Gay Webb

Partial Transcript: I’m Gay Webb, I was born and raised here in Cocke County, Tennessee. I’ve been along this river all my life too, so, ya know, it’s been dirty about as long as I have, so that’s about the cause of it, when I went and took 4 year off to participate in the service during the Korean War, while it was going on, and stuff like that, then come back to Cocke County, I’ve worked for about 30 some years to get this dang river clean. Political lies are hard to handle, they’ve got money and politics, it’s just hard to handle, that’s why it’s still dirty. Even though we got it a lot cleaner than it was, but there’s no way of saying anything is good because it was so bad before, that’s not a case, it’s still damn river is bad, that still the politicians are still taking the money from the paper company and we’re still floating down the river, still dirty river.

Partial Transcript: We get some, it’s hard to do. It’s hard to get enough information off of it, but they did. Partly the Pigeon River was a sustainable river. If you had a spot on the Pigeon River, whether you were a white man, whether you were Indian, or Native American, if you had a spot on this river you could get all your food, you could get you everything you needed, you had it right there. The Cherokees called it, I don’t know the word they used, but it meant beautiful maiden. That was the most beautiful word in their language, and that’s what they used on the Pigeon River, cause to them a beautiful young lady was the most beautiful thing in the world, this river was second to that most beautiful thing in the world, that’s why they named it. I wish I could quote the name for you but I can’t, it’s too hard for me to mouth.

Partial Transcript: Well, when the pollution started in the river, you take Hartford TN, the little town of Hartford; it was bigger than Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge. That’s the first ?????? was Hartford. Hartford was a growing community, really a driving community, unbelievable good wages and stuff for that year. Then it kills, pollution kills so slow. That’s what happened to Hartford, it killed it so slow that you didn’t see it dying. Even though you, at the end of the day, the little town was no longer there, the schools were sick, people were sick, and blah blah blah, that’s what happened to us.
I still think that there’s, will come a time when they will do a study on the health of the people. There’s never been a study, this is such a shame too, there’s never been a health study on Dioxins inside chemical, that got into the peoples diets, in the blood, in their stuff, and then there’s never been a study on it, all this money we spent wasted, never.

Partial Transcript: Widowville, Widow, Widow, cause there were so many widows there cause the men had died. This is true, it wasn’t made up either. The ladies that did this they were very sad, but they would bunch’em together and try to find a little bit of happiness, so they called themselves the Widowville, one of the Widowvilles, they did it to themselves.

Partial Transcript: I don’t know any figures on that, and I know it’s tremendous a lot though. We could never even get, you got the Big Pigeon, which is this Pigeon we’re on, then you’ve got the Little Pigeon, which comes through Gatlinburg, and Greenbrier in over that area. Now you’d think it would very simple to compare how many cases you’ve got here on the Little Pigeon come down to Gatlinburg, on the Little Pigeon coming out of Greenbrier, and then come over and compare it with Cocke County, and get the same amount see who’s got, no, that’s not right, they can’t do that, that’s another cover up. They’ve covered it up so much they don’t want to open it up again, cause it makes them look bad. There’s no way you can make something like that look good.

Partial Transcript: It’s hard to say how much changed, that’s why I’m saying it just slowly killed it. Once they come on-line, like the theaters were no longer there, you know, everything is gone. And it just slowly but surely, there was a train station not too close to my house up there, big train station, for that time. A lot of things like that, it just slowly killed it. That’s why it’s so hard for me to define it for you, what really happened.

Partial Transcript: Well the river, it had such a tremendous lot of wildlife and fish and stuff in it, it’s just hard to describe how bad it was. I remember there was a bunch of, don’t know how to describe it, turtles, soft shelled turtles, in that river, and they would get big, like that, and it’s the only place I’ve ever known them to be. They survived a long time, cause they’re going in and out of the clean water, but then finally they died out too. About all your fish is gone up there, but there’s those few tributes that still keep coming into the Pigeon River, and keep repopulating. We’re hoping that, we can never get it down low enough now, till they can reproduce, we’ve got it low, we’ve not got it low enough to reproduce our fish. And, we’re having, they’re “you’ve don’t need no more, you’ve got enough” ya know, that’s your Federal Government, and your State Government too for that matter.

Partial Transcript: The pollution, it was kind of like rotten eggs. A very bad scent. I know the children on Hartford, this is a little long thing, they would close the windows on one side where it come up, got the breeze from the river, they’d go right take the children over the other side of the house, kind of isolate ‘em. No air conditioning now, mind you, but that’s still air conditioning for the children, so that they could survive. And that’s the way those children survived. Just because of those open windows.

