Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  Three summers later, in 1962, George Woolley returned to the Black Lagoon on a whim, a twenty-year-old in search of nostalgia and a cool respite from a hot day. The pool was nothing like what he remembered. The water was dark and the stench foul. Against his better judgment, Woolley took a quick swim and swallowed some water, which tasted awful. Surfacing, he noticed purplish foam clinging to his body.

  No one swam in the Black Lagoon anymore.

  Once Toms River finally started to grow, it did not stop. Between 1950 and 1960, the population of Dover Township (its formal name) more than doubled to 17,000, while Ocean County’s population grew almost as fast, to 108,000. The growth would accelerate further in the 1960s, when Ocean was one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States and all of Toms River seemed to be perennially under construction. Ciba stoked the fire by expanding steadily. In 1955, the company’s two partners in Cincinnati, Geigy and Sandoz, bought minority stakes in the Toms River plant from Ciba. The three firms were envisioning big things from their mini-city in the pinelands, which they rechristened the Toms River–Cincinnati Chemical Corporation.1 The factory had suffered through a few lean years in the mid-1950s because of weak demand for vat dyes, but by the end of the decade it was firing on all cylinders and was about to begin a major expansion. Already, with a payroll of almost five hundred in 1959, the chemical plant was the county’s largest private employer, by far.

  The completion of the Garden State Parkway in 1955 ended the regional isolation that had begun in 1812 when a hurricane sealed Cranberry Inlet and crippled the marine trades in Toms River. The huge highway project, which took eight years to finish and included 172 miles of meticulously engineered roadway, was an economic boon because it drastically reduced the travel time to Toms River from the big cities to the north.2 During most of the town’s long somnolence, the trip from New York could take a day or more. With the completion of the parkway, it took less than two hours. Weekend visitors raced down the highway to beach communities in Ocean County, so real estate prices soared. The Barnegat Peninsula and Long Beach Island went from attracting a few thousand tourists every summer to more than one hundred thousand. Some visitors stayed and looked for year-round housing in the towns they drove through on the way to the shore, including Toms River. Land prices rose as egg farmers sold out to developers. The character of the township began to change. The newcomers arrived in wave after wave, and Toms River gradually stopped being a place where everyone knew your family and your place in the social order. The residents of the new subdivisions were rootless, united only by a shared conviction that their town’s rapidly rising property values and wholesome image must be zealously guarded, come what may.

  It was a golden time for anyone lucky enough to land a job at the chemical plant. The company was on a hiring binge; the payroll hit one thousand in the summer of 1961 and kept rising. The pay was outstanding: almost three dollars an hour for an experienced equipment operator. John Talty, at age twenty, joined the company in 1960 after proving to his interviewer that he could calculate the sides of a right triangle using the Pythagorean theorem, a feat he vaguely recalled from high school geometry class. At $78 a week, his salary as an entry-level laboratory assistant was unheard of in Ocean County for someone without a college degree. Talty was ecstatic. “In 1960, it was the place to go if you lived around here,” he remembered. Talty met his future wife in the lunchroom (she had been hired a week after him) and would work at the factory for thirty-six years until it finally closed. In a community where housing costs were already soaring to levels that were out of reach for many blue-collar workers, a job at the plant was a secure route to prosperity. John Talty, George Woolley, and thousands of others would repay the company with their unwavering loyalty, come what may.

  Its payroll was not the only way the company spread money around the community. Its executives were the driving force behind a nine-year campaign to build Ocean County’s first hospital. Community Medical Center opened in 1961 on a choice piece of land near the parkway, just down the road from the factory on Route 37. The following year, the company bought a run-down nine-hole public golf course on an old dairy farm near downtown, built a new clubhouse and swimming pool, and reopened the Toms River Country Club, whose sixty-seven acres quickly became the private playground of the town’s business and political elite. Company executives sat on the boards of the First National Bank of Toms River, the Ocean County Boy Scouts Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Toms River Yacht Club and were reliable contributors to the local Republican Party (and occasionally the Democrats). The company’s senior executives were, by all accounts, deeply involved in town affairs, even if they were not quite of the town. Many of the top managers were from Switzerland, and their German accents and advanced educations (many had doctorates in chemistry) stood out.

