They were there 50 years ago: Delco residents reflect back to first Earth Day
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the very first Earth Day. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the many outdoor and group events originally planned to celebrate Earth Day’s golden anniversary into virtual environmental webinars and programs, online learning opportunities and activities, and more.
Environmental, community, and government agencies are trying to keep the spirit of Earth Day alive this week, employing creativity and technology, to stay within the government guidelines of social distancing and stay-athome orders to stop the virus’s spread. It will be quite different from the first event, a social world-changing milestone for the history books, half of a century ago.
The very first Earth Day in 1970 brought 20 million Americans, ten percent of the country’s population at the time, out to demonstrations in streets, parks and college campuses in hundreds of cities across the nation, to demand changes to save the planet and to protest the deterioration of the environment. Earth Day was a unified response to an environment in crisis that included smog, polluted water ways and oil spills, among other pressing environmental issues. In Philadelphia, history also took place that month, with the advent of the country’s very first Earth Week, celebrated April 16-22, culminating with its inaugural Earth Day celebration on Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park.
Bill Reinersmann of Broomall remembers the day well. As a junior at Marple Newtown High School, Reinersmann, who grew up in Newtown Square, said April 22, 1970 was the only day that he ever skipped school.
“We saw Earth Day as a day to hang out with people who had similar thinking,” the semi-retired information systems analyst reflected back. “We saw it as a chance to have a good time, too. I was a typical kid back then, thinking the ‘hippie’ world was very cool!”
The late U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie was the keynote speaker at Philadelphia’s Earth Day. Other notable attendees included consumer protection activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader, the late landscape architect Ian McHarg, the late Nobel prizewinning Harvard biochemist George Wald, the late U.S. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, the late poet Allen Ginsberg, and environmental activist Ira Einhorn, who was later convicted of murdering his then-girlfriend Holly Maddux in 1977. Einhorn died April 3, 2020.
“I don’t remember anything any one of these speakers spoke about that day,” Reinersmann said. “However, I do member two years later, flying back from Europe in 1972, and seeing a brown haze as we approached the shores of the U.S. I remember thinking about how much we needed to clean up the air. I am sure this thought came from the awareness created by that first Earth Day.”
According to information on EarthDay.org, a site solely about the annual day that celebrates and brings awareness to environmental issues, Earth Day’s founder was Senator Gaylord Nelson, a junior senator from Wisconsin, who had long been concerned about the deteriorating environment in the United States. In January
1969, he and many others witnessed the ravages of a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, Nelson wanted to infuse the energy of student anti-war protests with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution.
The senator announced the idea for a teach-in on college campuses to the national media, and persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservationminded Republican congressman, to serve as his co-chair. They recruited Denis Hayes, a young activist, to organize the campus teach-ins and they choose April 22, a weekday falling between colleges’ spring break and final exams, to maximize the greatest student participation.
Recognizing its potential to inspire all Americans, Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land and the effort soon broadened to include a wide range of organizations, faith groups, and others. They changed the name to Earth Day, which immediately sparked national media attention, and caught on across the country.
Groups that had been fighting individually against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife united on Earth Day around these shared common values. Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, urban dwellers and farmers, business and labor leaders.
As Nelson said years later, “Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.”
Yvonne LeFever of Prospect Park didn’t realize it at the time, but she witnessed history during a school trip to Washington, D.C., on April 22, 1970. Her eighth-grade class at St. Hedwig’s School in Chester stopped at the National Mall to visit the Washington Monument, only to see “a zillion hippies” instead, she said.
“The nuns were afraid to let us off the bus,” she chuckled at the memory. “A park ranger approached our school bus and told Sister that it was okay to visit the monument. He said it was a harmless event, not a riot.”
LeFever’s class walked single file down a roped-off aisle, past “the long-haired hippies in bell bottoms and blasting rock concert.”
“A TV news camera switched to us and the news reporter announced ‘and here is a group of school children going to see the Washington Monument’,” LeFever recalled. “I can tell you, truthfully, that I don’t even remember going to the top of the monument that day. I was too overwhelmed by the scene of that very first Earth Day in Washington, D.C. I still celebrate it every year. I am proud to be an active and proud tree hugger.”
Fran Portale of Glen Mills vividly remembers the first Earth Day celebration in Philadelphia. She was 18-years-old and a student at West Catholic Girls High School in Philadelphia. Now a retired property manager, Portale recalls attending the event with her girlfriends, including Denise O’Malley Dugan, with whom she is still good friends.
“I remember there was a lot of people that day at Belmont Plateau and the weather was absolutely beautiful,” Portale reminisced. “Most of the people there were close to our age and we all enjoyed sitting on blankets and just enjoying the day. The awareness of the environment had just begun, and was only in its infancy stages.”
Although she doesn’t consider herself a staunch environmentalist, Portale said the event sparked her awareness of the necessity to do her part to recycle, repurpose and reuse.
Molly Armstrong of Aldan remembers attending the first Earth Day with her friend JoAnn Bell Walker of Downingtown.
The friends, who lived in the Briarcliffe section of Darby Township at the time, were 20 years old and working at Penn Central Railroad at 32nd Street.
“We took a half day off from work to attend,” Armstrong recalled. “We got a ride to Belmont Plateau. It was beautiful that day! There were bands playing and I remember the crowd was so peaceful. It was a positive and wonderful expe
rience, one I never forgot.”
Diane Brocchi of Glen Mills has a similar recollection. The mother of three grown daughters was only 16-years-old and living in Broomall when the first Earth Day took place.
“We all knew Earth Day was going to happen in Philadelphia and we talked about it in science class and listened to our school debate team discuss it,” Brocchi, who’s now a special events coordinator at Villanova University, remembers. “I went with friends to Belmont Plateau and it was packed with people, of all ages and races— more people than I had ever seen before in my life. Everyone got along, and we just hung out, listening to great music. There was an incredible feeling of peace, joy and hope to make a difference for our earth. Pollution was so bad back then and we tried to create an impact by making everyone aware.”
Brocchi said she remembers visiting her great grandparents in Philadelphia and the air seemed to have a stench compared to the suburbs because “pollution was so bad back then.” Today, Brocchi says she tries to recycle, reuse and never litter.
Although she feels there weren’t too many major changes in the first 30 years following the first Earth Day, she feels the general population is finally taking notice and action in the past 20 years.
“At Villanova, where I work, there is a strong dedication for the environment and we honor Earth Day, not just once a year, but every single day,” she said proudly. “After 50 years, we are finally seeing some differences around the world. In Venice, the water is cleaner than in years past. In China, birds are back after escaping heavy pollution for years. With humans kinder to the environment in many places, Earth seems to be coming back, as beautiful as it has always been. I hope we finally are learning something from all of this.”
By the end of 1970, the first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other first of their kind environmental laws, including the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act. Two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act. A year after that, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act and soon after the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. These laws have protected millions of men, women and children from disease and death and have protected hundreds of species from extinction. The decade that followed saw some of America’s most popular and powerful environmental legislation: updates to the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Andrea Glidden of Milton, Del., attended the 1970 Earth Week events at Independence Mall in Philadelphia, with her friend Gwen Skalish of Glenolden. They both remember listening to a presentation there by Ralph Nader.
Friends with Skalish since growing up together in Glenolden, Glidden was a senior at the Philadelphia College of Art. Artists and writers at the school were invited to contribute to the school’s Earth Day exhibit. Three of her displayed photographs, that depicted air pollution, were chosen for a display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then were featured in the official publication of the Philadelphia Earth Week Committee.
Skalish, currently selling real estate at Berkshire Hathaway, went on to become manager of the MacDade Mall, from 1977 to 2007. She says she has practiced the message of Earth Day throughout life since.
“I recycle every day,” Skalish stated, smiling. “I collect my family’s and my neighbors’ recyclables too, just to be sure everything gets recycled. I’m a pest about it.”
Glidden said that she, too, has carried the message of that very first Earth Week with her through the years.
“I’m a lifelong home gardener, growing much of my own vegetables,” she explained. “I follow organic gardening practices, and I reuse and recycle. My late husband and I built an energy-efficient home in Unionville where we lived for 22 years. To further help, we utilized native plants.”
Linda Veblen of Waldoboro, Maine, was a student at Marple Newtown High School in 1970. Her teacher, Thelma Schmitt took her and a few other students to an Earth Day conference during Earth Week, and she never forgot what she learned there.
“It was a day of lectures on critical topics like climate,” Veblen remembers. “It was a daylong symposium on the urgency and science of remediation of the global trends of earth warming. Most of the attendees were professional scientists, college students and professors. It was an eye-opening experience. We didn’t get to attend the concerts or the outdoor celebration, much to my dismay, but we did learn a great deal.”
Dr. Wayne Goldey of Glen Mills also participated in the very first Earth Week in Philadelphia, half for the fun and adventure of it, and half for more serious reasons. As a sophomore at Darby-Colwyn Senior High School in 1970, Goldey couldn’t resist the invitation of an upperclassman to skip school and attend the Earth Day festivities at Independence Hall. Only 14-years-old, he hopped into his friend’s “cool blue Mustang convertible” and arrived to find masses of people, he later found out numbered about 20,000.
