Environment: Living, Dangerously, with Toxic Wastes

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The abandonment of Times Beach was attended by a frenzy of attention from newspapers, which was apt, since the town was created by a newspaper in the first place. The St. Louis Star-Times bought the square mile of flatland wedged between the Meramec River and the highway, and in 1925 sold plots for $67.50 each to anyone who agreed to buy a subscription to the paper (which is now defunct). After World War II it became a regular working-class town. Times Beach, like many Midwestern river settlements, had a tang more Southern than latitude alone could explain and a small-town coziness that is rare these days. People who liked it really liked it, and stayed. Land enough to build a house could be bought for $800, even after the local boom of the 1970s.

It was during the early 1970s that Times Beach, looking to keep down the summer dust, hired a fellow to spread oil on ten miles of unpaved streets. Unfortunately, the oilman also filled his truck with waste sludge from a downstate chemical factory, and so for at least a couple of summers, he sprayed tens of thousands of gallons of a dioxin-laced goo all over town. The agent of the town's destruction was a man named Russell Bliss. "Do I blame Bliss?" asks Joe Capstick, who lived in Times Beach 14 years and, after the town's demise, moved down the road. "Sure. Hell, yes. Hell, yes."

Medical science is not sure what a decade of daily dioxin exposure has done or will do. Cancers and genetic damage are the most fearsome possibilities. But one obvious effect of the dioxin discovery has been the rearrangement of townspeople's memories: in retrospect, that purplish coating on the streets has become the paradigm for life in Times Beach. They remember, now, all the dead birds around town, and the stillborn kittens and puppies. Michael Reid, 19, remembers that he and other children loved to bicycle behind the dioxin truck, skidding and sliding in the thick oil slick. Joe's wife Penny Capstick remembers falling down in it. They all remember the children tracking it in. "I can remember Jeri Lynn as a child sitting by the road just kicking her feet in the stuff," says Marilyn Leistner, who lives near by. "Just kicking and kicking in the stuff." The richest memories have become images of menace. "That was a very nice home there," says Leistner, the town's final mayor, as she drove through Times Beach recently. "That whole wing was a game room paneled with imported teakwood." Suddenly her tour-guide tone changes: "The man who lived in that home has had a lung removed. I remember the minister's wife who lived next door there had a miscarriage. The lady who lived here, she had two miscarriages. Kidney cancer over there, and the home here, the wife died in childbirth. This next family, the dog had a seizure disorder, and their little girl had terrible stomach and bladder problems." Leistner has four children, all in their 20s. "One of my daughters has a seizure disorder; she tried to commit suicide in 1983. Another daughter, she's hyperthyroid; we almost lost her to cancer of the cervix at 21. My former husband has a liver impairment."