The day coal smoke choked St. Louis: Revisiting local history

The year was 1932. Eighteen months later, the filtered room was home to twice as many critters as the other.

“I’d see these little shavers get the sniffles and then flicker out,” Dr. Lee Wallace Dean, a research physician, said of the unprotected population.

The killer was the coal-smoke pollution that smothered St. Louis every winter. Factories, locomotives and homes burned sooty, high-sulfur soft coal from mines in Southern Illinois. It was cheap and plentiful, but it belched thick, choking smoke. It darkened the daytime and covered everything with black dust.

St. Louisans had grumbled about it since at least the 1820s. The city adopted its first smoke ordinance in 1867, but pollution grew with the city. By the 1930s, national studies called St. Louis air the nation’s worst. In 1936, a St. Louis grand jury called the city “a nose and throat doctor’s paradise.”

Five years later, the air was much clearer. How that happened is one of this community’s signal achievements. It required battling entrenched household habits and major interests from business and labor. And it took an infamously nasty day to force change.

The solution was to greatly reduce the use of Illinois coal. The St. Louis Smoke Abatement League, a reform organization, proposed the idea in 1933. Coal interests howled, arguing for 25,000 miners and 15,000 distributors. The Coal Exchange of St. Louis urged people to install more efficient furnaces.

There was serious talk of building neighborhood power plants to provide steam for houses, much like the “steam loop” that still heats many downtown buildings. In 1937, the Board of Aldermen voted to require that low-quality coal be “washed,” an expensive process that smaller mines couldn’t afford.

It didn’t work. Dealers kept slipping across the Mississippi River bridges with dirty coal. Then the city required them to sell smaller chunks. Coal interests opposed that, too.

Then came Nov. 28, 1939, or “Black Tuesday” — the ninth day of thick smoke with a winter season barely begun. Bright sunshine illuminated the suburbs. East of Kingshighway, motorists used headlights to inch through haze. Trains ran late. Street lights stayed on, glowing dimly.

This time, it was the gasping citizenry that howled. Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann created a special Smoke Elimination Committee, including Raymond R. Tucker, an engineer and the city’s dogged smoke commissioner. Three months later, the committee recommended that all customers, big and small, install efficient and expensive mechanical fireboxes or use anthracite, high-quality hard coal.

On April 8, 1940, aldermen adopted the plan 28-1 after endorsing, then rejecting, a last-minute exemption for railroads. About 250 angry coal dealers heckled from the gallery during the vote.

The city helped arrange shipments of hard coal from Arkansas for the next winter. Illinois communities talked of boycotting St. Louis-made products. City smoke inspectors hunted “bootleg” coal dealers in alleys. But changing fuel did the job.

For winter 1940-41, the Weather Service reported seven bad smoke days compared to 30 the year before. Railroads bought diesel engines. Homes and businesses switched to natural gas. In five years, the city cut coal smoke by 75 percent.

Raymond Tucker, dogged smoke-pollution fighter

Raymond R. Tucker was teaching mechanical engineering at Washington University when he became secretary to Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann in 1934. Three years later, he helped write the city's first major coal-smoke ordinance, which created a powerful new job of smoke commissioner.

Nobody wanted it. The word around engineering circles was that the political headaches weren't worth the $6,000 salary.

Tucker already made that as mayor's secretary. Dickmann talked him into taking the job, even though the ordinance wouldn't allow for a raise.

Tucker jumped into it with determination and an engineer's eye for detail. He soon concluded that the problem was the fuel, not how it was burned.

He backed the call for banning low-quality coal — Illinois coal — except in furnaces with automatic stokers, an expensive proposition that made the cheap coal impractical for most customers. He was Dickmann's expert when the mayor persuaded the aldermen to adopt that key reform in 1940.

Tucker returned to the university in 1942 and later served as city civil defense director for two years until 1953, when he ran for mayor. He was re-elected twice, becoming the city's second three-term mayor, but lost his bid for a fourth term to Alfonso J. Cervantes in 1965.

Later on, Tucker was fond of saying that the job of smoke commissioner was tougher than being mayor. He died in 1970 at age 73.

Newspaper wins Pulitzer Prize for smoke reporting

On Nov. 26, 1939, the Post-Dispatch ran a lead editorial of about 1,400 words under the headline, "An Approach to the Smoke Problem." It called for a community-wide effort to solve "the evil that is ruining our city."

Two days later became known as Black Tuesday, when the blanket of coal smoke covering the city was so thick that motorists and streetcar operators had trouble seeing where they were. Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann later said the fortuitously timed editorial "gave the opportunity we were looking for" in enacting needed reform.

The newspaper covered the issue with nearly daily articles, features and photographs — nothing flashy, just thorough journalism. The staff effort earned the Post-Dispatch the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for public service.