JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And our subject today is cities.

JAD: Cities.

ROBERT: And if cities are like organisms, and one thing we should say about every organism that's ever been ...

JAD: They die.

ROBERT: Yeah, they die.

JAD: So you would think cities would die.

ROBERT: You would.

JAD: But Jonah says no.

JONAH LEHRER: Cities die very, very rarely. And they almost never die if there hasn't been a total, total catastrophe, physical catastrophe.

JAD: Which is weird if you think about it, says Jonah, because take a company.

JONAH LEHRER: Sometimes they can get very big, so that they included hundreds of thousands of employees.

ROBERT: And yet they die all the time.

JONAH LEHRER: Of the 30 companies in the original Dow Jones, only three are still on the Dow Jones index. If you took 30 cities from the 1920s, I can guarantee you all 30 of those randomly selected cities would still exist on the map. And the question is why. Why don't they die like every other social organization?

ROBERT: What is it about cities that gives them this crazy persistence?

JAD: That question led us to a place that by all measures should've died long ago. A place called Centralia.

JAD: Okay, so we begin on the side of—where are we?

PAT WALTERS: We're on Route 61 in eastern Pennsylvania.

JAD: Right.

JAD: This is Pat, by the way. He's a producer at Radiolab.

PAT: Hello, hello, hello.

ROBERT: I know who Pat is, thank you very much.

JAD: Anyhow ...

PAT: We're waiting for this guy named Tom to meet up with us.

JAD: Hey, are you Tom?

TOM HYNOSKI: Yep.

PAT: Tom Hynoski.

JAD: How you doing? I'm Jad.

TOM HYNOSKI: When did you get here? Just now?

JAD: Just now.

PAT: And we had asked Tom to show us around his town.

TOM HYNOSKI: Probably the best place to go is up on the hill up there, and you can look over everything.

JAD: Okay, sure.

JAD: So we go up on the hill with Tom.

PAT: We actually meet up with another Tom.

TOM DEMPSEY: Tom Dempsey. I was the former postmaster here.

JAD: So we now have two Toms.

JAD: Tom, Tom.

PAT: Very confusing.

JAD: Anyhow, the four of us stare down into a valley that used to have a town in it.

TOM DEMPSEY: There was all streets with homes on them all over here.

JAD: Now Centralia is just trees.

TOM DEMPSEY: Well, right down here was the ...

JAD: Tom Two points to some trees.

TOM DEMPSEY: Our high school. Over here ...

JAD: More trees.

TOM DEMPSEY: Saint Ignatius Church.

TOM HYNOSKI: There used to be a playground right at the bottom of this little hill right here. You can still see the bars.

JAD: This is where things get a little strange. I mean, right next to the swing set where kids used to laugh their little heads off, there's a hole in the ground.

PAT: Right there, I can see some steam coming out of the ground.

JAD: Spewing steam. And Pat and I would later discover when we got close to it that that steam was really hot.

PAT: It's hot and wet.

JAD: Oh my God. Hah! [bleep] Where exactly is the fire?

TOM DEMPSEY: Underneath us.

JAD: Like how far?

TOM DEMPSEY: Here? 50 feet maybe.

JAD: So 50 feet down.

TOM DEMPSEY: If it is.

JAD: Can I ask you, the smell doesn't bother you guys?

TOM DEMPSEY: What smell?

JAD: You can smell it. It smells like burning tires here.

TOM DEMPSEY: I don't smell it.

TOM HYNOSKI: That must be something from New York that's stuck in your nose or something.

JAD: [laughs] Come on!

JAD: It really did smell.

PAT: But the thing no one can deny is that underneath our feet, there's a web of coal mines that stretches for miles.

TOM DEMPSEY: 40 miles in each direction, 30 miles.

JAD: And somewhere in those mines is a fire that's been burning for 40 years, and has either destroyed this town ...

PAT: Or not.

JAD: Depending on who you ask.

JAD: This is Pat right here.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: My name is Mary Lou Gaughin. I'm 82 years old, and I lived in Centralia most of my adult life.

