Prologue

 

 

 

I was twelve years old in 1965. It was a year when the world felt like it was changing: Walter Cronkite reported on civil rights every night; we were sending troops to a country called Vietnam; men were walking in space, and the Rolling Stones were making rock and roll music sound nasty. Computers filled up entire buildings at NASA; the internet was decades away; our biggest war was cold, and telephones were still things that were wired into walls.

I had the perfect family, living the American dream: Mom and Dad, two kids, a three-bedroom house in a little suburb of Los Angeles called San Diablo, located out at the eastern end of the San Gabriel Valley. Fifteen years ago, the whole area had been orange groves; now it was a middle-class neighborhood that centered on families supported by the local aerospace industry. The houses all had nice front lawns and pools in the backyards; there were cocktail parties for the parents and birthday parties for the kids, and the most successful fathers bought brand-new color console television sets that weighed as much as refrigerators.

It was all perfect…until something went wrong with the smog. It was so thick that on most days we couldn’t see the foothills at the end of our street. A lot of us kids were no good at running because of the smog—it would make your lungs burn and seize up after half a lap.

Breathing problems, however, were the least of what the smog was doing to us.

Of course we didn’t know that when it all started to fall apart…