Phyllis Glazer – Texas Legacy

TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Phyllis Glazer (PG)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW)
DATE: October 21, 2000
LOCATION: Winona, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Lacy Goldsmith and Robin Johnson
REEL: 2119 and 2120

Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview.

DT: My name’s David Todd. I’m representing the Conservation History Association of Texas. And it’s October 21st, the year 2000 and we’re outside of Winona Texas at the Blazing Saddles Ranch, at the home of Phyllis Glazer and we have a chance to be interviewing her about her work on behalf of this community here in their effort to fight a number of health risks and contamination problems. And I think that fight has gone on almost to a national scale. I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us about that, Phyllis. Phyllis I thought we might get started by how you first got affected, aware, involved in this controversy.
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PG: We bought this ranch in April of 1988 and we’re only really using it to come out on weekends. And then around the summer of 1990, my youngest son and I decided to live here because we just loved it so much. So it was toward the end of 1991 that I was driving my child to school and—to take him to school, to take anyone anywhere, you have to drive down the main highway in town. And I didn’t know what the facility was, it was called Gibraltar Chemical Resources and all I knew is, you know, it just always stunk really bad and, you know, made you sick to your stomach or gave you a headache, but I never really knew what they did there. And they had an explosion apparently just before I drove through and I could see people evacuating and running and like a brown—brownish-red smoke going clear across the highway. And it burned, that’s what I remember, is it really burned. Two days later…
DT: It burnt your eyes or nasal passages, what was…
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PG: It burned everything. I guess if you were put on fire, that’s what it felt like. My eyes watered and burned, my nose, my throat, and it burned down to my chest. I mean, it’s just like fire. And couldn’t breathe so, you know, I just held my breath. And two days later my throat was irritated very badly. So I opened my mouth and I looked with a makeup mirror and saw that it looked like my mouth had melted. It looked like stalactites were hanging down and what it was, is melted skin and big white pustules which are, I—I found out later, are—were ulcers, had formed in my nose, mouth and throat and a small perforation had formed through my nose—my—the septum of my nose. So I didn’t know what had caused that. I just didn’t draw a link at all. But a few months later there was a community meeting held and my ranch manager said that I needed to go to it and so he took me to it. And it was that night that I learned what the company really did there. And, I mean, I was just absolutely shocked. And I still remember the president of the company was trying to belittle the fears of the community about health effects and water contamination. And he said, “Well, if we contaminate the aquifer we’ll just clean it up.” And I had been in insurance, I—I was one of the first insurance women in this country. And I just found myself on my feet and I said, “You don’t have that kind of money, I don’t know of anybody that does.” I mean, I don’t—I always do research when I am interested in something. When we got this ranch, I was very interested in the history of it. And I remembered that the aquifer was one of the largest on the continent, the Carrizo-Wilcox. So obviously president of this company either didn’t know, didn’t care, or was inept, I really didn’t know. But there wouldn’t be anyway to clean up an aquifer of that size, especially because of so much water source
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here. You have the Sabine that flows from the North to the South, it flows into the gulf. And, you know, just all the water sources here, all the tributaries. This is East Texas. People don’t do irrigation so there’s a lot of water here. To take a chance and put deep wells and injecting hazardous waste through them, I’m saying through them, most people don’t realize these wells are not contained, they’re open-ended, they’re just well shafts.
DT: Can you describe what the operation was about?
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PG: In my own personal opinion, the operation was about greed. That’s what it was about. And I believe their only real product was death, death and destruction. What the company did was they were a toxic waste dump. Trucks and trains from all over the country and all over the world brought their most toxic chemicals here to dump and a very strange way that the government allows this dumping because there is no real destruction of hazardous waste yet. We don’t know how to do it. Nobody’s looked into the technology really. It—it—I guess it’s just too expensive. It’s cheaper and this is the cheapest method, is to inject this toxic waste, untreated, undiluted, through a reverse process of an oil well. So instead of bringing oil up, they’re injecting hazardous waste down.
DT: Are these wastes mixed up or are they segregated?
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PG: They’re not segregated, oh no. No, and so sometimes you have chemical reactions or blow-ups and then they put liquid nitrogen down to cool it. Yeah, very dangerous, I mean, when I talked to some chemical engineers about it, they said, “You know, if there was ever a really good chemical reaction, that thing could just, I mean, it could just blow under—under us.”
DT: You mentioned that when you first became aware of this you had health problems and then there was a community meeting. Did you meet other people who had health problems?
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PG: Oh yes.
DT: Can you tell what sort of problems they were having?
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PG: Well, I didn’t just find out just at that community meeting. After I spoke up at that community meeting, for the next several months, mothers started bringing me their children. And these were poor women who could not always afford to go to doctors. And they brought me children with birth defects and illnesses. I mean, it looked like the community had been to war and, I mean, I just couldn’t believe all that I heard and all that I saw. There was a child with neurofibromatosis, which is an elephant man’s disease. There was a couple children that were albino, black children that were born albino. There were children who were black who had all types of skin discoloration. I would say much of the community, the number one health problem was respiratory problems. And I too, since I had moved here, developed asthma. So did my youngest child. And so it was not uncommon in Winona to hear everybody coughing, I mean, all the time.
DT: Did the people who actually worked at the plant, the deep well injection plant or the waste blending facility, did they have any particular problems that were even worse than those in the general community?
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PG: Well, we didn’t know about it then. Of course, I found out since and, yes, hepatitis, cancers, neurological problems where they would shake all the time, you know, and just all types of things, respiratory. But also I’ve heard from some of them since the facility has—has closed, with children that have been born with skin disorders and problems.
DT: Would these problems flare up at the same time as upsets or incidents at the facility?
