Toms River (2 page)

Many of his neighbors didn’t believe him, and it was easy to understand why. Michael’s convictions about the cause of his illness threatened almost everything that the people of Toms River believed about themselves, their town, and even their country. With its strip malls and package stores, its subdivisions and ball fields, Toms River was no different than thousands of other towns. It had grown very fast—as fast as any community in the United States for a while—but growth was the engine that created its wealth. If the detritus of Toms River’s prosperity had been quietly buried, dumped, or burned within the town’s borders, then many residents seemed to regard that as a necessary if unpleasant tradeoff, like rush-hour traffic or crowded beaches in July. Besides, environmental risk was everywhere. The choices that the people of Toms River had made over the decades—to defer to authority, to focus on the here and now, to grow at almost any cost—were hardly unique. If Michael Gillick was right, then all of those choices were wrong—and not just in Toms River.

Michael had been waiting for a very long time, and he was willing to keep waiting. In bleak hospital wards as far away as New York City and Philadelphia, he and his mother had met dozens of other young people from Toms River with cancer—far too many to be a coincidence, he was certain. Many of those friends were gone now, gone forever, but Michael was still here, waiting. He had sat through hundreds of committee meetings and press conferences and strategy sessions in lawyers’ offices. He had waited for the results of scientific investigations that seemed to drag on forever, including the big one—the one that was supposed to prove that he and his mother were wrong, that they were just being emotional, hysterical. The so-called experts had gotten a surprise then, hadn’t they?

Michael and Linda Gillick had started out knowing nothing, and now, more than thirty years later, they knew almost everything. Along with many other people, some of whom they had never even met, the Gillicks had helped to uncover the secret history of Toms River: a dark chronicle of dumpers at midnight and deceptions in broad daylight, of corporate avarice and government neglect. They had fought the fears and delusions of their own neighbors, and they had been vindicated. Now Michael felt he was closer than ever to achieving his final goal. It was just a matter of biding his time, and then the whole truth would come out at last. He could wait a little longer for that.

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PART I
THE ICE CREAM FACTORY

Who Tom was, if he ever was, is the first unsolved mystery of Toms River. He may have been an adventurer named Captain William Tom who helped chase the Dutch out of New Amsterdam in 1664 and then prospered as the British Crown’s tax collector in the wildlands to the south, in the newly established province of New Jersey. Or he may have been an ancient Indian named Old Tom who lived on the cliffs near the mouth of the river and spied on merchant ships during the Revolutionary War on behalf of the British or the Americans, depending on which side paid the larger bribe.

The people of Toms River, in their infinite capacity for self-invention, prefer a different origin story, one that features neither taxes nor bribery. Despite some doubt about its veracity, the story is enshrined on park plaques, in local histories, and even in a bit of doggerel known grandly as the township’s “Old Epic Poem.”
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According to this version, a man named Thomas Luker came alone to the dense pine forests of central New Jersey in about 1700 and settled near the bay, on the northern side of a small river that would bear his name. He lived peacefully among the natives, took the name Tom Pumha (“white friend” in the Lenape language), and married the chief’s daughter, Princess Ann.

Today, just up Main Street from the spot where their wigwam supposedly stood, is a bank that used to be known as First National Bank of Toms River. For decades, First National fueled the town’s frenzied growth with easy credit before it finally imploded in 1991 under the weight of hundreds of millions of dollars in bad real estate loans and a Depression-style run on its assets by frantic depositors. There was nothing apocryphal about its spectacular collapse, which was the largest bank failure in New Jersey history and a harbinger of even more jarring local crises to come, but no plaques or epic poems commemorate the event. In Toms River, history has always been a fungible commodity.

Before the chemical industry came to town in the 1950s and the supercharged growth began, the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Toms River was the American Revolution. In the years before the war, because of its quirky geography, the village had been a haven for small-time piracy. Cranberry Inlet, a narrow passage between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay, was one of the few places on the New Jersey coast where ships could safely wait out storms. But captains who brought their ships in through the inlet to seek shelter in the bay became sitting ducks for the local riffraff, who could slip out of Toms River in whaleboats, attack the ships, and steal their cargo before scurrying back to hide in the shoals. Scavenging shipwrecks was another lucrative pastime. If too few boats ran aground on their own, enterprising locals occasionally moved things along by posting lights in unfamiliar places on the beach to confuse ship pilots looking for the inlet.

