Nancy Classics by Ernie Bushmiller for April 14, 2016

I grew up in a town that had a paper mill, a veneer mill, an oil refinery, a chemical plant, and a pogy processing plant (I’ll let you look that up on the web). Most days the effluvia climbed high into the atmosphere and was dispersed, but sometimes humidity and air pressure kept them close to the ground. On those days you could literally tell which way the wind was blowing by the prevailing odor in the air.

The Union Stockyards in Chicago were very “odoriferous” until they were gradually phased out in the 1960s. I remember as a child smelling the stench when the wind came from that direction!

My husband grew up on a side of town where Union Camp and Glidden Paints had their buildings. During the daytime, the odor was strong, at best. At night, the empty barrels would be opened to off-gas. Then it became downright overwhelming. I always got a headache if we went to town…

Could be Pasadena, Texas, just south east of Houston. Between the oil refineries and the ship channel, we used to call it “Stink-a-dena”!

I grew up outside of Pittsburgh and the H.J. Heinz company had a big facility on the North Side. When they were making vinegar you could smell the acrid, nostril-tingling odor miles away.

I used to live in a rural area, about 30 percent active farms with livestock. The manure from the dairy farms was spread on the fields, and that was a fertile smell..But there was a veal farm about half-a-mile away, and that was a sick, diarrhea smell when the wind blew toward us (veal calves live a miserable short life — look it up). .And some old farm family about two miles away had pigs running around eating garbage collected from the nearby town. The muddy barnyard and dialpidated house looked like Dogpatch with the animals all over, escaping onto the road and occasionally run over. The smell was horrible for the farm’s small size, and spread to a radius of several miles. .If that little farm with only a few score pigs was so smelly, you can imagine what huge pig farms are like. But I suppose it depends on how they are managed.

That’s some neighborhood.

God bless the EPA.

Garbage incinerator! Haven’t seen one of those since I was a small child.

We lived by a huge bakery/factory for a well known company . Was heaven