about what you're doing, looking around who else has been successful.
What are the rules of engagement?
What does it take to be successful in this environment?
What am I going to do that's going to separate what we're doing from everybody else that
allows us to add value?
And for me, some of the code in building an engineering firm started with, I want to
have the best people.
Because I like to work with smart people.
I've worked with really, really smart people.
A lot of folks will tell you, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the
wrong room.
You've got to get in another room with us.
And I've always felt like that, that there's brilliant people.
And I want to work with them because it's exciting.
But together, we can come up with solutions.
We can solve problems.
We can do things to make a difference.
And then, with good people, we want to work on problems that are important.
We want to work on things that are of national significance.
So the company was involved with medical isotopes.
The company's involved with next generation nuclear reactors.
But we're involved with alternative energy, with wind, with solar, hydrogen, electric
vehicles.
We're involved with cybersecurity so we can protect our assets.
And getting to learn about those things is a thrill.
We've had ridiculously great opportunities.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory called us years ago and they said, we want a 3D print
and nuclear reactor and we want you guys to help.
It's great over cocktails to talk about.
We did.
And we did.
And it was a thrill, though.
And that's what it was about, having the kind of people and the focus to be, trusted to
be involved in those kind of things.
We got called by NASA about a year or so ago.
And they're not calling Harry.
They're calling our top people that they know.
And they say, well, we're going back to the moon.
We're planning on getting back to the moon.
And they said, we're going to have a moon base.
I'm loving it.
Of course, I grew up in the 60s, so I'm thinking we're 20 years too late.
But nonetheless, we're going to have a moon base.
And they said, and we're not going to power that moon base with a coal plant.
They're going to want a small module reactor.
Can you help us with a small module reactor for the moon?
And I'm like, my guys came in to tell me this because they're all excited.
I'm like, oh, my word.
I said, yeah, we're going to do it.
And so we're getting engaged in those kind of things.
But again, great people.
Solve problems.
Make a difference for clients on things that matter.
That's such fun.
That is such fun.
Your cover is so blown.
It's fun.
I would not play bitwisk with you at all.
I'm not doing it because that's amazing.
But I don't do anything.
What you're saying is it's Wednesday.
They ask you to help build a nuclear reactor on the moon.
Right, right, right.
I know.
That's not just...
They didn't ask Harry.
They asked the smart people that work with Boston Company Services to do it.
They don't want me anywhere near.
I'm listening at you kind of speed through your story as if it's not that significant.
It's amazing.
Well, it goes fast.
It's just you're just one foot in front of the other.
It's like crossing a river, rock to rock.
Get that next rock before your foot comes down.
That's what it has been like.
Just grow the company, build it.
Where do we want to go next?
Why can't we do that?
What's fun?
Why can't we do that?
I like that question.
I love that question.
But I think there's something else that when we were having lunch that really stood out
to me is your passion to help small businesses and people see and see expanded possibility.
Thank you.
When did that come up for you?
Where you wanted to give back?
Well, I think both my parents were like that.
They both grew up during the Depression.
They were old and my father was born in 1915 and my mother in 1923.
So we always had family in the house, like most people down here particularly.
We always had family in the house, but it was just part of who we were.
And as I've had opportunities, especially as the business has matured and I'm getting
to catch a little bit of breath, I'm getting ready for my second act, giving back and helping
is such a big deal.
So there's so many things we can do.
This region with the national laboratories and TVA and a great university and all the
good people here, there's no reason we can't have a high-tech regional economy like Silicon
Valley or Research Triangle Park.
And when you do that, it's not just for scientists and PhDs and engineers.
Everybody's salary goes up.
It rises the level for everybody.
Because if you go to those places, they're taking kids that could work in McDonald's,
and instead they're training them how to work in a clean room, in a clean lab, or how to
do a bioassay.
And after six months in community college, they can walk into a $60,000, $70,000 a year
career because nothing's stopping them from going to get a PhD, but it's a real-life job
with benefits.
And I think if we work together here, and that's all it takes is everybody working together
and saying we can build that here.
We have all the right stuff.
We can build a regional economy that everybody can participate in.
And I love that.
So I'm happy to work with small businesses.
I work with the Knoxville Entrepreneur's Center.
I work with Knoxville Area Urban League and with a bunch of other groups.
And how can we help folks get ready to take advantage of everything this area has to offer?
And I think we need to all come together, get Centro, Espano in there, they're a great
group, and get the UT Apex program now together, and say, how do we get mom and pops?
It's not just the entrepreneurial side.
I'm big on the high-tech entrepreneurial side.
We could talk about that, Market Square, Ventures, and all sorts of good things.
But the mom and pops that are trying to get over the hump and start a business, and you
ask them, well, do you have a checking account?
Well, no.
And what is your bookkeeping system?
Well, I got these shoeboxes.
We can help with that.
We can help with that and get them where they're getting ready to, where they can get a loan.
Because there are programs that alone money to small businesses, and where they can get
some mentoring, like 100 Knoxville.
I bet you've talked to folks from 100 Knoxville down at Knoxville Entrepreneur's Center.
And there are things like that we can do.
The guys at SEED, oh, my word, standing JD at SEED program, introducing kids to the whole
green economy, building energy-efficient housing.
I'm sorry, I'm talking too much.
No, no, no, no.
I love this stuff.
I'm sitting here thinking about how I would tag this.
This is how I tag.
I'm Harry Boston, and I approve this.
No, I'm having a time of my life.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You know what, Harry?
I gotta tell you this.
I really am inspired by you and your optimism.
Oh, yeah, I'm optimistic, yeah.
And your forward motion.
The fact that when you see a fork in the road, you take it, and the way your life has unfolded
and evolved, I think it's really inspiring.
And it's proof that anything is possible.
Thank you for being with us today.
Thank you so much.