"I'm doing this for you!" Mom would say to me. "It is your generation who will be so adversely impacted by these damn atomic tests; can't you see that?"
    "No," I thought. "No, I can't." I was a teenager preoccupied with popularity in school. My mom's rants against the government embarrassed me.
    My mother, Irma Thomas, was the first "activist" I ever knew. It would be years before I fully comprehended the courage and significance of my mom's actions, much too late to tell her so.
    Mom was pregnant with me in 1951 when the U.S. government began detonating enormous nuclear bombs in the Nevada desert, just over 100 miles from my home. It was the Cold War era. Fears of Kruschev's bombs triggered testing of hundreds of U.S. bombs, and mushroom clouds were visible from our back yard.
    As a child, I was terrorized by the name Kruschev and his deadly bombs. I cried in school as we practiced crouching beneath our desks during regular drills to prepare for Russian attacks.
    My mother boarded up the tiny window in our basement food storage room. She was doing what the government had instructed, building a makeshift bomb shelter. Mom looked up from her task of stacking powdered milk and canned vegetables on the shelves.
    "This makes no sense at all, Shelley," she growled. "I'm readying a bomb shelter to keep my family safe from Kruschev's bombs, yet our own government is dropping bombs on our heads and telling us we're safe."
    She was right, of course; it made no sense at all. Furthermore, it was a lie. The Atomic Energy Commission continued to reassure residents living downwind of the deadly fallout clouds that they were never in danger. And so, we consumed milk from local dairies and vegetables from our gardens.
    Soon, my friends and I were examined regularly by "government doctors" looking for irregular thyroids and nodules. Hundreds of children in Southern Utah had their thyroids removed. My mother refused to let them take mine.
    "Not unless you tell me what you want it for," she wrote on the form I returned to my fifth-grade teacher.
    In the mid-1950s, lots of people started getting sick in my hometown: cancer, thyroid disease, leukemia in children, diseases with names we'd never heard of and illnesses that took people's lives quickly, too quick for diagnosis.
    Birth defects and miscarriages became common. Entire herds of sheep and cattle dropped dead. Still, our government denied the atomic tests were to blame. Mama's best friend, Helen Reichman, died of stomach cancer. Helen loved to garden and had fallen gravely ill one day after working outside under a fallout cloud. She never recovered. Neither did my mom.
    My mom launched a one-woman battle against the government. She spent her days writing to the president, to her congressmen, to the AEC and to scientists. She penned editorials to our county newspaper headlined: "They are Killing Us, Not the Russians!"
    A chart hung on the wall in our dining room with rows of square boxes drawn on it. Each box represented a home within a three-block radius of ours. As someone in each home was diagnosed with a disease, Mom would draw an "X" on the house. In high school, a precancerous tumor on my ovary was surgically removed. Two years later, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune debilitating muscle disease. Mom drew an X on our house.
    My mom declared her own war. Hers was against a government who had deemed her family and neighbors, her whole town, expendable.
    She gathered a group of townspeople (suffering from a variety of cancers and autoimmune diseases) and photographed them in our backyard. She mailed the "Downwinders" photo to media across America. And, the media responded. My mother and her "chart" appeared on Ted Koepel, the Today show and in countless magazines and newspapers everywhere.
    Mama passed away before my breast cancer diagnosis in 1993. It was the type of breast cancer the women of Japan developed years after their exposure to radioactive fallout. I survived the surgery, the months of radiation treatments and the endless chemotherapy.
    I continued to hear my mother's courageous voice: "I'm doing this for you, Shelley. Someone must be held accountable for what they did to my ballerina."
    And so, I grew up to be an activist. Like my mother, I now write letters to my president, plead with my senators to vote against funds for Nevada test-site readiness and continue to speak out for downwinders. Recently, I was honored to represent downwinders in campaign ads for the re-election of Congressman Jim Matheson whose legislation fights the renewal of nuclear tests.
    I am even more honored to be my mother's daughter. I learned so much from you, Mom. When I dare to ask questions and demand answers and accountability from those in authority; when I fail to be intimidated by senior senators who seek to minimize my fear of nuclear waste storage and renewed testing, I know that I learned something about courage and tenacity from you.
    Truth is: I'm doing this for you, Mom.
   ---
   Michelle Thomas is a lifelong resident of St. George. Her mother, Irma Thomas, was honored (posthumously) for decades of work on behalf of Downwinders.
  
* (Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance 
     with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *