father-in-law answered the phone. He’d come home from his barber shop. He told me that Ann had the truck packed up, and the family was ready to go. They were going to stay with relatives in Schuylkill County, about 60 miles from Middletown. “ But that day was payday,” Jim recalls. “When I heard about the accident at Three Mile Island. I only had five dollars in my pocket. Ann didn’t have any money at home. Her father had paid to gas up his car and my truck. But I had to get to a bank. 1had no idea how long we'd be away from Middletown.” His boss, who was still in 1he office, had offered to take him anyplace he needed to go, so Jim asked to be dropped off at a branch of his bank that was in the direction Ann would be driving. Then he and his wife arranged a rendezvous at a shopping mall. For the next five days, Jim and Ann and ■ Lee and Andrew slept on the living room floor of an aunt's house in Schuylkill County, it was very uncomfortable, and they hated imposing on relatives they barely knew. “ It seems like all we did was watch the TV news, buy food, cook meals, and watch the news some more,” Jim says. Ann adds that “ it wasn't until Friday night or Saturday morning that we realized there was a strong chance we'd never be able to go back home. After that, we couldn’t think about anything else.” Now, of course, the exile is over—but the fears it produced are more painful than ever. "We thought we'd feel good once we got back to Middletown," Ann says, "but it was not a joyous return—not for any of us. We feel very uncomfortable here. And it keeps getting worse. I keep thinking we shouldn’t be here at all.” "You want to think the whole thing is over," Jim added. "Once we came back, we kept telling ourselves that was true. But we know, deep inside, that there's a big pressure cooker sitting down there, down at Three Mile Island. There are more than 400,000 pounds of highly contaminated radioactive water lying in the bottom of that containment. That has to come out. But how can anyone get in there to get the water out without releasing the radiation? That's a puzzle 1can’t solve. But I do know that the people down there are working with something they don’t understand. Day to day. it’s a totally new experience for them.” There was an edge of despair in Ann’s voice when she said, "In a way, it is worse for us." The Hursts’5-year-old son Andrew had had a terrible time breathing when he was a baby. The Hursts took him to Harrisburg Hospital, then to Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. During that two-year period, he had somewhere between 75 and 100 chest X-rays. though the doctors couldn’t define his ailment any more precisely than to say that the child had an unknown virus which had spread over one- third of his lungs. He's been healthy for the past three years, but when the accident at Three Mile Island occurred, and the radiation was released, "I couldn't forget all those X-rays,” Ann says. "Jim and I know that staying here is unhealthy for him." With a self-mocking reflectiveness, Jim defined his own dilemma. “ 1 say, how can they sell us out for economic reasons, but yet I’m risking my health and the health of my family for economic reasons. I can’t leave. 1 can’t let this home just sit here. I would say this house was probably worth $35,000 to $40,000 before this thing happened. 1 have no idea of what it's worth now. "But that’s not the important thing to me. The thing is that my work is here. I have 12 years that I've put into a public- servicc-type job with a good retirement plan. It's going to be a very, very difficult decision for me to leave now. It’s not like I have anything to go to. Middletown is the only home any of us ever had. I guess we’d have to pack up our clothes, store our furniture. rent a tractor trailer, and just hit the road. And when we thought we were at a safe distance from Three Mile Island, we'd start knocking on doors until 1 got a job. Then we'd locate wherever we happened to be. But it is very difficult to do that.” What the Children Saw On Friday, March 30. Ann Hurst heard that there was trouble at Three Mile Island about 15 minutes before her husband did. So she was over at Middletown’s Grandville Elementary School, picking up her daughter Lee when Jim began his search for a telephone. Lee was confused. “ I didn't know what had happened. My teacher said she was going to close the blinds so that we didn’t get hurt or anything. Then the principal started getting on the loudspeaker and yelling that if your parents didn't pick you up, they were going to take you over to the farm-show building. 1didn’t know how I’d find my mother." Lee was lucky that she left school early. Within the next hour the scene there became even more chaotic and panicky than the one Jim had witnessed when he stood in the phone booth in the gas station near his office. By noon, the school was jammed with parents. The street in front was clogged with the campers and pick-up trucks in which the families hoped to escape. Here is what Mrs. Marcia Christ, 25, a fifth-grade teacher, saw as she tried to maintain some semblance of calm in her homeroom: "Parents kept running into the building to get their children out. Some of them were carrying blankets. They’d throw them over their kids' heads, as if that would protect them from the radiation. A couple of them had newspapers, too. They’d put them over the children's heads. They’d say. Hurry up, hurry up, we're leaving.’ A lot of the children began to sob. Then their parents would practically drag them away. I think they thought the governor was going to call a general evacuation, and they would beat the rush out of town.” In mid-April, after school had resumed, I spent an afternoon taping a discussion with 16 students in one of Mrs. Christ’s fifth-grade reading classes. They were bursting to describe the events of that day —and surprisingly eager to recount the nightmares those events had produced. • A blond-haired boy, with a slight lisp: “The first time I heard about it was on Wednesday when I got home. My father said there was a leak in the nuclear reactor. I wasn't really too worried about it. Neither were my parents. Then on Thursday, when we were in school during math, we talked about it. No one was scared then either. But when I got home my grandmother said she’d heard it was getting worse. “On Friday morning we were doing gym, and some teachers came in. They said, 'Do not go out. Wc repeat. Do not go out.’ Everyone started saying, ‘We're going to die. We’re going to die.’ "We went back to our homeroom. It was a beautiful day, but the teachers wouldn’t let us go outside for recess. We got sent home early. Some of the parents picked up their kids, but mine were working. When J got home I was worried about my grandmother. I was afraid she might not have heard anything about it. She always has her doors and windows open. “On Saturday night, when the guy on the news said there would be an evacuation, my mom got real excited. She said, ‘Pack your stuff, everything. We have to be ready.’ The next morning she decided we should leave even if there wasn’t an evacuation order. So we put all our stuff in the car. and my parents, my grandmother, and I went to stay with my uncle in a nearby county. "That day we heard about the bubble and how it started to get bigger, and then how it was going down. My mother and father were talking about how, if they didn’t get all the pressure out and all the radiation out, we would probably die. “ When we got back to Middletown, I still wasn't allowed to go outside until school opened again.” • A boy born in the coal-mining area 40 miles from Middletown: “ My grandfather lives in Halifax. As soon as we got home that Friday we started packing the car. We headed for his house right away. It was hot in the car that day. We kept saying, 'Can we open the windows? Can we open the windows?' My mom was afraid the radiation would get in. She kept saying ‘no’ until we were 30 miles away from Middle- town.” • A boy with glasses, and a succinct, precise manner of speech: "My mom came to pick me up at school. But the only reason she did was because the radio said that if there was an evacuation al] the kids in the school would have to go to the Hershey arena. “My dad works at Three Mile Island— he’s the supervisor of operations for unit number two. He said it was okay to go outside. So my brother and I went out and played all week.” • A boy who'd been raising his hand shyly for several minutes: “My uncle works at Three Mile Island, too. He said that if there would have been a meltdown it would have wiped out Middletown, Highspire, Steelton, Harrisburg, and Goldsboro. On Wednesday, I heard that it was six minutes away from a meltdown. "I didn’t think there was anything to worry about, though. On the radio they kepi making jokes. They said that instead of sitting on the front porch watching the stars you can watch your friends glow. “ Bu1 on Friday my whole family jumped in the car about 15 minutes after I got home from school. “My mom thought that if there was a meltdown we wouldn’t be able to come back for 30 or 40 years because of the clean-up. She was really afraid. She was crying. Her whole family has always lived in Middletown. "We were all afraid. Well, I wasn’t really. I guess my mom was scared the most.” • The boy from coal country: “ I was scared because we forgot our pets. I really like dogs. The whole week I worried that some maniac would come along and kill them. "My grandfather kept saying that if the plant blew up, it would be like an atomic bomb. 1 kept having dreams about the plant blowing up. Sometimes 1 still have them. “ In one of them we were in our house in Middletown. All of a sudden we heard— like a bulletin on the radio, saying that the plant was about to blow up. Then our house did blow up, and we were walking around, looking at our walls, just like we were ghosts. Then 1 heard there was a cemetery outside our house. I kept walking around it." • A sandy-haired boy: "I had a dream that was kooky. When the meltdown happened, we looked outside our house and there were all sorts of people running around yelling. ‘Ah, it’s going to blow up. Ah, we’re going to die.’ “ In my dream, my family went down to the cellar. We don't really have a cellar. And we just stayed there, like a tornado was going to come. "Then the cellar blew up, and we were all dead. 1 saw myself lying dead on the ground. And I saw a whole bunch of stardust floating around. It was really the radiation, I guess.” • A boy who’d been silent throughout the class, who talked in a calm, even voice: "I had a dream that the meltdown took place while I was sleeping. I kept hearing my baby sister crying and my mom screaming and my dad hammering things and running all over the place trying to get clothes and stomping down to the cellar, getting suitcases. “My sister kept crying. I was running around the room smashing things because I was so mad about what had happened. 1 smashed my mirror. I took bags and I took boxes and I just threw my stuff in—all my clothes and my toys. Then 1 ran down the steps and said. 'Here, Dad,’ and plopped the things all over the floor. Everything went all over the place. “He hollered at me and 1 was upstairs, crying. He got everything packed in the car. Then I ran downstairs and I got all my stuff. My sister came down, crying, and she had her pillow. My mom was down there, crying, and she was hollering, too. Crying, hollering—that's all I heard. “We got out of Middletown and we were going down Route 81 and I was thinking, ‘Oh, no, here comes the meltdown. It's going to beat us.’ "Then I woke up and had a glass of water. I was real scared.” • The sandy-haired boy again: “ I had Live Jazz Nightly Extensive list of fine wines Beer and sandwiches TAVERM SW 11th &Morrison 227-8219 NO COVER Open Monday through Saturday 28
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