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PG: I really didn’t hear much when the facility was up and running about those flare ups with their employees. I did hear from the community, in fact. We finally a had a network and through working with our engineers, we found that if I smelled something, and I’m North of the plant, I would call around and see East, West, North and South of the plant who was having any effect or an odor or health effect. And we would determine which way it was, I mean, the wind was coming this way. It was—it was always really remarkable and, in fact, one family out here used to blow bubbles, you know those children’s bubbles, to find out which way the wind was blowing because if they smelled it, the wind was coming toward them from the facility. And one of the most horrible things that I can recall is that the state agency, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission always was trying to bail out the company. If we would ask them which way the wind was blowing that day and—or what the company was doing at a particular time on a particular day, they would send people reports that the wind was blowing this way or that way and it couldn’t have been from them so we got our own reports and, of course, they were lying. Or sometimes they gave the wrong day and wrong time. It was amazing the—you know, I used to say, “Maybe they’re just plain inept.” But, in looking through records, government records, there was—in my opinion, there was no doubt that there was absolute corruption between many of the agencies and the facility. One of the board members of—of the company was an ex-governor, John Connally. The Sabine River Authority had given the company six million dollars in revenue bonds, which are public funds to build the facility in the first place under a drinking water pollution prevention bond. And why would you—why would you even consider that drinking water pollution prevention when you’re putting hazardous waste through the drinking water aquifer? And then the Sabine River Authority owned it until the facility had paid them off but that bond covered their office equipment and supplies, their buildings, the injection wells, and their lawyers. And I have big questions about the Sabine River Authority. And, of course, the Sabine River Authority for years has wanted to put in a Waters Bluff Reservoir, which would flood this entire area. But some businessmen in Dallas had secured a wetlands to prevent that. But my secretary and I went to a meeting
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at Texas A&M in Commerce in 1996 where that very thing was being discussed and the Sabine River Authority, not knowing we were, were telling us they had already walked it through Congress, it was a done deal. So what I believe,, in my humble opinion, of just being a housewife—a middle-aged housewife with no formal education, is that they decided to drive the property values down so they could steal the land from the black community that lives in Waters Bluff. Talk about institutional racism. Somebody needs to go after Sabine River Authority. And when I’d call the Sabine River Authority, when I heard about this, and asked them if I could have the file on those loans, they knew who I was so they said, “Well, what do you want with them,” which they’re not really allowed to do. And they said, you know, “The statute of limitations has run out on that so we’ll send you every single page, have a ball.” Well they did and, of course, I ran it past a lawyer who specializes in that and he said there’s really no statute of limitation on government corruption. So if there’s any lawyer out there that would like to take this thing, I’ve got the whole file, every page, it’s very interesting.
DT: You talked a little bit about the community of Winona, can you describe the number of people, what sort of people live here, how they support themselves, and maybe most important, how you helped organize them.
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PG: The community was a very divided community. This is East Texas and there was a black community here and there was a white community here and everybody got along very civilly in recent years. But that’s because everybody stayed in their place basically. And to get the community together was very difficult. Winona has four hundred and fifty-seven people living in it. So when I talk about Winona, I talk about the adjacent communities too because, in a rural community, a lot of people just plain live out of town, it’s not all incorporated areas. And so, it’s an area, it’s a Winona area. And probably about two thousand people that I would consider living close enough to possibly be very affected by what was going on at the facility. Even more if you go out a little bit further which, of course, these emissions did. But when the company first came in, there was a little gal who decided to fight back and she formed a group called Concerned Citizens of Winona / Owentown. She had two children and she was killed a few years later. There were witnesses that said she and her fiancé were sitting in a truck after they had dropped her children off from work and waited for their train to come, which finally did come and killed them. Now the—this girl had said for about a week before she died that she had been set up for a kill. She told everyone that. She was terrified. The Sheriff’s Department had picked her up a week before she was killed for being drunk, which she claimed she was not. And they booked her and then apparently released her
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immediately. And she just knew that she was going to be killed. Her file is sealed, it’s in Upshur County, it’s the only sealed file in the county. When I asked the Sheriff, J.B. Smith, of Smith County about her death, he said she was the town drunk and she was just drunk on the tracks, her and her fiancé. Well, she and her fiancé had just gotten off work. She worked in daycare for children. She’d just dropped her children off to her mom and they were heading out for the evening. They weren’t drunk.
DT: Was the community as a whole pretty frightened of the facility or were they angry or indifferent? What was their attitude?
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PG: Most of the people really just felt it smelled and they were very worried about their water, about water contamination. But you’ve got to understand that there’s a lot of people here with very little education. And so it’s very easy to believe government agencies and officials when they say, “There’s nothing to worry about. It smells a little bit, that’s not going to hurt you.” I remember the first time that I called the agency to ask them why that was smelling. They told me not to worry about it, that I was only smelling solvents. And I said to them, I mean, I have no education, you know, and I said, “Do you know what solvents are?” I said, “Solvents are chemicals. Why wouldn’t I have to worry? What kind of solvents?” Boy a hush—I just heard a hush. And that was basically what was happening. I don’t know if there were payoffs, which I have always suspected, I don’t know if it was just—I don’t know all that was involved. But there were very few officials with the Texas State Agency that I believe were really on the up and up in trying to even do their jobs.
DT: What would happen when you—there were nuisance odors or upsets at the plant that frightened people, I suppose you’d call the state agencies and what sort of response would you get?
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PG: Sometimes they would tell us that we were the nuisance and not to bother them again, next time call the Sheriffs Department. Sometimes they’d just really tell us off. They told off an elderly woman once, Mary Johnson. She was an asthmatic and the company was setting fires that burned our forests down. It’s a long story but it was their forest beautification project. They had put up a big sign and basically burned down the woods for miles all the way from the Interstate to Winona on both sides of the highway. And we would complain for months to the agency about this outdoor burning, day and night, where we had to actually turn our lights on to drive during the day through here. And the odors were unbelievable, they were chemical odors, it—it wasn’t an odor of woods burning. So this old woman calls them up and said she needed help, she was an asthmatic and all that smoke was in her house and I still remember the man’s name, Joe Burgess, of the TNRCC [Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission], told her that she was the nuisance and not to bother him again. And she said, “Well, there’s three fire engines out there right now and I think there’s more on the way and everybody in town is trying to fight the blaze.” And he said, “What?” And she hung up and she moved away. She lived in her grandmother’s house. Her husband had to come out of retirement and go back to work to be able to get them to leave everything behind and leave. And there were other people that did the same.
DT: When you started seeing so many health problems in the community, the birth defects and cancers and respiratory problems, did you turn to the Health Department?
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PG: Oh yes.
DT: What sort of reaction did you get there?
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PG: Same thing. It was all in our minds, it was probably because of inbreeding of the community. And I want you to know that new people coming in would develop asthma or cancers. I knew a family that had moved here from Ireland that then had two sons born with birth defects, one of them has just died. So inbreeding, I mean, that’s a racist remark, of course it is, of course it is.
