Caroline Fraser

I, you know, I wanted to talk about all that and I didn't want to just use it as a kind of Trojan horse to introduce all the stuff about pollution.

But I did think it was a way to get people maybe to think about these issues differently.

who might not otherwise want to do that.

And I think people are interested in the history of how they might have been exposed.

When I did a reading up in Seattle a month or so ago, everybody was talking about where they grew up in relation to the smelter, like how close they were to it.

And, you know, what they might have experienced as a result.

And that, I think, is one of the interesting things about the Tacoma story is that many poor people were directly exposed.

You know, the people who worked at the smelter, they lived right around the smokestack.

So they got the worst of it.

But there were a lot of other communities in the area, including Mercer Island, where I lived.

grew up, which is now kind of a famously wealthy, you know, some of the, you know, Microsoft people have houses there.

Or, you know, I think Paul Allen had a house there.

And it was when I was a kid growing up there, it was a well-to-do upper middle class place.

And

One of the things I look at in the book is some of the really bizarre crime that happened on the island at that time.

That you wonder, was this, you know, in any way related to, you know, some of these things we're talking about, the rise in poverty?

lead in the air from leaded gas because Mercer Island is crossed by I-90.

I-90 comes down out of the Cascades and crosses Mercer Island, which is sitting in the middle of Lake Washington.

And ends up in Seattle.

And so Mercer Island had a lot of pollution from I-90.