WTTW Journal; No. 206; Coming Clean

<v Speaker>Coming clean. A retrospective on our environment. <v Speaker>Next on WTTW Journal. <v Speaker>People know that something is wrong. <v Speaker>The war is part of it, but it's deeper than the war. <v Speaker>The more thoughtful critics of the war have known from the beginning that the war was <v Speaker>just a symptom of something much deeper. <v Speaker>Black people and poor people have long known what's wrong. <v Speaker>Now the garbage and the crowding and the stench and the unhappiness and the crime have <v Speaker>spread beyond the ghetto. And all of society is coming to realize that it must <v Speaker>drastically change its course. <v Speaker>A lot of strategies have been used in the past by people seeking change. <v Speaker>Movements have come. Movements have gone. <v Speaker>And some very real sense. This movement may be our last chance. <v Speaker>If environment is indeed a fad, it will be our last fad. <v Speaker 2>I live in an area that a maggot can't breathe in. <v Speaker 2>The politicians are forcing people to the streets.

<v Speaker 2>Period. <v News anchor>Someday the world will be a better place if it listens and acts. <v News anchor>In the meantime, perhaps for a generation or more, it will be frighteningly costly to <v News anchor>each of us to clean up the mess. <v News anchor>Each of us has made what is at stake and what is in question <v News anchor>is survival. <v Marty Robinson>And that was 20 years ago. <v Marty Robinson>Social turmoil born of many issues. <v Marty Robinson>A lot of questions, too few answers. <v Marty Robinson>Hello, I'm Marty Robinson and this WTTW journal is part of a three year project <v Marty Robinson>with the Chicago Community Trust exploring issues of concern to our community. <v Marty Robinson>This is the year of the environment.

<v Marty Robinson>Our program begins by looking back to 1970, before there was <v Marty Robinson>even an EPA, before the Clean Air and Water Acts, when it was <v Marty Robinson>routine to dump raw sewage into our rivers and for poisonous smoke <v Marty Robinson>to belch into our skies all as if there were no tomorrow. <v Marty Robinson>But as we'll see, tomorrow is now here and environmental success <v Marty Robinson>or lack of it is a series of small stories about a big subject. <v Speaker>A quiet side street on Chicago's southeast side, 1970. <v Speaker>Not much has changed over the years. <v Speaker>It was a family place then where kids were always playing in the streets, in parks. <v Speaker>And it is a family neighborhood today. <v Speaker>Its lifeblood was once industry. <v Speaker>Much of that has died away, but it is still the kind of area where train tracks <v Speaker>run so close to homes that you can find a freight car parked in your backyard.

<v Speaker>Homes have been sold. People have come and gone. <v Speaker>One family that stayed was the Mellons. <v Speaker>Rose Mellon had nine kids. <v Speaker>The youngest were her twin daughters, Dorothy and Donna. <v Rose Mellon>I just thank the good Lord that they're here today. <v Rose Mellon>Because what they went through. <v Rose Mellon>What I had to go through. <v Rose Mellon>It it'll never leave my mind. <v Rose Mellon>Never. She would bleed from the mouth and not just <v Rose Mellon>a nose bleed or, you know, would stop. <v Rose Mellon>Her hair and everything was covered with blood. <v Rose Mellon>I get up, wipe it up, and I'd have to sit up with her because I was afraid she was gonna <v Rose Mellon>choke on her own blood. <v Rose Mellon>But it would just pour out. <v Speaker>It was like I didn't want my mom to leave. <v Speaker>You know, every time she wanted to leave the hospital, you know, I didn't want her to go <v Speaker>because I didn't know what I was going through. You know? <v Speaker>And I just remember the pain that I went through basically just a little

<v Speaker>bit. But I remember that I couldn't walk or nothing from it. <v Speaker>You know, I remember as clearly as she does, but it hurt. <v Speaker>Yeah. <v Rose Mellon>There was smoke coming out of the asphalt plant. <v Rose Mellon>It was smelly. <v Rose Mellon>And it was like you seen all over the city of Chicago out of the smokestack. <v Rose Mellon>And I would just like it was coming right into my yard. <v Rose Mellon>And you could feel it when it fell. I knew your skin was gritty. <v Rose Mellon>Coming to my house, I had the windows open because at that time I had no air <v Rose Mellon>conditioning. My counter was always gritty. <v Rose Mellon>I wipe it up now or later was the same thing. <v Rose Mellon>It wasn't very nice here at all. <v News Anchor>The family became living testimony to how bad the pollution was. <v News Anchor>They bussed to government hearings and pester their alderman to get rid of the plant. <v News Anchor>But Rose and her two daughters also became targets of letters and threats <v News Anchor>like no smoke, no paycheck.

