Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (7 page)

Philadelphian Will Smith first made a name for himself as the rapper “the Fresh Prince,” and Boyz II Men rose to fame after scoring a hit with “Motown Philly.” But Pennsylvania had been in the pop-music limelight before—thanks to nonPennsylvanians Billy Joel and Elton John
.

Until Billy Joel released this song in 1982, it seemed unlikely that the depressed, Rust Belt Allentown region in eastern Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley could be the subject of a catchy pop tune. But Joel used the area as a metaphor for the effects of the industrial economic recession of the 1980s and charted a hit song in the process.

Why Allentown?
The song's lyrics evoke the despair and disillusionment of an unemployed blue-collar worker, but Allentown wasn't the place Joel had in mind when he was writing the song. He'd read a magazine article about the decline of the steel industry in the Lehigh Valley, particularly in neighboring Bethlehem, which is mentioned in the first verse. But Joel thought “Allentown” sounded like a more generic name for an all-American town. In 2007, he said, “If I look at a map and I want to find where the heartland begins, I'd probably start right there in the Lehigh Valley . . . So the name Allentown worked for me as a heartland name.”

It also worked with the chords and melody Joel had come up with in the early 1970s, while trying to write a song about his own hometown of Levittown, New York. As he tried to write that song, though, Joel discovered that Levittown seemed too boring
to merit a pop song. The original lyrics went, “We're living here in Levittown/And there's really not much going down/And I don't see much when I look around/The trees are green/The dirt is brown.” Joel put the song away until he played a series of concerts in Allentown, met the residents, and saw what was happening to the community. He said, “There was a kind of wearing on the area from what had happened in the steel industry.” So he decided to write about that.

Did you know?
“Allentown” isn't the only song about Allentown. Frank Zappa's 1975 song “200 Years Old” and a 1950s folk song by Irving Gordon, “Allentown Jail,” both mention the town.

Elton John had been a longtime fan of tennis player Billie Jean King, and they became friends after running into each other at various celebrity tennis tournaments. When King gave John a personalized tracksuit, he told her he would write a song for her. “Philadelphia Freedom” was a reference to King's team in the World Tennis League—the Philadelphia Freedoms.

What it's about:
The song was, according to John, “one of the only times I tried to deliberately write a hit single,” but it presented some problems for radio DJs: “Philadelphia Freedom” was 5 minutes and 41 seconds long. Many DJs had already vowed not to play any songs longer than four minutes because it complicated their playlists. (Accounting for commercials, the popular “14 hits in a row” hour-long format didn't work if songs were longer than four minutes.) John's song was so successful, though, that listeners demanded DJs play it anyway.

Did you know?
In the end, the song's lyrics (by John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin) ended up not having any direct references
to Billie Jean King, tennis, or sports at all. Instead, and in spite of being written by two English songwriters, “Philadelphia Freedom” had a patriotic quality with lines like “'Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia freedom/From the day that I was born I've waved the flag.” The lyrics resonated strongly with Americans—so much so that the song was used as an anthem for the U.S. bicentennial celebration a year later.

 

It's a tiny town today, but Titusville in northwestern Pennsylvania was the birthplace of one of history's most important economic developments
.

Town:
Titusville

Location:
Crawford County

Founding:
1796

Population (2008):
6,200

Size:
7.5 square miles

County seat:
No

In 1796, the town began as a single plot of land claimed by a settler named Jonathan Titus.

In October 1948, in a Rust Belt town about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, a heavy, choking smog settled over the streets and houses. For four days, it suffocated the people living there, but it also led to the first clean-air regulations in the United States
.

D
onora, Pennsylvania, got its start as a factory town. In 1899, the Union Steel Company (founded by William H. Donner, Andrew and Richard Mellon, and Henry Clay Frick, who also teamed up with Andrew Carnegie) laid out the town and set up shop. The group even named the place after themselves: Donora was a combination of Donner and Nora, Andrew Mellon's wife.

By the late 1940s, Donora had grown to about 14,000 people. The steel company still employed many of them (though it had since changed its name to the American Steel and Wire Plant), and the Donora Zinc Works had opened in 1915. Those two factories, both owned by U.S. Steel, pumped smoke into the air constantly, so smog was a common problem. Some residents tried to do something about it: In 1918, residents sued the Zinc Works, claiming pollution from the factory had made them sick. (They won and the owner had to pay damages.) And in the 1920s, a group of farmers across the river in Webster also complained, saying pollution from the factories was killing their crops. The city started taking samples of the air around town to test the pollution levels, but no one ever did anything about it. The factories were too important to the town's livelihood. According to one resident, “It was a normal way of life.”

