[hoagy62]

Sweet Lord! Is that for real??? High noon???

[this_ol_patriot]

Oh yes, here's a Google on Donora smog and lots of interesting things come up, it was the incident that brought air quality to the forefront back then. It was a lethal fog of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and metal dust, zinc, from the zinc works there. 20 people died. My Dad used to tell us about it.

We used to go past the Palmerton, PA zinc works back in the 60's on the way to Phillies games. It stripped an entire mountainside of trees and always stunk to high heavens but the money and the jobs were there. Here's a linked picture of that. It's cleaned up now.

Really though we weren't concerned that much back then. I grew up in the hard coal region of NE PA and we had culm banks in our back yards and coal trucks all over the place. We all burned coal and grew up blowing black snot all the time.