  As smoothly as things were going in Toms River, Ciba was having trouble elsewhere. Since 1947, the company had made epoxy resins and adhesives in Kimberton, Pennsylvania, thirty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The factory was on top of a hill, the village in the valley below. Anything Ciba discharged would flow downhill toward the streams that supplied Kimberton with its drinking water, but that did not deter the company from digging a series of unlined seepage lagoons to serve as waste dumps.3 By 1957, there were eight lagoons on the hill. That same year, engineers working for the local water company detected carbolic acid and salt, two of the principal waste products of resin manufacturing, in the streams at the bottom of the hill. Facing accusations that it had contaminated the water supply, Ciba agreed to dig new wells for the village far from the tainted streams. That was enough to stave off a lawsuit, but it did not mollify Kimberton residents, who did not hide their hostility.4 In Cincinnati, meanwhile, the two factories Ciba had co-owned with Geigy and Sandoz since 1920 were increasingly unprofitable, in part because of the city’s newfound insistence that the factories treat their waste before dumping it into the public sewer system and the Ohio River.

  In 1958, Ciba made a portentous decision: It closed all three factories (two in Cincinnati and one in Kimberton) and shifted the work to a location where relations with the locals were far more amicable and where there was plenty of room for waste dumping. The newly renamed Toms River Chemical Corporation (Cincinnati was dropped from the title) would no longer be a place that made only vat dyes.

  The new signature products at Toms River would be azo dyes, a family of dyestuffs that traced its chemical lineage back one hundred years to the fuchsine magenta that was the first competitor to William Perkin’s mauve. Azo dyes were not quite as durable as vat dyes, but the colors were brighter and more varied, and the dyes were cheaper to produce. They required just three or four manufacturing steps, compared to seven or more for vat dyes. Azo dyes had been hugely popular since the 1880s and had been manufactured for decades in Cincinnati. Now manufacturing was moving to Toms River, to a cluster of new buildings north of the original vat dye manufacturing area.

  By 1960, the azo complex was finished: four new production buildings plus two laboratories and two giant warehouses. Unlike vat dyes, azo dye production required phosgene gas, a colorless, sweet-smelling vapor that could kill on contact and was the most deadly gas used in World War I (first by the Germans and then by the Allies). The gas was so dangerous that Toms River Chemical eventually built an isolated, bunker-like building with reinforced concrete walls and special one-ton holding tanks whose steel walls were a quarter-inch thick, just to store phosgene. It was a place no employee ever wanted to visit, especially old-timers who had fought in the Great War. Nearby was another small building used only to store another ingredient of azo dyes, benzidine, which had already wreaked carcinogenic havoc at the Cincinnati Chemical Works, though very few workers at Toms River knew it.

  A second new manufacturing cluster at Toms River Chemical, east of the original vat dye area, was just as dangerous. There, also in 1960, the company constructed another large factory building—Building 108—and an attached w
arehouse for the production and storage of an entirely new slate of products: resins, brighteners, insoluble pigments, and a variety of specialty chemicals, most of which had previously been made in Kimberton. In addition to producing vat and azo dyes to color fabric, the Toms River plant would now make products to color plastic, paper, carpet, leather, food, and even detergent, as well as super-strong adhesives and protective coatings. Almost all of those products required heavy use of highly volatile solvents, particularly toluene, xylene, trichloroethylene, and, most alarmingly, epichlorohydrin. The latter was a quadruple threat: flammable, very irritating to eyes and lungs, capable of burning through skin, and a likely carcinogen.5 Between 1961 and 1965, Toms River Chemical manufactured its own supply of epichlorohydrin in a small structure next to another small building the company erected in 1957 to make anthraquinone, the keystone ingredient of vat dyes that was also highly flammable and a carcinogen, though its cancer-causing properties were not known at the time.6