JAD: What year were you born in, if you mind me asking?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: What year was I born?

JAD: Yeah.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: 1927.

JAD: Mary Lou Gone grew up in a town not too far from Centralia.

PAT: Tiny little farm town called Burnsville.

JAD: And when she got to Centralia, she said ...

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It was like moving to the city. It had a Legion, had a drugstore, it had ...

JAD: Couple thousand people.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Lots of bars in Centralia. Somebody told me one time there were 22 barrooms in Centralia. I don't know if that was true because I didn't frequent bar rooms at that age.

JAD: And all these places that she just mentioned were right on top of each other.

PAT: So when you were walking around, you'd see people all the time.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Just take, for instance, you'd go to the post office after work.

TOM DEMPSEY: I'll show you where the post office was.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Tommy would be there sometimes.

TOM DEMPSEY: I was postmaster here for a number of years.

PAT: You're pointing at a forest.

TOM DEMPSEY: It's hard to imagine this stuff.

PAT: It is hard to imagine.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah, I walked in the post office because your mail wasn't delivered. So I'd go up to the post office, I'd get my mail. And you'd meet people in the post office, you'd meet people coming out of the post office.

TOM DEMPSEY: This was a good football field here. Now it's all growing in, nobody's cutting the grass. There's bushes growing up in it now.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Tommy Dempsey would have a story. I would be an hour until I got home. A whole hour! This is how Centralia was.

PAT: Okay, fast forward. It's Memorial Day, 1962.

TOM DEMPSEY: This is where the bar used to dump all their garbage. Now the fire started, I'd say just about right here where I'm standing right now.

JAD: Tommy points to a little patch of nondescript yellow grass.

TOM DEMPSEY: Right here.

JAD: How did it start? Do we have any idea?

TOM DEMPSEY: Well, it started ...

JAD: The most likely scenario, he says—we also heard this from a writer named Joan Quigley.

JOAN QUIGLEY: I'm the writer of The Day The Earth Caved In.

JAD: Is that people used to heat their homes with coal, and maybe somebody threw their ashes into the garbage which then ended up onto the dump.

PAT: It caught the whole thing on fire.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Furniture, rugs, kerosene cans.

PAT: Which, Joan says, wasn't that unusual.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Some of the former firefighters said the dumps caught on fire all the time.

JAD: And usually the fires just fizzled out on their own. But this one, for whatever reason, before it did, wandered a little bit.

PAT: And it found its way over to an old exposed ...

TOM DEMPSEY: Exposed coal vein there.

JAD: Basically an old strip mine that should've been covered but wasn't.

JOAN QUIGLEY: So there was just a big, open cavity.

JAD: And when the fire got in there and ...

TOM DEMPSEY: Hit that coal vein.

JAD: Poof!

TOM DEMPSEY: Fire trucks came up here and they hosed down the fire until they thought it was out and they left. Following day, somebody says, "Oh, we see smoke and steam coming out of the ground up there." So they came back the next day and they tried to get the fire out and they couldn't very well do it. They weren't getting it.

JAD: Because at that point, it was too late.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I wouldn't know where to start with this mine fire. I wouldn't know where to start.

JAD: The first place that fire camped out was right underneath Mary Lou's house.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I have some ...

PAT: And from that point on, it kind of took over her life.

JAD: My goodness, are these your scrapbooks?

JAD: When we were there, she pulled out these two ...

JAD: Gigantic scrapbooks. This is gonna take four men to lift this book.

JAD: Each book is literally three feet tall, and they document in painful detail how that fire split the town in two.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This is how intense I was with this mine fire.

PAT: She heaved open the book, and she showed us this picture of three people crouched on the street in front of a hole.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This is my husband, my son, and me.

JAD: Husband holding a thermometer.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: We dropped this down on a fishing pole, down on a ...

PAT: Oh, like you're ice fishing.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah.

JAD: This was their way of measuring the temperature of the fire below.

JAD: And what did it read?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It was pretty high.

JAD: 100 degrees high?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: 850, something like that.

JAD: What? Under your house?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: No, this was on the street.

PAT: But the street right in front of her house.