Partial Transcript: It was a real dark oily, looked like black oil, that’s the best way to describe it. It was a little more liquid than oil, but not much. There’s so much foam on it. There’d be sometimes 3 or 4 foot of foam. And there’s still foam floating down it. That’s the damn sad thing about it. You could go up there, we could go up there now ??? I can show you big gobs of foam coming, ??? where it’s coming from, from that damn mill up there, this paper company is still dumping this stuff in the river.

Partial Transcript: It was just a slow process. The only thing I know to say on it, it’s just such a slow process. And the beauty of the river. I know one thing, this happened up in North Carolina, they stopped the, they shut the plant down, in order they were gonna rebuild it. Now I’m not for sure I’m telling the exact truth on this thing, but I know I’m close on it. They were gonna rebuild the plant up there so they shut it down. Well when they shut that plant down, it cleaned up that river so fast that the people were going out and looking at it and crying. Grown men standing there crying, because they see this beautiful river being done that way. Now this, I don’t know it to be true, I hear it’s true, that when the people were getting so upset about it, they canceled their build up and started polluting again so they wouldn’t be seeing this clean water like this. Cause once that river’s ever clean I don’t think it can ever go back with it. It’s this thing about it, once we ever get it clean, ‘course this green stuff you see here, that’s pollution. That’s not normal. You’d think it’s normal but it’s not, but if this paper company would stop polluting that would be crystal clear. This river has 95% comes out of National Forest. It’s the only river east of the Mississippi that does this. It is the cleanest river east of the Mississippi. Because Cherokee, Smokey Mountain National Park, and all this other strange stuff that comes in here has 95% ??? so you’re gonna always have this beautiful spring if we can ever get the damn politicians and so called medical people to look at it and do what’s right.

Partial Transcript: I just seen it was going on so bad and then you know I’d come back from the Korean War, and trying to work and stuff like that, and I still see close to my, I lived within a ¼ mile or so of the river all the time. And one of the things about it too, working conditions of Cocke Countians, this is the thing, that maybe it’s a little far out from what were talking about, but the old women would stop in my store and one of them would come and get the stuff they wanted to take home, like the bread and the milk and stuff like that, because they were so tired, now I’m talking about women in their 60s. They were going to Gatlinburg and cleaning rooms. Now this is not right. When you don’t, there’s no hotels for you cleaning near their homes, if they had a job here they could, but they have no job up here. They fly those, and they’re still doing it. Cocke Countians are bussing thereselves to Gatlinburg, Pigeon Ford, for wages, and we’re glad to have those wages, of course, wouldn’t do otherwise, but I’d like to have some in Cocke County. I’d like to have some motels in Cocke County. And then stuff of that nature, we’re just simply without it.
Once those women, I seen when you asked that question, once those women, I seen what it was doing to our older women, how unfair that was for them, that’s one of the things other than the obvious things of killing the environment the way people were treated.

Partial Transcript: 04 I just started organizing and getting people, I made me up a card. Made up some cards, named Appalachia Environmental Group and I started from there. And people would thank me, because thank goodness I had enough knowhow and enough credibility that people would trust me. So they would come and give me money, and buy whatever I needed of that nature, I tried not too much money, but you get into it. And they would give me whatever I needed. And would start going into the meetings and going to, the Governor decided that he would do so much for me, and Al Gore decided he’d help me, and, which none of them ever did, now, before it gets too long, and all the politicians decided they wanted to get a hand in it. I think they thought that I was just like anybody else, they’d pat me on the back and say go away little fella. They pat me on the back and they’ll get their damned hand off my back right fast (laughter). That’s not what I’m here for. Be painted as some so-and-so. That’s the way I started and just sticking to my guns. I wouldn’t change.
EPA has reason to come to my house. I live behind the store. I built the store and the building I live behind it. Ya know, like we used to do back then. And the head of EPA he come to visit me. Me and him turned out to be good friends, ya know. He couldn’t care less where I lived or died, but you know he started to come and visit me. The Governor would fly in on his plane, the stuff like that would go on. I just listen, smile, and go on about my business. Like one of them said, they were talking about their worst, there’s five regions in the EPA, or was at that point, and they were talking about their worst problems. One of them had Love Canal, the other had this and that, and so on and so forth, then when they come up then, they come up to the Southern, he said “let that damn Gay Webb go at this, you ought to have him.” And that sorry son of a bitch said “he’ll either agree with you or he’ll do exactly what you want, the next day he’ll be back doing the same damn thing over again.” So, I thought that was one of the best things.

