GUEST POST: William Thaddeus Stevens III

The following guest blog was submitted by Kim. If you'd like to have a guest post please refer to the following link 'Be A Guest Blogger' and e-mail me at LungCancerFundraiser@gmail.com.

 

My uncle, William Thaddeus Stevens III or as we liked to call him Uncle Bill, was an extraordinary man; as a navy veteran, corporate lawyer and an amateur historian, he lived life to the fullest. Uncle Bill had graduated in May 1939 from Duke University and soon afterwards enlisted in the US Navy. As luck would have it, his first ship was USS Arizona and his first port of duty was Pearl Harbor. Uncle Bill was right in the middle of it when the Japanese aircraft attacked his ship on the morning of December 7, 1941 and was one of the survivors who managed to swim to safety.
 

After the war, Uncle Bill went to University of Chicago for Law school and practiced law in a prestigious firm in New York. While a corporate lawyer mainly, Uncle Bill was also intimately involved with the civil rights era and even worked for some time with the famous lawyer Herbert Wechsler on his Supreme Court brief in the matter of New York Times v. Sullivan, one of the most important cases of that era. This was before he was diagnosed with lung cancer, to which he succumbed a few months later, leaving behind a grieving widow and an adolescent son. It was a life well lived but cut painfully short because Uncle Bill would have gone places. Before being diagnosed with cancer, he was flirting with the idea of running for the House of Representatives and he would have been a great legislator.
 

Uncle Bill’s lung cancer came as quite a shock to everyone because as a health nut (before being health conscious was fashionable), Uncle Bill had kept away from smoking. He did enjoy the occasional cigar with scotch but that was it. It should not have been enough, on its own, to cause him lung cancer. So what caused it? This was around the time, when increasingly experts and medical researchers were pointing out that something was amiss with asbestos. At the time, I had just started med school at Harvard, where I came across a research paper on the use of asbestos in navy ships. On my prodding, father contacted a lawyer friend of Uncle Bill’s. They together came up with the plausible idea that Uncle Bill may have been exposed to asbestos on USS Arizona from 1939 to 1941. By pulling a few strings in Washington, father managed to confirm that those who served aboard USS Arizona did in fact get exposed to asbestos. Indeed a lot of those sailors who survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were exposed to fumes of burning asbestos, causing them lung cancer from asbestos exposure.
 

My aunt, Uncle Bill’s widow, and her son filed a lawsuit against the Navy. This lawsuit created quite a stir back then. The Navy was sued for not just the pain and suffering their actions had caused Uncle Bill’s family but also for loss of future earnings.
 

Lung cancer and asbestos have a direct nexus. In fact asbestos is the second most common cause of lung cancer. Navy veterans, sailors and those who have worked on Navy shipyards have high risk of developing asbestos related diseases, including mesothelioma and lung cancer from asbestos.



 

 

The following guest blog was submitted by Kim. If you'd like to have a guest post please refer to the following link 'Be A Guest Blogger' and e-mail me at LungCancerFundraiser@gmail.com.