JAD: Oh, wow!

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: The garage was right—as you can see, the garage here, it was right there.

JAD: She showed us another picture of her standing in her garage in front of a trench that they'd dug. And inside that trench ...

PAT: You see flames.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Oh, we used to go out at night and watch the glowing and the embers.

PAT: Fire up there got so bad that some of Mary Lou's neighbors actually got government money to leave their houses.

JOAN QUIGLEY: And they were the first people bought out.

PAT: Never once, like, at the beginning did you think, "Oh, maybe we should just get out of here?"

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: No.

PAT: There's a fire under here. Never?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: No. I never wanted to, no.

JAD: Instead, she did exactly the opposite.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This was my husband. and this was a big official and this was ...

PAT: She dug in her heels and started writing letters.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Congressmen Mulligan, Musto. We wrote letters to him. We talked on the phone with him. I couldn't tell you all the congressmen we talked to. Four governors, all the Harrisburg officials. And they were promising everything but the sun, but it never happened.

JOAN QUIGLEY: But other than the people who lived on that street, many, many people in town didn't have to worry or even think about the mine fire.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Nobody ever believed that the fire was even serious in Centralia. My husband, myself, and Helen Wilmer.

PAT: Oh, so everyone else was kind of "Oh, whatever."

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It's uptown. The fire's uptown.

JAD: All that changed on Valentine's Day, 1981.

TODD DEMBOSKI: We're up a little bit higher.

PAT: Because of this guy.

JAD: A fella named Todd Demboski, who at the time was just a boy.

TODD DEMBOSKI: I was 12.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Twelve-year-old boy.

JAD: He's playing outside.

JOAN QUIGLEY: In his grandmother's backyard.

TODD DEMBOSKI: And I noticed some small wisps of smoke coming out of the ground.

JOAN QUIGLEY: So he went over to take a look.

TODD DEMBOSKI: As I bent down to investigate, I noticed that my feet were starting to sink in. It was really soft.

JOAN QUIGLEY: It was like quicksand.

TODD DEMBOSKI: The more I tried to struggle, the more I was just opening the hole larger.

JOAN QUIGLEY: And he wound up sliding.

TODD DEMBOSKI: To my thighs, to my waist.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Until he was ...

TODD DEMBOSKI: I was under.

JOAN QUIGLEY: All the way underground, surrounded by hot steam.

TODD DEMBOSKI: The smoke was so intense.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Smells like rotten eggs.

JAD: Whoa!

TODD DEMBOSKI: I was screaming for my cousin.

JOAN QUIGLEY: And his cousin heard him and came running over.

TODD DEMBOSKI: Plucked me out like a flower.

JOAN QUIGLEY: What happened to him changed everything.

JAD: Because suddenly, reporters were everywhere

TODD DEMBOSKI: Reporters from the Evening Herald.

[NEWS CLIP: Nightline.]

JOAN QUIGLEY: National news media.

JAD: Everybody pointing their cameras at Todd.

[NEWS CLIP: I seen smoke, so I went over to see if it was the mine fire. And when I did, I just fell right through.]

JAD: And doing stories about this town that was on fire.

[NEWS CLIP: Beneath Centralia, the underground coal fires still burn hot.]

[NEWS CLIP: Centralia is an inferno. Literally.]

JOAN QUIGLEY: That attention ...

[NEWS CLIP: Parts of Centralia look like the outskirts of hell.]

JOAN QUIGLEY: ... would focus ...

[NEWS CLIP: Toxic fumes.]

JOAN QUIGLEY: ... on what had to happen for the town.

PAT: It wasn't long, says Joan, before some of the younger residents ...

JOAN QUIGLEY: Very small, informal group of young parents.

PAT: ... organized a march.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Down Locust Avenue, down the main street in town.

JAD: How many people are we talking about here?

JOAN QUIGLEY: Couple dozen, with red ribbons around their arms and their wrists. And they walked two by two down the main street of Centralia like striking miners.

JAD: Mary Lou glared at them as they passed.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I was bitter. I was bitter. They claimed they were for helping the town to be saved, but they weren't.