  In the early years of the plant, most of the men who went to work at Toms River Chemical, even the ones who transferred from Cincinnati, had only a vague understanding of the dangers posed by the chemicals they were handling. The same was true of the women, many of whom worked as secretaries in the adjacent office buildings and had to get used to the powerful smells. Ray Talty was working as a stockboy at a local A&P when he got a job at Toms River Chemical in 1962, following in the footsteps of his older brother, John, who had been hired two years earlier. Ray, like his brother, met his future wife at the factory. Jackie Talty gave up her job in 1971 to raise their children, but before she did she went through many pairs of nylon stockings. Any secretary sent on an errand to one of the production buildings, where the air was thick with solvent and acid vapors, would run the risk that her nylons would melt on her legs. “You’d get these holes in your stockings,” Jackie Talty remembered. “If you complained to one of the bosses, they’d say you could put in a receipt for a new pair of stockings, and then they’d say, ‘Be grateful you have a job.’ I don’t think anybody ever put in a receipt.” Said Ray Talty: “Early on, we didn’t really know much. In the sixties, if you said anything the supervisors could be pretty sarcastic. Some of them would say, ‘What do you think this is, an ice cream factory?’ ”

  Because the Talty brothers and George Woolley all worked in laboratories at Toms River Chemical and not in a production building, they had a chance to see the entire factory complex. They quickly learned which places to dread. Building 102, the main vat dye production area, “was all benzene, chlorobenzene—all these solvents in this really big dark building. It was the worst building that you could work in or even just walk through,” said Ray Talty. Explosions were a constant risk: On December 22, 1960, for example, on the second floor of Building 102, a pressurized kettle containing an explosive mixture of eight thousand pounds of tar, dye, and nitrobenzene burst and crashed through the floor to the ground level, blowing out dozens of windows and hurling chunks of iron forty feet in all directions. Workers “took cover wherever they were, some lying flat on the floor,” according to a company memo that blamed operator error for the accident.7 George Woolley was especially worried about the building where resins and specialty chemicals were made. “Some of the stuff that came out of Building 108 was very bad: epichlorohydrin, ethylene oxide and also toluene and xylene, but the epichlorohydrin overshadowed everything, it was bad stuff,” said Woolley. The phosgene gas was intimidating too. Even the labs could be dangerous places; the technicians were handling chemicals they knew almost nothing about. One day in the early 1960s, John Talty was accidentally soaked with dimethyl sulfate, a derivative of sulfuric acid that was later determined to be a likely carcinogen. The foreman sent him to the nurse, who told him to go home and take a shower. Afterward, while lathering up for a shave, he discovered that bleeding sores had opened up all over his face. Soon afterward, he decided to get involved in the factory’s union; his brother and Woolley later joined him.

  Lurking behind the more conspicuous fears about fires, explosions, spills, and melting stockings was something darker. “You would hear stories about people working in the plant who got cancer, even back in the sixties. It wasn’t something people talked about back then, but it was there,” said Woolley. Most were older workers who had transferred from Cincinnati or Kimberton and had thus been exposed for decades. A few were much younger, including Jackie Talty, who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was twenty-six, four years after quitting the factory to have children. Another twenty years would pass before the first tentative efforts to find out whether the number of cancer cases among employees of Toms River Chemical was unusually high. No one wanted to ask during the go-go 1960s, when the community and the company were growing like crabgrass in full sun. It was one thing for managers and employees to acknowledge the risk of fires and spills; it was quite another to face the possibility that merely breathing the factory’s air was a serious long-term health risk. “They were much more concerned about acute safety, about somebody getting burned or blown up, than they were about the exposures to toxic fumes day after day,” said Woolley. “As long as you didn’t drop dead on the spot, they didn’t care.”

