TMI 35 years later
“We lived in Virginia and we sold our house. We came back up here where we’re from. Had I known? I don't think we would’ve moved here in this area. Even though, now what are they saying? It'd be better off to live 50 miles away. First it was five, then ten, I heard them talking.”
“I was baking cookies when Patty called to say that there has been an accident at Three Mile Island. Turned the radio on, but it was not until in the evening when we heard that the radiation is still leaking. Scranton [and] Met-Ed lied. Charles was out mowing the lawn and he had blush on his face afterwards. We were worried. Charles had terrible hives, [he was] very anxious.”
“[They] weren’t going to make a big deal out of it. After a while, yes. Not at first, because when I first became involved some of the neighbors here did not like it at all—they thought I shouldn't be doing that. Then they changed their little pea-brains and they decided that, yes, there had been danger and that it still was there.”
“Our youngest daughter was pregnant at the time. She went to New Jersey and our older daughter went with her husband to West Virginia. My mother went to Ohio. Everybody that I knew left. You know, almost everybody was gone from here.”
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
“We went to West Virginia. We weren’t gone for very long because, see, Charles was afraid he’d be called out to go. Even our youngest daughter. Because she was pregnant she didn't want to come back home, but she had a job and she couldn't stay away. She said, ‘I can't stay forever. I gotta come back.’”
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
“Back in the year that she was born, they radiated babies’ [thyroid] glands because this was supposed to protect them. I called the hospital but they said, ‘No, we have no records.’ But they did do that. They used to irradiate children's feet to see if their shoes fit right. Yes indeed, they did that.”
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
“Well, she was working in Harrisburg and some of the plumes went that way, towards Harrisburg. So, she was convinced. She was involved, too. We went to that first rally, which was not long after the accident, and I met people there. Like Jane Lee— she lived down on a dairy farm down the road here— and the husband of the woman who was her friend-- her husband died of cancer, too.”
“They were all friends and they had seen some bad things with their cattle. The one had a mutation. Someone down in Goldsboro told me, the day of the accident— there were cats that they would feed. They said these cats were lying around on their backs with their mouths open just as if that they were trying to breathe.”
“Along this road there were so many people— this one woman told me they lived just a couple of doors down, and she said she kept goats. She said: 'They'll come and check on my goats to see if the goats are okay, you know, but they don't check on the people.' She later died of cancer. Isn’t that ironic? So many people are deceased. Jane is. Willis Wolf who lived down in Newbury— he’s deceased. Beth is deceased and then Judy, she was a professor. She and so many of the people that I worked with are no longer living.”
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
“Marjorie— I’ll tell you what she did: she took some of these [plant] growths, which I showed her, and she took them to this professor at Columbia. She didn't say where they came from and she said: ‘What would have caused this?’ And he didn't hesitate— he said: ‘radiation.’”
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
“We were very lucky, but right across the street— he [the neighbor] lives right there. His mother died of cancer, his father died of cancer, his son died of cancer. And then down the road a little further there's so many people. Of course, we know cancers come from other things, too, but…”
“That Jane Lee— one time we were down in Washington and she said, 'I'm just getting fed up with this. I think I’m gonna quit.' And this guy from the NRC said, 'Don't ever quit, don't ever quit.' You know, first you think they were not too pleased with some crazy women coming down there, but they were really very nice.”
“I still think they didn't do right by us, never did, never did. And I think some of them knew it, you know? They realized it, too, some of the people who were involved. I was just reading something. Thornburgh— seems that he was more upset about things than some of the other people. I thought that's odd, he didn't seem to be, but maybe, deep down, some of them were more worried than they seemed.”
“I hate it because I know… I just think that's what killed Patty. After she died, her husband Jerry kept in touch. We remembered our birthdays and everything. He developed cancer. Even though Patty wanted him to have a case, he dropped it after she died. I don't know why.”
“The police came with sirens and loudspeakers telling us to stay inside, turn off [fans], etc. Close doors, windows. This happened twice. More emissions. We were not told until later. Pregnant women and young children were strongly advised to leave the five mile area. Schools were closed, and children were taken to Dillsburg where their parents had to pick them up.”
Story of a Mother:
Helen Hocker
“It got to the point where we didn't trust anyone because we heard so many different things, and then we’d hear about emissions after the fact. Carter came to Middletown. Made no difference. We [were] still in limbo. Feeling sick, tense and jumpy all the time. A man came around with instructions in case of evacuation— [I got] sick of the word.”
“We keep in touch because she has no sisters or brothers and her parents are both deceased. Just the other week she came down and brought Patty's guitar. Wasn't that nice? We gave the guitar to our oldest grandson because Patty was the one who bought his first guitar and pay [sic] for his lessons. He was so emotional about it. He was almost in tears because it brought back so many memories for him. He was just a boy.”
“Some years later he married again and asked if it was okay to bring his new wife to visit us and we said that it was. Last year Gigi, his wife, called and told me she didn't want us to read about his death in the obituaries. He had died, too, of cancer.”
“Our daughter Patty [died.] It wasn't diagnosed in-person, that must be a difficult thing to diagnose, and the first doctor couldn't find anything. Then when she seemed as if she had no improvement a friend of hers said, 'I think you should see another doctor.' So she saw the doctor that my husband sees now. When he did further tests he found it [cancer] and admitted her to the hospital right away. If it’d been diagnosed earlier, she might have had a chance of surviving.”
“They understand. There’s nobody really in my whole life who was involved as I was. I don't do it anymore. But I did a lot, I was very active.”
“It was raining there and the whole way home. It was like a graveyard here when we came home. No children around. I [had] very bad headaches, and Charles still had hives. Charles saw his doctor. The hives [were] caused by contact.”