JAD: What they were really for, she figured, was getting out.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: They were looking for funds to get relocated.

JAD: She even hated their name.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Concerned Citizens Against the Centralia Mine Fire.

JAD: She thought, how are they the concerned citizens? She's the concerned citizen. She had been fighting the fire for years.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah.

JOAN QUIGLEY: The media was there taking video.

JAD: Cameras filmed the marchers looping red ribbon over everything. And Mary Lou's neighbor Helen ...

JOAN QUIGLEY: Cut the red ribbons down.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Because we fought so hard to try to save Centralia. Why did they want to do this?

JOAN QUIGLEY: People like Mary Lou and Helen Wilmer.

PAT: They started telling people ...

JOAN QUIGLEY: "No, no, no. Here's why it's safe. Here's why you should stay."

PAT: And while parents from the other group were on TV complaining about gasses ...

[NEWS CLIP: It's in the home, and it could be a death house.]

JAD: Mary Lou, Helen and a few others started up their own committee.

[NEWS CLIP: The United Centralia Area Mine Task Force.]

JAD: They got on TV themselves, and in the community, they started printing out fliers.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Fact sheets.

JAD: And handing them out.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Yep, door-to-door.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Lam: Okay, I call this meeting to order.]

JAD: At town meetings, the dueling committees would get up there and make their case.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: But this is a ...]

JAD: Get yelled down.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... will not protect us!]

PAT: Would it get ...?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It'd get rowdy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Absolutely ridiculous!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Lam: Families fighting against families, neighbors against neighbors.]

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: There's Lammy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Lam: They split the town apart.]

PAT: Who's that?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: David Lam.

PAT: This guy David Lam ran a motorcycle shop in town, and he was also a member of this concerned citizens' organization. And one morning, about 4:00 am ...

JOAN QUIGLEY: He was sleeping in an apartment, and someone threw a Molotov cocktail through his plate glass window.

JAD: Mary Lou showed us an article from her scrapbook.

JAD: It was related to Lam's activities as an officer of Concerned Citizens. Wow! This is no joke. This is like the Sopranos, but worse.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This was really—it was really bad.

PAT: And in the midst of all this chaos, Congress started considering a bill that would basically let them buy out the town.

[NEWS CLIP: Some observers believe that for about $50 million, Centralia could be totally bought out.]

PAT: And so the mayor decided let's hold a referendum.

JOAN QUIGLEY: And the issue was stay or go.

JAD: In the weeks leading up to the referendum, Mary Lou and Helen again went door to door talking to people they'd known their whole lives. And pretty much everyone they talked to said ...

JOAN QUIGLEY: I really want to stay. My mother wants to stay.

PAT: August 11, 1983.

[NEWS CLIP: Shortly before 10:00 this evening, Centralia's mayor announced the results.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There's 545 votes cast. 200 voted to stay, 345 voted to relocate.]

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I was crying, yes. In my heart, I never thought that would happen ever.

PAT: You thought that everybody would stay.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: We would stay. Maybe 40 people might decide or maybe 30, but that was devastating to know that so many people wanted to move. It was.

JAD: And when you look at her scrapbooks, everything stops after that day.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah, this is just thrown in papers.

PAT: Wow, it just stops so abruptly.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yep. I was mad and disgusted. I didn't want to do no more about it. That was the end.

PAT: Almost immediately after that vote, Congress bought out the town, people started packing up and leaving.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Now let me see where it is. I have some that has the big numbers on it.

PAT: Mary Lou told us that when you decided to leave, a demolition crew would actually come to your house and paint ...

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Big red letters like this.

PAT: ... a big number one in front of your house.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It looked like blood was dripping off.

JAD: Oh, it's like you were marked.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah.

JAD: And what would happen, she says, when your house was marked is that your neighbors would see it, they'd get nervous, and then suddenly their houses would be marked. And then suddenly the whole block would be marked.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: And I knew everyone quite well, and I think I stopped talking to some of them.

JAD: She'd see them on the street, she says, and look the other way.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I didn't like any of them.

