The Tire Prints and the Smoke Menace
70 “in the Navy”: The New York Times, “The Negro In The Navy,” February 3, 1948.
A positive, right-hearted article, but the segregation is still startling. There was only a single Black officer in the United States Navy.
The fact that the Navy Department has published a critical analysis of its segregation policies by its only Negro officer is an indication of a changing attitude in that tight-knit officer corps. This is a good time to push the effort for removal of segregation barriers . . . A man’s courage and capabilities cannot be, and should not be, judged on the color of his skin. It is encouraging to see a growing realization of this truth.
70 “Liquor Industry’s Ban”: Carl Spielvogel, “Liquor Industry’s Ban On Women May End,” The New York Times, October 20, 1958.
70 “the everlasting hazeless sunlight”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Magnetism,” The Saturday Evening Post, March 3, 1928.
70 all smog, blurring and stinging: Lauren B Hitchcock, “Will Smog Strangle Your City?”, The Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1956. “By 1945, those same skies were too often a dirty gray-brown. An eye-smarting, exasperating pall settled over this city.”
From the thirty-third chapter of Chandler’s Long Goodbye:
The weather was hot and sticky and the acid sting of the smog had crept as far west as Beverly Hills. From the top of Mulholland Drive you could see it leveled out all over the city like a ground mist. When you were in it you could taste it and smell it and it made your eyes smart. Everybody was griping about it. In Pasadena, where the stuffy millionaires holed up after Beverly Hills was spoiled for them by the movie crowd, the city fathers screamed with rage. Everything was the fault of the smog. If the canary wouldn’t sing, if the milkman was late, if the Pekinese had fleas, if an old coot in a starched collar had a heart attack on the way to church, that was the smog. Where I lived it was usually clear in the early morning and nearly always at night. Once in a while a whole day would be clear, nobody quite knew why.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, Houghton Mifflin 1953.
70 a smog alert: Robert L. Heilbroner, “What Goes Up the Chimney,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1951.
70 a pavement walk: Chip Jacobs, William J. Kelly, Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, Henry R. Abrams 2008. Chapter One, “State of Siege,” 18. “Cunning and silent, its gray mist engulfed buildings and streetcars, obscuring the sun and killing all sense of direction as it assaulted Los Angeles’ citizenry with a face-stinging burn,” write Kelly and Jacobs. “Eyes welled, throats rasped, hands grasped for hankies and for answers.”
71 An August 1950 smog: Heilbroner, “What Goes Up the Chimney,” Harper’s.
71 tire prints in the grit on Madison Avenue: The New York Times, “ ‘Smog’ Coats Pedestrians And Cars in Midtown Area,” August 19, 1950.
“Anxious persons telephoned East Fifty-first Street and East Sixty-Seventh Street police stations to inquire what it was all about.”
71 “The dry cindery dust”: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Heinemann 1963. Chapter One, 2.
71 Smoke from a coal-burning Con Edison power plant: Heilbroner, “What Goes Up the Chimney,” Harper’s. “In New York City, for example, the four huge stacks of the Waterside plant of the Consolidated Edison Company tower over the East River like tubes torn from the Queens Midtown Tunnel,” Heilbroner reports. “The stacks carry into the air the waste from four huge boilers each as large as a four-story building. And they smoke: ten thousand pounds of dirt pour out of the stacks every day and the sulfur gases have already started to attack the gleaming end wall of the nearby U.N. building.”
The size of the enterprise is, in the staggering way of cities and industry, satisfying. “Each day something like ten million pounds of coal or oil is poured into its boilers. From this enormous quantity of fuel comes a half million pounds of smoke.”
And of course, this next wasn’t being measured by Con Edison or Harper’s in 1951. One gallon of gasoline produces about 18.7 pounds of carbon dioxide; 22.4 pounds from each gallon of heating oil; and a pound of coal means 2.07 pounds of CO2.
71 staining one side of the tower: The New York Times “Truman Rejects City’s Plea On Gas,” August 5, 1950. The New York Times, “City Seeks To Ease Smoke Evil At U.N.,” August 8, 1950.
