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Before Erin Brockovich, there was you

The story of a quiet hero.

By Ashley HerzogPublished 2 years ago 7 min read
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Leo Gorie must have known he was dying when he started on the mission of his life. He wasn’t wrong to think his fate was sealed and he had nothing to lose. He had spent decades installing asbestos as a construction worker and president of the Building Trades Union. Despite repeated assurances that asbestos was safe, the asbestos fibers had invaded Leo’s lungs. He had cancer.

The worst part? Rich businessmen who owned the asbestos mines and sold it for use in construction work knew it was killing people. In 1918, Prudential Life Insurance reported that American insurance companies usually denied coverage to asbestos workers because of the “assumed health-injurious conditions of the industry.”

1918. For reference, Big Business knew the dangers of asbestos exposure six years after the sinking of the Titanic. The Roaring '20s had yet to come roaring in. Leo himself wasn’t born until November 1928. Two years later, a major asbestos company, Johns-Manville, circulated an internal corporate memo, detailing all the ways asbestos workers were being maimed and killed.

Leo should have been going to school at Latin, a Catholic high school, in the early 1940s. But his father, a sailor on the Great Lakes, died aboard a commercial ship on Lake Erie when Leo was ten. His mother, a widow with three sons, started drinking.

Leo didn’t have much direction after that. Sometimes, after his mother paid her tab and went home, the bar owners would feed him dinner. After all, he seemed hungry and was unusually thin, to the point his friends nicknamed him “Billy Bones.”

He wasn’t unknown to the Cleveland police, who once caught him and his buddies on top of a bank building in downtown Cleveland. They drove him home in a police cruiser. They already knew him fairly well, inasmuch as he was a chronic truant. He would knock on the windows of his school and wave to his friends instead of going to class. But when he did show up, “He always got an A,” so they let it slide. Rumor had it his mother couldn’t afford the tuition, and Leo felt bad for making her pay it. He wanted to drop out of school and go to work.

Leo Gorie at his wedding to Regina Masterson. They were both 18.

After what happened to his father, he shied away from sailing, which had been the Gorie men’s vocation since they arrived in Cleveland from Ireland as famine refugees. Leo was the great-grandson of Edward J. Gorie, a Great Lakes ship captain who earned his own chapter among the Marine Captain Biographies in the official History of the Great Lakes. Leo’s grandfathers cussed like sailors and lived like drunken pirates. They must have been tough as nails — then again, so was he. Instead of sailing, he chose construction.

It was a fateful choice at a crucial time in the history of construction work. Around 1943, the year before Leo Gorie dropped out of high school,

The president of Johns-Manville says that the managers of another company were “a bunch of fools for notifying employees who had asbestosis.” When one of the people in attendance ask, “Do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they drop dead?” According to deposition testimony, the response was, “Yes. We save a lot of money that way.”

— Martindale Legal Library

Leo went off to work as a union construction worker anyway. Two decades later, he was voted in as president of the Building Trades union. Inspired by the civil rights marches of the 1960s, he became the first union leader in Cleveland to voluntarily desegregate. Some of his men threatened to quit if they were forced to work with “n — — rs.” Leo told them to quit; the men who felt this way made the worst construction workers anyway. As he predicted, they stayed — but voted him out in retaliation. His days as a union president were over.

He wasn’t in the best health as the 1970s commenced. He smoked cigarettes, a vice he was never proud of. He got tired easily and had a chronic, painful cough. But even then he didn’t slow his roll. After leaving the building trades, he spent more time at home with Regina, the wife he married at age eighteen, and their six kids. He took in his ailing mother, who was now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Leo’s mother had three sons, his friends would later recall, and of all of them, she disfavored Leo. She chose to dote on his two younger brothers instead. But when the boys were grown, Leo was the one who took her in. After getting his mother situated in his three-bedroom home in Bay Village, Ohio — a house he had worked hard for, and was proud to afford on construction wages — he went back to work.

His daughter Lynne (whom Leo insisted on calling by her full name, Mary Lynne), says he started traveling to Mississippi for work, although she wasn’t sure what he did there. More construction, probably. He brought home a puppy, that’s what she remembers.

In 1978, he also started doing research. He had always been a good student and an avid reader. He went back to the library. He knew there was something about asbestos that couldn’t stay secret forever. He had spent twenty years installing asbestos fibers in office buildings, apartment complexes — even St. Raphael, the Catholic church in Bay Village where he was a founding member and the head priest, Nelson Callahan, was his childhood friend. Now he was ready to go and rip it all out.

He shared his findings with Bob Sweeney, another childhood friend from the Irish-American enclave in the Kamm’s Corner neighborhood of Cleveland. Bob was a lawyer and a former Democratic Congressman who had just been elected to the Cuyahoga County Commission. (Bob Sweeney was also the son of Congressman Martin Sweeney and, if nobody minds me saying so, the cousin of Cleveland’s most infamous serial killer, Dr. Edward Sweeney, whom the Sweeney family covered for.) Leo was an Irishman, a Clevelander, and a Democrat as well, so he showed Bob what he had found on the asbestos companies.

By now, Leo’s cancer was terminal. Bob Sweeney would go on to become a multimillionaire, and his relatives ruled the Democratic party in Cleveland for the next twenty-five years, riding on their reputation as asbestos crusaders. They’re still running for office as progressive crusaders for the little guy. When Leo Gorie died three weeks after doctors confirmed he had terminal lung cancer, got an obituary in the local paper. He also got a funeral attended by thousands, as well as a eulogy from Nelson Callahan, his close friend who was now heading St. Raphael as a priest. Callahan opened the eulogy by saying, “Today, I want to discuss, simply: goodness.”

To him, Leo Gorie embodied goodness. Callahan told the mourners he had spoken to Leo almost daily in the last weeks of his life. Like the tough-as-nails Captain Edward Gorie, he didn’t fear death. In fact, if an autopsy on his lungs proved they were full of asbestos fibers, death was a small price to pay in order to save generations of construction workers from the same fate. If the powers-that-be used his case to justify ripping out all the asbestos from the schools and apartment buildings, his work on earth was done.

He thought if he recovered from lung cancer, Big Business would use it as proof asbestos was safe. In fact, I found proof that at least one Big Business offered him a great deal of money to pay for his cancer treatments and send his grandkids to college, on the condition he keep quiet about his research. Leo Gorie rejected it. As for his time working in Mississippi? I found out via an inquiry at the National Archives that Leo Gorie was secretly involved in the civil rights movement. Although I’m still waiting on the full file, it seems he was down South helping with desegregation efforts.

As Father Callahan said, God knows who gets the credit. Nobody is stopping to cash in their stocks on their way to Heaven. The Sweeney family, and their law firms, got their settlements and attorney’s fees — millions of dollars’ worth. They were in it for money and political clout, and they got it. But today, I would like to make sure Leo Gorie gets the credit. The late Bob Sweeney’s official Wiki biography recalls that

Sweeney was one of the first lawyers to bring forward a lawsuit related to asbestos. During his research, he discovered an incriminating document that showed that the manufacturers of asbestos had been aware of its dangers for half a century but conspired to conceal the information from the public. As a result of large settlements from the asbestos manufacturers, he would go on to earn millions of dollars.

His research? It was Leo’s research. I never got to meet Leo Gorie, but I know I will, someday.

Until then, I’ll be carrying the torch.

Leo Gorie is my grandfather.

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About the Creator

Ashley Herzog

If you like my work, feel free to tip your writer.

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