The accident at TMI occurred shortly before the Jewish holiday of Passover. I was picking up a meat order from the kosher butcher in Harrisburg, when I heard something on his shop radio about an incident at TMI and that no evacuation had been ordered yet. I had been living in Hershey for a little over a year at the time, and I don’t think I was even aware that there was a nuclear facility nearby.
“pack up the baby, we’re going to Lewistown.”
I drove back to Hershey with my 6-month old son in the car, and when I got home I tuned into the 12 Noon news on the television.
Of course the news was all about the incident and pregnant women a mothers with small children encouraged to evacuate. Since I was getting worried, I thought about calling my husband at work at the Hershey Medical Center. I chose not to because I thought he would think I was just being a Nervous Nellie new mom. Turns out, he called me and told me to “pack up the baby, we’re going to Lewistown.”
We drove to Lewistown where we stayed with the parents of a friend and her husband, who also stayed there with their young daughter. We watched the news over the weekend when the talk was all about a”hydrogen bubble.” That was pretty scary, so we then went to New York City to spend the Passover holiday with my husband’s parents and waited for news that we could safely return to Hershey. My husband traveled back to work at HMC sometime during that week and took my son and I back sometime later.
I remember thinking that it was strange that evacuees had been sent to Hersheypark Arena when it was so close to TMI, and Hershey residents like my family were leaving Hershey!
children later liked to joke to new acquaintances that their eyes glowed in the dark
We had a friend at that time who was in the Air National Guard at Olmstead Base. He said that geiger counter readings when he flew over TMI did not indicate dangerous levels of radiation in the air, and so he did not evacuate his wife and son who was the same age as mine.
My son was a nursing baby, and I and seem to remember my pediatrics office at HMC monitoring my son’s health and progress for some time after the accident. I thought they were worried about radiation in the water.
Since we continued to live in Hershey thereafter, my two children later liked to joke to new acquaintances that their eyes glowed in the dark because they grew up near TMI.
Enid
