Dorothy Kowalczyk ran Kowalczyk's Pharmacy on McKean Avenue in Donora, Pennsylvania from 1946 to 1959. During the October 1948 smog disaster that killed at least twenty residents and sickened thousands more, she filled prescriptions for respiratory distress while the steel mill that employed most of her customers continued operating. She never spoke publicly about the smog until decades later. This conversation, reconstructed from historical accounts and period testimony, explores what it meant to witness environmental disaster while remaining silent about its cause.12
You opened the pharmacy the morning of October 27th, 1948. What do you remember?
Dorothy: The black. That's what I remember first. Not gray, not even dark gray, but black. Like someone had draped funeral cloth over the entire town.
I unlocked the door at seven-thirty like always, and Mrs. Hudak was already waiting outside. Couldn't see her until she was maybe three feet away. She needed something for her boy's breathing. I remember thinking, well, it's just fog. We get fog.
But it wasn't fog. You could taste it. Metallic, sulfurous. Made your eyes water just standing there. And Mrs. Hudak didn't say anything about the air. She just said, "Bobby's wheezing again, do you have that medicine?" Like it was a cold. Like it was weather.
The mill kept operating through all five days of the smog.
Dorothy: (long pause) Yes. You could hear the whistles. Shift changes. The mill ran through everything—floods, strikes, wars. Why would fog stop it? That's what people said. That's what we... (trails off)
Look, you have to understand what the mill meant. My husband worked there. My father worked there. Half my customers worked there or their husbands did. The other half worked at the zinc works. When the mill ran, Donora had money. When it didn't, well. You remember the Depression. We remembered.
But you were filling prescriptions for respiratory distress all day, every day of the smog.
Dorothy: (quietly) Yes.
And after?
Dorothy: More. Many more. The coughing didn't stop when the fog lifted. I filled more prescriptions for breathing trouble in November and December 1948 than in the entire previous year. Children, mostly. And old people.
Mr. Schwerha died the first night. He'd come in the week before for his heart medicine. Mrs. Ceh died. Twenty people died during those five days, maybe more after.3
I knew these people. I filled their prescriptions. I knew their children's names.
And I never... (stops)
Never what?
Dorothy: Never said what I was thinking. Never said, "Maybe it's the mill. Maybe it's the zinc works. Maybe we should talk about what's in the air we're breathing."
I'd hand over the asthma medicine and say, "Make sure Bobby uses the inhaler like the doctor said." I'd smile. I'd ask about their family. And we'd both pretend we didn't know why Bobby needed the inhaler.
Devra Davis, who was two years old in Donora during the smog, later wrote that people maintained "a kind of civic omertà" about October 1948. Does that feel accurate?
Dorothy: (laughs bitterly) Omertà. Like the Mafia. Yes, I suppose that's right. We had a code of silence. But nobody enforced it. That's the thing people don't understand. Nobody threatened us. Nobody told us not to talk.
We just didn't.
The mill didn't need to silence us. We silenced ourselves. Because what were we going to say? "The thing that feeds our families is killing us?" That's not a conversation. That's a suicide note.
But surely some people must have spoken up?
Dorothy: Oh, some tried. There were a few—mostly people who'd moved to Donora from somewhere else, didn't have family in the mills. They'd say things at church socials, at the grocery. "Shouldn't someone do something about the air?"
And people would just... change the subject. Talk about the Pirates. Talk about the weather. The regular weather, not the killer fog.
Those people who spoke up? They didn't last long in Donora. Not because anyone ran them out. They just left. Found work somewhere else. Because a town where nobody will talk about the thing that's killing you—that's a lonely place to live.
You said your husband worked at the mill. Did you talk about it with him?
Dorothy: (very long pause) Once. Just once.
It was maybe a week after the smog cleared. I was filling prescriptions for the Kovar children—three kids, all with breathing problems now. And that night at dinner, I said something like, "Maybe they should put some kind of filters on the smokestacks. Maybe there's a way to make it cleaner."
And my husband just looked at me. Not angry. Sad, maybe. Tired.
He said, "Dorothy, where do you think the money for this house came from? For your pharmacy? For everything we have?"
And I said, "I know, but—"
"There's no 'but.' There's the mill or there's nothing."
We never talked about it again.
What changed? Why are you talking about it now?
Dorothy: (laughs) Because I'm old and everyone's dead? Because the mill closed in '66 anyway, so what was the point of the silence?
No, that's not fair. I'm talking about it because I think about Bobby Hudak. And the Kovar children. And all those prescriptions. I think about how I was the person who saw it most clearly. I had the evidence right there in my ledgers. Prescription after prescription after prescription. I could have counted them. I could have shown someone.
But I didn't want to know. That's the truth of it. I didn't want to count them because then I'd have to admit what the numbers meant. And admitting it meant choosing—the mill or the children. Our livelihood or their lungs.
So I just kept filling prescriptions. Kept smiling. Kept pretending that asthma was just something that happened, like rain.
The U.S. passed its first air pollution legislation in 1955, seven years after Donora. Do you think the silence delayed that?
Dorothy: (sharply) Oh, the government knew. The Public Health Service came, did their investigation, took their samples. They knew what killed those people. What sickened thousands more. It's all in their report—sulfur dioxide, zinc, lead, cadmium, all of it from the mills.4
But knowing and doing are different things. And doing requires people like me to say, "Yes, this happened. Yes, it was the mills. Yes, something needs to change."
We didn't say that. We said, "It was just weather. Just a freak accident. Just one of those things."
We gave them permission to do nothing. Seven years of permission.
If you could go back—
Dorothy: (interrupting) I'd like to say I'd speak up. I'd like to say I'd count those prescriptions and take them to the newspaper, to the government, to whoever would listen. I'd like to say I'd choose the children over the mortgage.
But I don't know. I honestly don't know.
Because I'd still be married to a mill worker. I'd still be living in a town where the mill was everything. I'd still be the person who could lose everything by telling the truth.
That's what people don't understand about silence. It's not always cowardice. Sometimes it's just arithmetic. You add up what you have to lose, and you subtract what you might gain by speaking, and the numbers don't work. They just don't work.
(pause)
Although I suppose the numbers didn't work the other way either, did they? The mill closed anyway. The children have asthma anyway. The silence didn't save anything. It just made us complicit in what we couldn't stop.
What would you want people today to understand about Donora?
Dorothy: That it's easy to judge us now. Easy to say we should have spoken up, should have demanded change, should have chosen differently.
But you're living in your own Donora right now. You just don't see it yet.
There's something in your town, your industry, your life that's hurting people. Maybe it's not as obvious as black fog, but it's there. And you're staying quiet about it because speaking up costs too much. Because your job depends on it. Because everyone around you has agreed not to notice.
And someday, someone will interview you, and they'll ask why you didn't say anything when you knew. When the evidence was right there in front of you.
And you'll have to decide whether to tell them the truth—that you were afraid. That you chose comfort over courage. That you did the arithmetic and decided silence was cheaper.
(pause)
I filled prescriptions for children who couldn't breathe, and I never asked why. That's my answer. What's yours?