Chapter 30 Third World Souvenirs

I have had my share of experiences in the lands south of the border.  Today I have strong feelings about mass illegal immigration but what is one person to do?  I have worked in Bolivia, traveled to most of the countries in South America, and worked and traveled in Mexico.  I generally like Hispanics, but just what is a Hispanic or Latino?  Are not most of them just Native Americans of some percentage or other who's people at one point or another in their history were forced to adopt Spanish as their primary tongue and expunge their native religions and languages?  How does that make them Latin or Hispanic (from the word Hispanola, the first island Christopher claimed for Spain)?   Actually a Peninsularo is the correct term for anyone who was born on the Iberian peninsula of Spain.   A Creole is anyone who was born here in a colony or can trace lineage back to a Spaniard or French colonist.   Most of the so-called or self proclaimed Hispanics, or Latin Americans, are in truth, merely Spanish speaking Native Americans with some varying percentage of Spanish or Native American in their lineage.  They are not that special a breed, but are pretty much like what we call African Americans.  They have a varying ancestral genetic makeup that could include Spanish, French, or English genes along with the African.   In fact in the Caribbean basin, what pasts for Black and Hispanic are indistinguishable.  Throw in a bit of Indian, the Hindu kind, who were brought over to Trinidad, and other British colonies, and you have a real genetic stew going.

But I digress.

When I was living in Tulsa over at Place One off Riverside Drive, I had occasion to go to the Post office on Peoria.  I was waiting in the seeming endless line one day and met this gal from Colombia.  I struck up a conversation with her and had more than enough time to chat her up.  We agreed to meet later.  I took her out for drinks and I think we had dinner then went back to her place.  One thing led to another and we hit the sheets.  Now I can only assume I was great at the art of seduction, or she was fishing around for a husband to put her on the superhighway to citizenship.  In either case, I was in like Flynn in no time.

 

Being a considerate partner I decided to sample cuisine south of the border, and being a good Catholic girl, she was intrigued but not entirely relaxed and comfortable with my endeavors.  We finished our assignation and parted ways.  Before we could meet again, I noticed this familiar itching.  It wasn't in my nether regions, but in my beard.  Seems I got a few unexpected garnishes with my Colombian snack.  I once again hit the drug store and eradicated the little bastards before they spread.  I did my lower regions as well, just to be sure that I got all the sons of bitches.

Now I’m not picking on our friends from South America, but don’t they notice when their privates come alive at night and feel like a pack of mosquitos just took up residence?  I mean you have to be numb not to feel the little critters crawling around and the itch when they start to feed.  Is it that our Third World neighbors just get used to it?

 

I guess it is one of those questions we will never know.

 

Update...I wrote the above years ago, and as you can no doubt tell from the frequent news reports, new diseases are cropping up like mushrooms after a shower due to the flood of our southern neighbors across our borders to get on board the Gravy Train of the Western World.  From Kissing Bugs to Bed Bugs, the Central, South and Mexican Americans are bringing their national treasures to share with us in exchange for a better life on the Gravy Train. 

 

I think it is a measure of how wretched the refuse is, that in all my days in South America and Mexico...I never once brought home any souvenirs, rather I had to come home and get them from the recent arrivals. 

 

Such is life and the New World Order.

Chapter 29 National Cash Register

Now, if you are asking yourself, if this guy has a steel trap for a memory, I do have a pretty good head for recollection, but to be honest, I wrote most of these entries years ago in a journal of sorts.  To post them I am just updating them a bit, like with this intro, and then cutting and pasting the rest in.  So why didn't I finish posting these years ago?  Good question.  Too many things going on, procrastination, you know the normal list of things.

There was a club off of Peoria, which for a while in the mid 80’s, had a late night TV broadcast on a local station.  I can’t remember the name, but for a while it was a very popular place.  They put cameras in the club and telecast about an hour or so of the club’s goings on.  I use to go there frequently, making the drive from Bartlesville.  This is the club I took Dana to on our abortive date.  On another night I met a somewhat older gal that turned out to be the tri-state manager for National Cash Register or NCR.  We danced a while and then did the obligatory getting to know you routine, then decided to leave.  She had a condo nearby that we drove back to. 