DT: Do you see this whole problem with the facility being sited here as an instance of racism…
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PG: Yes. You know, EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is investigating Title 6 complaints, or environmental racism complaints in communities with hazardous waste facilities. And they just haven’t found any yet. And I always say you have to look at the big picture. EPA tries to break it down and look at each case individually instead of looking at all of the cases together. There is not an affluent white community in this entire country that have children like Winona, but I can show you plenty of minority poor communities that have children like Winona, that’s dead children, sick children, maimed children. So if you look at the big picture, I see racism. And I’m a white woman who had led a very sheltered life and was totally unawares that such a thing was going on in this country. I would have never believed it, never.
DT: You moved in from outside of the community. You’re clearly not black. Why did you take on this fight as your own?
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PG: I guess it was given to me, it was a gift.
DT: In what way?
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PG: I was the daughter of am immigrant, a Jewish immigrant, who had lost his family in the holocaust. My father loved people and felt that human rights was a very precious thing. And I was born and raised with that philosophy. Also when I was in, I believe it was sixth or seventh grade, that was the time of the Eichmann—the trials for Eichmann in Israel. And it was also the time of the Civil Rights Movement and I was exposed to all of it due to my father.
DT: Did you have conversations about it at the dining room table or…
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PG: The whole time, that went on for years and I was very interested. And my father was a very bright man and had a lot of philosophy and we would discuss, you know, cruelty, human cruelty, human greed. And he took me when I was eleven years old to the South. We went through Birmingham. Every summer my father would take me and my mother and we would go on his business trips with him. And he’d drive during the summer so we could go with him and see the country. And I remember when we got to Birmingham, we went to go into a café and it said “For colored only.” And I was afraid, I mean, I think I was eleven. And I said to my father, “If they knew we were Jewish, would we be welcome?” And he said, “Well, you think about it when we go in.” And I was so afraid I couldn’t eat. And I begged my father to get me out of that city, I was really terrified. And he said, “Well now you know what it felt like to be a Jew in Europe before the holocaust.” And he said, “The winds of a holocaust are never quelled, they always reach out through human greed and indifference.” And I never forgot that. So it wasn’t just the Jews. He said there was always a holocaust in the air ready to—ready to land anywhere there was humans because we carried it with us. It’s frightening, it’s really frightening. So I believe that I was groomed for this, that—you know, I don’t
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know how—how God makes his choices of who gets to do what, you know, but maybe it’s by figuring out who would be crazy enough to follow through on His plan and I just saw it. I saw the handwriting when I saw what was going on here and I knew that we had to win, no matter what the cost, no matter what had to be done, or the people here would be destroyed. And I believed that human life, being as precious as it—as it is, it didn’t matter what color the people were. What mattered is that they survived. And so basically, a little Jewish girl from Tucson Arizona who didn’t have any education stood five feet tall, got everybody together to fight a corporate giant and all the government agencies who, by the way, were also sending their own hazardous waste to this facility. That included EPA and the state agencies. And how we did it, was just…
DT: Tell us about that. How did you put MOSES [Mothers Organized to Stop Environmental Sins] together and the whole campaign to protect this community?
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PG: I tried to work through the concerned citizens and when I found out that they had basically kept the black community out of it and that since Pat McGahey(?) had been killed, the organization was not doing anything other than, you know, vent, I decided to start my own organization. And we called it MOSES because I was already taking people everywhere, you know, to Austin, to the state capitol and, you know, trying to get help. Because, at that point, I still felt that the government agencies were there to help us. I had no idea that they were involved as they were in this facility and in getting money for it off the top every month.
DT: In what way?
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PG: Depending on how much waste was received, the state agency would get so much off the top. I believe so did the county. I mean, everybody was getting their share except the people who were being exposed. It was a matter of greed that’s all. A select group of people in a small rural town that couldn’t defend itself was the chosen one to be dumped on and waste was brought in from all over. Hawaii was sending their spent torpedo fuel, that was the Navy. Mexico, the maquilladoras, was sending their toxic waste. A lot of people don’t realize that the General Trade Agreement—in the General Trade Agreement which I’ve never believed in, when American industries go to foreign countries and we’re basically exporting jobs—American jobs to foreign countries that don’t have to compete with insurance and pensions or health insurance or minimum wage, those companies must send their toxic waste back to this country for disposal. So we were—we are exporting American jobs and importing toxic waste. That really makes sense. I don’t know how we’ve ever figured out that that made sense, but it’s still going on. Just look at NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], the General Trade Agreement, and that’s what’s going on and that’s what it is.
DT: Well how did you manage to succeed in your fight to shut down this facility given it’s a powerful company and politically well connected and agencies sound like they weren’t sympathetic?
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PG: I just think that sometimes somebody comes along and it’s a time when it’s going to be over. And I got the community together and let people realize that we were either going to fight this thing together or we would die together and it was as simple as that. And people knew and we fought it together. And this community is better for it spiritually. People became friends, you know. The way to bring down the race barriers is to get to know each other. People aren’t really different, our traditions may be a little different or cultures a little different, but we’re the same. We’re the, you know, we’re all animals. We’re the same species for heaven’s sake. So when people get to know one another as friends, they don’t see the color anymore. They don’t see the different religions anymore. They just see, you know, people as their friends. And that’s a beautiful thing. I wish that would happen without having to have gone through the heartache and the loss that this community had to go through. They certainly paid for that.
DT: Can you talk about some of the heartache and the cost that you’ve suffered?
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PG: Me personally?
DT: And the community as well?
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PG: Well the community has a lot of cancer. Many of the children are very ill, some have died. A lot of respiratory problems, lots of cancers, birth defects. I mean, you know, the quality of life that this community once had which was a really beautiful life, a lot of Americans don’t know that people pay—pay a great deal to live out in the country. You don’t have the big jobs, you don’t make the money that you do when you’re a city dweller. But there’s a quality of life. People are around their families and friends for generations that we’ve lost, America has lost. And so has every other country that finally becomes urbanized, you lose that. And it’s a beautiful way of living. It’s kind of like city dwellers in the 1950s after a time of war, you know, when people could leave their homes and not lock the doors and trust their neighbors and be friends with people. And, I mean, we’ve utterly lost that in this—in this world. And I just really saw that way of life being erased in a beautiful community and it’s just been very sad. And there’s no way to explain it to anyone because, unless you’ve lived in a town like this and fought the good fight and gotten to know people for who and what they are, and there’s a lot of heroes in this town. A lot of old people, young people that took the chance of picketing with me, speaking out, having their properties burned, having their children threatened and continued to do it.
