Our Road: Then —EP46: PCB Dead Sea Scrolls: Seven Personal Journals

Photo: A stack of Deborah’s journals spanning from 1977 — 1982 taken from the Ferruccio’s Warren County PCB Dead Sea Scrolls.       

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In this Our Road to Walk: Then and Now podcast series, Deborah and Ken continue to examine the past in the context of the present. In their last episode, they focused on the current climate crisis and the petrochemical take-over. 

In this episode, they go back in their PCB Dead Sea Scrolls archives to a collection of 1982 documents that Deborah has found stuck in the last of a stack of seven of her journals spanning from 1977 to 1982. The dates on the documents coincide with her journal entries, and it’s clear from the journals that Deborah and Ken’s personal lives are inextricably woven into the documented PCB history.

They share several 1982 journal entries when the euphoria they have been feeling with new teaching jobs is shattered with news that county commissioners have just dropped the county’s PCB lawsuit against the state. 

To give context to the commissioners’ decision, Deborah and Ken analyze letters to the editor and news coverage leading up to it. 

The county is on a collision course with the state. It has been three-and-a-half years since Ken warned the Hunt Administration there would be “due process first; then civil disobedience.

But Ken and Deborah and Warren County Concerned Citizens are not done with due process, not yet, anyway.