It amazes me how trusting women can be, or were back then at least.  I must look like a nice guy, but then so did Ted Bundy.  My point being, I could have been a real crazy and here she invited me back to her place.  I did meet a couple of her girlfriends, and I may have shown them my driver's license just so they knew I was who I said I was and to increase her comfort level.  But there have been other times, when it was "how do you do, lets screw!" and we were off to the races without so much as an exchange of names that I can remember.

 

In the event, things worked out well for her and me.  She was a nice woman, probably about 9-10 years older than me.  Don’t get me wrong, but I was thinking sugar momma and gigolo.  Alas it was not to be. 

 

She didn't appear to be a cougar on the prowl, I think it was her celebration with her gal pals of her new promotion.  I just happened to be the icing on top of the cake.

 

She too was headed out of town, to Louisiana shortly after that.  She had gotten promoted, and was leaving in a week to take the other position.  So I guess I was a going away present so to speak.  It was too bad she was leaving, she was a hoot and fun to be with.  She turned out to be my one and only shot at a sugar mama.  She was probably near to pulling down six figures in the mid 80's, making almost twice if not three times what I was making.  It could have been fun, but turned out to be all too brief.

Back in the days of the Reagan Era, it seemed everyone was drunk on excess.  My god, there were new clubs popping up in Tulsa on Lewis and Peoria like mushrooms. There were clubs that I can't even remember the names of, nice glitzy upscale places on Yale and Sheridan.  Most were on Peoria or Lewis.  I used to go to the Double Tree for happy hour.   On Friday I would drive to Tulsa from B'ville to make a happy hour or two.  This was when Disco International in B'ville was beginning to fade. 

It seems that the down turn in oil prices hit the high rolling big spending locals first.  As stripper wells were shut in and plugged, more than a few locals in Washington County learned that the royalty money that all of a sudden seemed to be raining from heaven during the boom could just a quickly dry up.  I've heard of a lot of sad stories that would have ended differently had the individuals only put the money away; rather than spend it as fast as it came in.  They would have been set for life.   Instead they spent way too much and got in way over their heads and lost everything and then some when the tap was closed as the prices dropped.

As they say, only two things fall from the Heavens, manna and airborne rangers.

Trooping to Tulsa introduced me to a whole new group of people.  Like the nice buxom (yeah, that characteristic again) Catholic girl , who happened to be a nurse at St. Francis.  She had a nice personality, but struck me as a bit needy.  But what the hey? I liked her.

I was supposed to take her on a canoe trip but things got mixed up and it never happened.  I think her background was German.  Her biological clock was ticking and she wanted to have kids.  That gave me pause.  She struck me as one of the type who wanted about 8 or so, but she had the figure for it.  As my Ex Wife #1 would say she had "kartoffel stumpfers"  or potato stomping legs, and tiny waist and yes, as set of DDs. If I had to guess I'd say about 36 DD.  She would show up for happy hour with her blond hair hair up in a bun, channeling her grandmother, no doubt; her nursing uniform on, and this angelic look on her face.  This gal was like a rumbling volcano ready to spew hormones all over the landscape.  I had known two good Catholic girls just like her in college. One of them from very large family of 10-12 siblings from good practicing Catholic parents.  Birth control was not what they were practicing obviously.

I could tell our late 20’s something nurse was just waiting to sink her teeth into Mr. Right after about 25+ years of celibacy.  As Mr. T would say, "I pity the fool..."  It wasn't me, sorry to say, I would have liked to give it a go, but it never happened.  The happy hour crowd drifted on to another locale as they are wont to do, and I never saw her again.

I went to the New Year's Party there the following year in hopes that she might show up, but I didn't see her.  I had to go into St. Francis for knew surgery about 5 years later and never saw her either, but hopes of that were on the slim side, unless I knew exactly what unit she worked on, and I didn't. 

 

 

Chapter 28 Wow! Its 2015. and Time to reminisce about the S&J Oyster Girl

Okay, its been 4 years: really has it been that long?  I guess it has been.  Well then its time for another trip down memory lane.

Who here remembers the S&J Oyster Bar on Peoria?  There was one on Peoria and one on Yale. Not sure if they exist now.  I see there is one down town on 1st Street.  Well the one in Peoria was a meat market, and I don't mean seafood flesh.

Well, I think I might have made mention in a previous post about how I met a young lady who rescued me from the seductive intent of a gay co-worker from Phillips Plastics.

