Return to Love Canal

A new PBS doc updates a story I first covered 46 years ago. Plus: Nick Drake previews tonight's "Pink Moon."

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books (see link) and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre” which are still up at PBS.org. Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free

A new PBS “American Experience” doc on Love Canal debuted last night, and you can watch it via You Tube above. It’s titled “Poisoned Ground” but it’s literally a “Return to Love Canal,” the title, you’ll recall, of the play written by the Bill Murray character in “Tootsie.” This is no laughing matter, however, especially for yours truly. I was among the first to cover the chemical disaster nationally back in 1978--it took place in Niagara Falls, my hometown--and first to fully profile heroine Lois Gibbs.

In fact, half of my first book in 1981 on whistleblowers, “Truth or Consequences,” profiled at length three Love Canal figures: Gibbs (activist “housewife”), Michael Bayless (who worked for the main perp, Hooker—later Occidental—Chemical), and Hugh B. Kaufman (an Environmental Protection Agency gadfly in Washington, D.C.).

The book drew wide acclaim, leading to the thrill of getting interviewed by Studs Terkel in Chicago,. It even inspired a press party in a House committee room co-hosted by Sen. Patrick Leahy and young Rep. Albert Gore. I had interviewed Al because he had taken the lead on probing toxic dump sites. Here’s an excerpt from a Washington Post piece on the party:

Steve Boyan from the Washington Ethical Society, one of the panelists at the pre-reception program, said the book is about whistleblowers who "committed truth."

"These seven people saw things that were not going right and decided to speak," said Rep. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.).

Mitchell quoted Mark Twain and a Japanese proverb and let the whistleblowers tell their stories.

"We were average citizens standing up to do what we had to do," said Lois Gibbs, one of the unsilenced seven who was written about for her activist work at the contaminated Love Canal. "Sure, I gave three years of my life, my marriage, took lots of harassment; but it was well worth it."

Others among the seven at the reception -- Hugh Kaufman, Maude DeVictor and Ron Donell -- agreed on the value of their causes and gave brief descriptions of their crusades.

DeVictor, according to the book, "uncovered the possible far-reaching effects of the herbicide Agent Orange on American G.I.'s." Said DeVictor, who works with the Veterans Administration hospitals, "When one has a vision to see the omen, one has a duty to foretell."

Trivial, but for some reason I recall being struck by Rep. Gore dressed in a sharp, dark suit— set off by grey Hush Puppies.

Anyway, back to Love Canal.

I first heard about the human crisis there when The New York Times started covering it in a series of articles. They were inspired (of course) by a local reporter’s investigations, in this case by Michael Brown, at my old newspaper, the Niagara Gazette (I worked there two summers during college). Hooker and other local chemical juggernauts had dumped tens of thousands of barrels of chemicals, many of them cancer-causing, in an abandoned canal on the outskirts of town built by a man named Love.

Then they threw some dirt on it, planted grass and enabled developers to build hundreds of homes nearby, plus an elementary school and popular playground right on top of the buried barrels. It was in a middle-class (mainly blue-collar) neighborhood with rapidly growing families.

Now, by 1977, many who lived in the starter homes that bordered the former canal were citing out of control health complaints, including many involving their kids, birth defects, an array of cancers. Basement walls were stained with foul patches; sump pumps broke down from continual sludgy drippings. Local and state officials suggested mass hysteria was taking hold and tried to avoid taking action, fearing it might rile the chemical companies or hurt tourism.

Then young “housewife” Lois Gibbs, with no college degree nor scientific or activist training of any kind, rallied the homeowners (generally through the women). After many months of agitation, won crucial if belated state and federal attention—including from President Jimmy Carter—with firm promises and studies and eventually money that went to buy out dozens of homes, providing young or middle-aged couples a second chance at a healthier, normal life (though many still had to deal with the scourge of cancer). This also led to the mammoth new federal Superfund regime to cope with old/new disaster sites elsewhere.

Early on, I secured an assignment from New Times, the national magazine based in New York, to return to my hometown and write about Love Canal. I interviewed Mike Brown, Lois Gibbs and a dozen other homeowners/activists, and among others, the EPA staffer Hugh Kaufman who was blowing the whistle (via friendly media and congress members such as Gore) on Love Canal and hundreds of other toxic sites now emerging across the country. He’d keep doing that for, oh, another three decades or so.

That chemical smell around Love Canal—I recalled it well from growing up in Niagara Falls, known as a global tourist destination but by the 1950s one of the most intensive chemical locales (ten major plants) in the USA. But unlike the Love Canalers, I lived several miles away.

When I turned in my article to New Times, my editor literally rolled her eyes as she read parts of it. “Come on,” she said, “people really have bedrooms in their basements???” The class divide was too much to overcome for her. The piece, which was unprecedented in revealing the scope (and a listing) of Love Canal type “toxic time bombs” around the nation, was later published in Feature magazine, the short-lived successor to my former Crawdaddy home. I profiled Gibbs for mass-circulation Family Circle and then she starred in my book. Someone made a TV movie about her. Mike Brown (featured with Gibbs in the PBS doc) wrote a popular book, “Laying Waste.”

By then Lois had achieved the closing of the entire wide area around the Canal with residents receiving fair prices for the homes they abandoned. She went on to lead a group in the Washington, D.C. area, the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (CHEJ), which aided local activists responding to environmental disasters around the country. Now seventy-two, she’s still at it, nearly half a century after her own son started suffering from mysterious health maladies.

It’s a Pink, Pink, Pink, Pink Moon

Get out and enjoy the moonrise tonight, it might for many top their recent experience with the partial eclipse. My photo from last night over the Hudson and, of course, Nick Drake’s eternal commentary—here in just it’s instrumental track. Sing along!