Toms River (57 page)

Schlichtmann’s beautiful dream of a new kind of lawyering was turning ugly fast. The more toxic the atmosphere in the conference room became, the more frantically he spoke about the need for both sides to avoid another Woburn. The chief outside lawyer for Union Carbide, William Warren, had read
A Civil Action
and was surprised at what he was hearing from Schlichtmann. “I think that at the beginning everyone was appropriately skeptical,” said Warren, who headed the environmental practice group at one of Philadelphia’s largest law firms, Drinker Biddle. Butler, his colleague, was less shocked because he had read the more recent news stories about Schlichtmann’s self-exile to Hawaii and fervent conversion to conciliation. That did not make it any easier to negotiate a tolling agreement, however.

“It was a very, very tense meeting, it almost broke up at several points,” remembered Mark Cuker. The defense lawyers “were basically saying, ‘We know you can’t litigate this case because you don’t have your proofs, so why should we give you more time?’ ” In the end, though, the companies decided that the possibility of avoiding an expensive, uncertain, and highly publicized lawsuit was worth the risk of giving their adversaries an extra eighteen months. The two sides agreed on the tolling agreement, and the statute of limitations clock stopped ticking on January 31, 1998. Schlichtmann’s unorthodox ideas about how to pursue the case had passed their first test; as a result, there was at least a slight chance it might eventually be resolved without a lawsuit.

Now the work of the case began. Schlichtmann started hiring scientists. In Woburn, he had spent well over a million dollars on experts. In Toms River, there was no need for such extravagance; public agencies were already doing most of the needed scientific work. Still, the lawyers could not afford to wait for the case-control study results. The companies had agreed to a pause of just eighteen months, and no one knew how long Fagliano’s team would take to finish the study. Instead, the families’ lawyers would need to conduct a parallel investigation, a shadow version of what the government was already doing. Schlichtmann turned to Woburn veterans for assistance. Needing an epidemiologist, he hired Richard Clapp of Boston University, who had worked on the Woburn case and had served as a consultant to
Gillick’s advisory committee.
³
For water modeling, Schlichtmann signed up Peter Murphy, whose intricate reconstruction of the pipe system in Woburn had been so crucial. He also hired the aptly named John Snow Institute in Boston to survey the families about their health, habits, and medical history.

Mark Cuker, meanwhile, immersed himself in the scientific intricacies of the Toms River case. He even purchased a stupefying textbook called
Principles of Polymerization
(it weighed three pounds and was 832 pages long) and taught himself the basics of industrial chemistry, especially plastics. He also spent long days in the main branch of the Ocean County Library in downtown Toms River, the official repository of all of the documents associated with the state and federal investigations of Reich Farm and Ciba stretching back to the early 1960s. There were about three hundred thousand pages of documents, filling 168 feet of shelf space. The “wall of shame” is what the librarians called it—and still do.

The first interviews for the state’s case-control study began in the spring of 1998, just as a period of relative calm in Toms River was coming to a fractious end. In mid-May, at a meeting of her advisory committee, Linda Gillick announced that five new cases of childhood cancer had recently been reported to Ocean of Love by hospital social workers—the first new cases in sixteen months. Gillick left no doubt that she believed local pollution was to blame. “We can’t jump to any conclusions, but common sense would say, what do they all have in common?” she told reporters. Later, she was more specific, saying she suspected that the cases were somehow linked to United Water’s decision, during the previous summer, to use water from the two tainted Parkway wells for several weekends at the height of the town’s water shortage.
⁴
She was almost certainly wrong about that because, by mid-1997, water from those wells was being run through carbon filters as well as the air stripper. After filtration and stripping, it contained less than one part per billion of trichloroethylene or SAN trimer and posed no known health threat.

Gillick’s announcement provoked a new round of stories identifying Toms River as a cancer town, just as the summer tourism season
was about to begin. This time, business leaders did not hide their anger. “A lot of people were very annoyed, as I was, that we were getting beat up nationwide,” remembered developer Gary Lotano, who was an officer in the Toms River–Ocean County Chamber of Commerce. “People were saying we were Love Canal all over again. I thought it was an injustice.” Soon after Gillick’s declaration, Lotano vented to the
Asbury Park Press
, saying it was “irresponsible” for Gillick to “create hysteria” without waiting for the state to confirm the new cases.
⁵

Real estate agents were complaining too: The market was slow, and they blamed the publicity. “There were a lot of people who really wanted this whole thing to go away,” remembered Robert Gialanella, who served on Gillick’s committee. Several of his physician colleagues warned him not to get too involved with Ocean of Love; he lost several patients because of it. Later, when Gialanella tried to sell his house and move to Florida, his first buyer walked away after signing a contract. “We got a call from the realtor who said the buyer was backing out because of all the chemicals in the water in Toms River,” he recalled. Lots of people in town had similar stories; emotions were raw.

The strain was also showing within state government. Elin Gursky, Health Commissioner Fishman’s top deputy, had been working intensively on the investigation for more than two years. After a disastrous beginning in which she had infuriated the families by saying that a full-blown study of the cluster would be a waste, Gursky had worked hard to gain their trust. She drove across the state to attend the monthly meetings of Gillick’s advisory committee and was careful never to repeat her early mistake of sounding insensitive. So when a reporter asked her about Gillick’s announcement of the five additional cases, Gursky said she was “very, very concerned.”
⁶
That was the wrong answer, as far as Fishman was concerned. He did not want his staff stirring up any more anxiety and anger in Toms River until the department had officially confirmed the cases. Within days, Gursky had resigned under pressure and left the state.

Linda Gillick had the last word, as usual, because the health department
soon confirmed that there were indeed five new cases. No one who knew Gillick was surprised; she was a meticulous record-keeper of childhood cancer cases, and her sources at area hospitals were impeccable. Still, Gillick was wounded by the public criticism. She would remember the incident as the emotional low point of her many years of community activism. From then on, though she remained as blunt-spoken as ever, she would go out of her way to tell visiting reporters that Toms River was a “beautiful town” with “beautiful people”—but also a community with a cancer problem.

That was not a message many people in town were willing to accept. “I think the general attitude was a little worse than just skepticism about the cluster. It was closer to hostility,” remembered parent Kim Pascarella. “The main part of the community treated anyone from our group like we were nuts. They thought we were alarmists, and some people thought we were doing it for the money.” What sociologists call the “outsider versus insider dichotomy” had taken hold.
⁷
The town had split into two cultures, one much larger than the other, each with its own language and way of thinking. Across a chasm of mistrust and misunderstanding, the two sides regarded each other warily.

What most people in Toms River craved—what they had
always
craved—was to be perceived as normal. They were trying to get on with their lives. But life could never be completely normal for the Ocean of Love families. For them, moving on was not an option. That was especially true now that the case-control study was under way. They welcomed the investigation because, above all else, they wanted to know why their kids had been stricken, when so many others had not. For almost everyone else in town, though, the study was an unhappy reminder that their town had been branded.

Could Toms River be re-branded, like New Coke or Marlboro Lights? People had tried. Gary Lotano and other business leaders had briefly hired a famous New York public relations firm, Rubenstein Associates, for an image makeover of the town, but soon abandoned the plan as unworkable and too expensive. Earlier, residents of South Toms River had proposed changing the borough’s name to Cedar
Pointe, but voters nixed the plan. In August of 1998, however, a group of twelve-year-old boys succeeded where so many others had failed. The Toms River East baseball team won the Little League World Series, defeating a Japanese team and sending the entire town into a state of rapture.

Little League was the ultimate expression of suburban normalcy, and Toms River worked hard to excel at it. Thanks to aggressive fund-raising, the fields and facilities were superb, including stadium lights and indoor batting cages that would be the envy of some minor league professional teams. Eighteen hundred boys played. The female equivalent in Toms River was competitive cheerleading, at which local squads also excelled. The Little League team from Toms River East had been to the World Series tournament once before, losing in the 1995 elimination round. The 1998 team stormed through the eight-team bracket without a loss, finishing with a come-from-behind victory over Kashima, Japan, in which the star was a little-used player named Chris Cardone, who came off the bench to slug two home runs. There were more than one hundred thousand Little League teams around the world; Toms River East was the best of them all.

