Mryt Jones Oral Interview

Interviewer: Unknown
Interviewee: Myrt Jones, President, Mobile Bay Audubon Society (MBAS)
Date: May 27, 1992
Subject: Myrt Jones and the MBAS

Interviewer: May 27, 1992. Myrt, can you give me any idea how you got into the environmental movement and your first experiences with Mobile Bay Audubon Society?

Myrt Jones: Very vividly, over twenty years ago . . . we have a place at Mullet Point, a little summer home, and we were raising our kids to enjoy sailing, and swimming, and fishing, and all the good things around Mobile Bay, and we saw in the paper where Mobil had leased, very quietly, all the acreage at the mouth of the bay. We became very upset, our whole family did, and we sat around and talked, and one of my daughters, I have three daughters, said, why doesn't someone stop them? I said I don't know, sweetie. The next thing I knew I was involved. I'm a registered nurse. I had no background in any of this material, but I felt like that I was prepared to do something because, all of these years, I've had some kind of special support, whether it come from God, a guardian angel, or something. I had some kind of direction.

There was another lady that [be]came real concerned about what Mobil and the Department of Conservation had done. She put a full-page ad in the Eastern Shore Courier outlining what the situation was. I didn't know Ruth McDonald but I called her. I said, I'd like to sit and talk to you. So, we joined forces. And we were probably the first two that really got concerned about the situation. There happened to be a Save Our Bay club in Fairhope, Craig Sheldon had put it together, and he had a real good organization, but they were fighting Radcliff. Radcliff was dredging dead shells from the bottom of Mobile Bay, and they had been purported to be causing all kind of problems, water quality problems, destroying the grassbeds, and a lot of problems existed. So, that was their main focus for Save Our Bay. So, Ruth and I joined the club, and we eventually got them to oppose Mobil and the Dept. of Conservation. I got this idea to go to the morgue at the Mobile Press Register. I'd never done anything like that before. So, I went out and I told the lady [at the newspaper], I said, "Give me your folder on oil spills." She gave me this rather bulky folder, and I sat there and I was reading through it, making some notes, and there was a very small article that caught my eye. There was a spill from a barge in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts. Woodshull(?) Oceanographic Institute was doing some studies, in the very preliminary stages, and they carried it on through for, oh I know, seven years. Dr. Max Blumer was the individual identified in the article. So I sat down and just hand wrote a letter to Dr. Blumer and explained our situation here, and [that] I would like information on anything that he had put together. He was using the most up to date, scientific data gathering stuff, gas chromatography, or whatever they call that stuff. He sent me a little report and it was [entitled] Scientific Aspects of an Oil Spill. It was a bonanza. It was dynamite. As a lay person I could understand what he was saying, and I could see what I could do with it. We also at that time had the blow out at Santa Barbara. Just as an individual I called and I got in touch with a lady by the name of Lois Sidenberg (?). She, they were just thrilled to death to help us anyway they could. They sent me a whole bunch of slides, and with each slide they identified what it applied to and how damaging this spill was, and how on going it was, and how mad they were, and how inadequate the oil companies were in containing and probably handling that blow out. So, somehow I put together information from Dr. Blumer in with the slide program. I don't know how long you've got on your tape . . .

Interviewer: About an hour or two or three hours.

M.J.: Okay. Now, we started raising the public interest locally. Then we got state interest. And then the oil and gas board realized that they didn't have rules and regulations to apply to offshore drilling. So they realized they were going to have to draft and adopt these rules and regulations. They were going to have a public hearing in Montgomery. We had such strong support at this time that we told Governor Wallace that we wanted the public hearing here. [unintelligible] So, they had the first hearing here, and I read the proposed rules and regulations and they were real lousy. They had all kinds of loopholes in them. The people that attended the hearing downtown, it was an emotional frenzy. I got up there and, seems like I showed that slide program at that first meeting. Here is a housewife with very little background, but somehow I managed to get through showing that slide program. The oil companies and all these supporters of them just knew that they were going to have some problems, because I was using facts. That first hearing was not properly held. They felt like they needed to have another one. At the second public hearing, Mobil brought in all their big guns, and even brought in what we call the [unintelligible]. That's a biologist who had sold out to the oil company. She had stacks of material that she brought in, and she had been studying the Santa Barbara spill, and she was trying to say there's no problems, it's recovering nicely and all this kind of stuff. And she jumped up to Max Blumer's material . . . Well, Dr. Max Blumer came back after her. It was a professional battle then. Dr. Blumer came out on top. The geologists tried to counter some of the stuff that I had said, and all this. We had all the experts there and, eventually, I came to learn about the Mobile Bay Audubon Society, because they started getting involved. They asked me to come and speak before their group. So I took the slide program and spoke before their group. I was impressed with the Linzeys, Diane and Alicia Linzey, and some other people that were in the organization. Alicia asked me if I would join and I said, yes, be glad to. So I joined the Audubon Society.