She was a nice young woman who I struck up a conversation with sitting there schlepping down oysters and doing oyster shots (Vodka, oyster and hot sauce).

She wasn’t model pretty or anything like that, but she had a rack that would knock your eyes out.  But I think what attracted me to her the most was her sense of humor and her outgoing personality.  My erstwhile gay seductor had gone next door to a little bar, the name for which has long faded from my memory.  Well I used that opportunity to move to the bar swivel seat next to her's and to fill her in on my situation, setting her up to be my white knight.

She smiled and was more than game.  So my ride came back and much to his surprise I told him my new friend would be accompanying us the rest of the evening.  I think this was a Wednesday or Thursday night, hump night or the day after.  You know it was much easier back then to spend the night out and then put in 8 hours the next day and function than it is today.

After we finished out food and cocktails, we went over to the place next door for a while, I recall it was kind of a dive, outside was painted black, and it had a coffeehouse atmosphere to it.  We hung there for a while, them my ride suggested we go to a place on the east side, a gay bar called Zippers.

Now I don’t know if he thought my new female friend would bail on us due to our new destination, but she didn’t.  I rode with her, much to his chagrin.  We all made it to our destination in one piece.  The place wasn’t too busy, with a few lesbian and gay couples milling around on the dance floor and swapping spit in the booths.

My new friend decided to follow suit and we continued the make out session we had begun on the drive over.  Hey!  Her hands were busy driving, no one says mine had to be idle.

 

I wonder what changes come over a person when they hit middle age.  Do the hormones stop pumping, does the adventurous edge dull, or do the insecurities of fading looks, hair loss accumulate?  As I sit here writing this, it hits home how much fun it was to meet a one night stand, hit it off, go crazy on each other, and then say goodbye.  Do we as we get older see something inherently wrong in that now that even if given the chance we wouldn't do it?  My current wife, when we were dating in our forties did things that gave passing truckers an eyeful of her nicely formed naked derriere through the passenger seat of my SUV while they passed us driving on the interstate.  Could I get her to do that today?  I doubt it, and its only been 15 years since she was an enthusiastic accomplice.  I guess folks change, but its disappointing.

Okay...so we were working ourselves in to a sexual frenzy, we saw no sense in staying around any longer.  She wanted me to come home with her, and I agreed once I got assurances from her that she would drive me back to Bartlesville in the morning.  I had to go break the news to my ride, that he would be driving back to B’ville by himself.

I often felt very sorry for the guy’s wife, the beard.  She was such a nice woman, a bit on the rotund side, obviously Jewish, but in that fun effervescent way.  She reminded me of Mamma Cass Eliot of the Mommas and Pappas.  There didn’t seem to be a bad bone in her body.  Her husband was a real hound, I only hope he didn’t give her HIV on down the road.

Now let me tell you about my new friend.  She was a darling.  She had the best set of breasts bar none that I have ever seen.  Not huge but big and firm. The kind you dream about.  Nipples out to there, puffy aureoles, the whole enchilada.  She decided to take a bath so I joined her and we had a glass of wine and talked in the bathtub.  Well she talked I played.

Imagine how crest fallen I was when she told me she would be leaving Tulsa to get married.  Her fiancée lived out of state and was blind.  She wanted to have one last fling before she hung up her spurs.   I was devastated.  Here I thought I had met a really fun gal who I hit it off with right away, but it was not to be.   We had a great night and I saw her again over another weekend before she left for parts north and marriage.

 This was one of those nights that guys dream about.  I mean I just fell into this wonderful young thing’s bed by chance.   I wish I could remember her name, to put it with the wonderful memory of the love making we had.

There was one downside; she gave me gift that I will forever link her with.  They were very intimate and I didn't realize I had been given a gift until a week or so later when they began to itch like crazy.  Yes, she gave me the crabs.  Unfortunately I passed them on to at least one other person with whom I was intimate at the time.  We discovered them together actually, one weekend.  I saw them on me, so I inspected her and low and behold she had a menagerie too.  So I made a quick run to the drug store and we doused them with Rid and did away with them.  Don't ask me how I talked my way out of that, but I did.

Chapter 27 Happy New Year its 2010!

