and affidavits. A pattern was emerging, with some strikingly similar ailments among the seven of them. Hodge, Good, Gender, Crews, and Quigley suffered severe lung difficulties, at times requiring surgery, and in all cases causing chronic breathing problems for decades. Consistent intestinal attacks, often within a few months after leaving Nagasaki, became long-term realities of life for Hodge, Zotter, Gender, Crews, and Quigley; each of those men also experienced persisting painful conditions in their legs. And a pronounced chronic infestation of unusual weeping skin sores or ulcerations had been suffered by Hodge, Zotter, Good, Gender, and Quigley. Most of the men spoke of feeling run down by the time they reached middle age — as though they were much older than their chronological years. Time after time, medical specialists had been puzzled about their afflictions. By mid-1979, Quigley had reached a total of fifteen men — or their next of kin — who had been stationed with him at that roofless Nagasaki schoolhouse. Dispersed all over the United States and unaware of each other’s postwar medical woes, most of the men experienced agonizing health problems at an unusually early age. Six suffered heart attacks, four of them fatal, before the age of 50. Serious lung ailments, ongoing acute stomach pains, bizarre skin afflictions, aching weakness in leg bones — each of these physical difficulties, occuring at young ages, was reported for about half of the fifteen Company C veterans tracked down. Little more than an hour’s drive from Quigley’s Portland home, in the southern Willamette Valley town of Lebanon, lived Company C veteran William Hoover. “Bill had, been lucky, or so he thought,” Juanita Hoover reflected a year after Quigley had located her husband. But rapid- fire events ended the Hoovers’ feelings of good fortune. In quick succession, Bill Hoover’s wife recalled, “he had a tumor removed from his hip and a skin cancer from his ear — also a testicle operation. Then on Oct. 15, 1979, he discovered he had lung cancer. He had surgery immediately. It had grown so rapidly it had attached itself to the sac around the heart. They removed two- thirds of his right lung.” Hoover nearly died on the operating table. The fifteen former Marines’ health histories that Quigley documented represented about a tenth of the total number of Company C servicemen with him in Nagasaki. The fifteen had been a fairly random sampling and had turned up a conspicuous pattern of early onset of particular diseases. What’s more, Quigley pointed out, he had begun to do what the U.S. Government had always been in a far better position to accomplish, with its resources and access to records; but the government had never tried, refusing even to lend a hand to Quigley’s efforts. For Lyman Eugene Quigley — veteran of Tarawa, Okinawa, and other bloody battles in the Pacific during World War II — the most tenacious foes turned out to be severe health impairment teaming up with a recalcitrant U.S. Government. The new evidence he had uncovered didn’t seem to make any difference to the Veterans Administration, which turned down his claim again. “I got a willpower to live,” Quigley said as he leafed through stacks of negative replies under official United States Government letterheads. “I ain’t giving up yet. I’m not ready.” He continued his research work, until a fifth heart attack killed him in spring 1980, at the age of 58. A few hours after the funeral, Bernice Quigley drove across Portland to meet a group of Japanese atomic bomb survivors who were visiting the city as part of a speaking tour. As she talked to them, she learned that a number of her late husband’s ailments, including odd purple spots that would come and go and reappear on his legs, were quite familiar to the Japanese visitors who had lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atom Most of the men spoke of feeling run down by the time they reached middle age — as though they were much older than their chronological years. Time after time, medical specialists had been puzzled about their aftllcations. bombs fell. For Bernice Quigley, newly widowed, an insidious irony had completed a painful full circle. Downwind Residents Routinely, large atomic clouds blew from the Nevada Test Site to rural communities like Enterprise — a small town, more than 100 miles away in southwestern Utah, surrounded by productive farms and arid grazing country dotted with sagebrush and juniper trees. The same year nuclear testing began, a boy named Preston Truman was born near Enterprise. His parents, ranchers and farmers, taught Preston to ride a horse at the same time he learned to walk. “I can remember,” he would recall, “several times getting up with the rest of the family and driving out to my father’s farm in the moments before dawn and watching the western sky light up with the flash from the bombs in Nevada approximately 112 miles away. I remember on occasion hearing the sound waves come over. I remember later in the mornings watching on a couple of occasions clouds come over. To a little child that didn’t mean much. The atomic tests were very much a part of our lives.” When he was in high school, Preston Truman was diagnosed with a form of cancer called