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Rudi Steiner remembers Bluffton in the 1950s – The 1950s were dangerous times for kids growing up in Bluffton.
We grew up in homes and went to school in buildings painted with lead paint and floors covered with asbestos tiles. The air we breathed was filled with smoke from houses heated by Little Joe, Black Star, Jewel and Pocahontas lump coal.
Our electric power came from the Central Light and Power plant. It, too, was coal-fired. Wash days for Bluffton housewives were always a challenge, especially on the days the Woodcock power plant, just north of the National quarry, blew out its smoke stack.
Black soot was everywhere – on mom’s sheets and dad’s white shirts. Adding to the smoke, fly ash and soot raining down on the clothes lines in Bluffton’s backyards from the coal-fired Akron, Canton and Youngstown Railroad and Nickel Plate Railroad steam locomotives that belched out more of the stuff.
The out-of-state cars, trucks and Greyhound buses passing through on the Dixie Highway further polluted our air with carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and other pollutants from uncontrolled leaded exhaust emissions.
Each fall we raked our leaves into big piles and burned them in the street.
In January the Girl Scouts collected discarded Christmas trees and burned them in a ceremony called the Burning of the Greens.We did this all without EPA permits.
In June, July and August it seemed like mosquitoes were everywhere. Bluffton’s Mayor Wilbur Howe waged a personal war on the pesky insects by spraying them with DDT. He sprayed every storm sewer basin and the banks of Big and Little Riley with the stuff.
The prized Holstein, Jersey, Brown Swiss cattle and Duroc hogs raised on Bluffton’s farms deposited tons of methane gas emissions into the air through flatulence, belching and wet manure, and the runoff from farms polluted our ditches and eventually entered Bluffton’s water supply.
Each week the village maintenance crew picked up our trash and garbage and deposited all of the rotten refuse together in an unregulated village dump.
This is a sample of the content of "Bluffton Anthology - A creek runs through it." Copies are now available for $24.95 plus tax in Bluffton at:
• Roots by Strattons
• The Food Store
• The Black Lab
• Bluffton Senior Citizens Center
• The Dough Hook
• Polished
