by Dan Fagin
The list that follows includes all those I interviewed who were willing to be named. Others asked me to withhold their names and I have done so. I am profoundly grateful to them all, including Richard Albertini, Bruce Anderson, Melanie Anderson, Emma Ansara, Robert J. Baptista, Richard Bellis, Don Bennett, Esther Berezofsky, Michael Berry, Lois Bianchi, Eula Bingham, James Blumenstock, Lisa Boornazian, John Bucher, Bob Butler, Dan Carluccio, Judith Carluccio, Gary Casperson, Rajendra Chhabra, Dick Chinery, Angelo Cifaldi, Richard Clapp, Philip Cole, Craig Colten, Mark Cuker, Tom Curran, Bob De Sando, Michele Donato, John Paul Doyle, Michael Edelstein, James Etzel, Jerald Fagliano, Barry Finette, Heather Galick, Floyd Genicola, Robert Gialanella, Michael Gillick, Michael Gordon, Jon Gorin, Andrew Grange, Melvyn Greaves, John Groopman, Clark W. Heath Jr., Rich Henning, Peter Hibbard, Susan Hibbard, Bruce Hills, Jon Hinck, Kathleen Hughes, William Hyres, Donna Jakubowski, Laura Janson, Yu Jie, Steven Jones, Jeff Josephson, Allan Kanner, Charles Kauffman, John E. Keefe Jr., Judith Klotz, Alfred Knudson, Roden Lightbody, Liu Xiao-Mei, Liu Yu-Shu, Christine Livelli, Joanne Livelli, Gary Lotano, Harold Luker, Ray Lynnworth, David Malarkey, Jack Mandel, Jim Manuel, Morris Maslia, Nancy McGreevy, Sheila McVeigh, David Michaels, Bruce Molholt, Ernest Nagel, Gerald Nicholls, Terry Nordbrock, Kenneth Olden, Marian Olsen, J. Patrick O’Neill, David Ozonoff, Kim Pascarella, Richard Paules, Frederica Perera, Carole Peterson, Jerome Posner, Joseph Przywara, Dave Rapaport, Eric Rau, Bertha Reich, Juan Reyes, Herb Roeschke, Michael Rosenblum, John F. Russo Sr., Leona Samson, Jan Schlichtmann, Gale Scott, Nancy Menke Scott, William Skowronski, Martyn Smith, Wayne Smith, G. Wayne Sovocool, Tomm Sprick, Samuel Sprunt, Dennis Stainken, Shanna Swan, Jon Sykes, Jackie Talty, John Talty, Ray Talty, Deliang Tang, Ray Tennant, Anthony Travis, Pamela Vacek, William Warren, Dan Wartenberg, John Wauters, Stephanie Wauters, Dane Wells, Richard Wendel, Jorge Winkler, Steven Wodka, Carl Woodward III, George Woolley, and Mitchell Zavon.
Some of the people listed above provided assistance extending far beyond merely answering my questions. In their interactions with me, they showed the same commitment to unvarnished truth that they had demonstrated earlier in helping to uncover the secrets of Toms River. At the top of this list are those whose lives have been cleaved by cancer. The horror of losing a child, or almost losing one, is unfathomable to those of us who have not experienced it, yet Ray Lynnworth, Kim Pascarella, and Bruce and Melanie Anderson tolerated my intrusive queries; so did Michael Gillick, one of the bravest people I have ever met. Others who provided extraordinary help include Don Bennett, Mark Cuker, Jerald Fagliano, Barry Finette, and Bruce Molholt. They are credits to their respective professions. I am also grateful to Frederica Perera, Deliang Tang, and Mariette DiChristina of Scientific American for making my trip to China possible.
My students at the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute are a perpetual source of inspiration and delight. Several aided me directly as researchers. Susan Cosier and Alison Snyder did extensive document research, while Emily Elert, Kristina Fiore, Robert Grant, and Erica Westly also assisted. For help in tracking down sources and obtaining public records, newspaper clippings, and other documents, I owe thanks to Marcus Banks, Betsy Dudas, Stephen Greenberg, Jon Hinck, Cheryl Hogue, Robin Mackar, Mary Mears, Ralph Roper, Ellen Tracy, John Wauters, Stephanie Wauters, and Jorge Winkler as well as the reference librarians at the Ocean County Library, the Ocean County Historical Society, and the New York regional office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Colleagues and friends vetted portions of this manuscript, providing welcome suggestions and corrections. This group includes Marla Cone, Howard Frankel, Stephen S. Hall, Robert Lee Hotz, George Johnson, Ivan Oransky, Anthony Roisman, and Charles Seife. Any remaining errors are my own. I also want to thank my NYU colleague Brooke Kroeger, who was always supportive as I pursued this project and adjusted to academic life. It is a joy to work with such smart, dedicated colleagues and students, all of whom are committed to finding a sustainable future for deep journalism in service to democracy.
