'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
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Who was Karen Silkwood?
Join me, Deborah Roberts, for 2020 The After Show, part of the 2020 podcast. Listen now ad-free on Amazon Music.
Last year, my buddy Mike and I found ourselves inside a giant warehouse with hundreds of big wooden storage containers stacked floor to ceiling.
It felt like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. You know, the one where the government stores the lost Ark in a massive warehouse filled with crates where it'll never be found.
Well, we were definitely searching for lost treasure, hoping one of these storage containers would hold the key to a 50-year-old mystery. Okay, it's coming out.
We pulled out box after box, each one sealed with layers of thick packing tape.
There were boxes of toys and old family photo albums and a somewhat creepy ventriloquist dummy. Let me get this out of the way. I can't see what it says. And then... Mike, you found it. What? Silkwood storage.
The very last box in the very back corner.
Fingers down. Holy cow, I got goosebumps. On the outside, in black sharpie, was the name. Silkwood. Yeah, it's all here.
Holy mackerel. This is what we'd been looking for, hoping for. Cassette tapes recorded in the 1970s. Interviews a private investigator had made looking into a mysterious death.
The death of Karen Silkwood. Karen died in a single car crash off a dark, empty Oklahoma highway exactly 50 years ago this November. She was on her way to meet a New York Times journalist, reportedly to hand over documents she'd secretly been collecting at her job at a nuclear facility. But she never made it to that meeting. On the way, Karen fell asleep at the wheel, possibly under the influence of drugs, drove off the highway, crashed into a ditch, and died.
Or at least that's the official story. We've never believed it. Not for one second. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood Mystery. Episode 1, The Tapes.
I'm Bobby Sands. And I'm Mike Boettcher. We're two old gray guys who've been in this journalism game a very, very long time. Mike and I met as young reporters at competing Oklahoma news outlets. We were both on the scene of a hostage situation back in 1973. Bullets were whizzing past our heads. I dove off the end of a flatbed trailer, and what does this crazy character do? He stood there, holding a microphone in the air, trying to catch the sound of the bullets flying by. I said to myself, that's a guy I got to get hooked up with, and we've been buddies ever since.
By 1974, Bobby and I were working in the same newsroom, KTOK Commercial Radio in Oklahoma City. We wrote news copy on typewriters, and stories came in from across the country on the AP wire machine. When breaking news hit, the alarm on the teletype machine would go off.
That summer, reporting came through that KTOK newsroom about a 28-year-old union organizer making noise about safety conditions at a local nuclear facility.
Karen Silkwood was a lab analyst at a nuclear fuel production plant. It made the plutonium fuel rods to power a new kind of nuclear reactor, part of a multi-million dollar experiment to supercharge nuclear energy. And when she began to notice unsafe working conditions, leaks, spills, co-workers getting contaminated with radioactive material over and over again, she spoke up. Tried to change things, make them better.
Karen was a rank-and-file worker, one of only a few women who worked in that plant. And yet, here she was, standing up to her employer, Kerr McGee, an atomic energy giant.
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