Downwind Residents
Routinely, large atomic clouds blew from the Nevada Test Site to rural communities like Enterprise—a small
town, more than one hundred miles away in southwestern Utah, surrounded by productive farms and arid grazing
country dotted with sagebrush and juniper trees.
The same year nuclear testing began, a boy named Preston Truman was born near Enterprise. His parents,
ranchers and farmers, taught Preston to ride a horse at the same time he learned to walk. "I can remember," he would
recall, "several times getting up with the rest of the family and driving out to my father’s farm in the moments before
dawn and watching the western sky light up with the flash from the bombs in Nevada approximately 112 miles away.
I remember on occasion hearing the sound waves come over. I remember later in the mornings watching on a couple
of occasions clouds come over. To a little child that didn’t mean much. The atomic tests were very much a part of
our lives."6
When he was in high school, Preston Truman was diagnosed with a form of cancer called lymphoma.
Chemotherapy and other medical treatment over the next thirteen years cost about $100,000. As was true for all
other downwind residents, the government did not provide a penny. But Truman was relatively lucky. In 1980 he
was in remission from the usually fatal lymphoma. Out of nine children who were his friends in the immediate area
of Enterprise when he was a child, Truman was the only one who reached the age of twenty-eight. The rest died of
leukemia or cancer.7
The lethal potential of the nuclear tests was not immediately apparent to Truman and others. Especially in the
first years of the A-tests there was confidence in the government’s trustworthiness. "It was kind of almost a carnival
atmosphere in the beginning with the radio telling us where the clouds were going, following the tests, and always
assuring us there was no danger," Truman recalled. "But that wasn’t the way it continued."8 The incubation periods,
from initial radiation exposure to the development of consequent diseases, began to expire.
Always to remain vivid in Preston Truman’s memory was a day when, five years old, he heard that all was not
well for the young children of Enterprise. "I remember one morning going to the store with a friend of mine to cash
in pop bottles, and listening to some people from the town talk about a boy our age who was dying of leukemia and
listening to the details of the nose bleeds and the suffering he was going through. And this was a shock. I remember
talking with my friend and wanting to know; we didn’t know that little children could die, we had never seen that."9
Forty miles east of Enterprise, in Cedar City, Blaine and Loa Johnson buried their twelve-year-old daughter in
1965. She died of leukemia. A total of seven leukemia cases occurred for people within a two-hundred-yard radius
of their home, in the space of a dozen years.10
In the next sizable town, twenty miles farther northeast along Interstate 15, residents in the devout Mormon
community around Parowan were similarly hard hit. In 1978 Frankie Lou Bentley, whose mother and stepfather both
died of cancer a year apart, listed more than 150 cancer victims in the Parowan-Paragonah-Summit area, which
contained about fourteen hundred people during the nuclear tests in neighboring Nevada. The cancer was
particularly startling because so few people smoked in the community. "It’s amazing that there should be so many
cancer cases in an area as small as this," she told a county newspaper. "It’s to the point now where there’s not a
person in town who hasn’t lost at least one relative or knows of several people who have died of cancer."11
A coworker with Frankie Lou Bentley at the Bank of Iron County office in Parowan, Wilma Lamoreaux, watched
her fifteen-year-old son Kenneth die of leukemia in 1960.12 During a two-year period, leukemia struck four
youngsters in Parowan and Paragonah,13 an extremely high rate for towns with a combined population of about one
thousand. Normally, not even one leukemia would have been expected by medical statisticians.14
Eighteen years after her son’s death from leukemia, Wilma Lamoreaux declared, "There’s been wrong done.
There’s no relief in knowing your son died of negligence." She added: "I don’t want to be a rabble-rouser or
anything but I don’t want another generation to go through this. Cancer is such a long, painful, drawn-out death.15
In the nearby Escalante Valley cancer caused forty-eight of sixty-three "natural" deaths in official records since
the atomic testing began—an extraordinarily high ratio.16
And there were other worries. One fifth of the male high school graduates of the 1950s and early 1960s in Cedar
City discovered they were sterile,17 a particularly grievous condition in a Mormon culture which places great stress
on holy edicts to raise large families. For those who became parents, there were fears of genetic damage.
Elizabeth Catalan, who was a teenager while growing up in southwest Utah during the 1950s, lost her father to
leukemia when he was forty-three, and a sister to complications from an enlarged thyroid. A surviving sister’s
daughter remained on her mind: "I watched my beautiful little niece, Kay’s child, cope with the birth defect that left
her with a ganglia that doubled the size of her tongue and wound around, like a weed, inside her neck and down into
her shoulder."18 Elizabeth Catalan thought too about girls she abnormalities in their children.