DT: Maybe you could tell us some examples of the sort of heroics that you saw in Winona.
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PG: There’s so many. One woman who had an affected child had dyslexia. And trying to understand what was happening because they would have a lot of odors in their home. They lived near the school. She kept the chemical books for MOSES and she would study it and you could ask her about almost chemical and she could tell you about it. And that chemical book was given to me by a senior chemical analyst. I mean, it was beyond m—my understanding and she took that on to help her child. I’m trying to think, God there’s so many. Linda Smiley, she’ll always be one of my heroes. Her oldest child was born healthy before the facility came in. The two children she had afterward were born with serious multiple birth defects. The youngest had stunted growth. When she was eight years old, she weighed thirty-four pounds and wore a toddler four. And she had other problems respiratory, skin disorders. The middle child was the worst hit. She was born with tumors in her mouth which had to be removed, I think, when she was about six weeks old. The tumor activity kept up and she’s had, I believe, two or three tumors on her cervical spine that have been removed and keep growing back. She was born with unformed, I believe, unformed ears and web feet and she now is, I believe, sixteen and she’s developed a glaucoma that only black people get late in life. Now this is a white child. So you might say we have Gulf War Syndrome in a community that didn’t go to the Gulf War.
DT: Have there also been physical threats or…
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PG: Oh yeah.
DT: …legal threats that people have had to contend with?
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PG: Well there—of course the legal threats, but the physical threats are quite terrifying to just regular, normal, everyday people. You know, you don’t believe what you see in the movies is really going to happen to you, but it did in this community. When MOSES went to Washington D.C. in 1996 in June, when we—we returned, three of us mothers as we reentered our homes had a phone call that threatened the lives of our children. All three of us got our children out of here, one never to return. She never brought her children back into this community. So, it’s—it was very bad, it was a very violent time. I could not keep my family here so I had to hide my youngest child away for years, out of state. So it was a very difficult time and when I finally said to my son, I couldn’t keep him away any longer, there was just no way to keep up the fight, that was when the company was selling in ’95, he said, “Mom, I’ll stay away.” But he said, “You just can’t let them kill our friends, you just can’t.” So for my family, my children were really, my youngest child especially, was a sacrificial lamb. And the good news is he did very well at school back east. He’s now back at home with me and we’ve actually caught up. You know, they say you can’t catch up on lost time, but we ha—we did. And we have a mutual admiration society going. He’s an A student at a very difficult school and he’s very warm and loving and very respectful of people, very caring. And so are my other two children. So somehow, I don’t know, I—I guess I—I—I got real lucky that maybe doing what I was supposed to do, doing a good deed, just being a good human being, somebody looked after my back and made sure that my kids came through.
DT: Maybe you could tell about some of the people that have helped you and supported you either in the community or in your family as your sons have, or maybe in the media. It sounds like you’ve been able to get your story out and perhaps you could tell how you managed to do that.
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PG: Well it wasn’t easy but I guess one thing that seemed unique to the press was the fact that I was a white woman, that I was wealthy, that I certainly didn’t need to stay, that I was Jewish, and had involved myself in environmental racism issues. Wholeheartedly, I mean, you know, it became my life, has become my life. And in fact Stone Phillips of Dateline NBC once said to me, “Winona is not unique.” He said, you know, “I’ve seen lots of Winonas. What’s unique is that somebody that had any ability to help a community fight back stepped forward. That was unique.” Now that’s—that’s sad. This community’s certainly had much wealthier people here than me. We had a few billionaires here that did nothing—nothing to assist, not anything, and not that I didn’t go to them.
DT: What was their response, why were they indifferent?
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PG: I don’t know. Apathy is hard to explain. Maybe there wasn’t—I really do believe when people are apathetic to poor people crying out for help, that one does lose one’s soul, I really believe that. It’s just very sad because I don’t think of these people as bad or evil, but apathy kills—apathy kills people and it has in this community and there was no reason for it. These were people who could have made a few phone calls and helped these people. They had that kind of power.
DT: Can you say how your experience with the whole fight in the Winona area has affected you, how it’s touched your soul, perhaps changed you?
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PG: Well I think that I’ve come into my own. I’m—I’m finally the person that I was supposed to be. Not an angel, but I believe that I was given a task because I’m a very determined person. If—if I feel that something has to be done, I’ll see it through to the bitter end. Never say die. And that’s probably almost all I had going for me. I had no education in what was going on here and I had no real abilities. In fact, I was always praying that my father was still around. He was an engineer, he would have understood all of this. So we had to just learn as we went. But, you know, once you’ve—once you’ve made that change, once you’ve changed, you never go back.
DT: And where do you think you’ll go on from here? I understand that you’re planning to sell the ranch. What is the next step for you and for MOSES?
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PG: It’s to continue on. Winona has never been the only fight for me. It’s always been anyone under the same circumstances, and there’s so many of them. And so the fight is with Washington. The state—our state legislators couldn’t be less interested and that goes across the board pretty much. We’ve had very little help from any of our legislators in Texas. I’ve had to go to other legislators from other states to get assistance and I know one thing they always say is—like congressmen, “Well, who’s your congressman there?” And I’ll say, “Congressman Ralph Hall.” And then they know why I get no assistance out here. “Best Republican on the Democratic block” I always say.
DT: And what sort of reaction do you get from political figures—public servants when you go to them and say that we have a problem, can you help us?
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PG: Well some won’t see me, others do and others are actually quite friendly but say, “You know that we can’t help you or we won’t get our corporate money.” I mean, that’s honest Injun. Money drives Washington and the state, money. It’s not the citizens. Somehow along the way I believe we’ve lost our democracy because corporate America runs the country. If everybody’s got to have money to run, we wouldn’t have an Abraham Lincoln today, we wouldn’t have him.
DT: Well is that one of the bigger challenges that you see for the future? Is it this problem of campaign finance reform or what are the big environmental issues you see facing us?
