It was June 1969. I was an 11-year-old kid just starting to figure out that the world was bigger than the farm we lived on and times around us were changing rapidly. The Vietnam War was on the news every night with reports of casualties and protests. My cousin shipped out to join the fighting. Woodstock was still two months away. The previous year had seen the assassinations of both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It was a time of upheaval and innocence lost. Life would never be the same.

When I saw the reports of the fire on the Cuyahoga river, it was hard to imagine how a river could be so polluted that it would catch fire, but that's exactly what happened. Sparks from a passing train ignited oil-soaked debris floating on the river and fire boats were quickly deployed to try and put it out. Amazingly, the first time the river caught fire was in 1868 and there were several other incidents over the years. The Cuyahoga runs through Cleveland, Ohio and at the time was one of the most polluted waterways in the United States. It empties into Lake Erie and there were growing concerns about the amount of pollution that was being dumped into the Great Lakes.

Other rivers had experienced similar fires over the years, including Detroit's Rouge River, Philadelphia's Schuylkill, the Chicago River and New York's Buffalo River. Public awareness and outrage had finally reached the point that action had to be taken.

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