<v Rose Mellon>I just like being outside. I used to cut the grass. <v Rose Mellon>Naturally, they had to be with me. <v Rose Mellon>We spend the majority of our time out there, play in the pool <v Rose Mellon>and just sit on a porch. <v Rose Mellon>And I was asked, why don't you move? <v Rose Mellon>I bought the House and 67, and they're telling me to move. <v Rose Mellon>I had nine children then. <v Rose Mellon>They were all just growing up. I'm trying to put them through grammar school, Catholic <v Rose Mellon>high school. <v Rose Mellon>And I didn't have no intentions of walking because I didn't do the dirt <v Rose Mellon>near. <v Speaker>It makes me mad. You know, that nothing was really ever done about it. <v Speaker>You know, they just let it go. <v Speaker>There's nothing you can do about it, though, unless you have money or power. <v Speaker>And, you know, I don't have any of that. So it's basically you're the little guy. <v Speaker>You can't do anything about it. <v Speaker>An empty lot is all that's left today following the move of the asphalt plant to another <v Speaker>part of town. But it turned out to be a hollow victory, though both Donna <v Speaker>and Dorothy say they are fine today.

<v Speaker>They will always live with the fear of cancer. <v Rose Mellon>We fought because I knew I was fighting for my <v Rose Mellon>kids lives and for other kids that were little in this <v Rose Mellon>area because it didn't just stop here at my home. <v Rose Mellon>It was growing throughout the whole neighborhood and maybe into other <v Rose Mellon>areas because smoke has no boundaries. <v Speaker>When a hot summer day once meant going to the beach or fanning yourself on the back <v Speaker>porch, the pollution could be bad enough to kill fish and turn <v Speaker>daylight into night. <v Speaker>Smog pushed Vietnam protests off the front page on the southwest <v Speaker>side near Midway Airport. People in bungalows and tiny row houses were being squeezed <v Speaker>by pollution from a sanitary district treatment plant and a coal burning Commonwealth <v Speaker>Edison Power Station. <v Speaker>A young priest began organizing the people of his parish into Davids to challenge <v Speaker>the Goliaths.

<v Father Dubi>They felt powerless, but they just had to accept the fact. <v Father Dubi>What could they do? What could a little person do to fight city hall or fight these car <v Father Dubi>companies? <v Father Dubi>My father was a steel worker for 40 years. <v Father Dubi>U.S. Steel South works and then the summer, it was very, very <v Father Dubi>hot and sweaty. And in the winter it was so cold. <v Father Dubi>And he hated that walk into the mill, the dinginess and the dirtiness and <v Father Dubi>the drabness of the whole community and particularly of that mill with <v Father Dubi>the smokestacks spewing forth all this stuff. <v Father Dubi>He was trapped. He couldn't do anything. <v Father Dubi>And that's why he always told me that there was strength in organization. <v Speaker>You know, go. <v Speaker>Now it is small parish in Hazel Crest, Father Dubi seems a long way from those days <v Speaker>of rage, but the memories are still a part of him.