But on October 27, 1948, a weather system moved into the Monongahela Valley and dropped a heavy fog over Donora. The fog trapped the sulfur and other chemicals pumping out of the factories. With nowhere to go, the pollution started filling up the air in town.

Most of the people in Donora weren't worried initially. They figured it was just very bad smog that would pass eventually. Joann Crow, who was 12 years old at the time, said, “Dad couldn't drive us to school because it was so hard to see. He had to walk us . . . with a flashlight, which we thought was fun.” As the days wore on, the smog grew thicker. At a high school football game on October 29, people in the crowd couldn't see the players on the field, and the ball kept getting lost in the haze.

Then came a rash of breathing problems. The first victim was a man walking home at night. He started choking, stopped for a moment to rest, and died. Soon, people all over town were choking from the bad air. According to one resident, “The air was yellow and so full of sulfur. It burned my eyes so badly that I had tears. My eyes were burning like fire.” The local hospital was overcrowded with patients, firemen were going door-to-door with oxygen tanks, and doctors couldn't examine people fast enough. Ultimately, about 7,000 Donora residents got sick. Twenty of them died in just five days, a horrifying number for a town in which only 30 people had died during the entire previous year. The local funeral home was so overwhelmed that it ran out of caskets.

Finally, on October 30, the town council convinced the superintendent at the Zinc Works to close the plant in hopes of
preventing more deadly gases from being pumped into the air. And the next day, the weather changed. A front moved in, pushed the fog out of town, and it began to rain. Almost as quickly as it had come, the smog disappeared.

As the poisonous air cleared, people clamored for some kind of explanation. U.S. Steel called the deaths an “act of God” and blamed them on asthma and other ailments, but a doctor at Donora's Board of Health, William Rongaus, thought differently. He argued that the deaths and sickness were the direct result of air pollution. He said later, “People were dying while I was treating them. I called it murder from the mill.”

Even so, the people of Donora were initially unwilling to take on U.S. Steel in a fight for clean air. The company employed thousands of townspeople, and thousands of others ran support businesses that depended on the steelworkers. But the story had made the national news, and it wasn't just up to Donora anymore.

The deaths in Donora were big news, especially after major newspapers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia picked up the story and radio personality Walter Winchell discussed it on his broadcasts. Pennsylvania's Department of Health, the U.S. Public Health Service, and Donora's town council launched investigations . . . the first organized inquiries into the effects of air pollution.

Their findings showed that the mills were contributing to the pollution in Donora, but authorities shied away from officially blaming U.S. Steel. Others were bolder—editors at the newspaper in Monessen, just a few miles from Donora, wrote
that the damage was “something no scientific investigation is necessary to prove. All you need is a pair of reasonably good eyes.” For its part, U.S. Steel—though it admitted no liability—did eventually pay small settlements (between $1,000 and $30,000) to the people who got sick or lost loved ones.

More important, though, the study was the first real recognition that air pollution was a major problem in the United States. Change came slowly, but the events at Donora inspired lawmakers (first on the local and state level, and then nationally) to enact legislation to clean up America's air. The Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 was the first, but the most sweeping was the Clean Air Act of 1970, which put strict restrictions on emissions from automobiles and factories. During the congressional hearings debating the law, Donora came up repeatedly; the danger the town's residents had faced in 1948 was something no one wanted to encounter again. The law was updated in 1990, and today, the air over the United States is much cleaner than it was in 1948—it's estimated to have 98 percent less lead, 41 percent less sulfur dioxide, and 28 percent less carbon monoxide, though environmentalists stress that there's still a long way to go before the air is truly “healthy.”

The decline of the steel industry hit Donora hard, and today, it's a small town of about 5,000 people. The Zinc Works closed in 1957, and the steel plant shut down in 1966. For many years, Donora's older residents saw the 1948 smog as a stain on their town's reputation. According to one city councilman, “The smog in Donora over the years had been looked upon as a black eye. The older folks just didn't want to talk about it because they thought it was bad publicity.” But as people moved out (and in)
and the hazards of air pollution became more widely known, Donora started to take pride in its history and its place in the environmental movement.