Flash forward to 2010! Wow! Has it actually been almost three years sicne I wrote in this blog? How time marches on, it waits for no man. A lot of things have happened... I got married again. My father passed away. My daughter started college and my son turned into a rock star. He plays in a red dirt country band out of Stillwater called No Justice. He tours the midwest and they just signed with Sony Red. He plays regularly in Tulsa, Dallas, Houston and as far north as Chicago. He has recently been spending time in Nashville laying down guitar tracks for their upcoming CD. On a recent trip to B'ville I saw from the news that the wheels had fallen off the life of the Danish Pastry. Her son and husband were arrested on drug related charges and her business burned along with the May Bros. Building. It is a shame...the May Bros was always such a nice building. Seriously, it is too bad. We all hope our kids avoid the kind of pitfalls her son apparently willingly stepped into, selling drugs. His father claimed the marijuana growing in the garage was his, probably in a a misguided attempt to protect his son. I don't know how this might affect the father's postion with the city and community center. As to the cause of the fire..I don't know what the final out come of the investigation is or was, I am aware the owner of the restaurant and his buddy were prime suspects. I have been in the vacat spaces that held the reported meth lab. I find it hard to believe that the tenants of the second floor did not smell something amiss, whether during the labs operating period or after. I would suspect strong odors of cooking chemicals would be a tip off that something was amiss. Those spaces were like someones old attic. Dusty, debris ridden and a perfect place for pigeons to roost. That is the reason the suspects had keys to the spaces it was reported. I have reconnected to three people mentions in or starring in this blog. At least one died this past year, my old branch manager who was so interested in my conquest of Carolyn B. I don't know the cause of his death, I only read the obit. I made a trip through Bartlesville on the occasion of my daughter's graduation with honors from Union in Broken Arrow. I was saddened to see the old homested on Cherokee and shocked to see that they had dozed the stately homes on Cherokee at Adams. I guess they needed a place for the middle schoolers to loiter and leave their litter. Ah-h! Progress. This must needs be short. I'll have to dig out my old journal and see what if any, entries I wrote for inclusion, but have not yet posted.

