|
9.
|
Text: Moses Villalobos to History of Crockett, Rodeo and Tormey area's! June 25, 2016 ·I thought I'd share a story about the last days that ended some of our fondest memories for those of us who grew up in Tormey.Coping: A Belated Christmas Story by Tom Emch, San Francisco Chronicle, January 17, 1971 (*2)(Copyright © 1971, San Francisco Chronicle. Reprinted with permission. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission from the publisher.)When an industrial giant with assets of more than $824.5 million writes to one of its hourly workers whose assets are a wife, five children, some equity in a pickup and nine years of service to the company, it sometimes comes out like this:"We sincerely regret that due to the closing of the Selby Plant, all company homes must be vacated before June 1, 1971."...this document is to be considered official written notice of termination of tenancy."Moses Villalobos received this letter last August 3, along with forty-three other employees of American Smelting and Refining Company who live in company-owned housing at Tormey, California.The letters were delivered in the sleepy, tree-shaded village about a week after the news broke like a death in the family:"After 85 years of continuous operations, one of the country's oldest lead smelting and refining plants -- American Smelting and Refining Company's Selby Plant, 25 miles north-east of San Francisco -- will be permanently closed down..."The announcement, distributed to Bay Area newspapers, added: "Every effort will be made by the Company to minimize the effect of the closing on the Selby employees."Minimize the effect of closing? How?Of some 340 Selby employees, nearly 260 would not be transferred; they would lose their jobs. About forty-four would be forced from their rented homes and have to find another place to live; another ten families who own their property and homes would be denied use of sewer lines on company property and would probably be forced to leave by Contra Costa County sanitation department requirements.How do you minimize the effects of loss of income, loss of housing, when the paycheck stops right before Christmas and your home will be razed to the ground six months later?This was the scene in Tormey last December; on B Street, where the eighty-year old houses have company numbers on them and look solidly alike.Mrs. Villalobos lives at 260. Her children range in age from five to fifteen. It is painful for her to talk about the future: "We have to live from day to day, because we don't know when it will come, when he will be told he is through. My husband can't look for work until he is laid off; he can't quit because he'd lose his severance pay."We had to sell our car and put the money on the pickup so the finance company can't get it, and we don't know where we can move to. He doesn't have a job lined up. It's hard."Christmas?" she looks bewildered. "Presents for the children? Maybe a tree; I don't know."The Torres family lives at 240 B Street. They don't know what they will do either. Across the street lives a woman whose husband has worked for ASARCO for thirty-seven years. "Please don't use my name," she pleads. "We're still hoping for a transfer."She says bitterly: "They're not telling us anything. We brought up three daughters in this house; we remodeled it and put money into it, and now we'll have to leave. Our daughters are gone now. They all went to the little school at the end of the block -- Selby Grammar School -- and to high school in Crockett."The Cordova family lives down the street in a pastel blue house that is well tended. The Malaneys live nearby and so do the Whites.Jesse White may be one of the last residents of the company-owned houses in Tormey. It will be his job to close down the village, help demolish the homes and the smelter. After that? Well, he doesn't know.Quentin Harris, a veteran crane operator at the Selby Plant, has made up his mind what to do. "I'll take my pension -- $130 a month. Maybe I'll go back home. Home? That's Russellville, Arkansas."Harris has made it through rough times before and has no time for self-pity: "We'll make it all right."Dudley Stillinger, who lives at the end of B Street, is lucky. A metallurgist with ASARCO for nineteen years, he will be transferred to the company's plant at El Paso, Texas: "Of course, we have to leave," he says, "it will be difficult getting settled again."His wife, Susan, adds: "I don't think I really believed it until they boarded up the first house. It was depressing; everybody felt it."She looks around her living room with its comfortable furnishings and the pictures of her children. "This has been a marvelous place. There's freedom here; it's a good place to bring up children. They can play safely, climb the hills. We'll miss it."The Stillingers pay $37 a month rent to the company. The average rent paid by employees in company housing is $43. Similar housing in nearby Crockett or Rodeo would cost four times as much, if they could find it.Dudley Stillinger knows where he'll be going, what he'll be doing for a living. Moses Villalobos and more than 250 hourly wage earners don't.There has been a lead smelter on the Selby site since 1885 