I have tested the patience of a succession of editors at Random House throughout the long gestation of this project. I am so grateful for their unflagging support, which began with the fabulous Ann Harris and continued with John Flicker, Beth Rashbaum, Susanna Porter, and finally Ryan Doherty, a terrific manuscript editor and a real champion of this book. My literary agent, Jane Dystel, and her business partner Miriam Goderich similarly never lost faith and have been sources of savvy counsel over the years.
My feelings about my family’s contributions are impossible to commit to type. I hear the voice of my mother, the late poet and playwright Lois Levin Roisman, on every page. My father, Arnold Fagin, is my exemplar in many ways, even though, deep down, he still hopes I will become a lawyer. (Too late, Dad.) My wonderful daughters Anna and Lily tolerated my obsession with grace and good humor. As they grew into adulthood, so did this book; theirs is the more significant accomplishment by far. As for my wife, the legal journalist Alison Frankel, this book could not exist without her. She read and critiqued almost every word, but her contributions go much deeper than superb editing. Alison has listened to me talk incessantly about Toms River—and Toms River—for seven years, and about so many other stories for twenty-five years before that, and yet not once has she run screaming from the room (though there have been several close calls). With Alison’s love, anything seems possible; without it, nothing would.
Notes
Chapter One
1. The origin story featuring Thomas Luker and Princess Ann was related in a twenty-nine-page book written in 1967 by Pauline S. Miller, who for many years held the officially designated title of Ocean County historian. Her self-published book, called Early History of Toms River and Dover Township and written to commemorate Dover’s two-hundredth anniversary as a chartered township, also includes a version of the “Old Epic Poem” about Tom Luker and his Indian bride. In 1992, the town placed a plaque honoring Luker next to a footbridge in Huddy Park, near the ferry crossing he supposedly established in about 1712. Miller’s brief chapter on Luker carries the optimistically definitive title “How Toms River Got Its Name.” Skeptics of the story, however, note that Luker partisans, including his descendants, did not publicly champion their forebear until the 1920s. Only “Indian Tom” and William Tom (sometimes spelled William Toms) are suggested as likely namesakes in histories of the region written during the nineteenth century, including A History of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, New Jersey by Edwin Salter, published in 1890, and Historical Collections of New Jersey by John Warner Barber and Henry Howe, published in 1868. Casting a bit more doubt on the Luker story, the fight song of Toms River High School (now Toms River High School South) begins this way: “Oh! Old Indian Tom was the man who gave his name to our high school upon a hill!” Teams at the school, founded in 1891, are known as the Indians.
2. The description of the 1782 British raid on Toms River, first published in Rivington’s Royal Gazette, a Loyalist newspaper in New York, is reprinted on pages 328 and 329 of Historical Collections of New Jersey.
3. The Dover Township name was finally formally discarded in 2006 when residents voted to change the name to Toms River Township. Fierce debate preceded the plebiscite, in which more than 40 percent of township voters voted against the switch.
4. Thomas A. Mathis’s political career came to a startling end in 1958. Suffering from an undisclosed illness, he shot himself in the head in a second-floor room of his mansion, just a few days after he was discharged from a Philadelphia hospital. While several local newspapers reported the suicide, the Mathis-owned Ocean County Sun was more circumspect, telling its readers that the eighty-eight-year-old party boss “succumbed at his capacitous Main Street residence Sunday morning after two weeks of illness.” Today, most residents of Ocean County know Thomas A. Mathis only as the namesake of the older of two adjacent bridges that connect Toms River with the beach communiti
es on the Barnegat Peninsula. The Thomas A. Mathis Bridge was built in 1950 and cost $6 million. Mathis and his son secured the state funds for the project.
