Ch25 - "Ground Rounds" is more than a lecture. Why can't the "brainiacs" resolve Renata's exposures?

CHAPTER 25 GRAND ROUNDS February 10th 1981

Scientists and their tribe are odd.

If they find an explanation they move on, but when they can’t, they seek fresher responses to progressively older questions. While Kern’s pyramidal roof theory accounted for some of the city’s residential lead issues, other times it failed. In particular it didn’t seem to apply to their index case, baby girl Renata.

Brooklyn sought counsel from multiple sources across the last weeks of 1980, sometimes reaching to the east coast and other times more locally. On a snowy February day he called his former ridergiver, hoping the Olympic race car crew chief would confirm his industrially-based assertions.

Instead the crew chief explained that race car fuel was largely mixed off-site, minimizing the Olympic spillage hypothesis.

Brooklyn rambled to another favorite topic, one of take-home poisons, referring to chemicals left where they don’t belong.

Amused by ramblings of a largely unremembered caller, the crew chief volunteered he was employed as a foundry foreman, shortly querying Brooklyn about green sand knowledge. Confessing to an absence of green sand knowledge, Brooklyn absorbed the foundry worker’s words. Green sand is a sticky mixture that has previously served as a mold for molten metal, lead included. Sadly, lessthan green sand has found its way into home gardens and even children’s sand boxes. Brooklyn shortly stared down a figurative rabbit hole,

hastily thanking the foundryman before hanging up to seek Mel’s assistance.

Given Mel arrived earlier on a recently-purchased three-speed bike, the professor pair drove Brooklyn’s Citroen to a Guinotte avenue address. While Brooklyn activated the Citroen’s parking brake–leveler, Mel reviewed field notes, ones applicable to a battered mobile home enlarged through a conventional-framing.

Brooklyn noticed a homemade sandbox positioned adjacent to a swing set, finding its contents very unbeach-like. Both shortly knelt, scooping lumpy sand into date-labeled baggies. Days later Snoops editorialized their stooped postures connoted reverence, perhaps the sort that applies to sick children.

Sensing their sandbox-related anxiety, Racer explained that their lead-in-sand specimens would be the last analyzed that day.

Listening to their descriptions of Renata’s play area, Racer reviewed some of his Coke bottle – milk jug herbicide misgivings, thoughts wandering occasionally toward Andy. He question whether the former popcorn prankster benefitted from five hundred community service hours.

While that day’s Jarrell-Ash’s output was less than record breaking it was nearly nine when the Guinotte sand specimens took a turn. Both lead-in-sand samples yielded off-scale high’s requiring serial dilutions in favor of more measurable results.

Short of ten by only a minute, Racer powered down the Jarrell-Ash before phoning Brooklyn to let him know that the Guinotte sand box samples didn’t just contain lead, their content approximated that of Missouri lead ore.

Other desperate parents, ones seeking similarly inexpensive options, would tragically repeat the Renata repurposed green sand scenario. Just as Kansas City had shared dreadful heat wave consequences with St. Louis, children across Missouri suffered incalculable intellectual losses from heavy metals and improperlyapplied pesticides.

From humble origins, the Brainiac team added speed, adding environmentalists and code inspectors to its ranks. Rather remarkably, Racer returned to his cycling avocation, joined by fellow boarder and K-L-W employee, Morris Johnson, Jr.

While Racer’s world again extended past the Jarrell-Ash alcove it never reached the Champs-Elyees. Racer’s sense-of-humor perhaps pinnacled when he informed the credit union’s Phyllis he wished to withdraw two one hundred bills to restock a bicycle-based safety deposit box, causing her to wonder why a former railroad employee didn’t hide his get-out-of-jail money in his boots.

For a few weeks Brooklyn served as spokesman for a radiobased public health campaign. Anyone listening to WHB prior to six a.m. might have detected a pronounced New York City accent.

The Call contacted Consuelo one evening as she prepared dinner.

Reporter Rex sought Consuelo’s opinion regarding take home poisons. Finding the inquiry isolated from either Bill’s cough or mule-based air pollution, she deferred. Have a good evening, Rex. News outlets struggled to understand why a bicycle store owner had partially resolved a public health crisis. The Call published an archived Million Dollar Speedway photo, the accompanying story described Indianapolis cycling champion, Major Taylor’s successes (1878 – 1932).

