Word: silkwoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bizarre story. Just before duck on a November day in 1974. Karen Silkwood was killed on her way to meet a New York Times reporter. She had said she was bringing evidence which would prove that her employer, the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation, was manufacturing defective plutonium fuel rods, but her car went out of control on a lonely stretch of Oklahoman highway and the documents never arrived. Only a few days earlier, she had been contaminated by eating and inhaling plutonium, which AEC investigators concluded was deliberately placed in her apartment...
...people had ever heard of Karen Silkwood on that fatal winter day, but over the next five years her death sparked rallies and candlelight processions in New York, Chicago, St. Petersburg and Cleveland. A symbol for the feminists, the environmentalists, and the labor movement, her name was shouted at Seabrook and invoked in union halls. In 1979, when a federal court jury found Kerr-McGee guilty of negligience and awarded the Silkwood estate $10.5 million in damages, her picture made the front pages of papers across the nation. She became what Richard Rashke calls "a nuclear martyr...
...that he shouldn't be permitted in a courtroom." He has not lost a case before a jury in twelve years, even though he regularly takes on the polished lawyers who represent powerful corporations. The multimillion-dollar losers include the Kerr-McGee energy conglomerate, for allowing Employee Karen Silkwood to be contaminated with plutonium; Squibb, for marketing an inadequately tested pregnancy-detection drug (Gestest) that apparently caused birth defects; and, most recently, Penthouse magazine, for a 1979 article that libeled a former Miss Wyoming, Kimerli Pring. The jury awarded her $26.5 million last month, a record if it survives...
Thought Hold Out gives a culture shock as it drags you (yes, you still mourning the Browne of the '70s, you're a hold-out, too) into the '80s, there are a few things to remember the Old Jackson by: from the Karen Silkwood T-shirt hibernating beneath the cover's collegiate get-up to the extra-lyrical remarks following "Boulevard," there remains the characteristic sense of earnestness taken only half-seriously. Holding out is no longer the mythic concept of embattled separateness familiar from "Father On" or "From Silver Lake," nor is it the sole property of the omni...