When Beth Catalan became pregnant, the fetus dissolved in utero. "One of the things I always wanted to be was a
mother," she told a citizens’ commission inquiry in Washington in 1980, adding that "you run a Geiger counter over
my body and it’ll click."19 She decided not to take the risk of trying again to give birth to a baby.
Nestled in a picturesque valley, Beth Catalan’s hometown of St. George long enjoyed bounties of the land. Since
the days that Brigham Young, elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, wintered in St. George, the
town seemed to epitomize reasons for Mormon references to the Utah region as "Zion." Benefiting from a warm
winter climate, proudly sustaining a college, in the middle of the twentieth century St. George was a tranquil and in
many ways idyllic place to live.
On a sunny day about three decades after nuclear weapons testing began upwind, a seventy-three-year-old woman
named Irma Thomas opened the front door of a trim house on East Tabernacle Street in St. George. She had grown
accustomed to welcoming out-of-state researchers carrying notepads and tape recorders and cameras.
Irma Thomas offered the visitors chairs in her living room, next to the shelves of ceramics she had made with her
hands until disquiet with the gathering tragedies in the neighborhood had compelled her to put aside the potter’s
wheel. Few questions were necessary to prompt her to speak about painful realities: a town, and an entire region,
devastated.
"We’re not numbers, we’re not statistics, we’re human beings," she said, motioning to her living-room wall
covered with family photos, an acute blend of pain and fury and vulnerability seeming to lace her words as she
spoke. She did not mention the skin cancer across her back. Sometimes she laughed, an irrepressible zest for life
surfacing through outrage and anguish. She talked about the suffering of her cancer-ridden husband, of her daughter,
whose nervous system was in the process of falling apart, of her children’s blood damage, stillbirths, hysterectomies,
and miscarriages, of her brother, destined to die of bone cancer less than a year after the interview.20 grew up with,
now women, coping with aftermaths of miscarriages and physical
And she pointed through the living-room walls toward the homes of neighbors in the residential area. She had
compiled a list of thirty-one cancer victims who lived in the houses within a block radius;21 smoking was rare in the
heavily Mormon community.
"They couldn’t pay anyone for the loss of a child. I hope they realize that," she said, hands folded in her lap.
"And the people of my generation are just dropping by the wayside."22
Punctuated by her special kind of laughter, and silences, eyes often brimming with tears, Irma Thomas shared her
perceptions about living in a town A-bombed by its own government:
We accepted all this. It was our government and we accepted it. . . . We didn’t connect it to people’s
cancer at first. It takes a while. . . . I’ve been at work on this for two years. I was concerned about it many
years before that. The people of St. George, after the 1953 blast, some of the people got a little nervous . . .
People had to have cars washed down . . . The AEC guys came by to soothe all the ruffled feathers. . . . And
yet so many people died from that. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to see it. And it’s pretty
horrendous....
I work to raise my children. And later I find out this has happened, it just infuriates me so I can hardly
stand it. I get so upset and frustrated, I can hardly stand it . . . The victims are outraged. . . . Our earth is
getting so filled with radioactive waste. And it doesn’t go away. . . .
One of my favorite sayings, "Oh too much talk, hit ’em on the head with a rock." . . . I’m going to keep
pounding, here and there and everywhere, till somebody hears me. . . . All I can do is right here, in this
house. All I can do is do what I can, the way I can. . . . Look how long we suffered, for thirty years.
Nobody makes a peep. When the congressional hearings were happening last year, I told them it looks like
a big show for the politicians. . . . At the hearings it came out, about the government trying to confuse us
with "fission" and "fusion" [a secret directive from President Dwight Eisenhower]. That big old Army
president we had. I’d like to dig him up and hit him in the head.23
By 1980 recent national publicity had often left the impression that St. George and nearby towns were the main
recipients of radioactive clouds from Nevada bomb blasts. But test fallout was not limited to the southern part of
Utah. More than two hundred miles northeast of St. George, between the cities of Provo and Salt Lake City, is the
town of Pleasant Grove, populated by several thousand people. Affidavits filed in federal court in 1980 cited ten
leukemia deaths among people living in Pleasant Grove during the 1960s; seven of those leukemia fatalities were
children.24
Still farther away from the Nevada Test Site, in the Uinta Mountains of northeast Utah some four hundred miles
from where the atom bombs exploded aboveground, severe impacts have been reported as well. The Uinta mountain
range tended to have a "sweeping effect," bringing down fallout on grasslands in the dairy country below the Uinta
peaks. In the summer of 1980 a U.S. District Court suit charged that the government should be held liable for
radioactive contamination of milk in the area and resulting cancer.25
One of the plaintiffs, David L. Timothy, grew up on a dairy farm in the mountainous region of northeastern Utah.
