Worlds Collide at Love’s Canal

In 1938, Hooker Electrochemical confronted a future without its founder when Elon died in a tragic automobile accident. The longtime patriarch was just 68 years old. Hosannas to his leadership piled up in a moving tribute album, which was quickly published as a special edition of the company newsletter, “Hooker Gas.” “Engineer, Industrialist, Patriot, Public Servant, Author, Humanitarian”: Elon Huntington Hooker was all of these things, the tribute declared, and would be sorely missed. Yet while Elon’s passing hit family and friends hard, it did not slow the firm’s extraordinary growth. Indeed, over the next thirty years, Hooker Chemical (as it soon became known) grew at an even more impressive rate than during Elon’s time. By midcentury, the company was a global leader in the production of an astonishing array of chemicals beyond bleaching powder and caustic soda—degreasers, rubbers, explosives, defoliants, plastics, and much more. One measure of its far-reaching reputation came in the late 1940s, when Hooker executive Bjarne Klaussen traveled from Niagara Falls to the South Pacific to watch a new round of atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. Cleared of its native inhabitants, the tiny island served as Ground Zero for a weapon far more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II. Klaussen was part of a small delegation from American corporations and universities that had made “special contributions” to the nation’s atomic development. “Hooker played an important role in the Manhattan Project,” the company historian bragged just a few years later (without providing further details, though they probably revolved around chemical igniters and explosives). The company would remain a key player on the Cold War chemical front for years to come. Hooker’s explosive growth during the 1940s and 1950s had a palpable impact on the Love Canal landscape too. For booming production overwhelmed the firm’s on-site disposal capacity. Searching for new ways to deal with this growing problem, Hooker resorted to “inground disposal” at sites beyond the Niagara plant.