With the coming of the Revolutionary War, such underhanded tactics suddenly were not only legal, they were regarded as acts of patriotism. The men of Toms River pursued British shipping with gusto and cooperated with American privateers who seized Loyalist ships and sold their contents at auction in the town square. The British struck back in 1781 by torching the town’s salt works. After losing still more supply ships, the Redcoats returned the following year to burn the entire town, including all fifteen houses, the rebuilt salt works, and the local tavern. Holed up in a small stockade in what is
now Huddy Park in downtown Toms River, an outnumbered force of twenty-five rebel militiamen led by Captain Joshua Huddy tried unsuccessfully to hold off the attackers. An account of the raid in a Tory newspaper described the subsequent rout: “The Town, as it is called, consisting of about a dozen houses, in which none but a piratical set of banditti resided, together with a grist and saw-mill, were with the blockhouse burned to the ground, and an iron cannon spiked and thrown into the river.”
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Huddy was captured, held in irons on a prison ship for two months, and then hanged without a trial. His execution was a major diplomatic incident that enraged General George Washington; the uproar even led to a brief suspension of the Paris peace talks that ended the war.

In the thirty years that followed, the population of Dover Township (the town’s official name until 2006, though almost everyone called it Toms River) quadrupled and its “banditti” went straight, more or less.
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They prospered as merchants in a bustling port that featured two inns and was a busy stop on the coastal stagecoach route. Unfortunately for the town, a storm in 1812 sealed Cranberry Inlet, and with it the community’s chief source of income and main connection to the outside world. (Exactly 200 years later, Hurricane Sandy would devastate parts of Toms River and the shoreline communities, destroying more than 400 Ocean County homes and causing major damage to more than 1,100 others. Sandy came close to reopening Cranberry Inlet but did not quite succeed because so many hardened structures had been built in Ortley Beach during the real estate boom of the 1960s and 1970s.) With the closure of the inlet in 1812, Toms River was once again unimportant, and it would stay that way for the next 140 years. Its population stagnated at less than three thousand for a century before edging upward starting in the early 1900s with the arrival of the railroad and summer tourists from Philadelphia and New York. Toms River was the sleepy center of what was, literally and figuratively, a backwater county. The 1920 census of Ocean County recorded about twenty-two thousand people in a county of almost nine hundred square miles, a third of it under water. Most were still farmers or tradesmen, with a sprinkling of wealthier landowners.

Secure in their insularity, the town burghers hunted in the pinelands, fished in the bay, and sailed on the river. The same families lived in the same comfortable homes from generation to generation, perched comfortably atop a hierarchy that was as rigidly defined as it was unchanging. The most powerful family, the Mathises, lived in a white mansion on Main Street. A mariner turned automobile dealer, Thomas A. “Captain Tom” Mathis and his son William Steelman “Steets” Mathis ran the all-powerful Ocean County Republican Committee for fifty years, exercising iron control over patronage in town and county government from World War I to the mid-1960s. For much of that time, the father or the son (they took turns) represented Ocean County in the New Jersey State Senate.
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Everything in Toms River had its place, as did everyone. Anything that mattered had been settled long ago. The pirate days were over.

The very big idea that would transform Toms River and reshape the global economy was born in 1856 in the attic laboratory of a precocious eighteen-year-old chemistry student named William Henry Perkin, who lived with his family in London’s East End. It was Easter vacation, and Perkin was using the time off to work on some coal tar experiments suggested by his mentor at the Royal College of Chemistry, August Wilhelm von Hofmann.

No one in the world knew more about the chemical properties of coal tar than Hofmann, and coal tar was a very important compound to know about. It was, arguably, the first large-scale industrial waste. By the mid-1800s, coal gas and solid coke had replaced candles, animal oils, and wood as the most important sources of light, heat, and cooking fuel in many European and American cities. Both coal gas and coke were derived from burning coal at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen, a process that left behind a thick, smelly brown liquid that was called coal tar because it resembled the pine tar used to waterproof wooden ships. But undistilled coal tar was not a very good sealant and was noxious, too, and thus very difficult to get rid of. Burning it produced hazardous black smoke, and burying it killed any nearby vegetation. The two most common disposal practices for coal tar, dumping it into open pits or waterways, were obviously unsavory.
But Hofmann, a Hessian expatriate who was an endlessly patient experimenter, was convinced that coal tar could be turned into something useful. He had already established a track record of doing so at the Royal College of Chemistry, where he was the founding director. Knowing that the various components of coal tar vaporized at different temperatures as it was heated, Hofmann spent years separating its many ingredients. In the 1840s, his work had helped to launch the timber “pickling” industry, in which railway ties and telegraph poles were protected from decay by dipping them in creosote, made from coal tar. But the timber picklers were not interested in the lighter and most volatile components of coal tar, which were still nothing but toxic waste—more toxic, in fact, than undistilled coal tar. So Hofmann and his students kept experimenting.