0:50:33 – 2119
PG: It’s—it’s much more than that. It’s much more than environmental. Corporate America, and I’m not talking about all corporations being bad, but corporations that have to buy favors, like our polluters. When I’m saying corporate America or industry, that’s who I mean. It’s those who must buy favors. When they give big amounts to presidential or congressional or senatorial campaigns and then our legislators say, “Oh well that doesn’t sway me at all.” Oh, bologna. If I gave a couple hundred thousand to a particular candidate and I called, I’ll talk to them, I won’t talk to an aide. And if I need a little favor, even if it’s in the middle of the night, he’ll take my call, I guarantee you. But if I’m just a, what they consider I guess a peon, someone who doesn’t give, or only gives ten dollars or a hundred dollars, an aide will assist me. And you know the aides change constantly. So you’re continually having to update a new aide as to who the hell you are after you’ve worked your tail off with the other one. The system is—is not functioning for the people. It’s functioning for anyone who can buy it and people have got to take it back. And I really believe what Ralph Nader has said, it really doesn’t even matter any more who’s in because who’s running the country is not the president, and not our legislators, but industry. The dirty industries that have to buy their way are running this country.
DW: I’ve got a question. I’d be curious to know if you say if you give a legislator a hundred thousand, he’ll take you’re call. Well I’m not saying it’s fair or just to fight fire with fire, but what if three wealthy environmentalists got together and they each chipped in a hundred thousand and said it to the same legislator who would write the permit to the place, we’re going to top the bad buys contributions, we want it shut down. Has anyone ever tried that approach…
0:52:55 – 2119
PG: Yes.
DW: …or thought about it?
0:52:56 – 2119
PG: Yes.
DW: Tell us a little about that.
0:52:59 – 2119
PG: There are wonderful environmentalists out there and I’m going to name one because I’m a fan, and that’s Don Henley, who give great amounts to politicians who are environmental, who think environmentally, who vote environmentally and who try to do a good job. And it helps enormously. But, of course, there’s just not enough of them. I mean, I—I don’t know a second Don Henley, I know one. I could name you many, many corporations that give a lot of money and have a lot of clout. So we just need to, I guess, support Hollywood more. We—we need, you know, people—I’ve heard a lot of criticism about movie stars and rock stars who try to get involved politically, but we really do need them. Everyone is entitled, if they’re an American citizen, to speak in this country and—and they’re all entitled to—to give in what they believe. And boy, I—I hope they continue.
DW: You mentioned earlier the fight here, I heard once the phrase, people who came to join you picketing, for example. And I would be curious to know, since I don’t really know the whole background on the Gibraltar case, so you did picketing in front of the place. Did you boycott their product? Did you go to their Board of Directors meetings and raise heck? I’m just curious to know what were the activism techniques you used to shut this place down?
0:54:46 – 2119
PG: Some of the activism that we did was really new to all of us. I mean I had never been an activist, ever. So one time we picketed the company’s shareholders meeting and we hired a red—a very bright red crop duster to pull a banner that said, “Gibraltar pollutes, Mobley stock falls,” which was true. You know, kind of hard to sue somebody for something that’s, you know, in the public record. And we had the crop duster diving over the shareholders’ meeting so the whole building shook. It was a glorious day. May 13th, ’93. It was wonderful. And we found out that they had an ordinance in Kilgore Texas that if you were going to picket you had to get a permit, which, of course, is unconstitutional. Our First Amendment right says we can assemble. So I went and I was going to try and get this permit and, of course, I was denied it. So I said, “Buckle your seatbelts, because we’re coming.” So I remember our law—my law firm is a corporate law firm and they did a lot of work for my husband and here they were
0:56:24 – 2119
trying to help me. They were terrified. I mean, normally people would be picketing against their—their companies, so they were terrified. So one of the owners of this huge firm was on standby all that night trying to talk me out of doing that. And we had about twenty people that were going to picket. All of them knew that we were—it was very probable that we would be arrested. So those were twenty people ready to go to pr—ready to go to jail. But I had told the press and boy, press was there, I mean we had press from all over the state there. It was just incredible. And I heard that John Mobley, that was the owner of the facility in the shareholders’ meeting, because the whole building was shaking, was saying, “That damn plane.” So it was just great. I told my lawyers to bail everybody out but not me. I said, “Do you realize how bad I look after I’d been in jail for a night?” I said, “Bring national press, I’m going to look pretty bad, so just leave me in there until I rot.” So—but they never—they never arrested us and I then sued the City of Kilgore for an unconstitutional ordinance and won, so.
DW: Do you find that more of the battle is won through this kind of picket public media or through what’s done with lawyers and courts? How is it mostly won?
0:58:09 – 2119
PG: Lawyers and courts cannot win a battle like this. My lawyers will tell you that, that what won was public opinion. What won was press. You know, our—our legislators, you know, hate press and I always say it’s because it’s a reflection of themselves. What they get from the press is what they are. And all I know is all of the press that have been involved with us have saved us, has saved this community. The press has done that. So, I’m very grateful. I’ll always be grateful to the press.
DW: They often say that the way these companies win is they create protracted legal battles that are designed to bankrupt their opponents, but you didn’t find that to be the case?
0:58:54 – 2119
PG: Oh no, I found that to be the case too. The company had filed a RICO suit. Now that’s Racketeering Influenced Criminal Organization. That’s the exact type of litigation that the federal government uses to—to go after mafia. The company used that. Only a civil—in a civil way, to go against my family. My family members, my husband’s business, my mother, a 79 year old mother, and May and MOSES to get us to go away. But it didn’t work. I went to Ralph Nader and asked for assistance and was given it on a very personal level. And I’m—I will always be grateful to—to Mr. Nader for that and his—his teams of people that he had assisting us to—we went through that for two years. The company wanted thirty million dollars, plain words, they wanted everything, wanted everything my husband’s family had, we had, MOSES had nothing, you know. So they just figured they would get us to go away silently as lambs. A family of holocaust survivors does not let a community’s children be gassed to save their soul. So we didn’t let it happen.
(misc.)
End of reel #2119
DT: You were talking about the community being gassed earlier and I was wondering if you can maybe make a link in people’s minds between what kind of exposure that this community got and maybe what some of your forbearers experienced in Eastern Europe, Germany?
0:01:37 – 2120
PG: Well, I—I think most people know by now that a pesticide was used to kill Jews in the gas chambers in the showers, you know, it’s Nazism. They went to the showers but actually they were going in to be gassed. And in this community, this community received every chemical made by man, seven hundred families of chemicals, everything except for nuclear and low-level radioactive and certain levels of PCBs, which the company was found red-handed with anyway. So I always felt that, I mean, this community was gassed, there’s no ifs, for fifteen years. So there were some children who were conceived, carried, born, and lived all of their lives being gassed and—in America, these were American children on American soil. I always say, “Where were our troops?” They were in Sudan, they were all over, they were other places saving other people, other peoples that had oil. But they weren’t here and we wouldn’t have shot at them, we’d have welcomed them. But they weren’t here to save their own. And I don’t hold that against the troops, but against their masters.