<v Father Dubi>Our tactics were assertive, but it comes <v Father Dubi>right out of the Bible. I think that Jesus, throwing out the money changers, turning <v Father Dubi>over their temples was a pretty violent act, pretty violent, <v Father Dubi>but not half as violent, not a millionth as violent as what <v Father Dubi>people had to experience out there in the southwest side with the air pollution. <v Father Dubi>The deterioration of the environment and the sense of hopelessness that we can't do <v Father Dubi>anything. This has been the way it has been for years. <v Father Dubi>Nothing will change it. We changed that. <v Father Dubi>They changed it. They changed it. <v Speaker>[Tense music plays] <v News Anchor>He was the first of the environmental vigilantes striking mostly under <v News Anchor>the cover of darkness to spotlight polluters of the Fox River,

<v News Anchor>keeping from being publicly identified to this day, despite being chased by <v News Anchor>everybody from the FBI to local factory guards, a high school biology <v News Anchor>teacher who became a legend known only as the Fox. <v The Fox>And when I was talking to the kids, I would teach them about pollution and things like <v The Fox>that. And it began to dawn on me that <v The Fox>if I was if I had the character to mean what I said and believe <v The Fox>in what I was doing, then I was going to have to do something about it. <v News Anchor>He launched a nighttime raid on a sewer line of a big soap making plant that he said was <v News Anchor>dumping into a small creek, a creek that fed the Fox River. <v The Fox>I get out there and pull the lid and I look down at the bottom, sir, and <v The Fox>I just couldn't do it. I was I was a teacher, <v The Fox>obeyed the law, and I just couldn't do it. <v The Fox>And I was getting ready to go. <v The Fox>And I heard some plopping noise and I

<v The Fox>turned on my flashlight looking about and I saw a whole slug of <v The Fox>soap curds coming out and it was decided, hey, <v The Fox>that's something broke inside of me. <v The Fox>And so I just took everything that there was there and I threw it in the sewer. <v The Fox>And when I got it filled up, I couldn't hear the water run anymore. <v The Fox>And so somehow or other, I felt good about that. <v The Fox>I just felt that I had stopped something that this company was destroying. <v The Fox>I'd stop them in the act and I just felt good about it. <v The Fox>There it is. See that one? <v The Fox>Right. That's the original one. <v The Fox>You can see where they had attached steel braces to it and then put an angle <v The Fox>iron across the top of a certainly hacksaw through it. <v The Fox>So they they dug it up and moved it, pushed it down here. <v The Fox>It wasn't completely backed up, but it started to and they couldn't afford to let it go. <v The Fox>So they had to clean it out. <v News Anchor>It was the beginning of a string of Robin Hood like attacks that began to focus attention

<v News Anchor>on the environment here and across the country and lay the groundwork <v News Anchor>for future environmental activist groups like Greenpeace. <v News Anchor>The soap making plant eventually spent 12 million dollars to clean up, gave <v News Anchor>over land to the county for recreational development and one hundred thousand dollars <v News Anchor>to a wildlife association. <v The Fox>The people love this. It says it's important for a kid <v The Fox>to catch a frog in a river, as it is for a for a businessman to catch a musky <v The Fox>up in Wisconsin. And this is where it tests where the kids learn the love of the river. <v The Fox>That's a learn to love the environment by coming down here and splashing around <v The Fox>in the water and catching fish. <v The Fox>So the river is really kind of the heart of this whole valley and nobody <v The Fox>has a right to defile it. <v The Fox>I don't like doing what I have to, but the most important thing I <v The Fox>got to say about that is I shouldn't have to do it. <v The Fox>If the law is operating we shouldn't have all of this pollution.

<v The Fox>We shouldn't have animals being killed by spills. <v The Fox>We shouldn't have midnite dumpers. <v The Fox>We shouldn't have the companies using <v The Fox>the dead of night to belch out their fumes. <v The Fox>If the law is working properly. <v The Fox>If a company stack is belching smoke, we tried to cap <v The Fox>it. So that the smoke would go down inside the plant. <v The Fox>And when by the time they got up there to find out what the problem was, we were gone. <v The Fox>They left either bumper sticker or a note telling them what they were doing and <v The Fox>they already know what they're doing. <v The Fox>But we just left them identification saying that you got a problem. <v The Fox>And when they see the name of The Fox they know they've got a problem. <v The Fox>He loved me. <v News Anchor>Another target was an aluminum recycler who was dumping into the Fox River. <v News Anchor>He sells vegetable oil today after being driven out of business by the Fox. <v Robert Arundale>The environmental people were or did not like

