Tobacco Documents Online

38 I :ANNALS OF KADIATION CALAMITY ON MEADOW STREET , 0 N a Friday evening in mid-January of this year, Edna and Rob- ert Hemstock received a visit at their home, in Guilford, Connecticut-a town on Long Island Sound about fourteen miles east of New Haven-from their friends Loretta and Fred Nelson, who also live in Gullford. Edna Hernstock, a vivacious woman in her middle forties, who is Robcrt's second wife, works as an office manager for a manufacturing firm; Robert Hemstock, a red- haired, forty-nine-year-old man of Iri~.h ancestry, is a free-lance consultant f or ma+ chinery design and product developmenit. Loretta Nel- son, a slender, sombre woman in her early fortie<;, works at a nearby elec- tronics plant; and Fred Nelson, an affable, wiry, gray-haired man of fifty- four, is an oil-bui•saor ser"vicerinan. The two couples had become acquainted a year or so earlier, when the Nelsong' scvanteen-year-old daughter, Joyce, and Charles Hemstock, Robert's twen- ty-yeAr-old son by his first marriage, who had br:en living together in the Nelsons' Ihiause, on Meadow Street, learned that Joyce was pregnant. This was a caL384~ of some concern to both sets of prospectilre grandparents, because in 1982 Joyce, who is called Missy by her family undl friends, had been found to be sufferinj; from the extremely rare combination of glomerulonephritis-a disease of ithie kidney capillaries, which 1. /• ounce girl. Sitting at the Ilctn'stocks' kitchen table nearly three moittlu Iater, Loretta Nelson mncic a puint of rc- marking on how lucky ilFCy were to hc grafidpa'reirts, considcriq the threat that Joyce's kidney ailriteiit had posed to her pregnaiicy. Shc iidited, "And considering all the other Illness there's been on Meadow Street," which caused Bob Herhateck to sit up and take notice. "Thqt was the first timc I'd heard anything about a lot of illness oEi Meadow Street," Ilcnistork snitf t-F= cently. "Una and I had visiteti the Nelsans on several occasiuns while Missy was pregnant, and we had tsiet their neighbor Suzanne Bullock, whose seventeen-year-old daughter, Melissa, had been operated on for brain cancer earlier tlrAt year, but neither of us knew t glortrcrulor lipodystroph; but that he might be the vulnerabilit} type of envir ghe went on and Fred kr case of either one's fami minding the Melissa Bul next door, had develop she told the Walston II: nt 36 IVt -,d( young . _- A, brain tumor teen-seventi living at 4 house next c side. Slre then said father, Jonathan W was horn at 36 Mead, there most of his life, brain cancer in 1975. a woman who had liv -three houses over- asthma, in 1989, had tumor in the early nh Hemitock was flabl he Ireard, because whitar runs north to nAtVs at a salt m1r Guilford and Long onl y alxwt two )••nd: long and has on.,ir said, "Good God, Lc ize how odd it is tc brain cancer on one s Loretta replied ths 1 . ....._....1 l..,.;.I____ -G i.nr " nir.1iknrQ tA/rrP 2®2SS16105