DT: Given this opposition and the problems you faced, do you have any advice for communities like Winona or future generations of people like those who’ve grown up in Winona as to what they can do to try and reclaim their democracy or protect their health?
0:03:48 – 2120
PG: Oh, that’s got to change the system so that polluters aren’t running this country. The system’s got to be changed, there’s got to be third and fourth parties. There’s got to be more people involved in these debates. I mean, I really believe that if Ralph Nader and Buchanan or anyone else could have been involved in those debates, we would have had more people tuning in to hear the real issues because that’s what they would have brought out is the real issues. So I really look at these elections like sham elections. Two parties were given two bad candidates and we picked the less worse of the two evils and that’s the way it goes time and again. And while we’re—we’re poisoning our—our generations to come. I mean, I don’t know if Winona’s can be undone, but it wasn’t just Winona that had been gassed. These emissions can go thousands of miles. I mean, we know of states that are suing states two and three states over for air pollution. And in Dallas and—and in Texas, we know that when the fires were going on in Mexico a few years ago that it was in our air. I mean, it was affecting us. In fact, Van Cliburn had come to play the opening concert at the Bass Symphony Hall in Fort Worth and collapsed from the air pollution. So we’re all being effected. Cancer rates are high and high in children, higher than it’s ever been. Respiratory problems are so bad that the EPA has had to even agree that it’s happening.
DT: Do you think that part of the respiratory problems might be related to the waste that were blended here and then sent to the cement kilns in Midlothian?
0:05:56 – 2120
PG: That would be a—that would be a real good guess, yeah, I—I would think so and the other places like this facility. I mean, hazardous waste is everywhere. Texas is the leading state in air pollution, contamination, air releases, chemical accidents, spills. And Louisiana and California aren’t too far behind.
DT: What do you think it is about Texas that makes it uniquely bad?
0:06:32 – 2120
PG: Uniquely dirty?
DT: Why is Texas always appear to be on the bottom of most pollution lists?
0:06:40 – 2120
PG: It’s the good old boy system, dirty politics. “You do for me and I’ll do for you. We don’t give a damn about those poor people over there, especially if their dark. Nobody’ll care then.” That’s racism. Environmental racism is a very dirty form of racism because what we do is, instead of doing our no—a normal racist type of thing of not giving people proper jobs or proper respect or dignity, we kill their children, we gas their children. And, I swear, it must be painful to be God and know that he created us, it must be. And all the religious people that would—when they’d run into me would say, “We’re always praying for you.” Gee, that really did it for us. I always said, “Keep praying, but pass the ammunition.” Nobody did. This community was totally on it’s own. Nobody helped us, nobody. And that included the big—the big national groups. Oh, they would give us a little advice once in awhile or a little this, never got a grant, nothing, nothing.
DW: Why do you think the national environmental groups didn’t feel that this was their fight? And explain by national, I mean do you mean like the Citizens Clearing House for Toxic Waste or bigger like the Sierra Club, what level are we talking about?
0:08:32 – 2120
PG: We’re really talking any level of national organization. We would have individual people that worked for these various organizations give us advice or get us some information. I don’t believe any of those groups really had much money to begin with because if—if you’re talking about Citizens Clearing House, Lois Gibbs’ group, they tried to assist in every way they could, but they certainly couldn’t give us money, couldn’t get us lawyers, couldn’t get us doctors, couldn’t give us experts. And I don’t know of any group that can. But what I do believe is that when a company like that is going to come into a community that an equal amount should be given from that company for the community to get their own experts and their own lawyers and let the community have a—have a chance or—or get some Ralph Naders in there to—to help run a cleaner government, get some public servants. You know, when this country was first founded, our legislators did not get paid. In fact, Abraham Lincoln had no money left after—when he was killed. Mary Todd had to go to congress and say, “I need money, my husband used all of his money through the war.” And they denied her that. So she went to Europe and told everyone in Europe had happened and then congress gave her some money. Pretty bad for a woman who had lost three children, they wouldn’t take care of a president’s widow. They claimed she was mad, maybe she was after losing a husband and three children.
DT: So you think that a lot of the environmental problems that we face and the justice problems we face are sort of an issue of following the money, that the money explains much of it.
0:10:35 – 2120
PG: Follow the money, it’s pretty easy and it does leave footprints.
DW: Because I’m new to the whole issue here, maybe you can explain a little, it’s a deep well injection but all the illnesses and everything we’ve talked about seem airborne, right, and gas and stuff, so I’m a little confused as to how this process worked and you can explain it to David.
0:10:58 – 2120
PG: Yeah, a lot of people don’t understand how people got sick, was it from the water, you know. How did a deep injection well facility cause so much health problems? And you’ve got to understand that, not only did they do deep well injection, but they had a solvent recovery facility at the surface, they had a fuels reblending facility at the surface. They had a ra—a—a—a railroad spur where they did transfer—they transferred from the trains to the company. And, of course, there were trucks that overturned and spilled out their contents. So a lot of the chemicals that were brought in were very—were I think what they call aromatics, would go into the air. If you think of perfume, you open a perfume bottle and boy, you can smell it. Aromatics would travel. So—also volatile chemicals, if they were spilled out, could be airborne. So the facility site itself now is highly contaminated. It’s contaminated three aquifers. The soil is contaminated. I mean, the place can never be a brown fields. I don’t know if you know what a brown fields is, but it’s—EPA will help clean up areas that have been contaminated by industry and then put poor communities generally, minority schools, minority housing, again, I—I don’t believe in this. I believe this is environmental racism. Putting poor people’s children on—on semi-cleaned up lands. And where the site is, we’ve been told by EPA, can never be a brown fields, that’s how contaminated it is. How contaminated? Nobody knows because nobody’s looking. As far as we know there’s no true remediation going on there. So the government used six million dollars in public funds to put the facility in, protected the facility from u—from we the—the citizens and our health complaints, insulated them, and now they’re covering up for them because they too sent their own waste there.
DT: What sort of cover up do you see happening?