“The music was blaring from Red Bone, a popular group of the time and the entire cast of the hit Broadway musical, “Hair,” was performing songs such as ‘Age of Aquarius’ and ‘Sulfur Dioxide.’ It was mesmerizing. I didn’t know who the important speakers were at the time, but I knew they were ‘big shots’ of the movement and I knew I was witnessing history. I later researched and learned the speakers were Ralph Nader, Alan Watts and Hugh Scott.”
When he returned home, he had to face the wrath of his parents, teachers and principal, who had learned he played hooky from school.
“My parents were extremely upset that I cut school to hang out with Vietnam War protesters with lots of hippies,” Goldey remembers. “I understood my father’s perception of the event since we were a military family with a brother who had just returned from Vietnam. However, I am sure he would have recognized the importance of that event 50 years later.”
Goldey, who retired from a successful career in education in 2017, said he always treasured the fact that he witnessed this historic event. He went on to receive science degrees in geology, physics and chemistry, and then to a 40-year career in the Ridley School District as a science teacher, department chair, assistant principal at Ridley South/Middle School for 24 years and principal at Edgewood Elementary School for 16 years. His wife Gloria Goldey is currently the principal at Lakeview Elementary School in Ridley Park.
“Being an educator for forty years, I always considered myself an environmentalist,” Goldey said. “I often reflect on the times that I either directly taught students about environmental issues or facilitated schoolwide celebrations and lessons of Earth Week and the related topics throughout the year. Hopefully, I instilled the responsibility that citizens have when they advocate for environmental issues or intelligently vote for lawmakers who will enact safeguards for our planet. As long as people inhabit our Earth, there will always be environmental issues for which to fight.”
Tom Gallen went to the historic Fairmount Park event and he, too, has distinct memories of what would become an annual celebration. The retired PECO electrical engineer, who now makes his home in Treasure Island, Florida, was living in the Penn Pines section of Upper Darby in 1970, with his wife and three children. He was 31 years old and studying for his master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that he went, simply to take part in what he perceived would become a historical event. During that time period, he was used to attending the “be-ins” at Belmont Plateau, which he describes as “large hippie-type gatherings.” He was a fan of jazz music, so he recalls not being overly impressed with the rock and folk artists featured at the event.
“At that time, I wasn’t that aware of the real meaning behind the occasion,” Gallen confessed. “However, after that day, I believe people all over the nation started to consider the harm done to the environment by their actions.”
Although he believes the world is heading toward an environmental catastrophe some day, he isn’t sure it can be stopped based on the world’s continued industrial progress.
“I know several people whom I would call environmentalists,” Gallen shared. “They support alternative power sources and they are vegetarians. I can’t be them. The best that I can do is recycle materials and try to eliminate the single use of plastic.”
Margaret Cossentino of Lansdowne, married for 32 years and the mother of four sons, was present in Fairmount Park on that famous day in 1970. She and her friend Elaine were 17-year-old seniors at Archbishop Prendergast High School.
“Thinking we would make a difference by not taking a big SEPTA bus on Earth Day, we proudly rode our clunker bikes in heavy Township Line traffic from Havertown to Belmont Plateau,” the retired graphic designer laughs at the memory. “I have only vague memories of the event itself — almost everyone was young and enjoying the nice day with presumably altruistic intentions. I remember a tiny Ira Einhorn was up on stage in the far distance. I guess we went to the event because it was a worldwide call to action, happening locally, that we could easily be a part of.”
Cossentino remembers how her favorite sweater reeked of car exhaust from all of the pollution she faced on her bike ride there and how she was saddle-sore from the bike ride’s long distance.
“The event was a noble idea,” she said prior to the
50th anniversary. “However, we’re still living with the repercussions of pollution and those of us who remember the day know how the life of the late Philadelphia counterculture and environmental guru Ira Einhorn turned out!”
Cossentino said she has always been concerned for the environment.
“Recycling is very important at our house,” she interjected. “I switched our energy providers to cleaner sources some years ago, even though they’re a bit more expensive.”
Cossentino continued, “We’ve all seen the frightening changes in the weather and climate these past years. As this terrible coronavirus has brought commerce and human activity to a standstill, pictures showing a cleaner atmosphere and clearer waterways are unexpectedly coming in from around the world. Fifty years ago, at the end of
1970, bipartisan support for new environmental concerns led to the establishment of the EPS, enacting environmental and wildlife protections in the U.S. Unfortunately, some of those rules have recently relaxed. I am hoping that more resources will be directed toward the development of cleaner, safe energy.”
The theme of the 2020 Earth Day is climate action. Few will debate that the most serious environmental issue facing society today is the change in the climate system in response to emissions of greenhouse gases. According to Earth Day literature, climate change represents the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the lifesupport systems that make the world habitable. Global temperatures are rising. The five hottest years on record have all been in the last five years.