Kita and Susan

It was unusual for me to wake up before my alarm went off, so when I was awakened around 4AM on Wednesday, March 28th, 1979 I was puzzled.

I got up and found my dog, Kita, was wide awake and pacing about furiously. I went back to bed for a couple more hours thinking it was just a deer or something near the house. We lived in a wooded area at the top of a steep road, Hess Road, between Middletown and Elizabethtown. On a topographical map we were almost exactly three miles as the crow flies from Three Mile Island. I later found out that when the accident initially began near 4AM it created a loud roar like a jet engine. I surmised Kita must have heard it.

I remember someone saying something snarky about ice cream cones melting.

I got up and went to work as usual, which was about a half hour drive towards Harrisburg where I taught middle school art on Union Deposit Road, just south of Harrisburg. I really don’t recall hearing anything about the accident that day at work. I do remember when I got home my ex-husband, who I will call Brad, told me a guy he knew had inside knowledge about what we were starting to hear about in the news. The one thing I remember his friend telling him was about a meltdown, about what it was and there was danger of it happening. It was such an unknown, I don’t remember feeling terribly alarmed at that point.

I went to work Thursday and the other teachers were talking about it in the break room. I told them about what Brad had learned, about a possible “meltdown” and they scoffed at me and made jokes – I remember someone saying something snarky about ice cream cones melting.

By that evening the news was getting pretty scary and Brad and I were wondering what we should do. We both felt responsibility to show up at our jobs as long as there was no evacuation. There were rumors one could be pending.

Some were asking me why their parents didn’t come for them.

me with my students who were mostly 8th graders in my yearbook club. I’m the one on the far right in dark V neck sweater

Friday I went to work and while there Governor Thornburgh advised pregnant women and children to leave the area. I had a class of 6th graders when parents started showing up at the school to pick up their kids. The intercom in my room was interrupting the class frequently, the secretary asking me to send another child to the office where their parent was waiting. The students still in my classroom started getting very anxious. One of them pointed to the windows and exclaimed the sky was turning green, which of course it wasn’t. Some were complaining they felt sick. Some were asking me why their parents didn’t come for them. I had to remain calm and reassuring for these children. In my mind I was hoping we all could leave ASAP. I heard through the grapevine that there were plans to make all highways one way leading away from TMI. Which meant I wouldn’t be able to go home, and my beloved husky Kita would be stranded in the house. Once all the students had left I went down to the office on my way out, and the secretary told me there was a phone message in my mailbox. There of course was no internet or cell phones then. My husband had called the school and left me a message to meet him at home as soon as possible. I heard a teacher say one parent was so frantic as to miss the curve of the school driveway and ended up on the lawn, then raced into the school with car door still hanging open!

As Brad pulled out of the driveway I looked back and wondered if I’d ever see our wonderful dream house again

Susan’s house

The highways were never changed to one way out of the area fortunately so I was able to get back to my house, even though it was going right into the disaster area! From our hilltop home we could actually see the lights on the towers at night in winter, when there were no leaves on the trees. Brad was outside the house when I got home and we were trying to stay level headed because at this point we felt the thing could blow any time. We decided to leave his small Mustang II behind and take my big 1971 Chevy Impala. We made a plan in seconds, to quickly race through the house and grab anything we felt most important to take with us and be on the road in 20 minutes. The sense of urgency was palpable. We grabbed important files, photo albums, some clothes, I grabbed a quilt my great grandma had made, a tablecloth my mother had embroidered, some wood crafts my grandpa had made, and my best artwork. The trunk on that car was huge, so Kita had most of the back seat. While packing up, a car sped by careening all over the curvy road. As Brad pulled out of the driveway I looked back and wondered if I’d ever see our wonderful dream house again, that two friends of his helped us build ourselves only two years prior.

breakfast dishes still in the sink, some helium balloons were now floating on the floor, drawers hanging open….

May 7, 1979 New York Times. It’s hard to read my sign, at the top edge center. If you look straight down from that there are two guys wearing aviator sunglasses and I’m the next one to the right.

It’s a strange feeling, when there’s no fire, tornado, flood, or anything you can see, but you’re running for your life. And you leave your house and belongings behind, perhaps to never be seen again, yet knowing they would still stand until nature reclaimed them. Thinking back if I were to go through it again I would only grab my dog and high tail it out of there!

We drove to our home town of Lititz about 22 miles away in Lancaster County and stayed Friday night at my grandma’s house. She lived alone but our parents all lived nearby. My parents had a house at the shore, in Stone Harbor, NJ so Saturday we drove down there to get further away. Nobody else in my family felt a need to get beyond 25 miles from TMI! At the shore we watched the news all weekend. I looked over the stuff we’d grabbed at the house and made a list of it, thinking that it would be interesting to note sometime in the future, and it was.

We both called out of work on Monday and I think returned home either then or soon after. It was weird going back into our house because it showed we’d left in a hurry: breakfast dishes still in the sink, some helium balloons were now floating on the floor, drawers hanging open….

On May 6th we boarded a bus for Washington DC to join a huge protest as a result of what we now know was more than just an accident, but a disaster, at Three Mile Island. I made a picket sign attaching a deer skull onto the center of the symbol for atomic energy. I painted across top and bottom “IT ALMOST HAPPENED – LET THIS BE A WARNING” We went with another couple, who called us the next day to tell us we, and my sign, were in the center of a crowd shot on the front page of the New York Times on May 7th. I guess I really got my message across!

Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden -September 1979

Lastly, this is a photo I took of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden that September when they came for a press conference at the entrance to TMI. After that, they stopped by a house across the street where an elderly woman lived. Very few people knew they planned to do that and I was lucky to find out. There were only a handful of people. We all fit into the woman’s living room and she gave Ms. Fonda a gift of an afghan blanket she crocheted. Jane told us she was wearing an outfit she had on in The China Syndrome.