National Geographic, 10/26/2020
Strangers still find Charles Stacey, who is 88 and lives in the Pennsylvania town of Donora, to ask him about those five October days. Sometimes they use words that appeared in the headlines: the Incident, the Disaster, the Death Smog. The broadcaster Walter Winchell had one of the most famous voices in America back then, and that’s what Stacey remembers most vividly—walking into his family’s house the evening of October 29, 1948, and turning on the radio.
“And Walter Winchell was saying, ‘There’s a little town in western Pennsylvania where people are dropping dead,’ ” Stacey recalls. “And I said to myself: ‘I wonder where that could be?’ I could barely see people right across the street, and we don’t have any wide avenues here in Donora. We all knew the air was bad. But we thought that was a way of life. We didn’t realize it was going to kill people.”
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