0:13:50 – 2120
PG: Well, I always tell press, “Why don’t you go to the TNRCC or EPA and ask them about the clean up? They’ll gi—they’ll you a real song and dance, but you take it some experts and you’ll see there’s nothing being done there. It’s just been left.” This community was left to it’s own fate, where our own government turned their backs on us. And this is happening in thousands of American communities. So, again, I ask, “Why are we sending our troops elsewhere? We need them right here.”
DW: Was this Gibraltar a major employer for the community, a source of revenue and if so, did they force or try to divide the community on the old jobs versus the environment kind of thing, well fine, we’ll shut down but then you’ll all have—did they play that card and was that a factor in this situation?
0:14:45 – 2120
PG: Yeah, the company tried to play the card that they were a big employer in the area. Of course, they never had more than maybe a handful of people from this community ever work for them. They brought people in from other places, further away. And even all of their upper management always lived far away from here. But they always were touting the fact that they, you know, were a big employer in the area. It just wasn’t the case. I know at one hearing back in August of ’93, the company brought in something like, well, hundreds of people by bus to come to the hearing. It was a public hearing so the agency was going to let them speak. And one of the Sheriff’s deputies was telling people from Winona that there was no room in the inn, turning them away. Of course, his wife worked for the company. So we tried to tell the agency that this was going on, and they knew, and they let it happen. But Dateline NBC was there also, Channel 8, Ellen/Alan Burke(?). And the people were very mistreated. The agency left and said, “Well, we’ll come back another time.” John Hall, chairman of the TNRCC commission said, “We’re going to do this again.” Never happened. The agency lied to the people here over and over again. They held hearings during black revivals every year. They knew it was black revivals because the ministers here told them it was. And so, after fifteen years, MOSES went to the press with the story of EPA and the state agencies coming in during known black revivals, then it stopped.
(misc.)
DT: I think you chose the name MOSES partly because you were leading people hither and yon, out of the wilderness and I’m wondering if you could also explain what the—it was an acronym if I understand, is that right?
0:17:28 – 2120
PG: Yes, MOSES was an acronym that actually a little gal who was Unitarian came up with the name MOSES because everybody was, you know, nobody knew what the hell I was doing. They just figured that I was so determined to do it they’d just hang on. And MOSES stands for Mother’s Organized to Stop Environmental Sins. So—and it’s funny, the name Moses also means “saved from the water.” So it’s just kind of funny how—and my father was a—in the Jewish religion, we’ve tracked by—by last name Moses’ descendants disappeared but his son Aaron’s descendants became high priests. And so my father was a son of Aaron. So Aaron was a brother of Moses. And what was funny is that Aaron, of course, was the spokesperson for Moses because Moses stuttered, he couldn’t speak. So Aaron was the spokesperson. He was eloquent, he was articulate.
DT: Thinking about the name of your group as an acronym, can you talk a little bit about the passion of mothers to protect their children and maybe some of the instances you saw of what a parent would do.
0:19:10 – 2120
PG: Well everybody knows about a mother bear. You never go near a baby cub if the mother is around, you never do, because a very peaceful bear who is a herbivore, who eats berries, will kill you. And humans are no different. We’re an animal and we will defend our young against anything, anything. A mother will try and save her child if a diesel or a locomotive was coming after her, she would try to save her child. And that’s an instinct, that love, that instant love the moment you have that child. It’s a gift. And I think that anyone is—that is determined to do something can do it, I don’t care who they are. I don’t care—I’m always talked about in industrial circles as having used bad science or not being an expert. And if you look up the word science, it means knowledge especially through experience and many of these scientists do not have their knowledge through experience. They have it through books. They haven’t seen children like this. They haven’t talked to people who have lived through a nightmare. They haven’t even come here. In fact, many of the doctors involved in examining us would not come to Winona to do it. We had to go to other cities because no one who knew what kind of chemicals were being handled there would come here to see us. And we had children to put to bed every night. We had children who were playing in the area and we couldn’t defend them. So—Mary Shelly wrote a book called Frankenstein. Frankenstein was not the name of the monster. The monster was never given a name. Frankenstein was the creator. The creator made a monster and abandoned it and the monster went wild. That’s what happened in Winona. They unleashed a monster, would not claim him, abandoned it and left a community to fend for themselves. That’s what happened here and no one came to our aid. Why did I come forward to do this? Because God put me here. How on God’s earth could a—a Jewish, wealthy woman from Tucson Arizona, married a Texan and come here to this God forsaken place in the middle of nowhere, unless destiny brought me. So I knew that I had to do everything, everything humanly or inhumanly possible.
DT: You were telling me about this acronym MOSES and part of it concerns mothers and what they’ll do to protect their young and then the other part talks about environmental sins and I was wondering if you could say that the activities of Gibraltar and American ecology were mistakes or just oversights or if you think that they were examples of sins and evil?
0:23:33 – 2120
PG: I think it was a Frankenstein. It was science without a soul. That’s what happens when you don’t care about your moral obligation and science is your God. You have Winona.
DT: What do you think our sort of outlook is for science and technology? I know that there are some scientists such as the one that David Weisman just mentioned, Bill Joy, who is very concerned about where technology is taking us, that we don’t know what we’re doing to ourselves because the technology has become so complex and the science underlying it is beyond most people’s ability to understand it. Do you see that happening here in a sense?
0:24:31 – 2120
PG: Well, I’m a layperson so I’m going to have to tell you the only way I can explain it, is we—we know that there are medicines, there are herbs that are natural, that side effects or whatever can be contained. They’re not just completely runaway. But when we synthesize things, we humans, we make things, there’s uncontrollable results. I mean, I heard that on TV the other day and that made sense to me. That made sense from what I’ve seen. Is—it’s like with—with oil. Oil is in the ground, it’s provided to us and we’re able to use our machinery and do things with it. And when we overuse it, when we waste the gift that was given to us, we have to get rid of its waste byproducts. And there’s no way to do it, we don’t know how. When they talk about waste disposal plants, about in—incineration or deep well injection or anything, or storing, that’s—that’s a good one, storing. Everything that’s stored leaks. It’s not being stored, it’s being dumped. We haven’t put any money or research really into finding a way to—to—to truly destroy our monsters. And I think our monsters, once unleashed as they are, are going to get us. The dinosaurs are no more. Are we not expendable too, if we’ve abused this land? I think we have. There’s a—there’s a saying in the Midrash, which is a type of bible and it says, “And God led them around the garden of Eden and said, ‘Behold my world, see how beautiful are my works, for if you destroy or ruin my world, there will—there will be no one else to repair it’” I believe that that day may come if we don’t wise up. And I’m afraid, I’m afraid because I have children. I’m afraid for them.
