AGMET

The next future Super Fund site I had contact with I actually worked at.

Agmet had been started to reprocess the silver nitrate from obsolete x-rays back into silver. The basic process was to use an acid bath to strip the silver nitrate from the x-rays and process it back into silver electrolyticly. 

I answered an ad right after New Years Day 1973 for a chemist.  I had been laid off from the research lab at General Foam at the end of the year and my wife was pregnant with who proved to be our oldest son, Kyle.  They had bought an atomic absorption spectrophotometer(AAS) and all the necessary accessories, with the idea they would be able to tell when an electrolytic bat, of which they had several, was loaded up on silver and should be changed.

They wanted someone temporary who could set it up and get it running and then train their main lab technician, who didn’t know anything about AASs, to operate it.  At that pointing my life I had not been out of work so many times or so long that I was desperate enough to take something that was not intended to be permanent, but I thought why not.  I had run one at Allentown Testing Labs right out of college, and as it turned out, Manny, the man who ran the plant, knew nothing about them, which turned into an advantage for me I suppose.

Anyway I wasn’t hired off the interview and went back home.  I think they didn’t want to have to pay someone with a degree.  Anyhow after about 3 weeks, I hadn’t found anything else, and told my wife that they were not going to get too many people in off the street that knew anything about AASs, a sit was  a comparatively new technology at the time, so I called them back and yes, they hadn’t gotten anyone and I should come back in for  a talk.  I got the job.

I found out years later that their location, between Lofty and Delano (named after the family of FDR’s mother, who had coal lands in the area years ago) southwest of McAdoo, Pa., had been put on the Super Fund list.  I think it may have been abandoned at some point by the owners with a lot of acids and plastic x-ray substrate sheets left lying around.

A foot note to this story.  Many years later I came into possession of the AAS I had been asked to set up at Agmet, how is not germane to the present discussion. It was long since rendered not usable by years of abandonment, but I still have it.