Chapter 26 Field Work and uh, Drilling in Nevada

When I started at PPCo I was working in a relatively new high tech area of satellite interpretation. Remote Sensing it was called. It was based on a series of Earth observation satellites put in orbit to originally monitor crops. The geological community found it could map structures equally well and showed them things that could only have been imagined in their wildest dreams. Geologists had had orgasms over early hand held photography taken by the Gemini and Apollo astronauts. The Landsats as they were collectively called turned them into whores. A whole community of geoscientists became Remote Sensing whores. They sold themselves for grant money and prostituted themselves in order to get companies, particularly oil companies, to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for processing systems. At the time, the government subsidized the satellites so digital tapes with imagery of large areas were only $200. Photographic negatives or positives were even less expensive. Phillips was one of the first to lie on her back. A whole group existed and they even had their own research support. Namely me. What ultimately happened is we bunch of whores got syphilis and died. Metaphorically speaking of course. The powers that be in the community over sold what we could actually do. The oil companies, Phillips, Cities Service, Amerada Hess, Oxy, Amoco, Exxon, ARCO, Pennzoil, the list goes on and on. Most no longer exist, all shelled out the bucks to have their own Remote Sensing group. The community held annual meetings in South Dakota at the remote sensing data center in Sioux Falls. Still others were held in Michigan, and in Colorado. What I learned right off was that a lot of the "research" was being done by the same guys and a lot of them were in academia. They just flogged the same data, looking at if from 90 degrees and writing a paper, the stepping a few paces to the right and looking at it at 45 degrees and writing another. It was a business. All the while the oil companies were shelling out the bucks for staff and equipment that never delivered. The oil crunch of the mid-80's changed that, along with President Reagan privatizing the operation of the remote sensing satellites. This led overnight to the cost rising 10 times to $2000 a tape with a copyright hanging off of it. No longer could companies swap tapes to save a buck now it was $2000 each time anyone used it. This had a dampening effect on the party. Then the price of oil dropped and almost all the staffs were cut back. Some drastically. Phillips went from probably 20+ people to 5. A whole new industry sprang up then. It was called the value added industry. All those people who worked for the companies set up small companies with new or used equipment they might have purchased from their former employers. They now would do the value added processing on the raw data for the oil companies for a fee. That is pretty much how things work 20 years later. Now as part of the ongoing effort to get the oil companies to shell out money, independent groups, I guess lobby groups sprang up. One was called the GeoSat Committee. Their stated goal was to demonstrate the need, and lobby for new generations of satellites that the government would fund. Things called group shoots where a consortium of companies would fly at their own expense, new sensors while teams mobilized from the participating companies, swarmed over the target areas taking readings in order to calibrate the data received from the sensors. My first experience was to go to Nevada for several weeks with three co-workers and collect ground truth data. We flew into Reno and then drove a circuit of the state, mainly through the central and north, never venturing to Las Vegas. On our first lunch stop, one of my co-workers disappeared into a book store. When we sat down in a cafe he tossed the book in my lap. It was called "The Brothels of Nevada". Well, being the only bachelor of the group, I was expected to give a report of the night's "discoveries" at breakfast the next day. It was a duty I ably performed for the next couple of weeks. It was tough but someone had to do it. Some of the little mining towns had two or three brothels and I felt duty bound to visit them all in the time allotted to me. We headed toward Hawthorne near Walker Lake and the huge Army ammunition depot. Bunkers dotted the valley hillsides as far as the eye could see. We headed on to Tonopah and I sampled the charms of the gals there. They were a delight. We eventually turned north toward Ely, then cut over to Winnemucca, then Battle Mountain and eventually back to Reno. There were a lot of stops in small towns along the way, Goldfield is one I remember. It was a long time ago, but I can still remember the good times. The reader has to remember that this was pre-AIDS. The girls didn't even require you wear a condom. The etiquette went as follows. You walk in. There is a bar. You sit down and order a drink. The proprietor or madam will try to rush you to pick a girl by trotting them all out for a look see. You take your time, have a drink, chat, then choose one. You talk, possibly buy her a drink then head to her room. The Madam tried to rush me, I turned to her, smile and said "Am I in a hurry?" All of a sudden they stopped treating me like the horny 20 something I appeared to be, and was. I all of sudden appeared to be a veteran, all because of the little book. Each gal, has her own bedroom. About he size of a very small motel room. Money changes hands. The Madam comes by and collects it. The clock starts. She asks you to drop trousers and then checks your equipment for leaks. Really. She would manually inspect you for anything she didn't want any part of. Then she would wash you using a basin of warm water. Then you get naked and talk specifics of what you wanted. French, Half and half, etc. Yeah, the book explained the vernacular. Basically, French was your garden variety blow job. Half and half was she started you off with a blow job and finished you with intercourse. Of course you could just start off with intercourse. I didn't need any assistance getting me up so I just opted to get after it. The first gal that entertained me was a very pretty one of Afro-American descent. She was , as most of them were, from southern California, and was up doing a stint at one of the "Ranches". It must have been a slow week, because she broke a few rules. One, we got into some heavy kissing, and two, we ran overtime and she didn't seem to mind much even though the Madam was hammering on the door. Another gal I remember was named Lola. Even had a playboyesque business card with the stylish Femlin silhouette. This gal had big honking hooters with bright pink aureoles and long pencil eraser thick nipples. She had a shock of blonde hair and pale ivory skin. Another gal was named Terry, a pretty brunette with a nice figure. How time flies all those 20 something hookers would be old enough to be grandmothers now.