PAT: Really?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Mm-hmm.

PAT: And one day in the fall of 1987, these divisions caused something to happen that is just kind of mythically bad.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Yeah.

JAD: It involved a married couple who'd been in the town—well, she'd been there her whole life.

JOAN QUIGLEY: And as a couple, they were divided. One wanted to stay, one wanted to go. I think it was the wife who didn't want to leave.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: And the husband, well he was a shovel runner, and he wanted to take the money you get from relocation and get out.

JOAN QUIGLEY: Their neighbors were moving, had moved. The houses around them were being torn down, and they had to make a decision.

PAT: And all we really know is that at some point, they started to argue.

JOAN QUIGLEY: And ...

PAT: And it escalated.

JOAN QUIGLEY: And he stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife, and then drove up to an old stripping pit and set himself and his car on fire.

JAD: Wow! This is gonna sound like a strange question, but is there anything about that that makes sense to you? Like, why couldn't people let go of this place?

JOAN QUIGLEY: It is very primal.

JAD: Beyond that, she really couldn't say why. And we asked Mary Lou, who hung on long after the murder, after that referendum, after the town was basically empty.

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I have no idea what kept me there. I have no idea.

JAD: You have no idea?

MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Uh-uh. No idea. I just didn't want to move.

PAT: Today, 11 people live in town.

TOM HYNOSKI: His brother and his wife and ...

TOM DEMPSEY: My mom and them live down in the intersection.

JAD: Tom and Tom pointed them all out from the hill. We knocked on every door, figured we'd ask them what it is that keeps them living literally on top of a fire.

JAD: Hi, good evening.

[door slams]

JAD: Wow. That was the shortest ...

PAT: But none of them wanted to talk to us.

JAD: Not even the dogs.

JAD: Hey!

[dog barks]

JAD: Whoa! Okay, dog. All right.

JAD: But then Tom Two took us to one last spot.

JAD: Where are we right now?

TOM DEMPSEY: We're in Saint Ignatius Roman Catholic Cemetery.

JAD: This cemetery is just a few feet away from the hill where we started. And it's a really strange contrast. You go from this steamy hell and then suddenly you're, like, in woodsy Vermont.

TOM DEMPSEY: There's a lot of people.

JAD: It's beautiful.

TOM DEMPSEY: This is my grandfather and my grandmother.

JAD: Tom has four generations buried here.

PAT: Do you know how many people are here, Tom?

TOM DEMPSEY: There's over 3,000 burials in this cemetery alone.

PAT: 3,000?

TOM DEMPSEY: Yes. Plus.

JAD: And the thing is, says Tom, even the people that left, fled that fire, continue to come back and be buried in this cemetery. Which means this place, this cemetery, is the only thing in Centralia that's still growing. And suddenly, how Joan put it earlier ...

JOAN QUIGLEY: It is very primal.

JAD: ... made sense.

JOAN QUIGLEY: You can experience your life on a multigenerational plane.

TOM DEMPSEY: This is where my great grandparents are buried.

JAD: Which means, in a sense, this town will never die as long as the cemetery's still here.

TOM DEMPSEY: I can't even read their name on here.

PAT: This year?

TOM DEMPSEY: I'll dig it out.

PAT: Oh, it's under the dirt.

TOM DEMPSEY: D-E. Get this up out of here somehow. It's sinking down into the ground.

PAT: It's in the dirt now.

TOM DEMPSEY: Yeah, see it?

JAD: Here we go. I can see it. DEMP-

TOM DEMPSEY: S-E-Y.

JAD: S-E-Y.

JAD: Thanks to Pat Walters for reporting that with me. And also to Chris Perkel and Georgie Roland who directed a great documentary about Centralia called The Town That Was. You can find out more information about that on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Bye.

[JOAN QUIGLEY: Hello, this is Joan Quigley. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Brenna Farrell. Our staff includes ...]

[TOM DEMPSEY: Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters.]

[JOAN QUIGLEY: Tim Howard and Lynn Levy. With help from Nicole Corrie and Sam Rowdman. That's all, folks!]

-30-

 

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