Our Road: Then -- E6: Archives, Public Sentiment

Our Road to Walk: Then and Now

Ken and Deborah’s lives change forever on December 20, 1978, when they hear an announcement on Warrenton’s WVSP NPR radio station that the state plans to buy property in the Afton community of Warren County to bury PCBs that had been spewed along the roadsides of 15 counties that previous summer. Afton is the rural community where they live. They also learn that a public hearing is scheduled for two weeks later when the state will present its PCB landfill plans for EPA approval.
Perhaps it is serendipity that night when Deborah brings home a year-high stack of Margie Watson’s News & Observer newspapers for mulching their garden the next growing season. Devastated by the PCB announcement, Ken and Deborah decide to be proactive and to pore through the newspapers that Margie has kept in meticulous chronological order.
By morning, they have two notebooks full of articles that reveal facts about the danger of PCBs and other deadly chemicals, and they see the scale of the threat, not just to Warren County, but to the state.
For Ken and Deborah, this eye-opening night is the beginning of their journey as archivists, historians, and researchers who believe in evidence-based education and activism.
With what they’ve learned, Ken and Deborah meet with Afton residents who begin to join forces as a multi-racial grassroots opposition to the state’s PCB plans.
On Christmas night, 1978, Ken speaks on WVSP radio, beginning, “We of Warren County and the surrounding counties are united this Christmas night not only by the spirit of Christmas but by the cancer-linked PCBs that live in the soil along our highways…."
Ken ends his radio talk by saying, “And, so, I am urging the citizens of Warren County to participate in the political spirit of Christ, of Socrates, of Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. These men had the political spirit because they did for their own times, and for all times, what they knew in their hearts to be right.”