The tumultuous 1960s brought out the activist in Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition leader
Published: Friday, November 14, 2003
BY STEVE TANNER
The mid to late 1960s set the stage for countless paradigm shifts among America's youth. For some it was a time of youthful indiscretion, followed by a retreat to the status quo. For Ted Smith -- whose grass-roots activism would, for starters, help protect the integrity of Silicon Valley's drinking water -- lessons learned in 1968 would define his life's mission and concept of community.
Smith, who co-founded the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in 1982 and serves as its executive director, might have become a professional football player had his knee held up.
"I went to college wanting to play football, and that was my identity. When I hurt my knee, I couldn't play football anymore. I looked around and said, 'Hm, there must something else in life,'" recalls Smith, who averts his eyes to the right as if watching a distant screening of his early adult memories.
Smith radiates a genuine warmth, which has an immediate disarming effect, despite his intense eyes, tall stature and booming voice. Reaching back into his rich archive of memory, Smith sets the stage for what eventually would be his life's turning point.
"I was still coming out of my jock phase," says Smith, referring to his first year at Wesleyan University and his first introduction to anti-war, anti-establishment activists. "These guys had long hair, were unkempt, loud, obnoxious. I thought, 'Who are these guys? They're never going to get anywhere.'"
But within a couple of years, Smith, sidelined by his injury and thus more involved in other activities such as music and current events, became more aware of the struggle for civil rights among black Americans and growing opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
In his final years of college, Smith says, he began to have more and more in common with the obnoxious longhairs he questioned his first year away from home.
But Smith's life was impacted most profoundly when the boundaries between his day-to-day life as a Vista volunteer in Washington, D.C. and the carnage of the six o'clock news were blurred. Vista, the AmeriCorps program Smith entered after graduation in 1968, took him from a middle-class, white existence to the center of a predominantly black neighborhood grieving the loss of Martin Luther King Jr. and besieged with riots and confusion.
Smith realized that although he managed to avoid the draft, he was unable to avoid the domestic war simmering at home.
"The war has come home," Smith thought, as he witnessed the riots following the 1968 assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy.
Shops were looted and burned to the ground, including the Safeway down the street from where Smith lived. He says the violence was sometimes so intense that he would have to hide, often with the help of his immediate neighbors. As a white visitor to a black neighborhood enraged by racial inequality, Smith says, his safety often was at risk.
"This was a time of intense rage, and we lived through it as being kind of the foreigners in a strange land," says Smith.
His heart was in the right place -- through Vista, he helped to get the Head Start program up and running in a neighborhood starving for a better education system -- but he realized the profound complexity of racial tensions at the time and learned that he could do the most good in his own community.
"It was this experience É that caused me to get enormously frustrated, enormously angry," Smith says. "There was so much injustice in the world; it was so unfair and overwhelming that I decided I needed to do something with my life that could, you know, make a difference."
Smith kept his promise to himself, enrolling in law school at Stanford University later that year to "get some tools and try to change the system."
Just getting through law school, he recalls, was a constant struggle of learning the necessary skills while maintaining his principles and ideals. Upon graduation, after having done community work in San Jose for a year, Smith settled down in the area and opened his own firm with another rookie lawyer and a paralegal.
Smith's firm fought on behalf of the "little guy." He says each small victory against larger firms and giant corporations reaffirmed his belief that he was on the right path.
But it was his work with cannery workers in the South Bay that would eventually lead to the creation of the Toxics Coalition. Amanda Hawes, an attorney who asked Smith to take on a discrimination case involving Mexican migrant and female workers at an area fruit cannery, would eventually partner with Smith in marriage.
Hawes was doing some work on behalf of the electronics workers, who often were exposed to hazardous chemicals. She suggested that Smith take up their cause. He admits he had very little faith he could effect change, seeing this as an issue that would have little interest from the community as a whole.
"I remember getting phone calls from people saying 'This isn't limited to one facility,'" says Hawes, a partner with San Jose-based Alexander, Hawes & Audet LLP, referring to the growing suspicion that chemicals used in electronics manufacturing were causing widespread problems. "But there didn't seem to be any illustrious examples of the effects of these chemicals."
Continued pressure from workers, and from workers' rights attorneys like Hawes, began to expose the so-called "clean industry's" dirty secrets. Then it became apparent that it wasn't just the workers in the valley who were at risk.
"It was really the discovery of groundwater contamination here in 1982 that prompted a whole transformation in my thinking. When the chemicals got out of the work place and into the groundwater, and then into people's drinking water É this light bulb went off," Smith recalls.
Twenty-one years later, SVTC has left a legacy of arguably safe drinking water, safer conditions for tech workers and the establishment of dozens of ordinances -- which have triggered federal laws -- dictating proper use and disposal of hazardous chemicals used in chip manufacturing and other tech sectors.
Like others who end up achieving what some write-off as unattainable visions of grandeur, it was Smith's summer in a virtual hell that forged a character able to bring his own community a little closer to paradise.
Steve Tanner is a Biz Ink reporter.
You can reach him at stanner@svbizink.com
© 2003 Silicon Valley Business Ink.