Partial Transcript: We finally got EPA half way involved. One of the worst things we run into and we had to learn, and this was hard for me to believe, that the EPA was always going to be on the paper company’s side. This is true. The paper, the EPA never helped Cocke County one bit. But the first time, they let on like they were gonna do something and then, wham, the knife went in your back. EPA should be done away with now and forever. The way they treated the people of Cocke County. They’re still violating the law. Like I say, that river there is still dirty. EPA is still up there in headquarters. I went up there and seen them, last time I was up there was about two, three year ago. They quoted me the same damn thing that I heard thirty year ago. It’s unbelievable that it’s still that way but it is.

Partial Transcript: It’s so entrenched in their way of life and they put so, the industrial people, paper companies and stuff of that nature, they put so many people in the process in the EPA and other places. State of Tennessee is an example, I would get a lot better response from North Carolina with Tennessee. The people in North Carolina treated me a whole lot better than the people of Tennessee did. It’s a wonder, why, why the people in North Carolina thought they were doing a good thing. They thought, well, we were trying to save jobs, we didn’t want to lose jobs, blah blah blah. Good argument. Tennessee, they didn’t have an argument. But they were still collecting all this money and stuff. We had dated, well I better not be naming names, but anyway, the different people like that they would get into a pressure situation and it just mess me up.
Could I take a break on that?

Partial Transcript: I was, Green Peace helped us with that. That’s the people who get credit for intercepting that, but it is true we intercepted the thing and it was widely spread that, they said they should not release all of those figures because that we would not understand, the public would not understand what they were talking about. And so, EPA and the paper company is just one like the other. And the State of Tennessee is such a, one of the worst enemies, and we’ve still got the worst enemies. Lamar Alexander has never been here to help us one bit with this river. With all this dirt, Al Gore. Isn’t that a shame? Al Gore, is talking about how great he is and how good he is with the environment and have this filth going through his district. I’ve asked him personally more than once to help.

Partial Transcript: “Oh, yeah yeah yeah, we’re gonna help, yeah”. I asked Alexander three year ago about it, I asked him again, I said “Mr. Alexander”, I said “the people of Cocke County have supported you all this time. Now it’s time you supported them.” Then finally, he must have said something to one of his helpers, (garbled) then one of his helpers called me over to the side with some other people and said that “we didn’t want to shake the boat too much, we don’t want the EPA snooping around down here.” (garbled)
Now this, after I went to Washington, at my own expense, in fact I never took an expense of any kind, I right it out of my own pocket, what I could. But they, that’s the way it went. The Governor, McWorth(sp?), big guy, sweet, everybody’s grandpa, he was on the paper company’s side too. Him and the Governor of North Carolina were just big old buddies. We found this out, we found this stuff out later. Anyway, he rode me on his plane, invited me down for dinner, all that stuff, and I knew better than that old shit, you know, but they pat me on the back and I said “get your hands off my back buddy” (laughter). He don’t do that to me. And I tried to be as nice as I could.
Anyway, the Governor, he’d done about all he could to get rid of me. And so, he just called up the phone, picked up the phone, told me that, said I’m gonna let, we had a hearing coming up, he was the essential man, the Governor was the essential man in it, he said “I’m just gonna go ahead and let them have what they want”. Said “I don’t want anybody to lose their job” and stuff of that nature. It just simply, I’m gonna let him have it. So, I forget the words he used, but I could go to Hell more or less. Well, I sit there and I listen for a few minutes on the phone, me and this one guys was sittin there, I said “Governor”, I said, “ I want to tell you something, now” I said, “you might have me put in jail or whatever, but” I said “you’re the sorryest son of a bitch I ever run up on.” And I called him every name that I could think of, and more too. Well, the reason I’m telling you this is there’s a better ending to it. Anyway, I called him everything, I said “you come down on that pickup truck, you stood up on that pickup truck, we stood with you, you lying son-of-a-bitch” and blah blah blah, and that’s the way it went.
0:21:36 He never said a word then. When he went back to Nashville he changed his tune. Now some more people got ahold of him too, it wasn’t just a Gay Webb deal. But he changed his tune, and he told me, he said after we, he started trying to help me out, he said he’d help me out with the river, and he did. When he got, I was in Nashville, and he seen me. He said “Hey Webb, come here, come here. You’re Gay Webb”, yeah, “come over here”. I was afraid to. He said “man” he says “I aint never been called names like that”. He said I used to carry beer down to Memphis in the ghetto down here”, he said “I’ve delivered beer off the truck”, he said “I thought I’d been called every name you could think of, but I hadn’t and you got ahold of me. You called me names I never heard done before.” I said “Governor, you know what happened.” He says “I know, I know, so let’s just forget about it.”
Anyway, the Governor passed away. And this would be hard for you to believe, but he passed away, and his son brought me some money. His dad wanted me to have it, two thousand five hundred dollars. I’ve still got every penny of it. Every penny of it goes back into the river, ?? go somewhere else. And his son told me, he says “Dad told me to give you anything you wanted.” And the last time I seen his son, he was running for Governor at one time, he took his billfold out of his pocket, and got his checkbook, right out of his pocket, and said “now you remember what Dad said? Here it is.” I don’t want a penny he’s got, if it come up to that I could buy, take the money and give it to the right, ?? this money , it don’t go to the wrong place. Money’s just not worth that much, you just can’t, you can’t say it’s worth that much.
Anyway, the Governor, the reason I wanted to get him in here, not because me and him had a cuss fight, but, he come to Newport then, and he walked down seen the river, looked about like that, he stopped right down here, got off his sick, he got up and walked down to the river, and they had to hold him up, he was staggering, he walked down and looked at the river and says “Hell fire ?? why is this river not clean, I thought we got it clean.” No, you didn’t. He said “Sue the son-of-a-bitches and make ‘em finish cleaning this river up.” That’s the last words I got to talk to him about it. That was his words “Sue the son-of-a-bitches and make ‘em finish cleaning the river.”