DW: And yet the owners of Gibraltar Chemical must have children too and this is a question I’ve always wondered, is what then is different in their minds? How tweaked can they be? Do they think they can live in an air plastic bubble filtered air constantly that they’ll never have to breathe again? I mean, you must have run up against these company guys that have—stockholders—how do they answer the same question, how does the moral thing somehow evade them? They must have families and children too?
0:28:03 – 2120
PG: Morals are a funny thing. I heard a—a—an ex-hit man for the mafia one time say on television, he said, “You know when I first started out killing people, it was , you know, just purely for money and I got real sick the first few times I did it and,” he said, “but after awhile, I could eat a hamburger and kill somebody or make a few jokes or, even begin to enjoy it.” And I really think that after you do something for awhile and you say to yourself, “Well, everybody else is doing it or it’s just going to be—these people are an acceptable risk, some—it’s got to go somewhere.” I’ve heard that from a lot of people, it’s got to go somewhere, that’s it’s okay. Everybody knows about it, it’s the great corporate wink, it’s a gentleman’s agreement, it’ll only haven to “those people”, that it’s okay. And they have it in they’re minds that that’s okay. And I—I think they slowly give away their souls until they really have—have nothing left. How could they? And when you talk about not thinking about their own children, there’s retardation in that family, and you’re talking about Mobley’s family. And these are people that have been around poisons and, you know, it can be passed on. So nobody gets away with anything in the long run, nobody.
DT: How do you get the message to people who have been affected or perhaps aren’t yet affected by environmental problems?

0:30:00 – 2120
PG: It—it’s not easy. There’s people here, even people who have lost loved ones or have cancer who cannot draw the connection. And we had tort litigation going here, which is now over. And in the state of Texas because of our esteemed governor’s drive for tort reform, bodily injury wasn’t something that could be proved, so we had to sue for nuisance. Yeah, it was a nuisance with our kids dying, yeah, that—that was a big nuisance. Just think, this—this man could be for the whole country. It’s frightening, talk about a Frankenstein. We may—we may release a monster. And so maybe Nader’s not wrong when he said, “Maybe if Bush gets in, it’ll have to be straightened out after that.” It’s sad. But you’ll have the very industry that’s causing all this problem running the country, two of them, Cheney and Bush. It’s absolutely terrifying.
DT: What sort of feelings do you have after learning what you have through the last decade or more of fighting to protect this community?
0:31:38 – 2120
PG: Well number one, I wasn’t able to protect the community and we weren’t able to protect it together. What we were able to do is see a time when this facility was in closure, it’s not shut down, it is in closure. Like I said, we don’t see any remediation happening at all. But the people are ill, children are ill, and that is increasing and more and more people will lose their lives over it because cancer takes ten to twenty years to come on and birth defects can skip one generation and hit another. So the effects will be felt in this community forever. All we can do now in this community is take our message to the world and basically say, “If you want to see what can happen, come visit us.”
DT: Is your message one of fear or is it one of hope…
0:33:01 – 2120
PG: Well, I think both.
DT: …what do you pass on?
0:33:02 – 2120
PG: I think—obviously I never gave up hope. And a lot of the people here said the only reason they kept fighting with me is I was so determined they didn’t want to break my heart by telling me that it couldn’t be won, that we couldn’t save the kids. And so kindness and neighborliness and love and friendship kept this community going and saved it in the end, if it’s—if you can called it saved. But our message is—is much, much bigger. The only way to fight despair is by having hope. And if you cave in to this type of stuff, it, I mean, we could have still been living with this facility. The trucks could still be coming in, but they’re not. So I think that’s the message for other communities. Number one, you’ve got to fight against a facility like this coming in and not believe anything the government agencies tell you about it being safe because they’re salesmen of deceit. Our government agencies and officials have become salesmen of deceit. Do not kid yourself, for money, for their jobs. It’s the way the world’s been and if we want a change, we’re going to have to take our democracy back. And I think one way we can do that is if we can have on the ballot “None of the above” on every ballot
0:35:06 – 2120
and if that wins, they’ve got to rerun a—a race with different people. Maybe we’ll finally get somebody worth voting for. I asked my son who had—had to be sent away for years for his protection. He’s voting for Nader—he’s voting for Nader. So I said, “Well, you know what they say is that a—a vote for a third party is, you know, a lost vote. You’re just throwing it away.” And he said, “Mom,” he said, “I’m an American. Why should I vote for somebody who’s not worthy of being president when there is someone. That’s not a vote thrown away,” he said, “that’s a vote used well.” My son’s twenty years old now. I hope we can all think of something like that. Let’s not throw votes away for men who don’t deserve to lead this country. Let’s find—there are good men and women, there are good people. Let a conscience run this country. Lawyers don’t always have consciences and we know most of our legislators are lawyers. Even lawyers don’t like lawyers, but to find someone with a conscience. Lincoln was self-educated and had no money. Truman only had a high school education. I don’t think most people know that. But some of the things that we need to start looking for is how bright someone is and morally bright, how illuminating they are, how caring they are, compassion. If someone has a bright mind and no compassion, that’s a dangerous person. So we have to start using different values in determining what a successful person is. Right now it’s—in America, it’s a person who has money. That’s scary.
DT: I’ll talk briefly and I guess in closing about things that don’t involve money or politics but maybe go back to why you originally came out to Winona to find a place of respite and peace. And is there a place that you think remains for you where you can go and enjoy yourself in the outdoors, a place in nature?
0:37:59 – 2120
PG: Well, I’ve always believed, or I shouldn’t say always, but in recent years believed that we’ve never really left the Garden of Eden, this whole world is a Garden of Eden. We’ve been given everything to sustain ourselves, including energy. But those who are blind to it and to the beauty of it just need to open their hearts a little bit and you can find it anywhere you go. As long as I’ve got my family and I’ve got my friends, I’ll take Winona and all that I’ve loved here with me for the rest of my life. I’ve lost nothing here. I’ve gained a great amount. I hope that everyone in this world can gain something out of misfortune like I have.
End of reel 2120.
End of interview with Phyllis Glazer.