Rex photographed Morris in a Finest cap. The caption was pure Morris. F-U-J-I is my choice, the Finest delivers. Readers wondered whether he were self-referencing or perhaps describing his bicycle.

Dr. Les Miles studied accounts of the Brainiacs’ successes, noting the absence of Dr. Brian Wozniak’s name, pleased to have met someone else foregoing personal recognition in favor of broader good. Les made a note to invite Woz to the Monday jazz jam.

The health department’s Dr. Beers was similarly pleased to have kept the huckster chelationists at bay. With spring 1981’s arrival, Mel returned to fern-bed sojourns with departed Marines and a similarly ephemeral Aimée.

Academic meetings require titles. Office Lady may have been pre-occupied with dinner plans as she typed GROUND ROUND, 3 - 4 PM FRIDAY

Yes, she abandoned her multi-line phone to retrieve entrées – ‘er entries, shortly producing corrected copy.

GRAND ROUNDS, 3 - 4 PM FRIDAY

Brooklyn donned a Big River lab coat before escorting two grand rounds speakers, ones originating with St. Louis-based Major League Chemicals. Students had pored over corporate reports to verify the speakers’ salaries exceeded the pay total for their eightperson faculty.

A seminar devoted to defoliant issues aroused mixed emotions in Racer. As a Missouri-Pacific employee he and Andy had dispensed Major League herbicides in tank-car volumes, soil sterilants, too.

Listening through introductions of Ralph Horncastle and Andy Sauerbier, Racer questioned the effectiveness of his efforts in dispensing expensive chemicals. While Major League estimated effectiveness via statistical protocols, its scientists grew plants in controlled plots, but perhaps more importantly, didn’t apply herbicides during hailstorms or floods, hardly limitations for the railroad.

Everyone struggled to hear Horncastle, given distracting fan whir originating with the projector. Horncastle thanked everyone for coming before moving to cheery news that Major League would soon market tandem herbicides, ones capable of immediate wilt-andbrown actions paired with pre-emergent or spray-and-wait characteristics. Major League’s newest entries’ could have doubled as action figure descriptions.

FINALE, COUP D’ GRAS, VERDICT, FINAL OUTCOME.

Major League’s circuit speakers asserted that herbicidal growth retardancy was specific to plants and inapplicable to humans, a drill-down that caused Woz and Racer to squirm in uncomfortable student desks. Racer suppressed the urge to question Horncastle about working and even living with Sauerbier on a trainset loaded with thirty-thousand gallons of such tandem chemicals.

Woz’ angst originated in recent experiences mostly originated in treating a forty-three-year-old woman found unresponsive postingestion of two-ounces of a chlorophenoxy herbicide. While suicidal ideation drove misuse of a Major League product, Dr. Wozniak’s other reality was that she had expired on hospital day forty-two.

During the Q&A, Dr. Wozniak questioned Sauerbier regarding emergency room resources appropriate to herbicide poisonings, referring to material safety data sheets. Beyond agreeing on the importance of these sheets, Sauerbier didn’t add much.

Satisfied with their speaker- salary review, students awaited Prof Mel’s inevitable and likely unanswerable questions. But rather than plant-only toxicity skepticism, Mel attacked along an unprotected flank. These chemicals’ intended effects won’t persist Mel carried his rationale in a flat case, one that housed two dried horsetail weeds, the second half-again as large as its travel partner Holding the plants side-by-side, Mel requested a show-of-hands regarding which had been harvested post-herbicide. Raising the larger plant, only the class clown posited it as herbicide-treated.

The smaller horsetail plant prompted a near unanimous hand raise.

Mel then tossed a Milky Way candy bar to the student comedian for an unlikely although technically correct response. With the clock’s hands nearing four, attendees remained, confident Mel was about to place the speakers on the ropes. Mel claimed contemporary agro-chemical use resembled another ill-advised practice, one of unnecessarily prescribing antibiotics.

Frustrated with perspectives misaligned with corporate-fueled enthusiasm, Sauerbier searched a sales valise for a reprint that he claimed refute Mel’s ineffectiveness assertion. Following two minutes of awkward silence, Horncastle took over, noisily loading their slide carousels into an embossed Major League sales valise.

Grand Rounds’ conclusion was heralded by the sound of two spring-loaded metal staples fed into matching valise hasps.

Anxious to loosen his Tabasco-stained tie and retire home for a nap, Brooklyn limited further questions.

LET’S HAVE A BIG HAND FOR MAJOR LEAGUE.