“I just want to expose Sir William Johnson
as the Tory, swindler, rapist, and terrorist
that he was,” I said.

My lifelong friendship with Dondi had been reduced to jousting banter like this over the phone every week or two.

“You’d probably get lynched if you called him a rapist in this town.”

“He had dozens of illegitimate children,” I said.

“Just like the other founding fathers,” Dondi countered. “He would have been just as famous too, if he hadn’t died.”

That, I knew was local folklore. “Want to know the other parts they never taught us in the seventh-grade?”

“What would that be?” Dondi asked, sounding bored.

“He stole over 400,000 acres from the Indians. He was the largest slaveholder in New York. He paid a bounty to the Iroquois for French scalps, including women’s and children’s. And after his relatives escaped to Canada during the revolution, they returned and butchered and scalped their former friends and neighbors.”

“So this is your motivational commencement speech?” Dondi asked.

“Part of it,” I said. “I’m also going to propose the name of the city be changed.”

“To what?”

Actually, I believed there was someone of merit who had been eclipsed by all the hoopla over Sir William. And it wasn’t Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the privileged suffragette. The part of her murky history that had been so politely ignored in our school lessons was her opposition to the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, granting African-Americans citizenship and the right to vote. She claimed, “no Sambo should walk into the Kingdom [of civil rights] first” [before women].

No, in my opinion, the most heroic figure to come from the community was Rose Knox, wife of Charlie Knox, the founder of Knox Gelatin.

Charlie saw riches in all the excess hooves, horns, and bones in need of disposal after the leather mills had harvested the cow, pig, lamb, and deer hides. He started a glue factory and then, in the 1890’s, built the Knox Gelatin Plant producing the first granulated gelatin for cooking. The company grew and the Knox’s became Johnstown’s greatest philanthropists, donating funds to start The Willing Helper’s Home for aging women, the YMCA, the library, a school, and Knox Athletic Field.

When Charlie died in 1908, twelve years before American women would achieve the right to vote, Rose Knox stepped in to run Knox Gelatin — somewhat surreptitiously, because women were not accepted as business leaders at that time. As in most factories, women who worked in the Knox plant were required to enter through the back door; the front door was reserved for the men. Saying she considered all of the workers to be “ladies and gentlemen and equal,” one of Mrs. Knox’s first steps was to close the back door and open the front entrance to everyone. On her first day, she asked for the resignation of one of her husband’s top administrators when he announced he could never work for a woman. She promptly revamped the sales strategy, built a new plant, and was one of the first to institute a five-day workweek and two weeks of paid vacation to all employees. Impressively, she survived the Depression without having to lay off a single employee. Under her strategic direction, the company evolved from making and selling little packets of unflavored gelatin, to developing and patenting the processes to manufacture the first gelatinized capsules for vitamins and prescription pills.

“So why wouldn’t a community disinherit its namesake’s legacy of land thievery, murdering, scalping, and heinous polluting, and rename itself Roseville, after Rose Knox, the smartest, most progressive, most egalitarian reformer the community ever produced?” I asked. Ironically, Dondi skipped right over the land thievery and murder, and latched onto polluting.

“Heinous,” he repeated back. “That kind of overreaction has shut down an industry that once put food on eighty percent of the tables in this community.”

“How is keeping carcinogens from flowing through town in an open sewer an overreaction?” I asked.

“What have they ever proven?” he stated, making it clear through his tone that he wasn’t looking for an answer.

In a way, I knew he was right. With half the population fleeing the area in search of jobs, it was almost impossible getting a handle on long-term health trends in the area. Plus, given the choice, most people in the community would have happily taken their jobs and prosperity back in exchange for the pollution and accompanying health risks which most refused to admit.

“How about benzene? Benzene is used in tanning leather, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Dondi said cautiously. “But OSHA won’t let workers near that stuff anymore, which is why the jobs have all gone…” he halted in mid-sentence. “What the hell are we talking about anyway?”

“We’re talking about Woody, and going to find Malcolm,” I reminded him. Because that’s what all of our phone conversations over the past six months had been about in one way or the other.

I could hear the red-hot hissing of Dondi’s cigarette as he inhaled. “Woody,” he repeated blankly. “What does benzene or Sir William Johnson or Rose Knox have to do with Woody?”

I wasn’t sure myself how all the dots connected, except that Woody, like so many before him, had shaved skins when piecework still paid pretty well and there were no other good options. He toiled in the same sweatshop for nearly seven years as a young man, snorting leather dust and blowing dark, stringy mucous into his handkerchief at night. The skins had been soaked in alkyl benzene and benzene polycarboxylic acid and then dried before being shaved. One dot I could connect was that exposure to benzene is known to cause DNA strand breaks like the ones that were detected in Woody’s form of leukemia.

Another dot went fifty years back to the 1920’s when benzene was first reported to induce cancer in humans. But the chemical, leather, and rubber industries vehemently denied there was any link to cancer in humans until 1979. By then, Woody had already fled the leather mills before they got the best of him (or so he thought), escaping to Florida, a new career, and wife Number Two. Maybe his brain somehow detected the chromosomal breaks in his body and silently whispered to him, “I can’t tell you why, but you must leave this place…leave your five year old daughter…leave your wife…leave now before it’s too late…if people ask, just blame it on me.”

Thirty years later, Woody went to Mexico with wife Number Three, came back with leukemia and talked like he had caught the disease down there.

Not knowing if I would push my oldest friendship to the breaking point, I said, “You know, sometimes there are risks in not taking chances.”

There was silence at the other end, except for the long, drawn-in stoking of his cigarette. Finally Dondi exhaled heavily and said, “What are you trying to say?”

“You think we can take this trip some other time, when it’s more convenient. But that some other time is when one of us might be dead.” I stopped and cringed. Knowing how it set Dondi off, I couldn’t believe I had used the D-word.

The cigarette hiss coming over the phone then became so drawn out I thought it was static. Then it stopped. “I’ll meet you and Woody at Logan and go with you to England to find Malcolm.”