The victory electrified Toms River like nothing before or since. For the first time since Maria Marshall was murdered alongside the Garden State Parkway in 1984, Toms River was in the national news for something other than polluted water and cancer. And for the first time anyone could remember, Toms River was famous for something positive. “Whenever I tell anyone I’m from Toms River, they say, ‘Oh, the water and the murder,’ ” one woman told the
Los Angeles Times
.
⁸
“Our little guys are undoing all that,” another told
The New York Times
. “People are finally going to see Toms River as just another all-American town.” Said a third, “It’s good to have something to talk about that doesn’t make us ashamed anymore.”
⁹
The returning heroes were met by a police escort at the off-ramp of the Garden State Parkway and taken to their home field, where two thousand fans were waiting and hundreds more lined the route. A few days later, more than forty thousand people—almost half the town—turned out for a parade down Hooper Avenue. To mark the occasion, Route 37 was
renamed Little League World Champions Boulevard. The same road ran past the old chemical plant, the hospital where many children had first been diagnosed with cancer, and the Ocean of Love office.

There was a special resonance to the victory because Toms River’s triumph had come via its children. After the Little Leaguers’ victory, residents who were asked by outsiders to explain the town’s athletic prowess often responded the same way: “It must be the water.” Some of the Ocean of Love families considered this arch reply to be a barb directed at them. They thought that some of their neighbors were using the Little League triumph to mock the notion that Toms River had a genuine pollution problem. Melanie Anderson, Bruce’s wife, wrote a letter to the
Asbury Park Press
saying that “the true heroes” were the sick children. “I said that baseball is hardly life and death,” she remembered. “If these baseball players were true heroes, they would reach out to these kids” with cancer. The Little Leaguers later attended a party for the Ocean of Love children, but the breach between the families and most of the rest of the town did not heal.

Around the same time as the Little League frenzy, the county legislature authorized a modest monument in memory of local children felled by cancer, after months of lobbying by the Ocean of Love families. Toms River loved memorials. There were more than thirty monuments and memorial plaques along Washington Street, the busy downtown thoroughfare and parade route that is now, by decree of the town council, also known as the “Avenue of Americanism.” Veterans, merchant seamen, volunteer firefighters, and first-aid providers all had markers, and there was plenty of room for more memorials on the spacious front lawns of the courthouse, the county administration building, and town hall, where a newly erected sign honored the victorious Little Leaguers.

The county politicians instead decided to place the pink stone slab memorializing the dead children elsewhere: in the back corner of a small and very quiet county park called Riverfront Landing. The dedication ceremony was sparsely attended; most of those present were relatives of the dead. The names carved into the granite slab included Gabrielle Pascarella, Randy Lynnworth, and Carrie-Anne Carter,
whose 1995 funeral had drawn nurse Lisa Boornazian to Toms River and spurred her to ask for an investigation of childhood cancer in Toms River.

There was some empty space on the pink granite, enough for a total of fifty names. Not enough space, as it would turn out.

There were more than 2,500 living ex-employees of the Ciba factory, and that summer they received a package telling them they had nothing to worry about. The fourth, and final, worker epidemiological study had been completed, and the results showed that the cancer death rate among ex-employees was slightly less than the statewide rate. “The bottom line is, we’re very pleased with the results,” a company manager told reporters.
¹⁰
Like its predecessors, the study was conducted by the industrial epidemiology group at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, led by Philip Cole and Elizabeth Delzell, whose work was mostly supported by manufacturers and industry associations. Ciba not only paid the $320,000 cost of the study, it was also paying Delzell to serve as its consultant on the state’s case-control study; she had already appeared at a public hearing on the company’s behalf.