In Oklahoma: The Pangs of Bearing Witness

It is Saturday morning, and Jim Smith stands at his stall in the Old Paris Flea Market, a recycled warehouse near Oklahoma City's railroad yards. Before him are tables laden with things to sell or swap: beer mugs, some tiny and some as big as umbrella stands, plus old bottles, crystal goblets and ceramic figurines.

A young man in tight blue jeans and tooled leather boots approaches not to buy but to gab. "Say, Jim. You want a full military funeral when Kerr-McGee gets done with you? We'll have to find you a lead coffin so you don't contaminate the cemetery. How many pall bearers you figure it takes to haul a lead coffin?"

That bit of morbid humor refers to possible resentment by the Kerr-McGee Corp., a major energy conglomerate, over testimony Smith has given in a bitter trial. It is the celebrated $11.5 million negligence suit brought by the heirs of Karen Silkwood, a former employee at a Kerr-McGee plutonium-processing facility in nearby Crescent (pop. 1,568). She accused the company of being cavalier about worker safety, and then died at 28 in a still mysterious car accident in 1974. The trial, however, focuses on charges that Kerr-McGee was negligent in a series of plutonium contaminations that took place in the nine days before her death.

Because Smith served for almost six years as a plant supervisor with Kerr-McGee, he was briefly last month the main event in Oklahoma City's federal courthouse. Neither accused nor accuser, he was required to tell the truth about subjects he would rather not have discussed. Now the witness is finding that day in court still intrudes on his life, even at the Old Paris Flea Market.

"Hey, Jim," a woman with strawberry blond hair knotted atop her head calls from a nearby stall. "You're our star. I want to shake your hand, honey. You're a celebrity. They even had you on TV." Putting out one cigarette, Smith then lights another. At 47, a short, broad-shouldered man in tan dungarees, he has the look of someone who could have spent his life punching in at an automobile plant or a paint factory. But Smith is a celebrity because the assembly lines he manned produced goods made of plutonium, a radioactive element so deadly that even microscopic doses can be lethal.

Formal schooling ended for Smith at the tenth grade. Then, through more than 20 years of self-education and training programs, he learned to master topics like atomic weights, valences and isotopes. Ironically, Smith loved the work. His testimony may have made him a hero to antinuclear activists--and all the more so in the wake of Three Mile Island--but for Smith the workaday life with plutonium fulfilled that old American dream of self-made success.

Childhood was orphanages in Wyoming. "When Mamma died, Daddy boogied," he explains. Later he caught up with Daddy for a night, just long enough to get a signature allowing him to join the Army at 17. Before he was 20 he had a bronze star and two Purple Hearts in Korea. Smith still bears a military imprint. He is intensely patriotic. The old pistols, swords and insignia patches he sometimes sells at the Old Paris provoke a special delight. He reads war histories, likes to carry a gun and believes deeply in following procedures. Just married and out of uniform in 1952, Smith stumbled into a job at the Rocky Flats, Colo., nuclear arsenal, a manufacturing plant for atomic warheads. "I'd heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but like everyone else back then I was dumber than a box of rocks about anything nuclear."

Smith learned. He soon switched to the production staff as a helper. Over the next 17 years he worked up to foreman and finally supervisor. He was present as scientific knowledge of plutonium grew from infancy, and he remembers these as his golden days. Smith worked at purifying plutonium and mixing it with other elements. He changed it from liquid to powder to metal and molded it into the workings of atomic weapons. Like most Americans, but in a more immediate way, he has made concessions to the nuclear hazard. "There's no way to get that plutonium out of me now," he says, knowing he was probably contaminated. "Only time will tell what it's doing to me."

When Smith left Rocky Flats for Oklahoma in 1969, he commanded several dozen men and made $12,000 a year. He had similar responsibilities with Kerr-McGee, where his crews produced fuel pellets for experimental reactors. When the plant closed in 1975, Smith was furloughed. His wife Phyllis, 43, a tall brunette with fashionably frizzed hair, carried the family finances with her job as a district manager for Avon. Smith began doing the family cooking. He also kept busy taking his motor home to auctions, picking up stuff for the flea market. He and Phyllis spent a lot of time working on a rambling clapboard house they bought in Shawnee (pop. 25,100).

This quiet life was disturbed two years ago by the visit of an investigator for the Silkwoods. Smith made a decision that swept him into a complex legal fight. "I figured if somebody, no matter who, asked a question, I ought to answer," he recalls. "Well, pretty soon it was the Silkwood people, the Kerr-McGee people and the reporters, and then I'm in court. If nobody had found me to ask questions, I wouldn't be involved in the damn thing."

In court he showed little enthusiasm. He sat with hands folded, spoke in monotones, invariably addressed his questioner as "Sir." The Silkwood attorney often had to egg him on for details. Nevertheless, his testimony seemed chilling. He told of workmen leaving the plant for lunch in plutonium-laden clothes. The restaurant where they ate was never checked for contamination. Teen-age farm boys, he testified, were put to work with no safety training. Once he and his men were ordered to don coveralls and respirators and work in a contaminated room for several days. They had to meet a production schedule instead of immediately cleaning up the contamination. Smith said his pleas for better equipment went unheard and life became "a continuous battle against leaks." Even the concrete walls were impregnated with plutonium. Smith claimed that to eliminate the plant as a possible source of contamination, "you'd have to break it up and put the whole thing in a nuclear burial ground," a conclusion substantiated by an expert witness, Professor Karl Morgan of Georgia Tech.

Whatever happens to the suit, Jim Smith wants nothing more to do with the Silkwood controversy. "I'm no crusader. I'm not antinuclear," he says. "The trouble is the regulatory people played Keystone Kops and gave licenses to a bunch of dummies who got real sloppy. Now the public is riled up. They've gone against nuclear. And this trial isn't helping."

Plutonium was unknown, Smith points out, until man learned to tinker with the atom. It has strange properties. A quantity of plutonium that is perfectly safe in one container will emit a deadly blast of radiation when put in a container of a different shape. It would be natural to assume that Smith would be happy never to see the stuff again. Not so. He speaks of the substance with something bordering on affection. "Plutonium is weird--and interesting. Every day it's a different challenge because it's temperamental. You can't just relax around it."

His only serious run-in with the deadly metal came when a chunk of it had to be surgically removed from his right thumb. More than a decade later the scar is well worn but still ugly. He could be in great danger from invisible specks of plutonium that may have found their way to his lungs, but he is blunt and fatalistic about it. "I'd go back to plutonium work any day," he says, "but at a first-class No. 1 outfit." With obvious dejection he adds, "After what I did in court, no place is going to give me a job. No place. I consider the nuclear door closed to me."

There are less important but more immediate problems too. Those kidding voices, for instance, that call out in the street, "How much the Silkwoods gonna pay you if they win?" He waves that scarred thumb in the air and yells back, 'I've still got some of that good stuff in there. I'll stick it in your beer. Then you watch how you feel next week."

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