5. Anthony S. Travis, “Perkin’s Mauve: Ancestor of the Organic Chemical Industry,” Technology and Culture 31 (January 1990): 51–82.
6. Working from recipe books, Egyptian dyers used reddish pigments from henna, madder, and safflower plants and blues from Indigofera tinctoria, or true indigo, to stain the linen cloth used to wrap mummies. The Greeks dyed their wool and linen tunics in vats of indigo. Centuries later, when the Romans invaded Britain, they were startled to discover that the Celts painted their bodies with a blue pigment that was probably made from woad. In fact, Britain may have gotten its name from the Greek prettanoi, or “tattooed people.”
7. Arriving on the South American shore in 1500, Portuguese explorers were so excited to find dyewoods that they named the newly discovered territory “Terra de Brasil” because the trees there yielded a red that was the color of burning coals, or braise in medieval French.
8. Excerpted from “Beautiful Tar: Song of an Enthusiastic Scientist,” Punch, September 15, 1888.
9. This chapter’s account of Johann Jakob Müller-Pack’s travails in Basel draws heavily on the work of a leading historian of the chemical industry, Anthony S. Travis of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. See Anthony S. Travis, “Poisoned Groundwater and Contaminated Soil: The Tribulations and Trial of the First Major Manufacturer of Aniline Dyes in Basel,” Environmental History 2:3 (July 1997): 343–65.
10. “Poisoned Groundwater and Contaminated Soil,” 349. The quotation is originally from a speech by August Leonhardt, who worked for a British dye manufacturer in the 1860s. His speech, “Remarks on the Manufacture of Magenta,” was prepared for delivery at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876.
11. The coloration of rivers was a mark of industrialization even before the rise of synthetic chemistry. In Hard Times, published in 1853, three years before William Perkin’s discovery of aniline dyes, Charles Dickens described the book’s fictional setting, Coketown, as “a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” Almost seventy years later, in his modernist masterpiece The Waste Land, the poet T. S. Eliot wrote: “The river sweats/Oil and tar/The barges drift/With the turning tide.”
12. The reference to the Rhine as a dumping ground for “effluents” and “rubbish” is on page 8 of Society of the Chemical Industry in Basle, 1884–1934, an official and privately published corporate history published in Switzerland to commemorate Ciba’s fiftieth anniversary.
13. Friedrich Goppelsröder reported his findings to the health committee of the Canton of Basel in a three-page handwritten letter dated June 8, 1864.
14. Markus Hammerle, The Beginnings of the Basel Chemical Industry in Light of Industrial Medicine and Environmental Protection (Schwabe & Co., 1995), 54. Translated from German.
15. The prosecution of Johann Jakob Müller-Pack in Basel was just the first of several highly publicized incidents involving water pollution by aniline dyes. There were also scattered reports of arsenic poisoning from eating artificially colored candies and even from wearing fuchsine-dyed stockings. The October 3, 1868, edition of The Times of London, for example, included two reports of “poisonous socks.” One, a reprint from The Lancet, the medical journal, described a ballet dancer who had to be hospitalized with a severe rash after sweating through her “brilliant red” stockings. The other was a letter from a physician who reported that one of his patients had suffered similar symptoms after buying dyed socks. When the man returned to the store to protest, the storekeeper admitted that several buyers had lodged similar complaints.
16. Casimir Nienhas’s experiment is described on page 56 of The Beginnings of the Basel Chemical Industry in Light of Industrial Medicine and Environmental Protection.
17. Society of the Chemical Industry in Basle, 1884–1934, 8, 76.
18. Beginnings of the Basel Chemical Industry, 44.
19. D. H. Killeffer, “Industrial Poisoning by Aromatic Compounds,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 17:8 (August 1925): 820–22.
20. Beginnings of the Basel Chemical Industry, 41.
21. Society of the Chemical Industry in Basle, 1884–1934, 56.
22. M. W. Tatlock, “Industrial Waste Treatment: Cincinnati Chemical Works,” Proceedings of the Eleventh Purdue Industrial Waste Conference (1956): 166–71.
23. The first comprehensive sampling of the entire Ohio River, from its source in western Pennsylvania to its terminus in the Mississippi River, was conducted September 18–29, 1950, by a newly created interstate agency called the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission. In the report that followed, “Pollution Patterns in the Ohio River—1950,” the commission concluded that the most polluted section was at the Cincinnati waterfront and immediately downstream.
