ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 17, 1996 TAG: 9607170010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALTVILLE
SERIES: Saltville: The town that wouldn't die
SOURCE: CATHRYN MCCUE STAFF WRITER
The homes along Fourth Avenue, though not company houses, are modest, with tidy yards and flower beds. Eunice Goodman, 69, has lived here half her life, raising three children with her husband. An antique pump organ dominates her small living room; upon request, she plays a hymn for visitors one afternoon.
Then the slender woman sits in a recliner and talks about her cancer.
She was diagnosed in 1982 with lymphoma, which turned up as a tumor in her knee - a rarity, according to her doctor at Bowman Gray Hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C. Goodman had surgery and chemotherapy and has been in remission for several years.
When her son James "Peanut" Goodman also was diagnosed with lymphoma, her doctor grew more concerned. Rarely is cancer, particularly lymphoma, passed genetically, he explained.
Eunice Goodman wonders if industrial waste from the Olin Corp. is to blame.
"Just anywhere there was a sinkhole, they'd throw stuff in there. So we don't know really what we're living with."
There are other Saltvillians with lymphoma, and Goodman starts reeling off their names and dates of death: Newel Smith on First Street, 1975; Bill Galliher who lived on British Row - so named for the workers that came from England with Thomas Mathieson at the turn of the century to help build the plant - 1992.
In all, seven people have lymphoma or have died of the disease in this small rural town - a lot, says Goodman's doctor, Robert Cooper, head of oncology at Bowman-Gray. There are usually only 40,000 cases a year in the country, he says.
In 1991, after treating the Goodmans, Cooper contacted North Carolina public health officials about his concerns, and they offered to study the cancer rate in Saltville. "Our [Virginia] health department said thank you, but no thanks," Goodman says. She helped a local group, the Mountain Empire Environmental Team, put together a four-page list of people with cancer, dead and living, going back almost 20 years, in an attempt to show officials there was a problem in their town.
After several years, their voices were finally heard. In an unusual move, Virginia health officials are working with federal experts to compile cancer deaths over the past 10 years according to Saltville's ZIP codes - information usually recorded by county basis. Dr. John Crellin, with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, says the report should be out later this summer.
Meanwhile, he notes that "cancer's just a lot more common than people realize." One of three people get some type of the disease, he says.
That statistic doesn't ease the pain of Diana Dye, whose family seems to have been hit by cancer particularly hard. One of Olin's harshest critics, she was one of only two people to criticize the company at a public hearing last year.
After an Olin executive described as too expensive an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to dig up and incinerate contaminated dirt, Dye stepped up to the microphone in the high school auditorium. "How can you put a price on people's lives like that?" she asked, her voice cracking with emotion. "Olin's got a lot of money out of [the land], and now it's worth nothing."
At TJ's Restaurant later that evening, one local businessman dismissed Dye's outburst. "She's a basket case," he said in a confidential tone.
It's the sort of reaction Diana Dye's brother-in-law, Fred Dye, and the few others who make up MEET have grown used to. When the group formed in 1990 to oppose a proposal by a company called Three Seasons to build an incinerator in town that would burn contaminated soil hauled in from outside the region, Fred Dye was threatened with a gun and sued by the company, which claimed he was impeding business.
MEET failed to block the Three Seasons plan, but when it turned its watchdog eye on Olin, publicly criticizing and questioning the company, its reputation as rabble-rousers was sealed.
The Superfund cleanup "is just another liberal bandwagon for these people to jump on," says Pete Price, who works at a garage downtown.
Fred Dye doesn't rile easily. He likes to go fishing, works hard at the U.S. Gypsum plant, and deals with the disparaging remarks philosophically. "MEET's been a thorn in some people's sides, trying to open people's eyes," he says. "I reckon it's the first time anybody's said anything" - anything critical of Olin, that is.
He's not surprised that no MEET members were invited to be on a new "community liaison panel" sponsored by Olin as part of a recent corporate-wide attempt to foster communication with people in its manufacturing towns. These panels include leaders from all sectors of a community - business, education, youth groups, education, local government, environment and more.
It had been talked about in Saltville for a couple years, says Patsy Jones, Olin's assistant in town. "But some didn't think it was needed. Some thought it was a bad idea," she says. They were "afraid some of the more vocal groups might get control."