71 A 1951 study in Harper’s: Heilbroner, “What Goes Up the Chimney,” Harper’s.
71 “the smoke menace”: It remained one of the decade’s stories—we’ll get to Los Angeles, our national smog capitol, in a little bit.
Lauren B Hitchcock, “Will Smog Strangle Your City?”, The Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1956.
You may not be worrying now, but this expert says people in every big city will breathe dangerously polluted air within a few years—unless drastic steps are taken immediately.
71 town in the Pennsylvania steel belt: Devra Davis’ When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution (Basic Books 2002) has a very strong opening section about Donora. An epidemiologist, Davis grew up in the Pennsylvania town. Asked about the tremendous dirtiness, her mother explains, “We used to say, ‘That’s not coal dust, that’s gold dust.’”
Davis’ mother continues, “As long as the mills were working, the town was in business.” Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water, Chapter One, “Where I Come From,” 8.
71 the wire and steel mills: Post-tragedy, Life Magazine sent a team to Donora. “Around the zinc works no grass grows,” the piece explains.
Even up on the hill, where a few farmers try to make a living, vegetables are covered with soot and all the sheep are black. At bedtime, when Donorans put out their lights, they can still see smoke swirling across their ceilings.
Life, “Death Over Donora. Smoky, Lethal Fog Kills 19 People in a Little Pennsylvania Mill Town,” November 15, 1948. Quoted in Thomas Jundt, Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America, Oxford University Press 2014, 69.
71 Wednesday morning, October 27, 1948: Heilbroner, “What Goes Up the Chimney,” Harper’s.
71 made getting to work difficult: As the Times put it, throughout these days “Donora had lived in a twilight world.”
The New York Times, “20 Dead In Smog; Rain Clearing Air As Many Quit Area,” November 1, 1948.
71 Kids used flashlights: Davis, When Smoke, 15.
71 Whole corners had been erased: Davis quotes a fireman and a mill worker. The firefighter first. “There never was such a fog. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, day or night. Hell, even inside the station the air was blue. I drove on the left side of the street with my head out the window, steering by scraping the curb.”
“I could not even see my hand at the end of my arm,” recalls Vince Graziano, then a strapping young steelworker. “I actually could not find my way home. I got lost that day.”
Davis, When Smoke, 15, 18.
71 sweet flavor: Los Angeles Times, “Pennsylvania Killer Vanishes: ‘God-Sent’ Rain Drives Out Smog and Saves Thousands, Doctor Says,” November 2, 1948.
Associated Press, “Rain Dispels Lethal Smog As 19 Lose Lives,” November 1, 1948. The concept was so nationally unfamiliar the AP had to define it: “Old-time residents couldn’t recall ever seeing such a dense smog, as the combination of smoke and fog is known.”
“The air began to have a sickening smell, almost a taste.” Berton Roueche, Eleven Blue Men, Little, Brown, and Company, 1953, 196. Quoted in Davis, When Smoke, 16.
71 by air travelers: The New York Times, “Survivors Of Smog Flee To High Land: Firemen Praise For Making Oxygen Tents With Sheets—‘Odor’ Detected In Plane,” November 1, 1948.
71 Donora’s high school football team: They kicked off to archrivals the Monongahela Wildcats. Donora lost 27-7. Davis, When Smoke, 16-7.
71 a Sunday rainstorm: The New York Times, “20 Dead In Smog; Rain Clearing Air As Many Quit Area,” November 1, 1948.
71 doctor with the medical board estimated: Los Angeles Times, “Pennsylvania Killer Vanishes: ‘God-Sent’ Rain Drives Out Smog and Saves Thousands, Doctor Says,” November 2, 1948.
71 “It was plain murder”: Associated Press, “Rain Dispels Lethal Smog As 19 Lose Lives,” November 1, 1948. The physician, William Rongaus, led an ambulance crew through the murk during the worst of it; Rongaus went on foot with a lantern.
Epidemiologist Devra Davis—who having grown up in town knew that Board of Health physician as Doc Rongaus—recalls visiting him in assisted living half a century later.