lymphoma. Chemotherapy and other medical treatment over the next 13 years cost about $100,000. As was true for all other downwind residents, the government did not provide a penny. But Truman was relatively lucky. In 1980, he was in remission from the usually fatal lymphoma. Out of nine children who were his friends in the immediate area of Enterprise when he was a child, Truman was the only one who reached the age of 28. The rest died of leukemia or cancer. Forty miles east of Enterprise, in Cedar City, Blaine and Loa Johnson buried their 12-year-old daughter in 1965. She died of leukemia. A total of seven leukemia cases occurred for people within a 200-yard radius of their home, in the space of a dozen years. And there were other worries. One-fifth of the male high school graduates of the 1950s and early 1960s in Cedar City discovered they were sterile, a particularly grievous condition in a Mormon culture which places great stress on holy edicts to raise large families. For those who became parents, there were fears of genetic damage. Elizabeth Catalan, who was a teenager while growing up in southwest Utah during the 1950s, lost her father to leukemia when he was 43, and a sister to complications from an enlarged thyroid. A surviving sister’s daughter remained on her mind: “I watched my beautiful little niece, Kay’s child, cope with the birth defect that left her with a ganglia that doubled the size of her tongue and wound around, like a weed, inside her neck and down into her shoulder.” Elizabeth Catalan thought too about girls she grew up with, now women, coping with aftermaths of miscarriages and physical abnormalities in their children. When Beth Catalan became pregnant, the fetus dissolved in utero. “One of the things I always wanted to be was a mother,” she told a citizens’ commission inquiry in Washington in 1980, adding that, “you run a Geiger counter over my body and it’ll click.” She decided not to take the risk of trying again to give birth to a baby. And there were other worries, one-fltth of the male high school graduates of the 1950s and the early 1960s in cedar City discovered they were sterile, a particularly grievous condition in a Mormon culture which places great stress on holy edicts to raise large families. “Please, God, don’t let us have killed John Wayne.” Perhaps some unlikely victims of the Nevada test program were the Hollywood cast and film crew of Howard Hughes’ production The Conquerer. In 1954, John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead, and producer-director Dick Powell filmed on the sandy dunes outside of St. George, Utah. They were there for three months. A quarter-century later John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Dick Powell had all died of cancer. Wayne, a heavy smoker, succumbed to cancer of his lungs, throat, and stomach in 1979; Hayward died of skin, breast, and uterine cancer in 1975; Moorehead passed away from uterine cancer in 1974. Another star of the movie, Pedro Armendariz, developed kidney cancer in 1960 and was later struck with terminal cancer of the lymphatic system. Dick Powell died from, lymph cancer when it spread to his lungs in 1963. The coincidence of these cases was placed into a larger pattern when People magazine researched the subsequent health of the entire Hollywood entourage that had worked on location in St. George. They found that out of 220 people in the cast and crew, 91 had contracted cancer by late 1980, and half of the cancer victims had died of the disease. (This survey did not include the couple of hundred local American Indians who served as extras in the film.) “With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic,” remarked University of Utah radiological health director Dr. Robert C. Pendleton. For two decades Pendleton had been warning that radioactive “hot spots” remained in numerous Utah locations, even after atmospheric testing had ceased. Added Dr. Ronald S. Oseas of the Harbor UCLA Medical Center: “It is known that radiation contributes to the risk of cancer. With these numbers, it is highly probable that the Con- querer group was affected by that additive effect.” Ellen Powell, Michael Wayne, and Susan Hayward’s son Tim Barker had accompanied their parents to the set in 1954. Tim Barker told of his mother’s protracted cancer: “She was in a fetal position, and she had lost her swallowing reflex, she had pneumonia and she had lost her hair.” In 1968 he had a benign tumor removed from his mouth. Michael Wayne later suffered from skin cancer. Barker echoed the sentiments of many residents downwind from the test site when he asked, “If the government knew there was a possibility of exposure, why didn’t they just warn us?” Federal nuclear authorities had long been aware of the deep resentment that had taken hold in numerous communities within a radius of several hundred miles of the Nevada Test Site. But the specter of culpability for the cancer deaths of such popular public figures caused concern at usually stolid government bureaus. At the Pentagon one official of the Defense Nuclear Agency responded to the news by murmuring, “Please, God, don’t let us have killed John Wayne.” • 26 Clinton St. Quarterly
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz