Coldwater Creek is about as bucolic as they come, a lovely little tributary of the Missouri River that meanders through North St. Louis County.
It’s also contaminated with nuclear waste. Has been since the late 1940s, just about the time subdivisions like the one in which I grew up near St. Ferdinand Park in Florissant, Mo., were sprouting all over North County.
The uranium used in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bombs that ended World War II was curated in St. Louis, and its waste stored improperly in two sites in North County. Over time, it seeped into the groundwater and into the soil. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a website started by a group of very courageous women. The official government site can be read here.
Turns out, most of us who lived in North County in the second half of the 20th century are Cold War collateral damage. The stories will be collected here, beginning with my own mom, Betty Gibson, who died of leukemia in 1994 at age 55.
Stories like this one:
One day in 1958, a young, engaged couple went looking for a house. They took a Sunday drive, heading about 15 miles northwest of their St. Louis neighborhood, Montgomery Street on the near north side, to a town called Florissant.
What was not to like about the Valley of Flowers? Florissant was an up-and-coming, affordable suburb. Highways were being built. A couple could have their own life but stay close to the city. For two Depression-era babies looking to build a family, Florissant represented the future.
And so they may have picked up a newspaper to plot their day. They may have seen an ad for a subdivision called Brinwood touting affordable housing with little money down. They may have read about an advertorial touting the “no through-traffic main streets.” They may have circled “shopping districts” and “good schools and churches.” And they probably read right over “Coldwater Creek sewer district.”
These are the keywords here: Coldwater Creek. Perhaps you’ve heard of this tributary of the Missouri River that starts near the airport and meanders through north St. Louis County. It’s getting national attention because of a new HBO documentary called “Atomic Homefront.”
If you think this is a North County story, it’s not. The film depicts St. Louis’ little known nuclear past as the uranium-processing center for the Manhattan Project, and how nuclear waste found its way into the soil and groundwater. The story is riveting and complicated, and connects the dots that now affect two St. Louis communities: Bridgeton, adjacent to the West Lake Landfill, and the neighborhoods nestled along the creek — a neighborhood in which our young couple found their starter home.
They closed on their ranch on Feb. 5, 1959, two days before they married at St. Liborius Catholic Church. In the next 7 years, they’d have four kids — a boy in 1960, a boy in ’61, a girl in ’63 and another boy in ’66. I was that girl.
Our neighborhood was idyllic. My older brothers Rick and Mike, and my younger brother Jeff and I played outside with the neighborhood kids constantly when we could, just needing to be home when the street lights came on. The Schultes, the Scharfs, the Sheltons, the Gartens, the Axleys, the Barnetts … every house had a mom with a set of eyes, so if you did something wrong you likely got in trouble twice.
And one block over flowed a tiny Coldwater Creek tributary, a part of that subdivision sewer district. “We must have played in that creek over a hundred times,” my younger brother Jeff said.
Over the years, when neighbors died of cancer, we figured it was one of those things. When it’s your own mom, well, that’s a stroke of personal bad luck. Betty Gibson lived on Estes Drive for 35 years, from her wedding day in 1959 until she died of leukemia at age 55 — exactly 24 years ago March 3. The missed years add up, and with every new grandchild, every milestone, every holiday, every large, grand family vacation, the missing piece looms large.
But you play the hand you’re dealt, because cancer can be so random. Until one day, you discover that maybe it wasn’t.
A shorter version, “Atomic Neighborhood,” was originally published March 2, 2018, in The South County Times.