<v Robert Arundale>the fact that a little of this was got into the river. <v Robert Arundale>Their comment was, yes, it will eradicate some plant <v Robert Arundale>life and reduce the amount of fish that could be <v Robert Arundale>present in the river. <v Robert Arundale>There is a great material right there that the aluminum oxide, which is similar <v Robert Arundale>composition to sand or silica oxide. <v Robert Arundale>The Fox did find this and he would stop up our water <v Robert Arundale>flow to the river and he would drop off skunks at the front of my home <v Robert Arundale>and the EPA would be right behind him. <v Robert Arundale>And sure, we were sitting ducks, so to speak. <v The Fox>Nobody likes to get dumped on. <v The Fox>Nobody. Feels like just because they have to obey the law, they <v The Fox>have to get rid of their garbage in a lawful manner. <v The Fox>They have to have it picked up. They have to have septic tanks. <v The Fox>They have to pay sewer tax. And then I see some powerful corporation or some.

<v The Fox>Irresponsible, greedy. <v The Fox>Businessmen dump his waste on the street. <v The Fox>They feel like that's it offends their sensibilities of being fair. <v The Fox>And this is what the whole idea is about. <v News Anchor>The Fox never really retired. <v News Anchor>He just changed his tactics. <v News Anchor>He still leaves his calling cards. Before he was chased by police <v News Anchor>and government officials. <v News Anchor>Now he's being pursued by Hollywood for a new series. <v News Anchor>Today, he works a lot with kids connecting in phone hookups to impress <v News Anchor>upon them the importance of the environment and the Fox River. <v The Fox>We have a duty to to leave the next <v The Fox>generation. It's like a camper at a campsite. <v The Fox>You're supposed to leave the place so that you if it's not better <v The Fox>than what you found it. It has to be at least as good. <v The Fox>It's the people that count.

<v The Fox>That's not the individual. The idea that counts. <v The Fox>And, you know, as a fireman friend said, hey, no matter what happens <v The Fox>to you, the idea of what you've done is now free and running and you <v The Fox>can't put it out. <v News Anchor>The Grand Calumet is a small river on our doorstep in northwest Indiana, maybe <v News Anchor>13 miles in length. <v News Anchor>Yet it is one of the most polluted in the world. <v News Anchor>Existing today as a tragic reminder of our past and a symbol <v News Anchor>of how much we need to accomplish in the future. <v News Anchor>This was once its beginning, bubbling up quietly from Natural Springs in the <v News Anchor>Dunes recreation area and a Gary suburb in the shadow of the big mills <v News Anchor>and their belching smokestacks. <v News Anchor>To see this part of the river is to see it as it once was many years ago. <v Reggie Kornas>The river was clean enough to catch big northern pike. <v Reggie Kornas>All kind of fish. And there are ducks and all kinds. <v Reggie Kornas>In my day, I seen it. I've seen it go from bad to really,

<v Reggie Kornas>really bad. Now I see a little improvement. <v Reggie Kornas>I know I see some fish and, you know, carp like other net. <v News Anchor>The river now begins where U.S. Steel makes it begin a mile and a quarter <v News Anchor>downstream, where the giant fortress like company spits out the millions of gallons <v News Anchor>of water it takes in from Lake Michigan each day for its cooling process. <v News Anchor>U.S. Steel is now under siege from the United States Environmental Protection Agency <v News Anchor>for violating the very limits it set up for itself for dumping into the Grand Cal. <v News Anchor>It's become a personal battle for the EPA regional boss, a former Lithuanian <v News Anchor>freedom fighter who is able to translate his hatred of injustice into <v News Anchor>his pursuit of polluters. <v Val Adamkus>They agreed to and the consent decree and unfortunately, they were violating. <v Val Adamkus>And it took us a while to catch them. <v Val Adamkus>And this is I mean, that's really what what what he says that

<v Val Adamkus>we are degrading and violating the permit. <v Val Adamkus>But they have they really willingly, <v Val Adamkus>knowingly violated that agreement. <v News Anchor>It's been blacklisted from doing any business with the government and is being threatened <v News Anchor>with a 50 million dollar fine. <v News Anchor>And this company is only part of the problem for the Grand Cal. <v News Anchor>Other industries and sewage treatment plants along the river are being chased by the EPA <v News Anchor>and Indiana.