Decided to jump into remembering the first Earth Day. In the spring of 1970 in ninth grade at Redstone Junior High School, our social studies teacher, Doug "Skip" Harbaugh, was 25 years old, energetic and innovative. About halfway through the school year Mr. Harbaugh had thrown out the standard curriculum, saying, "This isn't going to do you any good!" The first innovative unit was financial, and it's the most financially-valuable course I've ever taken. After that we moved on to environmental. We, the students in Mr. Harbaugh's class, became the Sincere Teenagers Opposing Pollution.
Some classmates specialized in manufacturing armbands; I'm sure that the neat printing with a magic marker was not mine. Doug was active in the Jaycees in Brownsville, and I suppose it was through those connections that he arranged an appearance on what was then the relatively new local radio station, WASP. The station manager had a weekday call-in talk program called Bob's Beeline. (I know, it sounds like a skit from Hee Haw.) There were four of us students selected to be on the program. Not sure if it was on Earth Day itself, could have been a day or two before or after.
The original studio was a small room in the Gallatin Bank Building in downtown Brownsville. Bob was a big guy, and the four of us sat around him--no social distancing. It was additionally uncomfortable for me because my Dad worked at a chemical plant a few miles downriver that manufactured, among other things, sulfuric acid for industrial use. The plant had recently installed pollution control equipment to capture gas that had previously been vented to the atmosphere. The control process had a side effect in that it generated a lot of steam with a fine mist of ammonium sulfate. It was probably better for the trees than sulfur dioxide gas. But unfortunately, though fog tends to accumulate anyway in the Monongahela River valley on clear cold nights, the portion of the fog bank connected to the plant often seemed to be a bit more dense and slower to dissipate. When a call would come in, "What about that cloud from that chemical plant?" I would frantically motion "Don't point that microphone at me!"
