ZACH CARTER
KENTUCKY’S
KING
Buckley had seen his friend Joe
Harding waste away to nothing.
The two had known each other
since childhood, when their families had adjoining corn and soybean farms in Tennessee and they
walked to school together along
crop-lined roads. Valedictorian
of his high school, Harding took
in a year of college while Buckley went off to war. But when the
two reunited at the plant, Buck-
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
ley began to notice how the work
made Harding sick and the bosses
hounded him for speculating
about possible radiation contamination. “They didn’t give him the
respect they should have,” Buckley
says. “He did his job. Joe came to
work after he looked like a ghost.”
Sores crept up Harding’s legs
and wouldn’t heal. Fingernail-like
protrusions grew out of his elbows, wrists, palms and the soles
of his feet. The nails, he said in an
audio diary, were “very, very painful.” He’d try to trim them, but
Known as the
“Atomic City,”
Paducah’s
cultural
identity
is largely
defined by
the uranium
enrichment
plant that
has operated
nearby for
more than 60
years.