Scraphogs Invade Hawthorne

A Nevada town faces unexploded bombs and simmering bias

Locally they are known as "scraphogs," and a few wear T shirts with a cartoon of a wild boar grinding a bomb in its teeth. Just after dawn each day, about 40 gather at the hillside, pick up pails and sift through the dirt and sagebrush for rusted metal and twisted steel. They occasionally dig up the nozzle of a Polaris missile or the casing of a 1,000-lb. bomb. Under the pitiless Nevada sun, each averages 1,000 lbs. of scrap metal a day. "It's rough work," says Billy Marshall of Hawthorne, Nev. "When I started, young guys would spend one day,...

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