JIMMY RUSSELL could not see his players at the other end of the football field. Donora was known for its fogs, thick and brown and vile-smelling, but this was like nothing they had ever seen or inhaled. When Russell realized he could not keep track of his players, he sent them home.
The air kept getting worse on Friday evening, October 29, 1948.
Verna Duda, the vivacious wife of Musial’s high school mentor, Ki Duda, was serving as Miss Halloween on a parade down McKean Avenue, tossing apples and candy to the townspeople. The air was bad, but then again, it was usually bad, so the parade continued.
By Saturday morning, nine people had died.
In the middle of the football game on Saturday afternoon, one player was urgently instructed by the public-address announcer to rush home. According to legend, the player’s father was dead by the time he got home, but historians say that part is apocryphal.
The game went to its conclusion, a 27–7 victory for Monongahela City, and then people went home and discovered Donora had suddenly, in the middle of a football game, become infamous.
“I was a senior in high school,” said Dr. Charles Stacey, who would become the superintendent of schools. “I heard Walter Winchell talk about the killer smog in Donora, and I said that must have been a different Donora.”
Winchell was the radio predecessor to the shock jocks and cable screamers of the next century. He was likewise known to exaggerate, but in this case he was entirely accurate. By Saturday night eighteen people were dead.
Devra Davis, author of When Smoke Ran Like Water, was an infant in 1948. Years later, as an internationally known scientist and writer, she acknowledged that Donora’s industry, thick air and all, had drawn her family to Donora.
“My zadie said, ‘It smells like money,’ ” Davis said, using the Yiddish word for grandfather. Her grandfather was a big, strong man who lived to be ninety-seven, but her bubbe, her grandmother, was already infirm, from bearing children in the foul air of the Mon Valley.
“When I was very young, I simply assumed that all blue-haired grannies stayed in bed, tethered to oxygen tanks,” Davis wrote.
LUKAZS AND Mary Musial were home on Halloween weekend. He had retired in 1943, after a stroke, and had suffered several others after the war.
People collapsing in the street, funerals up and down the main streets, made bad publicity for the steel industry. Once Walter Winchell’s rat-a-tat-tat news had ricocheted into the consciousness of America, Roger Blough, the chief counsel for American Steel and Wire, called Michael Neale, the superintendent of the zinc works, at three o’clock on Sunday morning and told him to dead-fire the furnaces—turn them down halfway.
They both knew the situation: A coke oven, or battery, runs above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If it goes below 800 degrees, the bricks will crack. “Once cooled, it can never be restarted,” Davis would write. The halfway step would protect the furnace but temporarily reduce the plant’s emissions.
Neale took three hours to follow Blough’s instructions; only after company officials arrived at his plant did he finally turn down the fires. Fortunately, rain began on Sunday, cutting the thick air, and by Monday, November 2, the mill was able to resume full production. But at least eighteen funerals had been held or planned.
Lukasz Musial grew weaker and was moved to St. Louis, where he was given Dickie’s room.
KILLER SMOGS in cities like London were regarded as local. Dozens of people had died in the steel city of Liège, Belgium, during an inversion in 1930, but a world war had rolled through the Meuse Valley since then, and nobody had time to study the cause of the smog.
The Public Health Service labeled the deaths in Donora as “a one-time atmospheric freak.” In the age before computers, before the Internet, before curiosity, before outrage, the concepts of “pollution” and “environmental health” had not yet been articulated. Nobody linked Donora to its sister city in death until many years later.
“Zinc is one of those elements that the body needs in very small doses in certain forms, but zinc can be poisonous in larger amounts and other forms,” Davis wrote in 2002.
Another material used in the zinc mill is fluorspar, “a rock made of crystals of fluorine tied with calcium,” Davis wrote. One sign of excess fluorspar in the air is mottled teeth. “My father had teeth like that,” Davis wrote. “We figured he simply hadn’t brushed enough as a kid.” Many years later, a chemist would find twelve to twenty-five times the normal levels of fluoride in the residents of Donora.
Scientists would learn that large amounts of sulfur leave “distinct marks on the linings of the lungs, but fluoride gases do not,” Davis wrote. “They pass right into the bloodstream and attack the heart and other organs, without marring the nasal passages, throat, or lungs. The lungs of those who died in Liège were clean. Nobody noticed.”
It would take science half a century to link fluoride gases with what had happened in Donora in 1948.
“Where there are valleys, the colder air from the hills can create an inversion layer that keeps warmer air from rising,” Davis would write, describing the “massive, still blanket of cold air over the entire Mon Valley. All the gases from Donora’s mills, furnaces, and stoves were unable to rise above the hilltops and began to fill the homes and streets of the town with a blinding fog of coal, coke, and metal fumes.”
Davis took a topographical map of her hometown and marked where the eighteen deaths had taken place. “Most of the deaths occurred in the parts of town that sat just under the plume that spewed within a half-mile circle of the zinc mill.” The Musial home was well within that circle.
“The fifty people who died in the month following the smog are nowhere counted,” Davis wrote. “The thousands who died over the following decade are nowhere counted. And there is no counting of the thousands whom Clarence Mills called the non-killed—all those who went on to suffer in various poorly understood ways.”
LYING IN his grandson’s bed, Lukasz began to go downhill.
“Our grandfather Musial spoke very little English,” Gerry Ashley said. “Dick had to give up his bedroom for our dying grandfather, who died right before Christmas. We knew when he died because Grandmother Musial screamed. We opened our gifts early because we were going back to Donora for Christmas.”
Lukasz died on December 19 and the funeral was held at St. Mary’s on December 24. Lukasz Musial was buried on the hill above Donora, where the air is relatively good.