But Saltville is a small Southern town, and people handle their disagreements politely. Dye's not bitter about the community panel and says that Barry Loupe, a fishing guide who will fill the environmental seat, will do a good job.
And he happens to be friends with Price, who staunchly supported the Three Seasons incinerator. "We didn't have words over it. We just didn't talk," Dye says. He still takes his car to Price's garage for repairs.
Woolly mammoth returns
In an empty lot on the west end of town, a small, white billboard stands like a sentry amid the gravel and weeds. Several seasons of wind and rain have warped its frame and chipped the paint.
The sign depicts a silhouette of a tusked beast rising in front of a semi-circular rose window. Below, a few simple words express the hopes and dreams of this rural, mountain town: "The Future Home of the Museum of the Middle Appalachians."
This modest proclamation belies what supporters envision - a state-of-the-art museum with interactive exhibits, walking trails, holograms and sound effects that would virtually thrust visitors - up to 500,000 a year - back through time in central Appalachia. If all goes well, the museum would secure Saltville's place among the top tourist draws in the South.
"Why, we'd put Gatlinburg to shame," former councilman Charles Norris says.
"It'll be just like an industry, only better," says Mayor Frank "T-Bone" Lewis. "We've got people putting their money on the line for this."
The notion of showcasing the natural and cultural history of the town and region goes back many years. By the time Jerry MacDonald, a former Radford University geology professor, got involved, the idea was ripe for action.
He recalls the summer of 1990. He and two scientists from the Martinsville-based Virginia Museum of Natural History were talking with a town official after spending the day in the wellfields on a trial dig.
"There was four of us and two six-packs sitting out on the picnic table," MacDonald says, and the first name they dreamed up was "River of Bones Museum." Two years later, the nonprofit Saltville Foundation formed to promote the creation of the more soberly named Museum of the Middle Appalachians.
The foundation now has an active board of trustees, two paid staff people and an army of volunteers, 275 members, an annual budget of $82,000, a gift of deed from the town for 48 acres, including the wellfields, and intentions of breaking ground in 1998.
Earlier this year, the Olin Charitable Trust announced a $6,000 yearly grant for operating expenses, and a promise to match by 50 percent contributions of $100 or more from former employees.
But in many ways the driving force behind the project are the Friends of the Museum of the Middle Appalachians - scores of volunteers who raise money, lick envelopes, give talks, write newsletters - anything to help spread the word.
"They're the ones that do the work," says MacDonald, who still serves on the board. "They are so creative."
Take, for example, the annual Woolly Mammoth Day, Saltville's alternative to Groundhog Day. In keeping with the Ice Age origins of this tusked beast whose bones were found here in the clay, the Friends thought it more appropriate to rely on a mammoth's prediction of winter weather rather than a modern rodent from Pennsylvania.
Besides, it's a great way to raise money and get some press. Last year, the local newspaper devoted almost three times as much space previewing the breakfast than to a story about the Superfund cleanup.
This year, the Friends served up their annual "mammoth" breakfast, featuring Ground Sloth Gravy, Paleo-Pancakes and Bison Bacon. At $5 per plate, they raised about $2,130. After breakfast and perfunctory speeches by local dignitaries, the crowd went out to the elementary school parking lot to see if "Woolly" would predict another six weeks of winter.
About the size of a cement truck and covered with thousands of orange-tinged twine tassels, Woolly is the brainchild of Fred DeBusk, owner of a local hardware supply store. Starting with a '69 International pick-up truck (``Something else that's extinct,'' he notes), DeBusk fashioned a wire frame in the shape of a woolly mammoth. She squirts water through her trunk, bats her eyelashes, and nods her giant head slowly to affirm winter's duration.
Woolly has become so popular, she's been asked to appear in parades in Marion, Abingdon and elsewhere. To streamline the logistics of hauling the beast up and down the interstate, DeBusk and the Friends unveiled "Little Woolly" during Saltville's Fourth of July celebration.
Building a world-class museum to draw tourists while cleaning up a massive toxic waste dump would seem contrary endeavors for most any community. Not Saltville. Museum planners decided early on to include the cleanup process in its exhibits as another example of the extraordinary connection between the natural resources and human culture in this valley.
But there are skeptics. Some Saltvillians say the Friends and the town are wasting their time, going after a high-falutin' tourist attraction when they should be trying to snag a few more good-paying employers.
"I support it, but we need industry more than a museum," says Evelyn Rector, who explains that four of her five children have to commute to Bristol. She didn't want to talk much about the museum effort because she's good friends with some of the supporters. "I don't want them mad at me. I got to live here with them."
Charles Mitchell, who went back for his high school diploma after the Olin plant shut down, says the museum is a nice idea. "But you want my honest opinion? I don't think it'll ever happen."
Like Rector and Mitchell, some folks won't believe it until they see it, and that day is further off than the museum foundation originally hoped. The first director recently quit due to differences with the board, and the groundbreaking is at least a year behind schedule.
Hopes that Olin would use the Fourth of July celebrations and the debut of Little Woolly to announce a major donation this year went unfulfilled. The foundation is still discussing the "tender" topic with Olin, says Steve Thompson, a board member and Virginia Tech architecture professor who has stepped in as interim director.
But the museum believers are pushing ahead. The foundation is launching a capital campaign this year to raise at least $1 million, and sponsoring a national architectural competition for the museum's design.
The group also has decided to build the museum in stages. "It's not necessary to build it like one great big box, like a Wal-Mart or Kmart, all at one time," Thompson says.
Should the museum become a reality, the old salt wells - silent since the plant shut down in 1972 - might once again be put into production making salt for tourists. Museum supporters believe the tourists will come from miles around, from overseas, too, to learn how subterranean shifts in the earth millions of years ago thrust huge chunks of rock to form the beautiful Appalachian mountains, and how the lake that once filled this valley eventually disappeared, leaving behind massive deposits of sodium chloride - salt.
"They claimed there was enough salt in the ground here to supply the U.S. for 50 or 100 years," former mayor William Totten says. "I countered the time would come when it was more valuable than it was during the Civil War. That's a fortune down there."
Perhaps the tourists will pay a few dollars to help carve away the blue-gray clay at the dig site in hopes of finding a pre-historic bone, a tooth, an arrowhead. They'll pay a few more dollars to buy a bag of brown granules, "Saltville - Salt Capital of the Confederacy" stenciled on the outside.
And they'll stay a few days at a local bed and breakfast, eat at a fancy restaurant, spend a day fishing on the North Fork, browse the antique shops, and buy a "Saltville - Dig It" ball cap on the way out of town.
It might be a very different place from the one Totten grew up in, a community forever pardoned from the death sentence delivered by outsiders upon Olin's monumental decision to pull out.
"I kept preaching to the people that we were going to make it," Totten says.
"And we did."
LENGTH: Long : 244 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. 1. Steve Thompson (above), a Virginiaby CNBTech architecture professor, has stepped in as interim director of
the Museum of the Middle Appalachians, the centerpiece of the town's
tourism plans. "Why, we'd put Gatlinburg to shame," predicts former
Saltville city councilman Charles Norris when asked about the town's
potential. 2. Fred and Patty DeBusk not only created the idea of
Saltville mascots Woolly Mammoth and Little Woolly, they created the
beasts themselves from the wire frame out. 3. Mastodon bones
retieved in a 1964 dig are in a collection at the Saltville
Elementary School. 4. Old company houses on Virginia 91, in an area
of town called Smokey Row. 5. James ``Peanut'' Goodman lives across
the street from his mother, Eunice Goodman. Both Goodmans have
lymphoma, which doctors say rarely is passed along genetically. 6.
Fred Dye (left) and Pete Price do not agree on many things
concerning Saltville's future, but they get along. ``Saltville is
too small to have any enemies,'' says Price. 6. The town turned out
for the third annual Woolly Mammoth Day at Saltville Elementary
School, which was sponsored by the Friends of the Museum of the
Middle Appalachians. 7. (headshot) William Totten. color. 8. Thomas
W. Totten collection. This aerial photo of downtown Saltville was
taken in 1946. 9. Thomas W. Totten collection The bucket line, the
9-mile aerial tramway, once was the longest in the world. It existed
from 1902-1968. Graphic: Map by staff. color.