Chapter 25 Phillips Hazardous Waste

When I first started at PPCo Research and Development I heard stories about the waste pits back west of the Pilot Plant. They were back in the trees along Sand Creek. These things, and I get this second hand from guys who had to survey their locations, were so noxious it make their eyes water just being down wind of them. No telling what went in them. Knowing a bit about geology. I know a meandering creek such as Sand Creek leaves over time a lot of porous sediments just right for migrating plumes. Unlined pits for hazardous waste and toxins make good sources from which these plumes can form. I also know that they tend to migrate to creeks and other surface bodies of water. So my best guess is these pits were unlined due to the fact it was not required at the time. The image of the area now shows that Conoco/PPCo now has four oxidizing ponds in the southern part of the picture. The round white donuts in the square green ponds are bubbles from the aerators in the ponds helping the bugs degrade oil and other nasties in the water. I can not be certain of the location of the old pits. My best guess is the big brown scar to the north west in the trees. Either that or they are hidden by the trees in the middle left of the picture. this is clearly a land fill. You can see the edge of the material to the south where they are pushing it into the trees. I can't say if this is Phillips property, but more than likely it is. There is a big debris pile in the upper right, the white area. It looks like a truck or dozer parked by the black area. There is a chance that the ponds were located where they have built a retaining wall and run-off containment basin just above and left of the containment ponds. The long rectangular structure that looks to discharge into a Sand Creek tributary. Anyone care to do some sampling down stream of this area in Sand Creek? I certainly hope you don't fish there. Sand Creek and Eliza Creek also catch the run-off from the National Zinc Superfund site. In 1984 the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was passed. This was called the cradle to grave act. This required companies producing listed hazardous materials to provide employees with Material Safety Data Sheets and to also track and inventory all wastes produced until they were destroyed. Cradle to grave. Well one day we start getting all these steel drums out at R&D. Turns out Phillips was none to diligent in disposing of the hazardous materials they produced and the government was shipping them back to them after finding them and tracing them back to PPCo. There are lots of ways to save money. I guess letting Sanford and Son hall your hazardous waste off for you is one way. In the event, they had to destroy it. Problem was nobody knew what was in the drums. A lot of them were rusty and were encased in plastic bags to prevent leakage. There were a lot of them. So Phillips set there engineers to designing an incinerator and a scrubber. Soon they were burning the waste and barrels all in one go. They patented the incinerator. John Mihm was the head of R&D at the time. You might remember him as Mihm the Merciless. Well we were going through layoffs about this time. When weren't we. eh? So he had a great club to find volunteers to man the incinerator. Kind of like the old Royal Navy Press Gangs. If your worth to your current organization was suspect, you were given the choice to be laid off, or work with hazardous and toxic chemicals all day. Nice choice, wot? I guess they had plenty of "volunteers" because the incinerator ran day and night for years. I don't currently see any trace of it on the Google images, nor do I see the Pilot Plant. Looks like they are cleaning up the place. Next up, Benzene spills in Borger and Plastics Plant explosions in Pasadena.

Chapter 24 Bartlesville, Toxic Metals and Superfund Central

In my career I have been an environmental consultant for one of the largest international firms in the country. I have been involved in numerous environmental law suits across the country from California to Dallas to Charleston. When I was in college, I did a special graduate research project on toxic trace metals. There are numerous plants that are called bio-accumulators. That is they preferentially pick up toxic metals and concentrate them in the plant tissue. Now this isn't a problem if the plant isn't a food plant. In the industry, certain plants are used to scavenge metals from affected sites, they are burned and the ash is encapsulated for disposal or the metals recovered. An example of a bio-accumulator is Astragalus mollissimus and Oxytropis lumberti better known collectively as Loco Weed. They are purple and white blossomed plants respectively, and are found in the western 2/3s of Kansas. The plants can poison cattle, horses and sheep. The poisoning occurs through Selenium over dosing. As you may have guessed Selenium is a nutrient too, but in massive doses, like so many other things, it is bad, very bad for you. When I first arrived in B'ville in 1980, I was fascinated by the Zinc smelters. My fascination stemmed from the fact there had been so many, and that Zinc a nutrient metal important to men to keep lead in the pencil as well as proper functioning of the related pump. What I also knew is that Zinc is intimately related to Cadmium. A not so nice metal, as well as Lead. We all know about Lead. Not only will it kill you coming out of the barrel of a gun, but it will make you kids dumb as a post if they choose to eat Lead paint or are exposed to it in other ways. My interest stemmed from the fact that I noticed the prevailing wind usually blew from the southwest. I could see in my minds eye, the town wreathed in open smelter smoke blowing across the town, across the flood plain and on to Dewey. As the smoke cooled particulates would rain out containing Lead and Cadmium. Not too much of a problem if you didn't breath the smoke or eat the soil, unless you had another exposure pathway, like food. I remember raising the question one day with my co-workers as we drove across town from R&D what they thought the Cadmium levels of the pecans from the orchard along the river was. You see pecans LOVE Cadmium. They scavenge it. So if you like those B'ville pecans, you are probably getting a good dose of Cadmium too. The Japanese discovered the culprit disease caused by excess Cadmium, Mercury too. Mercury causes horrible birth defects. The Japs learned you shouldn't shit where you eat. They were dumping Mercury laden industrial waste water into the bay where they did a lot of fishing. So they were poisoning the fish who in turned poisoned them. Not a problem for anyone but pregnant mothers. You just sweat it out in most cases. A little dementia might occur along with it; ever heard the term "mad as a hatter"? That is because hat makers used mercury to block hats and got a lot of mercury fumes in the bargain. Back to Cadmium. It causes Tsai Tsai disease which translates to "Ouch Ouch" disease. Cadmium ions which are nearly the same size as Calcium ions, replace Calcium ions in the bones. The problem is it doesn't make strong bones. So the sufferer gets micro fractures in the bones which are quite painful. I never did test those Pecans, but I never ate any either. Looking at Google Earth it looks like the orchard is still there, between Tuxedo and Phillips Blvds. Now I was in the Houston air port one day on my way out of town when I overheard another consultant talking about Bartlesville. It seems I hadn't been too far off the mark. But the exposure pathway that caused the entire hubbub was different and so was the metal. It seems that all the clinker or slag from the furnaces way back then were cheap fill and gravel to some enterprising eye. So they hauled the stuff off and used it to pave and fill the alleys throughout town. The house I had on Cherokee had a retaining wall and an elevated alley behind it paved with gray gravelly material. It seems the stuff was laden with Lead! The affected area according to the EPA report on the National Priorities List was a 135 acre site along 11th and Virginia Streets. It included schools, day cares, churches, playgrounds, parks, recreational areas and business properties. Further they found that: "NZC operated a zinc smelter on this site from 1907 to 1976, when it was acquired by the Zinc Corporation of America. NZC was also known as National Zinc Co., Horsehead, Inc., and St. Joe Mineral. The NZC smelter had no air emission controls, allowing emissions to be deposited downwind in various areas in Bartlesville. According to 1992 EPA reports, lead and cadmium levels in the top 2 feet of soil are greater than three times natural background levels. Although the extent of the area of contamination has not been completely determined, it includes contaminated soils at two schools and three day care centers. An estimated 1,700 students attend the school and day care centers, and 170 people work at the facilities. "

