Arlington

Following the completion of the John Day Dam, the original location of Arlington was moved south in 1963 to avoid the resulting inundation. Arlington was the birthplace of Doc Severinsen. 2000 census: 524. Personal Note: When I lived in the original town at the foot of the hill below the high school, the population sign read 480. My four-year high school student body count there at my junior year was 43. The senior class was even-numbered at just six. For a time I was junior class president. Some might call that a big fish in a very little pond. Chuck

One Ryan Brown, November 23, 2005, Clarks Honors College, writes: "Through the 1950s to the mid-1960s the nuclear reactors at Hanford [Washington] were all running at full capacity, so this was the period of the highest contamination of the Columbia river." Eureka! Those are years bracketing the time I lived in Arlington. About ten years ago I discovered that downriver from Hanford (including Arlington, Oregon, of course) the river had been polluted by radioactive waste from Hanford and that cancer rates among the folks who had lived in the Columbia River hot zone within the most vulnerable time frames were noticeably high. And would get higher as they grew older. I spent many a hot summer's day swimming in the Columbia. Not very well. I was a poor swimmer. My point, of course, being that I got a very unhealthy dose of radioactivity during my adolescent and later time there. It's significant that when a child or near adult is experiencing a growth spurt, such exposure can do greater damage than it would to a grownup under the same circumstances. More recently, just to illustrate that such a history can follow one into twilight years, when I insisted of my dentist that he take no X rays of my mouth, he persisted---in spite of my reasoned explanation for my stand---explaining, as dentists all do, I think, that the dose of radioactivity delivered via that route is very small and no harm would result. A few days after my last visit to him, I received a letter in the mail in effect advising me that I was fired as his patient. I haven't been to a dentist since except for repair of a broken tooth ... at Sears. Will the cost never stop? Chuck

1) Radiation accumulates in the human body over the individual's lifetime. Which I think is a very good reason I should avoid all sources of contamination possible, even the so-called small amounts delivered by doctors and dentists. That is, if I hope to live long and well. 2) The U.S. government took great pains to hold secret the mishandlings of nuclear radiations through air and water that occurred over the Hanford facility's lifetime. As a result, there were never signs posted on Columbia River shores warning of water toxicity. Over the years I lived in Arlington, I not only waded and swam therein during hot summer days in the desert heat; I fished in it summerlong, at times frying and eating my catch. 3) I have an increased lifetime risk of contracting a plethora of possible cancers due to those exposures. The risk grows greater with each passing year. 4) All of which prompts this current writing: God bless America, Home of the brave and free ... And of a governmental Bureaucracy That does not give a damn About dear you or me, And that casts quite far and wide Environmentally The pronounced effects of Toxic nuclear debris. Chuck