The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  Now that the town’s lawsuit is over, one has to ask: Did Stringfellow destroy a community or create one? How did a little town focused on the future—Little League, Junior Women, the Babysitting Cooperative—sour into an alliance of fear, obsessed with the past and all its failures? With the exception of John Longden, the jury refused to find any link between Stringfellow and the physical health of the plaintiffs. But what about Glen Avon’s spiritual health? During the trial, one plaintiff, Cynthia Baca, described what Stringfellow had come to mean. “It’s like having this great big shadow, this great big monster,” she testified. “You don’t know when it’s going to rear its ugly head.” She started to cry. “It’s scary.”

  What physical ailments the bulk of the four thousand people would have claimed, we’ll never know. But the suffering that the first seventeen blamed on the dump reads like a page from Jean-Paul Sartre: fear of future illness, nightmares, sleeplessness, dizziness, emotional distress, insomnia, trouble concentrating, irritability, nagging fatigue, depression, anxiety.

  Most communities learn to live with the low-grade fear and vague anxiety that characterize our century. In Glen Avon, Sartre’s existential nausea is understood to have a distinct source. One teenage plaintiff said that Stringfellow had shrunk his skeleton. Because the dump made him small, he had no self-esteem, and so he quit Little League. Tieg Lancaster blamed Stringfellow for his learning disabilities, even though his father and brother shared the same problems. Others, like Helen Fontaine and David Asher, said that Stringfellow caused their depression. Cynthia Baca traced the death of her backyard chickens and goats to the pits. Her vegetables were gnarly and stunted. Her carrots looked arthritic, she said, and her corn sprouted “peculiar-looking kernels.”

  At one point during the trial, a twenty-one-year-old transient named Timothy Durette—not a plaintiff—got into the spirit of things by leaping to his feet in the visitors’ gallery. He lowered his pants, pointed at a scar on his hip, and recited the familiar incantation: Stringfellow, Stringfellow, Stringfellow.4

  “There was no bodily injury to virtually all of them,” the jury foreman, Rudolph Klutschkowski, told reporters just after the trial ended in the summer of 1993. “And the Glen Avon people who have emotional distress are people who have had ten years of litigation put on them. We just didn’t see physical injuries. Once the lawsuits are over, many of their emotional problems go away.”

  Last winter’s settlement with the state of California may have ended Glen Avon’s lawsuit, but it hasn’t ended the legal work. There is a total of about $125 million—including interest—in the plaintiffs’ pot, almost all of it from the pretrial settlements. The plaintiffs’ attorneys will take nearly a third as their fee, plus as much as $30 million in expenses. This will leave about half of the fund for the victims. The division of the spoils is itself a tangled affair, again because each resident has a different complaint. To adjudicate the process, the plaintiffs hired a very special master known as a “distribution master.” Ever since Love Canal dividing spoils among complicated client populations has become a new and lucrative subspecialty of the law. The most exalted practitioner of this peculiar science—which goes by the comely name “mass tort claims resolution facilities”—is Francis McGovern of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. The Glen Avon plaintiffs have retained McGovern to distribute their money.

  I spent a few weeks trying to track down Professor McGovern. I spoke to him briefly by telephone in Barcelona, then managed to talk to him at more length when he stopped off for a couple of days in Alabama before jetting off to another continent. He is in great demand in these complex times.

  “There are two models for claims-resolution facilities,” he explained to me. “There’s the model of Social Security, where you give everyone flat amounts. At the other extreme is the model of the tort system, where you individualize the amount of money quite extensively.” But the system has a catch. The more precise the accounting of each individual case, the higher the administrative fee for McGovern, and the less the plaintiffs get.

  Transaction costs, he admitted, can run as high as 50 percent of the total pot of money. “So, generally speaking,” he said, “most people trade off a little exquisiteness of individualism for a lower transaction cost.”

  Not always, though. “You do run into cases where people want the exquisiteness,” McGovern said. It is in these cases that McGovern gets to really show his stuff. With the use of increasingly powerful computers, McGovern believes that he can approach, with infinitely more refined precision, the always unreachable certainty of absolute truth.

  In fact, McGovern said, if the variables are few enough, he can really save people a lot of hassle. “Less than twenty variables derives a 95 percent degree of certainty,” he said. “That is, you can predict what award the case will bring in the normal marketplace of litigation with a 95 percent degree of certainty.”5 In other words, with McGovern’s model, the entire trial, the burden of determining right and wrong, can be skipped and the two sides can get right down to cutting and cashing checks.

  Even after McGovern finishes his recondite mathematics, Stringfellow will continue. The case in the federal courts—where the hundreds

  of dumpers and the state of California have been squabbling for ten years about who is responsible for the cleanup and care of the site—is nowhere near resolution. The state’s argument alone is supported by 4,185 exhibits, one of which is forty-one thousand pages long.