When he was nineteen cancer was discovered in his thyroid—where radioactive iodine 131 from fallout is known to
lodge. In 1981, after undergoing thyroid surgery eight times, Timothy angrily demanded to know "why the hottest
spot in the state has been ignored by not only the officials but the news media too."26
Rose Mackelprang also wondered about lack of attention to the town of Fredonia in northern Arizona, about two
hundred miles from the nuclear test site. National journalists visiting St. George across the Utah border had not
bothered to report what happened to Fredonia’s residents in the wake of atomic fallout that regularly passed over
their town.
Soft-spoken, demure, devoted to the Mormon Church, Rose Mackelprang was willing to talk about what she
could never forget. "My husband and I moved to Fredonia in 1948. It’s just a little town, and we have a very happy
atmosphere down there. We did rather, anyway. They raise their own gardens and most of ’em have their own cows,
a lot of them do, and they have gardens and bottle their own food, put it up, store it, that’s just the life of a small
community."27 Rose Mackelprang’s husband, Gayneld, became a teacher in the public schools of Fredonia, where
the lumber industry was assuming economic importance alongside farming and livestock.
"At that time, when they started the testing in Nevada, it’d be at dawn when the tests would go off and we could
see this big light and then the ground would shake, it’d billow up you could see the big mushroom cloud go way up
and it was really quite exciting, it was different, we didn’t really know that much about it. As far as we knew, why, it
was really going to help us out, it was really something that our government was doing and it would be for our own
good. We trusted the government, we figured that it was necessary because, after all, the government does look after
us, and they’re over the people and they will take care of anything that needs to be taken care of to see that it’s
healthy, or otherwise . . . So we didn’t worry about it."28
In 1960 the population of Fredonia was 643. By 1965 four had passed away from leukemia—a truck driver, who
died at age forty-eight; a fourteen-year-old girl; a lumber crane operator, thirty-six; and Gayneld Mackelprang, by
that time forty-three years old and superintendent of the Fredonia Public Schools. A secret memorandum by the U.S.
Public Health Service’s leukemia unit director, Dr. Clark W. Heath, Jr., noted, "This number of cases is
approximately 20 times greater than expected."29 In the entire previous decade 1950 to 1960 no cases of leukemia
had been reported among Fredonia residents. The memo, dated August 4, 1966, and sent to the head of the federal
agency’s Communicable Disease Center, was marked "FOR ADMINISTRATIVE USE ONLY, NOT FOR
PUBLICATION."30
Soon after learning it was leukemia, Gayneld Mackelprang was dead. His widow recalled, "The doctors said it
was a lot farther advanced than they ever guessed. It was a shock, I can tell you. We hardly knew what to do, no
plans, no nothing. I had six children home, and I was expecting my seventh in six weeks."31
Cancer became commonplace in Fredonia. Rose Mackelprang ticked off the names of the next towns north along
Highway 89—Kanab, Orderville, Glendale—where cancer and leukemia had appeared. "Some of them have died
with leukemia, we have a lot of cancer, and it’s not the end of it. It’s still going on." Federal agencies continued to
deny responsibility. "One thing that really upsets me," she added, "is that instead of telling us it was dangerous, they
have denied it all the time, they’ve said they’re not at fault."32
6. Citizens’ Hearings, pp. 8-9.
7. Preston Truman, interviews, February 1980, December 1980, June 1981.
8. Citizens’ Hearings, pp. 8-9.
9. Ibid.
10. The Tribune (Salt Lake), Associated Press, November 21, 1978; Loa Johnson, interview, June 1981.
11. Color Country Spectrum (Utah), December 22, 1978.
12. Ibid.
13. The Tribune (Salt Lake), Associated Press, November 21, 1978.
14. Clark W. Heath, Jr., M.D., Chief, "Subject: Leukemia in Fredonia, Arizona," U.S. Public Health Service Memo, Leukemia Unit, Epidemiology Branch,
August 4, 1966.
15. Color Country Spectrum, December 22, 1978.
16. Samuel H. Day, Jr., "Rebellion in the Rockies," Progressive, February 1981, p. 9.
17. Ibid.
18. Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1980.
19. Citizens’ Hearings, p. 6.
20. Irma Thomas, interview, February 1980.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. The Tribune (Salt Lake), May 17, 1980.
25. The Tribune (Salt Lake), August 13, 1980.
26. David Timothy, interview, January 1981.
27. Rose Mackelprang, speech to National Conference for a Comprehensive Test Ban, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, December 12, 1980.
28. Ibid.
29. Heath, "Subject: Leukemia," August 4, 1966.
30. Ibid.
31. Rose Mackelprang speech.
32. Ibid.