  If Paracelsus and Bernardino Ramazzini essentially invented occupational medicine, laying the foundations for all the environmental health research that would follow, it fell to others to turn their unconventional observations into a disciplined science. One of the first to do so was a physician with the mellifluous name of Percivall Pott, a short-statured dandy who always wore his powdered wig in public. He prospered as a surgeon catering to London’s upper classes in the mid-eighteenth century, but Pott was also an innovator who developed new surgical instruments and dressings as well as improved treatments for ailments ranging from hernias and spine injuries to skull fractures. He had a deep distrust of conventional surgical practices, many of which were akin to sanctioned butchery. In 1756, when he was forty-three years old, Pott fractured an ankle after being thrown by his horse. He insisted on lying on the cold ground for hours so that he could direct the construction of an improvised stretcher made from a carriage door and the poles from a sedan chair. Having thus devised a safe way to reach the hospital, Pott managed to avoid the standard treatment of the time, which was amputation.8

  Despite his cultivated airs, Pott had the social conscience of a man who had grown up poor. His father died when he was just a toddler, so Pott relied on patrons to finance his medical education. He later returned the favor by housing destitute students and by treating the poor as well as the wealthy (his famous patients included the writer Samuel Johnson and the painter Thomas Gainsborough). As chief surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, founded in 1123, Pott was moved by the dire circumstances of London’s chimney sweep boys. As he would later write, “they are thrust up narrow, and sometimes hot chimneys, where they are bruised, burned and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty, become liable to a most noisome, painful, and fatal disease.”9

  After the Great Fire in 1666 destroyed large parts of the city, London’s chimneys were rebuilt as long and narrow flues with tight turns and sharp angles. The passages were so narrow—sometimes no more than nine by fourteen inches—that only young boys, typically four to seven years old, could fit inside.10 Many were half-starved orphans exploited by avaricious masters, who justified the abuse on the grounds that dirty chimneys were a fire risk. Cleaning the flues was agonizing work; it was not uncommon for a “climbing boy” to get stuck and suffocate. Clothes increased the risk of becoming trapped, so sweeps in England generally worked in the nude, scraping their knees and elbows raw as they squirmed inside the brick labyrinths.11 They labored in a hellish murk of dust and smoke and often had to maneuver while carrying a mortar and trowel so that they could fill in cracks between the bricks and chip away the hardened soot. Because the boys bathed extremely rarely—in some cases just once a year—the soot clung to their bodies and was ground into any exposed abrasions.

  What a
ppalled Percivall Pott even more than the nightmarish working conditions, however, was the “noisome, painful and fatal disease” that many former chimney sweeps developed after puberty: cancer of the scrotum. Exactly when and how Pott first made the connection between the cancer patients he was treating at St. Bartholomew’s and their former occupation as chimney sweeps is unknown; he did not elaborate on that point in his extensive writings. We do not even know how many young men with scrotal tumors Pott treated before he was convinced. But it was a landmark moment nonetheless: the first medically documented identification of a cancer caused by a pollutant. Pott was not the first to speculate correctly about a cause of cancer; Ramazzini, for example, in 1700 rightly guessed that nuns had higher rates of breast cancer because of their childlessness, though he did not know why.12 But Percivall Pott moved from guesswork to meticulous observation and documentation of cases.

  In 1775, when Pott finally wrote up his conclusions in an essay that began with a tribute to Ramazzini, he evinced little doubt about the cause: “The disease, in these people, seems to derive its origin from the lodgment of soot in the rugae [skin folds] of the scrotum.” James Earle, in a biography of his father-in-law he published thirty-three years later, was even more specific: “This species of cancer, which Mr. Pott has so accurately described, appears to be produced by some peculiar acrimonious quality in soot, when incorporated and fermenting with the secretions on the skin on some persons, whose constitutions are disposed to undergo a certain change, or receive a new modification of their inherent properties.”13 In other words, there was something about soot, or something in soot, capable of causing cancer, and there was something about certain people, or something in certain people, that made them vulnerable to the assault.