Creative History

  On the day before Halloween in 1948, a Saturday, in the early afternoon the Donora Pennsylvania High School football team was defeated on its home turf, Legion Field,  by local rival Monongahela High School.  The final score was Monongahela 27 Donora 7. Not a single pass was thrown during the entire game by either team.  But there was something far more odd, sinister and tragic than erratic play on the gridiron that both literally and figuratively overshadowed the field and the one hundred and fifty or so players and spectators who had gathered together that afternoon at Legion Field in suburban western Pennsylvania. The Smog. Speaking sixty-years later in 2008 to reporters from the Pittsburgh Gazette local resident Sam Jackson, who played in the football game for Monongahela High School remembered, “The smog was like a big cloud of yellowish mist hanging over the players.” Donora resident Paul Brown, who had left work early from the U.S. Steel Company Mill...

            Friday morning begins normally enough.  It is cloudy and overcast, a little gloomy with a slight chill in the air but it is nothing that the residents of New England aren’t used to.  After all, this time of year the temperature does fluctuate rapidly, with one day being warm and humid, summerlike, and the next cold and stark almost like winter. It is May 19, 1780 and the New England and Mid-Atlantic states have been in the grip of America’s War for Independence for over five years.  Much of the countryside is ravaged, many of the cities are still under British control, but led by George Washington, the Continental Army of the United States continues to survive and the spirit of American patriotism is proving resilient and indomitable.  There is reason for both hope and despair, but no one expects what this day is about to bring. At around ten in the morning the overcast sky begins to change colors turning from a pi...

The date is July 30, 1858 and the gentlemen and ladies of London’s upper class are walking through the streets with heads bowed and perfumed handkerchiefs held to their noses.  A massive cloud, an opaque yellowish mist with the consistency of a thick soup, is hanging in the air.  This cloudy mist has been rising up from the river Thames for the past month and now, by the middle of the Summer, it has enveloped the entire city in its miasmic haze.     The river Thames cuts through all of central London.  It is the main artery of transport for the entire city through which the commerce of almost the whole English speaking world flows.  The Thames is the center of maritime world trade, and in many ways in conjunction with the greater Atlantic Ocean itself into which it flows, the Thames is the primary reason that the sun is said to never set on her majesty Queen Victoria’s British Empire.  But during this stinking summer of 1858 London’s all i...