when California pioneer Thomas Selby (*3) "blew in" the first furnace. American Smelting and Refining Company purchased the smelter in 1905 and built the 610 foot high chimney in 1937, once the tallest in the world and a landmark on Carquinez Straits for more than thirty years.In its lifetime, until July 1970, it is estimated that the Selby Plant has produced more than three million tons of refined lead, 40 million ounces of gold and more than a billion ounces of refined silver. It is the only important lead smelter in the United States located on tidewater, linked to the ore-producing countries of the world by shipping.Six months ago there was little to indicate that the Selby Plant was in ill health financially. And when the announcement came that the plant would close, stockholders made inquiries, all of Contra Costa County wondered, and the employees to lose their jobs shouted: "Why?"Here is the company's official statement: "For the past several years, the Selby smelter and refinery has been operating at or near the break-even point and at only fifty to sixty percent of capacity," according to Ralph L. Hennebach, ASARCO executive vice president. "In the past year, new cost burdens... make it impossible to operate the plant except at a loss. These burdens include increased state, county and local taxes, higher labor costs combined with decreased productivity, and an increase in ASARCO's tidelands lease with the State of California."Outstanding among possible reasons for departure not mentioned by American Smelting and Refining Company are:-- The $1 million tax suit against ASARCO won last year by Contra Costa County. The company contended it did not owe taxes on metals inventory stored in government bonded warehouses, and took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. The State Court of Appeal found in favor of the county, and ASARCO now must pay. Says county auditor, H. Donald Funk: "I think this case must have a bearing on their decision to leave."-- A State Department of Public Health report on the Selby Plant issued last May 1: "The company is a major lead processor and the files of the department's occupational health program show inability to eliminate lead poisoning in employees despite technical assistance from this department." Says Dr. Fred Ottoboni, chief of the Air Sanitation Unit: "The inhalation of lead dust has to be controlled at the source and I think they have had the techniques worked out. There have been some cases of illnesses, but there hasn't been a death from lead poisoning in California in years."-- A State Department of Public Health report last June on the death of twelve valuable Appaloosa show horses in Benicia, Solano County, across the Carquinez Straits from the smelter. The interim report, since confirmed, names the Selby smelter as "probably responsible for the bulk of lead contamination" in the Benicia area. In addition, the report said, autopsies performed on the dead horses at UC Davis showed the horses died from what is known as "roaring disease," or lead poisoning. Pasture grasses in the Benicia area were found to contain 150 to 350 parts per million of lead.The owner of the horses, B. George Wesner, has filed a $1.2 million suit for damages against American Smelting and Refining Company, Humble Oil and Refining Company, Winton, Jones Construction, Inc., six unnamed corporations and fifty John Does. Attorney for the plaintiff is Helen Culiner of Melvin Belli's law firm.The dead horse phenomenon has plagued ASARCO for years. In 1916 there was a Selby Smelter Commission Report listing cases of horses suffering death by lead poisoning; the smelter was thought to be the cause of the death of some horses at Eliot Cove in 1953 and late last year the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the death of horses from lead poisoning near ASARCO's new smelter at Glover, Missouri.Another possible, but unconfirmed, reason for ASARCO's departure is tightening regulations of the Bay Area Air Pollution Control District. A spokesman for the District says ASARCO's compliance record is good: "They've gotten two violation notices in the last six months. One was a chimney violation and one was a ground fire." But the District, in September, named ASARCO and three East Bay oil refineries as major air polluters.The District spokesman said that on November 5, 1971 maximum emissions from a single point of sulfur dioxide would be cut in half, and that new lead emission standards of the State Air Resources Board require less than 1.5 micrograms of lead per cubic meter averaged over a 30 day period.At least one state official, who wishes to remain unnamed, insists that ASARCO could not comply with the new standards without a major overhaul of their smelter. Such an overhaul, of course, would be costly.Meanwhile, when questioned last July on the reason the smelter is closing, Armand L. Labbe, Selby Plant manager said: "The decision was based strictly on the economic situation. It's a matter of dollars and cents." He told California Living later that specific reasons were the U.S. import duty of $15 per ton of lead contained in concentrates; the high cost of the Selby operation, and the efficiency of the