Chapter Two
1. The description of the facilities and dye-making processes at the Toms River plant during the first years of its operation is drawn from Kevin J. Bradley and Philip Kronowitt, “A Staff-Industry Collaborative Report: Anthraquinone Dyes,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 46:6 (June 1954): 1145–56. At the time, Bradley was the assistant editor of the journal, a publication of the American Chemical Society. Kronowitt was a Ciba executive who helped to design and build the Toms River plant.
2. Robert J. Baptista, a former industry executive and historian of the dye industry, elaborated on why anthraquinone vat dyes were so useful in an interview with the author: “Vat dyes were a tremendous technology breakthrough because cotton fabrics would no longer fade.… The vat dyes were rugged molecules. They were built to last. They had just the right shape and weight to fit into the fiber structure and not get rubbed out or bleached out.”
3. November 14, 1956, memo from Ciba executive Al Meier to five senior managers.
4. Julia E. Gwinn and David C. Bomberger, Wastes from Manufacture of Dyes and Pigments: Volume 4, Anthraquinone Dyes and Pigments (SRI International, 1984, under contract to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), 46.
5. Bradley and Kronowitt, “Staff-Industry Collaborative Report,” 1153: “The capacity of four million pounds of dyestuffs requires about twenty-two million pounds of various raw materials. Chief among these are sulfuric acid, caustic soda, hydrochloric acid, phthalic anhydride, ammonia, benzene, nitrobenzene, glycerol and alcohol.”
6. Two years after being chased out of Basel, having returned to a vagabond life, Paracelsus wrote of his critics: “Not one of you will survive, even in the most distant corner, where even the dogs will not piss. I shall be monarch and mine will be the monarchy.” See page 73 of Das Buch Paragranum (The Book Against the Grain) by Paracelsus, as excerpted and translated from the original German in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Paracelsus: Essential Readings (North Atlantic Books, 1999).
7. Scholars disagree on whether the infamous book-burning incident involving Paracelsus actually occurred or is an embellishment added much later by his followers. Some versions of the story have Paracelsus burning a tract by Galen instead of Avicenna. In any case, there is abundant evidence that Paracelsus antagonized the city’s establishment during his brief stay in Basel. See, for example, Henry M. Prager, Magic into Science—The Story of Paracelsus (Sumner Press, 2007). The book was originally published in 1951, when Prager was a professor of history at City College of the City University of New York.
8. Das Buch Paragranum, excerpted in Paracelsus: Essential Readings, 74.
9. There is controversy over the wording of Paracelsus’s famous handbill advertising the Basel lectures, since versions were published many years
later by his acolytes and his enemies. The version quoted here is from Magic into Science—The Story of Paracelsus, 152–53.
10. Paracelsus’s book on mining diseases, Von der Bergsucht und anderen Bergkrankheiten (On the Miners’ Sickness and Other Miners’ Diseases), was written in 1533 but not published until 1567, twenty-six years after his death. While the book is generally considered to be the first full-length work on occupational disease, there was at least one earlier effort. A German physician named Ulrich Ellenbog in 1473 wrote a short work for goldsmiths entitled Von den gifftigen besen Tempffen und Reuchen (On the Poisonous, Evil Vapors and Fumes). It was published as an eight-page pamphlet in 1524. In addition, another contemporary of Paracelsus, Georgius Bauer, better known by his pen name Agricola, published his De Re Metallica (On the Nature of Metals) in 1541. De Re Metallica was primarily a description of the mining industry, but Agricola also wrote about mining illnesses and preventative measures, including ventilation shafts.
11. According to Bernardino Ramazzini’s De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (Diseases of Workers), published in 1700, Hippocrates also referred to mining diseases and noted that those affected by the “metallic pests” include not only miners but also “many others whose work is too near the mines.” Thus Hippocrates, who died in approximately 375 B.C., may have been the first to recognize that pollution can harm more than just directly exposed workers.
12. This quotation is from the first chapter of the third tractate of Von der Bergsucht und anderen Bergkrankheiten. Henry G. Sigerist, ed., Four Treatises of Theophrastus Von Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus (Johns Hopkins Press, 1941), 68.
13. Robert Meerpol, An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey (St. Martin’s, 2003), 13–15.