[He] told me that folks who made it to Palmer Park seemed to recover. The park sat high on a hill and was one of the few green places near the town, probably because the fumes from the mills did not regularly sweep over it. “My brother and I hauled women and children in horse-drawn wagons up to the park,” he said. “Soon as we got them above the smog, they would get much better.” Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water, 18.
72 “There’s nothing else you could call it”: Times, “20 Dead In Smog,” November 1, 1948.
72 U.S. Steel declared: The New York Times, “Denies Smog Zinc Blame: Owners of Donora Plant Issue Statement Stressing Fog,” November 17, 1948. This was the U.S. subsidiary American Steel and Wire.
72 Donora was, to the time: Robert L. Heilbroner, “What Goes Up the Chimney,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1951.
72 America’s single worst: In Greening the Red, White, and Blue, history professor Thomas Jundt gives the final tally. “22 people were killed, and about 50 more died within the next month.” 68.
The tragedy of Donora changed the public’s perception of the problem of air pollution. Reports and scientific investigations, once hesitant to assert suspicions that evidence pointed to pollution as a cause of disease and death, now had, as historian Scott Dewey has stated, “a smoking gun with air pollution’s fingerprints all over it.” Federal Security Administrator Oscar R. Ewing observed afterward that Donora “has proven—for the first time—that air pollution in an industrial community can actually cause serious disabling diseases.” Such dangers were now publicized nationwide.
72 pollution event: Elizabeth T. Jacobs, Jefferey L. Burgess, Mark B. Abbott, “The Donora Smog Revisited: 70 Years After the Event That Inspired the Clean Air Act,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 108, No. 52, April 2018.
“At a storefront museum approximately 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a sign reads, ‘Clean Air Started Here.’”
The PhDs explain, “This is not hyperbole.” Donora “changed the face of environmental protection in the United States.”
72 In 1950, for the first time: By which time Donora was sunnily known as the “smog-death city.”
The Los Angeles Times, “90 Affected When U.S. Tests Fumes At Smog-Death City,” April 20, 1949.
72 about “the hot-house theory”: Associated Press, “Warmth Amazes Experts But Winter Not Over Yet,” January 15, 1950.
72 Plass was standing and delivering a paper: Waldemar Kaempffert, “How Industry May Change Climate,” The New York Times, May 24, 1953.
72 And there was that word: The Washington Post, “Industrial Gases Warming Up Earth, Physicist Notes Here,” May 5, 1953. “Releases of carbon dioxide from burning coals and oils, said Dr. Gilbert N. Plass, blanket the earth’s surface ‘like glass in a greenhouse.’”
72 Carbon dioxide was warming the world by 1.5 degrees: The Washington Post, “Industrial Gases Warming Up Earth, Physicist Notes Here,” May 5, 1953.
72 warming the world by 1.5 degrees: Plass proved essentially correct. 65 years later, NASA reported average surface temperatures had risen 1.5 degrees, in comparison with the middle of the previous century.
Earth’s global surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, according to an analysis by NASA.
Global temperatures in 2018 were 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.83 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. Globally, 2018’s temperatures rank behind those of 2016, 2017 and 2015. The past five years are, collectively, the warmest years in the modern record.
NASA, “2018 Fourth Warmest Year In Continued Warming Trend, According To NASA, NOAA,” Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet, February 6, 2019.
Accessed 8-28-22.
72 six billion new tons: Waldemar Kaempffert, “How Industry May Change Climate,” The New York Times, May 24, 1953.
72 “World industry, pouring its exhausts”: The Washington Post, “Industrial Gases Warming Up Earth, Physicist Notes Here,” May 5, 1953.
72 in the New York Times . . . in the Christian Science Monitor: Waldemar Kaempffert, “How Industry May Change Climate,” The New York Times, May 24, 1953.
Christian Science Monitor, “Hot Weather Joins List of By-Products,” May 9, 1953. “Dr. Plass, a physicist, told the American Geophysical Union that industrial activity annually adds about six million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”