  The district judge assigned to the case is Reagan-appointee James Idleman, known among court regulars as judge “Idleman.” In January 1985, Ideman appointed Judge Harry Peetris to take over the entire case as the special master for Stringfellow. Stringfellow, in short, has its own federal judge-for-hire. These days, Peetris charges $400 an hour, and, as you read this, the meter on his wisdom is running. So far Peetris has collected well over a million dollars and is on his way to two million. His assistant, Karen Koe, charges $150 an hour for her contribution, which includes carrying judge Peetris’s notes and fielding his calls. She’s closing in on $500,000. The case also maintains its own private deputy attorney general, Don Robinson. By his own estimate, Robinson has logged nine man-years. (“Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody,” wrote Dickens. “He is famous for it—supposed never to have read anything else since he left school.”)

  The federal decision, when it comes, is not likely to be final. There have been successful constitutional challenges to the very concept of the special master. If such an argument is successful here, the entire case, after decades of lawsuits and millions to Peetris and his amanuensis, could be handed back to yet another federal judge with instructions to start over.

  Chances are good that as long as there are chemicals in the Stringfellow quarry there will be lawsuits about the cleanup. So, on my last day in California, I called the state’s engineer in charge of Stringfellow. His name is Rich Bailey, and he agreed to show me the site itself.

  As friendly as his first name and quick to offer it to a stranger, Rich is six feet of mainly arms and legs. For that matter, so am I, and thus, inside his rented Ford subcompact, we looked like two bugs stuck in a specimen jar. We passed through a sliding gate bright with warnings and rolled out onto a gravel road circumscribing the seventeen acres of Stringfellow at a comfy, oh, three miles per hour.

  At a glance, Stringfellow didn’t look very menacing: nothing more than a glade rioting in yellow blossoms, fat dandelions that looked more like midsize sunflowers—yellow, erect, heliotropic, healthy.

  “Blasted things,” said Rich, cracking his knuckles on the windshield with a flick. “The wild sunflowers look nice, but we don’t want ’em’cause they’ll root down through my cap.” Rich’s cap, he explained, is the layer of clay and lime authorized by Governor Jerry Brown in 1978 to cover the open lagoons and keep rainwater from washing through the pits and on toward town. The roots of the flowers weaken the cap and let in seepage.

  Rich is a straight
forward guy, unpracticed at bureaucratic euphemism. Without my asking, he admitted that the cap is lousy. “It wouldn’t pass standard now, but it was a had-to-do-something-back-then kind of issue.” When I asked Rich what kind of cap he’d put on there today if money were no object, his eyes ambled out across his fallen meadow, and he began to speak a fresh and lovely language. It was the first time I had heard such a voice since I had entered the wonderland of Stringfellow—the flat, uninflected honesty of an engineer.

  “I’d be thinking extremely fine grain, you know, low permeable clay, maybe three foot, or synthetic material, perhaps, and then top it probably with a foot of good soil over, say, six inches of kiln dust.” We silently nodded our heads like two old buddies who’d just lathed a particularly knotty piece of oak. Rich relaxed a bit. He pointed out a cluster of gray boxes at the lower end of the site. They pump out the rain seepage—about thirteen gallons per minute—and then relay it to a nearby treatment center until the next downpour leaks through.

  Back at the fence, Rich and I clambered out to stretch our legs and look at the site in the open air. Since the remaining Stringfellow legal battles are all about the cleanup, I wanted to know how long it might take. I asked Rich: For how many years will the pumps have to chug? How long will Stringfellow be a place? Rich puffed out his cheeks, kicked some rocks, and stared into a powder-blue California sky. “If the status quo is maintained,” he said, “and assuming extrapolation of all the trend data, then for it to reach nondetectable background levels would take over four hundred and fifty years.” We both stared in silence at the waving flowers.

  But Rich didn’t want to end our conversation on such a catastrophic note. He volunteered the information that the local Chamber of Commerce had always been a little ticked about the lawsuit. It just focused everybody’s attention on the negative, he said, and what kind of life is that? Rich told me that there had been some recent exploratory efforts to consider building a rock ’n’ roll amphitheater over Stringfellow—sort of a lemons-into-lemonade kind of deal. He cautioned, though, that any plan would have to be compatible with the site, and to his mind only one alternative use for Stringfellow is even remotely practical.

  “If you mixed in a solidifying agent in situ,” he said, “and then you eliminated the exposure path of waste and put some soil on top of it—I mean, put on a new cap and added control for in-flowing water and vapor emissions—well, then, I could see a golf course.”

  But the Stringfellow Acid Pits will not easily give themselves up to such a tidy and lasting solution. The methods being tossed around for stabilizing the leaking dump suggest that the Chamber of Commerce’s bright future is a long way off. A 1991 EPA study looked at a number of different alternatives. One called for sinking heatable rods into the dump and toasting Stringfellow to three thousand six hundred degrees, thus turning it into a giant glass ball. Another suggested mixing in concrete with what one newspaper account described as “fifty-foot egg-beaters” so that the brew would harden and remain entombed. Yet another method called for plying the dump with nutrients to attract microorganisms that would consume the chemicals. But it was concluded that nature has not yet evolved a life-form robust enough to adapt to the poisonous diversity of Stringfellow. In fact, this report was the first official hint that nothing really would work—that the best solution, the only solution, was to hire people like Rich Bailey, and a dynasty of curators after him, to check the pumps and mow the dandelions for the next half millennium.

