It is Saturday morning, and Jim Smith stands at his stall in the Old Paris Flea Market, a recycled warehouse near Oklahoma City's railroad yards. Before him are tables laden with things to sell or swap: beer mugs, some tiny and some as big as umbrella stands, plus old bottles, crystal goblets and ceramic figurines.
A young man in tight blue jeans and tooled leather boots approaches not to buy but to gab. "Say, Jim. You want a full military funeral when Kerr-McGee gets done with you? We'll have to find you a lead coffin so you don't contaminate the cemetery. How many pall bearers you figure it takes to haul a lead coffin?"
That bit of morbid humor refers to possible resentment by the Kerr-McGee Corp., a major energy conglomerate, over testimony Smith has given in a bitter trial. It is the celebrated $11.5 million negligence suit brought by the heirs of Karen Silkwood, a former employee at a Kerr-McGee plutonium-processing facility in nearby Crescent (pop. 1,568). She accused the company of being cavalier about worker safety, and then died at 28 in a still mysterious car accident in 1974. The trial, however, focuses on charges that Kerr-McGee was negligent in a series of plutonium contaminations that took place in the nine days before her death.
Because Smith served for almost six years as a plant supervisor with Kerr-McGee, he was briefly last month the main event in Oklahoma City's federal courthouse. Neither accused nor accuser, he was required to tell the truth about subjects he would rather not have discussed. Now the witness is finding that day in court still intrudes on his life, even at the Old Paris Flea Market.
"Hey, Jim," a woman with strawberry blond hair knotted atop her head calls from a nearby stall. "You're our star. I want to shake your hand, honey. You're a celebrity. They even had you on TV." Putting out one cigarette, Smith then lights another. At 47, a short, broad-shouldered man in tan dungarees, he has the look of someone who could have spent his life punching in at an automobile plant or a paint factory. But Smith is a celebrity because the assembly lines he manned produced goods made of plutonium, a radioactive element so deadly that even microscopic doses can be lethal.
Formal schooling ended for Smith at the tenth grade. Then, through more than 20 years of self-education and training programs, he learned to master topics like atomic weights, valences and isotopes. Ironically, Smith loved the work. His testimony may have made him a hero to antinuclear activists—and all the more so in the wake of Three Mile Island—but for Smith the workaday life with plutonium fulfilled that old American dream of self-made success.