Partial Transcript: Nothin. I’ve not done anything to amount to, that does any good anyway. I’ve tried, I just got burned out. You reach a point on an issue like this that you just, you dig all you can, but you just get burned out a little while. And I lost my wife about that time too. So, about the time that we were, I think the paper company, the second man and the 3rd man in charge, the paper company had 24 plants at this point we’re talking about, he seen me and my wife were in Atlanta together, he had offered me a lot of money. And, he told my wife, he says “I just got to tell you”, ??? I told her, he says, “that’s the only man that’s ever turned me down.” And I’m glad, that I flat turned him down on their money. She was so proud of that, till the day she died, she knew I’d a told her the truth, that I wouldn’t lie about it, but when he come and told her, and how important what it was, it made a difference, she understood then how much money we were talking about.

Partial Transcript: Yeah we got two or three class action suits going, Gordon Ball did that. I hired Gordon Ball for one dollar back 30, 40 years ago, hired him as our lawyer, and of course he’s made money and we didn’t get a penny. Of course that’s the way lawyers are, they just, but we got another law suit laying down there, in fact Gordon and I talked about it. Gordon had a heart transplant too, he’s not able to do a lot but he’s doing pretty good now. But we’ve still got the paperwork laying down there on the desk and the man wanting to do it, we just, Gordon was sick, and his son was coming along. We might, they said whenever I got ready they’d go ahead and file a law suit, another class action and get ‘em again.

Partial Transcript: They had a person on the jury on the first one, one we really should have one big time, that thought that Champion makes spark plugs, that we were talking about making spark plugs, when we were talking about making, this person on the jury, that’s who they picked that jury right for, and they hung the jury. And I think there was 6, 8 million dollars coming through, and of course the 6 million, 8 million lawyer gets a third, blah blah blah, then the others split up the money, the people along the river, so. And then we had another one that happened about the same way. But we just didn’t have it goin ??
Good lawyers be worth their weight in gold, right now for a good lawyer wanting this river, and wanted to take it, cause I don’t want to get in a law suit just for the sake of a law suit, but you can turn the river on, turn it off, well enough to make a dang good case that you’re being damaged. Of course there’s a lot of laws out there, and you start to, you get all these big law firms on you it’s a different story. The law firms that was helping the paper company is unbelievable amount of big shot lawyers. I can’t remember the names, I did know the names of the lawyers but I can’t remember ‘em now, which lawyer group they were with.

