The Cuyahoga River Was Catching Fire for the 13^th Time

The Cuyahoga River was catching fire for the 13^th time. It was Cleveland, late 1960’s. This would be the most arresting fire in the Crooked River’s flamed career. Downstream a mile or so, Lake Erie was drowning in raw sewer waste, unregulated pesticides and fertilizer, industrial dumpings, and shoals and murders of dead fishies.

In those early times, I worked a lot in factories, warehouses, dye houses, furnace rooms, and on truck docks, among toxic effluvia, pestilential industrial oils, and our old friend, asbestos. OSHA did not yet exist (created in 1971), and the moratorium on asbestos products was not implemented until the early 1970’s (although “they” knew about asbestosis and cancer at least as early as the 1930’s.)

Yeah, Asbestos Products and Phoenix Dye Works were two tenderloins of toxicity where I (and many of my friends) worked for 2-3 bucks an hour in malevolent acres of dye stench, scarring ovens, visible swarms of asbestos needle-fibers, and vocationally disillusioned floor bosses and foremen who I am certain died young.

We Were, Like, Fifteen, and Needed Jobs

We were, like, fifteen, and needed jobs. We needed to buy The White Album, elephant bells, a guitar, quarts of P.O.C. beer, late night Big Boy sandwiches, illegal admission to Cyrus Erie West and The Agora. We needed smokes, and white shoes. We had to attend concerts, dances, drive-ins, fishing outings. We needed chew, cherry and blueberry cigars, snuff, sara bidis, breath mints and a buck for gas.

We didn’t know, and would not have given a shit had we, that we were working at places that killed people.

Things were different then. We would not have recognized that places you worked were not supposed to kill people, because one of the major employers in the country, the military, was killing people (Commies) or getting people killed (your buddies, brothers and cousins) all day long in Vietnam. It was fucked up and numbingly normal at the same time. The country was also killing rivers and lakes, White people were killing Black people, and there were 685 murders in Ohio in 1969, 14,760 total in the USA.

By contrast, we were merely handling asbestos gloves, laughing about our white mustachios and goatees at the end of the shift, happy to be making “good money.” We were in-spiring the fumes of the dye/die house, and welcomed all overtime hours. We made $2.50 on hour, $3.75 for OT.

We were, like, 15, and we needed jobs.

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