I FIRST MET Anderson some 15 years ago, when I was a reporter for Woburn's Daily Times Chronicle. The city's toxic-waste tragedy had been a huge story since 1979, when state investigators discovered that the two municipal wells that supplied drinking water to Anderson's neighborhood were contaminated with industrial solvents. For years, the ongoing story was my main assignment: the various investigations by state and federal environmental agencies; the results of a study by the Harvard School of Public Health that showed a clear association between the contaminated water and Woburn's elevated leukemia rate; and an audacious proposal by a young lawyer named Jan Schlichtmann to make the companies presumed responsible for the contamination pay for their actions.
Until I left the Times Chronicle, in 1989, the city's toxic-waste legacy remained with me, and was intertwined with tragedies in my own life in ways that resonated with and magnified what I was watching unfold. My father died of lung cancer in 1985. My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1986, the year the trial took place; she died two years later, just as the appeals process was heating up.
A Civil Action -- both the book and the movie -- is a lawyers' story. From Perry Mason to The Verdict, the public has always loved a good lawyers' story, and the unfolding, and unraveling, of Anderson et al. v. W.R. Grace et al. is more compelling than most. Harr's 1995 book is a first-rate nonfiction account, fully deserving of the accolades that have come its way. I haven't seen the movie, but I've read what is purported to be the final version of the script; and though the screenwriters take considerable liberties with the facts, what they have come up with strikes me as high-toned entertainment with a social conscience, which is no small accomplishment.
But perhaps because I knew the people involved, perhaps because cancer was an ever-present apparition in my own life, it always seemed to me that Anne Anderson's story was considerably more important than Jan Schlichtmann's. She unearthed the mystery behind her son's illness and forced the nation to take notice. Eventually, investigators would report that the 28 leukemia cases diagnosed in Woburn between 1964 and the mid-1980s were four times more than should be expected for a community of its size. Anderson's tenacity -- and that of other Woburn activists -- led to a new understanding of the environment, to new laws, to stricter standards of accountability for companies that handle toxic chemicals. Schlichtmann's story, by contrast, is one of failure.