Partial Transcript: I wasn’t in on that one, I don’t know about that one, I’m sorry. But it did happen. I remember they, more than one time, they’ve tried to get ‘em to drink some of the water. And I’ve seen them offer it to them and of course they don’t’ take it. That’s a good stage thing anytime you can do it. And I’ve seen them do it. I’ve seen them go up to the plant, and they wouldn’t even drink the water out of the plant. The clean water. Nobody would drink it.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, it’s a great thing, the river, we got, just on a 2 dollar rafting fee, last year we got around 250, 450 thousand dollars, hundred thousand dollars, just in the rafting fee. It’s tremendous amount of money. That doesn’t count the other things, the hotel rooms and stuff that comes in. How much is it going off, I guess since the river’s been clean we have prospered well on it. When I filed the law suit, or when I started to fight, let me re-back, when I started the Appalachia Environmental Group law suit, and the ?? law suit or group, I had never seen one boat on that river. I live close to it, walk across it every day. But I’d never seen a boat coming down it until this now we got 450,000 dollars just on the rafting fee.
And if we get it clean, if we go ahead and clean this thing, it will clean up all the way into Douglas Lake too. It’s already clean up into those lakes some We just don’t see it, it’s a little slower there. But we’ve got this thing goin now, it will jump five times the first year because this is the only river east of the Mississippi that heads up, like I said before, in the National Parks. All the water comes out of the National Parks. This water right here will be cleaner than any water you’ve ever seen coming out of the tap. You could go right there and drink the water if we get this one polluter to stop it. We’ve got a few, I was seeing the other day, we got a few minnows out of the other streams, the little mountain streams, they’ve survived. I’ve been checking some of them, some are still there. Boy that makes me feel good to know those darters of all kinds are still there, still back in that mountain, if we can just get ‘em clean enough to get, let ‘em come out. We still got to stock in ‘em, so hopefully we got it going in the right direction.

Partial Transcript: I’d just like to see it clean and get the environment better in it. It doesn’t matter about the money and stuff is gonna be there no matter what we do, but I would like to see the river being clean because it clean all the way up into Douglas lake. A lot of our employment, it ranks good jobs for people. The main thing the environment, we don’t need to waste more water. Water is a precious issue. How much would some of the African nations, to get a stream like that. What would that be worth to them? Then we’re wasting it, we’re wasting that stream right there. You don’t see anybody coming down the river even though there’s a little bit of activity here. We’ve been here half a day, nobody’s come by here.
Now, if that river were clean, I guarantee there’d be children on inner tubes, there’d be people fishing, coming right down through here. Right there, its advantage, we don’t get it. And our politicians, we don’t have any politicians now helping us either. Governor, governor’s not helping us any. I asked him, I said “would you help us?”, “yeah, what do you want me to do?” I said “well you get rid of these two people if you would”. To tell you the truth about it I went to ask him to do it. I said “we know they’re dishonest”, one of em got fired, I never did know why and that was all that ever happened. I knew the man to be dishonest, I knew he was taking bribes, I knew his things were going through like that. I couldn’t prove it as such, you know in a law suit and stuff like that, it’s just, ya know. But I knew deep down, because those people who fought me all of those years, they had to use a lot of dirty tactics. Hopefully I was doing it right, as well as I could. I dang sure wasn’t taking the money and nobody else was as far as I knew it. So, we did pretty good with it.

Partial Transcript: I don’t know if we need anything, if we can just get that river clean, we’ll be satisfied, we’ll be well satisfied.

Partial Transcript: It would be important to me to have my name in history books, to help the environment. Help the environment get cleaner than what it is, the water cleaner. It would be a feather in my cap, it would be, just to have my name out there just so say I had done something. And my grandchildren right on down the line.

Partial Transcript: It would be bad. I hope that they will remember all the good things that we done, but you know history; history will be quite cruel and good. I just don’t have a really good wish other than having a good environment. That’s my wish because if we get a good environment, if we get this river clean, the other things will come, so.

Partial Transcript: Well, we covered how we exposed it, because the letters intercepted by Green Peace, and some of them intercepted the letter and ?? going exposed on it. But we’ve known for a long time in the Hartford area, like the Widowville, and stuff like that, that’s not a made up thing, you know, when you’ve got that many dead people, and dying people, and we did a wall up there, with the people who had died, just the people who had died in Hartford. And a tremendous lot up there, there’s no, and it’s such a shame, there’s never been a damn study done.
Officials would look at me and say you can’t be right, I am right. There’s never been a damn study done on the Pigeon River. Who, where the Dioxin came from, why did we get it, why can’t we get rid of it. And we still got Dioxins in the sediment, we don’t know how bad it is. I know there’s 42 feet of sludge in the lake up there, Walters Lake. We measured it one time, for different reasons, but there’s 42 foot of toxic sludge laying in that lake up there. The paper company has used that as their septic tank in Cocke County as their fill lines all these years and still laying up there. I don’t know what we’ll ever do with it. Once we can ever get it stopped polluting, it will clean up pretty fast but you still got that ?? laying there. Something’s gonna upset it, and bring it out. But once, if we could get it stopped, if we could stop them right now from adding to that river that would be clear in a month time. People talk about years. Not it doesn’t, it’s clear up in months or weeks, it will be crystal clear. Because this thing, like I say, all these different 5 or so rivers come out of the National Park. And they just flush like a commode. And that’s what people, the Nolichucky River and the French Broad started to cleaning ?? it’s the Pigeon with its magnificent flow as it does.