It doesn't seem that they investigated the other smelter sites around town either. If you haven't heard much about it, go figure, who wants to buy contaminated property? I am sure the city fathers, Phillips, realtors and others have had a hand in it. Some concerned person got on the stick and when National Zinc closed the plant grounds were declared a CERCLA Site. That's' Superfund to most of you. It stands for Comprehensive Emergency Response and Recovery Act, also known as the Lawyers Relief Act since 90% of the billons spent have gone to pay litigation costs and not to actually cleaning up. A Superfund court case amounts to a finger pointing festival. Maybe just maybe they actually find the responsible party and make them clean it up, but in most cases the company is long gone or been dissolved. Coppers Wood Treating, better know as the Creosote King , left contaminated creosote plants all over the country sitting on plumes of black gooey hazardous glop. Toxic to people and fish. The company is long gone morphed into another entity called Beazer. Yep, Beazer Wood Products and Home construction. They just walked away and made the government force them to clean it up. I worked on a suit for Conoco, before the merge. They bought a fertilizer plant in Charleston, next to an old Beazer/Koppers plant and got sued in a cross complaint. Seems once Beazer/Koppers got nailed they wanted to spread the pain around. So they sued Conoco for causing the problem. We won on behalf of Conoco, but they still had to clean up an adjoining marsh because a bit of Lead was found there by the EPA. So in order to save the marshland from a bit of Lead, they had to destroy it. There were numerous civil war cemeteries and battle field on and about the site which could have been the source of the Lead, but no, they probably forced Conoco to dredge the marsh then replant it.

The last word, is if you look at the second photo above you can see that they have cleaned up the plant site. The total area affected as reported above was 135 acres. I do not know how they remediated the affected residential areas. There are also another Superfund sites around town. BARTLESVILLE HWY 123 LANDFILL HWY 123 NORTH OF BARTLESVILLE QUAPAW, ST LAKE Landfill N. FUTURA & E CHICKASAW CITIES SERVICE COMPANY 510 SOUTH KAW STREET EAST BARTLESVILLE DUMP 5.5 MILES EAST OF BARTLESVILLE JOHNSTONE & LUPA DUMP NORTH OF JOHNSTONE STREET NATIONAL ZINC CORP. WEST 11TH STREET OLD DEWEY ROAD DUMP 0.5 MILES N. of Bartlesville SOMEX Limited - injection well 1350 South Virginia Avenue