modern ASARCO smelter and refinery at Glover, Missouri. The company also maintains smelters at El Paso, East Helena, Montana, and a refinery at Omaha. Foreign operations in which ASARCO has a controlling or a partial interest are located in Australia, Canada, Peru and Mexico.Cheaper operating costs abroad. This is the real reason for the Selby shut-down, according to James Buck. He's president of Carquinez Local 51, United Steelworkers of America, the bargaining agent for all the Selby hourly-wage workers."You can't sell me on the high taxes story," says Buck. "San Francisco has higher taxes and industry is moving in. And it certainly isn't high wages. I'm a top journeyman and I get paid $3.77 an hour; laborers get $3.07."The 1968 strike? They saved money during the strike; they weren't hurt, but the workers were. I know people who haven't gotten over it yet." A nationwide strike shut the plant for nine months in '68-69.Buck systematically rejects all the suspected reasons for the abandonment of the Selby smelter, including the $1 million tax suit and the tough air pollution control laws: "Foreign operations are just cheaper. If the ore comes from South America, it's cheaper to refine it in Peru," he insists.Buck has worked for ASARCO for twenty years and says of his employer: "They're a hard-nosed outfit. I've had to negotiate with them."Local 51, says Buck, will try to place unemployed smelter workers in other union jobs such as the ILWU and the Teamsters, "the ones with the hiring halls."More than eighty workers had already been laid off when this was written. ASARCO's schedule called for more lay-offs in late December, some before Christmas, and closing of the plant by January 1. Demolition was to begin shortly after that, and the company houses in Tormey were to feel the blade of the bulldozer in June. Once cleared, the land would be ready for a new owner.But messy problems remain. The little school in Tormey, on property given to the John Swett School District by ASARCO for as long as it is used for "educational purposes," is claimed by both ASARCO and the school district. It is now being used as an administration building and ASARCO wants the land back. The school district says they own it, and they have taken the matter to the county attorney.Another messy problem is the ASARCO-maintained sewer system which serves the school building and 14 privately-owned homes across the highway (old U.S. 40). After June 1, ASARCO will refuse to operate the treatment plant, and the home owners face eviction by the Contra Costa County Department of Health."There are sewage disposal requirements that can't be ignored," says Ted Gerow, county environmental health officer. At a citizens' meeting in the school auditorium last December, Gerow told the home owners they had four choices:"You can get an easement from the smelter and use the existing sewer system; you can form a sewer district, a taxing entity, and build your own treatment plant; you can annex to the nearest sewer district, the Crockett Valona; or you can abandon your property."The forty people in the room look stunned. The silence is stony."Wait a minute now, " breaks in county supervisor Alfred M. Dias. "No one's going to have to abandon their home. Let's review all the alternatives. Let's set up a septic tank meeting, a meeting with the Crocket-Valona District." Dias has in mind a committee -- the politician's answer to all sticky problems.A question from the audience is directed at Armand Labbe, Selby plant manager: "Is the smelter opposed to our using the existing facilities?"Labbe says: "There is a possibility it could be used for a limited time. That's all I can say." Pressed for a yes or no answer, Labbe says helplessly, "I don't know."Dias, the supervisor, hints at a law suit if the smelter doesn't cooperate on the sewer usage, and then pulls a rabbit out of the hat: "I don't want to get your hopes up. I didn't want to mention this, but there is a possibility of Federal funds. This is a disaster area just like a flood or a hurricane and... I don't know what a sewage treatment plant costs -- $500,000, I don't know -- but if it's declared a disaster area, the government will come up with a chunk of the money."Nobody appears eager to chase this bright rainbow, but they do volunteer to serve on Dias' committee "to get something done."The meeting breaks up. Outside the school house, vividly remembered by three generations of smelter workers' children, it is drizzling and gloomy. On B Street in Tormey there are no brightly lit Christmas trees in the windows. The company houses, those that are not already boarded up, are shut tightly against the light rain. One house has a forlorn-looking wreath tacked to the front door. There is no other evidence of the coming holiday season.You take in the scene and hear the words of Jim Buck, the union leader: "We can't make any plans." And Mrs. Stillinger who said, "It's a good place to bring up children."You think of Moses Villalobos with the five children, and of Ralph L. Hennebach, American Smelting and Refining Company's executive vice president, who said: "Every effort will be made to minimize the effect of the closing on Selby employees."
|