  SIX DEGREES OF LOIS WEISBERG

  Malcolm Gladwell

  1

  Everyone who knows Lois Weisberg has a story about meeting Lois Weisberg, and although she has done thousands of things in her life and met thousands of people, all the stories are pretty much the same. Lois (everyone calls her Lois) is invariably smoking a cigarette and drinking one of her dozen or so daily cups of coffee. She will have been up until two or three the previous morning, and up again at seven or seven thirty, because she hardly seems to sleep. In some accounts—particularly if the meeting took place in the winter—she’ll be wearing her white, fur-topped Dr. Zhivago boots with gold tights; but she may have on her platform tennis shoes, or the leather jacket with the little studs on it, or maybe an outrageous piece of costume jewelry, and, always, those huge, rhinestone-studded glasses that make her big eyes look positively enormous. “I have no idea why I asked you to come here, I have no job for you,” Lois told Wendy Willrich when Willrich went to Lois’s office in downtown Chicago a few years ago for an interview. But by the end of the interview Lois did have a job for her, because for Lois meeting someone is never just about meeting someone. If she likes you, she wants to recruit you into one of her grand schemes—to sweep you up into her world. A while back, Lois called up Helen Doria, who was then working for someone on Chicago’s city council, and said, “I don’t have a job for you. Well, I might have a little job. I need someone to come over and help me clean up my office.” By this, she meant that she had a big job for Helen but just didn’t know what it was yet. Helen came, and, sure enough, Lois got her a big job.

  Cindy Mitchell first met Lois twenty-three years ago, when she bundled up her baby and ran outside into one of those frigid Chicago winter mornings because some people from the Chicago Park District were about to cart away a beautiful sculpture of Carl von Linné from the park across the street. Lois happened to be driving by at the time, and, seeing all the commotion, she slammed on her brakes, charged out of her car—all five feet of her—and began asking Cindy questions, rat-a-tat-tat: “Who are you? What’s going on here? Why do you care?” By the next morning, Lois had persuaded two Chicago Tribune reporters to interview Cindy and turn the whole incident into a cause célèbre, and she had recruited Cindy to join an organization she’d just started called Friends of the Parks, and then, when she found out that Cindy was a young mother at home who was too new in town to have many friends, she told her, “I’ve found a friend for you. Her name is Helen, and she has a little boy your kid’s age, and you will meet her next week and the two of you will be best friends.” That’s exactly what happened, and, what’s more, Cindy went on to spend ten years as president of Friends of the Parks. “Almost everything that I do today and 80 to 90 percent of my friends came about because of her, because of that one little chance meeting,” Cindy says. “That’s a scary thing. Try to imagine what would have happened if she had come by five minutes earlier.”

  It could be argued, of course, that even if Cindy hadn’t met Lois on the street twenty-three years ago she would have met her somewhere else, maybe a year later or two years later or ten years later, or, at least, she would have met someone who knew Lois or would have met someone who knew someone who knew Lois, since Lois Weisberg is connected, by a very short chain, to nearly everyone. Weisberg is now the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago. But in the course of her seventy-three years she has hung out with actors and musicians and doctors and lawyers and politicians and activists and environmentalists, and once, on a whim, she opened a secondhand jewelry store named for her granddaughter Becky Fyffe, and every step of the way Lois has made friends and recruited people, and a great many of those people have stayed with her to this day. “When we were doing the jazz festival, it turned out—surprise, surprise—that she was buddies with Dizzy Gillespie,” one of her friends recalls. “This is a woman who cannot carry a tune. She has no sense of rhythm. One night Tony Bennett was in town, and so we hang out with Tony Bennett, hearing about the old days with him and Lois.”

  Once, in the midfifties, on a whim, Lois took the train to New York to attend the World Science Fiction Convention and there she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Lois, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. “He was at a pay phone,” Lois recalls. “He said, ‘Is there anyone in Chicago I should meet?’ I told him to come over to my house.” Lois has a throaty voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give hers
elf the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she’s not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice. “I called Bob Hughes, one of the people who wrote for my paper.” Pause. “I said, ‘Do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert . . . Robert Heinlein.’ So they all came over and sat in my study.” Pause. “Then they called over to me and they said, ‘Lois’—I can’t remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together.”

  This is in some ways the archetypal Lois Weisberg story. First, she reaches out to somebody—somebody outside her world. (At the time, she was running a drama troupe, whereas Arthur C. Clarke wrote science fiction.) Equally important, that person responds to her. Then there’s the fact that when Arthur Clarke came to Chicago and wanted to meet someone Lois came up with Isaac Asimov. She says it was a fluke that Asimov was in town. But if it hadn’t been Asimov it would have been someone else. Lois ran a salon out of her house on the North Side in the late 1950s, and one of the things that people remember about it is that it was always, effortlessly, integrated. Without that salon, blacks would still have socialized with whites on the North Side—though it was rare back then, it happened. But it didn’t happen by accident: it happened because a certain kind of person made it happen. That’s what Asimov and Clarke meant when they said that Lois has this thing—whatever it is—that brings people together.