Over seven decades, home sweet home has doubled as a hell zone of water, soil, and air contaminated with treacherous substances like uranium-238 (with a half-life of 4.5 billion years) and thorium-232 (with a half-life of 14 billion years). But there was one problem that the residents knew nothing about: Some of the deadliest toxins known to man had been dumped into Coldwater Creek. The creek was once a thing of beauty, to be sure. It runs past schools, golf courses, and soccer fields. These were the children of Coldwater Creek, a picturesque tributary through about 15 miles of the county, spanning communities such as Florissant, Hazelwood, Black Jack, Spanish Lake, St. They are but a microcosm, part of an untold number of people afflicted by their own government in an area that realistically must today be termed a “cancer cluster.” And they were by no means isolated cases in North County. These friends from the neighborhood where Wright grew up and went to high school were not random cases of bad luck.
Not after friends Kerry and Steve contracted appendix cancer, and Scott got a brain tumor, and Diane was diagnosed with nonsmoking lung cancer-all in the course of a couple of years. Not after Kathy Jones, mother of five adopted special-needs kids, died of uterine cancer at age 40. Not after Kathy Bindbeutel Broyles developed a brain tumor and died a few months later, at age 40, leaving behind four children. In just a few short years after that normal reunion, not so much would be fine. But it turns out that there was nothing ordinary about the McCluer North class of ’88. That’s not ordinarily what stands out to people about their high-school reunions. “It’s amazing to think about it now,” she says. Jenell Rodden Wright gets a chill when she recalls the 20-year reunion she attended for the McCluer North High School class of 1988, less than five years ago.
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