Interviewer: What year was this?

M.J.: I don't remember. You'd have to check through, it might have been '74, it might have been a little bit later. I really, you know, twenty years has gone by and it's hard to recollect the date. Eighteen or twenty years, anyway, maybe longer. Then, we, oh, at the second public hearing, this guy with Mobil came up to me and said, "Have you ever seen an oil rig?" I said no. "Well, how can you fight something you've never seen"? And I said, "I have read a great deal, many documents, and I know that y'all don't respect our environment and you're causing a lot of problems, and you're having all these fires and explosions," and . . . he said, "Would you be interested in seeing one?" I said yes. So, he said, "We'll take you next weekend to New Orleans." I went home and told my husband and he said no way, I'm not going to let you go on that trip. My husband is kind of a knight in shining armor, we've been married forty years and he's protected me in many ways. He said they'll put you on a rig or a plane and throw you off, they'll do away with you, they'll kill you. He actually felt like that. So, I called George Smith and I said I can't come. "Well, why not?" I said, "Because my husband thinks that y'all will kill me." He said, "Myrt, we're not going to do that. We can't afford to do that. Let me talk to your husband." He became, my husband told him, "She can go but if something happens to her, I'm coming after you." So he was my special host for the trip. You want to stop here or do you want to go on?

Interviewer: No, go on.

M.J.: Okay. So, they, the oil companies, Shell Oil, sent their private plane to Mobile and they sent planes to other sections of Alabama, picking up individuals. This was kind of a red carpet tour that they put on every weekend to sell the oil companies as being good guys. I went with an open mind. But, before I went I had a little notebook, and they had in the newspaper a big article about a major spill in the Gulf of Mexico from a pipeline break. I just put that in my notebook and a few other things. We flew to New Orleans and they had this big deluxe meal on the plane. And this young lady from the League of Women Voters, she was with us, and there was some other people with us. She was just ga-ga, she was just real impressed. I said, well, just lay back and relax, I said, this is going to get better. So they put us in a limousine and took us to their real fancy motel, like [in] the middle of the French Quarter. They put us in individual rooms on individual floors. They completely separated us. They gave us time enough to get cleaned up. Then we went to a big board room and there were representatives from all the major oil companies. Those of us that were from Alabama, and maybe a few other places, we were sitting around a big table and they showed us a film about what we were going to be seeing that next day, a drilling rig and how it operated, all kinds of stuff. Mr. Bell, who happened to be the big boy with Mobil, got up to talk to us, and Mr. Bell, in his comments, was saying, well, you know, we're not having any problems . . . we're taking every advantage to protect the environment. So, I pulled up my little notebook and I said, Mr. Bell, this is really a fact-finding trip and I think you should really be up front with us. These individuals should realize that you are having this major spill out in the gulf. Oh yes, Ms. Jones, you're right. So he realized that I was going to keep him kind of straight. They took us out to Antoine's and wined and dined us. Then we spent several hours in the [unintelligible]. At two o'clock in the morning I had had enough and I said, I got to go back. So George Smith took me back to the motel room and, at six o'clock, we got up and got on a helicopter and flew over the marshes, the delta, of Louisiana. You could see the devastation of what the oil companies had done, the COE, and others. They had just emasculated that beautiful area with their pipeline corridors, their keyhole slips, and whatever. So, we landed at a Shell processing plant right on the edge of the delta. I took my little notebook out and I was making notes because -- during that period I had been to some conferences [that] EPA had funded my way and others to [to] educate us on clean water act, clean air act, [unintelligible] -- I had a little background. I was putting in my little notebook what I thought to be violations of the law at this facility and how little they cared what they might be doing to the environment. George said, "What are you doing, Myrt?" I said, "Well, you know, we got this third public hearing next week. I'm just making notes for it." So then they put us in a boat, it was real rough, and I don't mind the water. We made it out to the rigs and they showed us how they operated and everything. We came back and flew back to Mobile. No one knew that Lois Sidenberg was helping me bring an expert witness, Dr. Norman Sanders, to Mobile for this third hearing. Something told me to call the oil and gas board's attorney. His name was Watson. Before I left, I told him, I said, "Now, at the public hearing I want the three of us to be the first ones to speak" because Mr. Lambereaux, who was the head of the oil and gas board, and the oil and gas board made it a point to put us at the tail end of the meeting. Drag it out so [that] the public would get tired of waiting. Then, a lot of people left. Norman flew in, he stayed here. He was fantastic. He just had it all together. He had all kinds of degrees, a young man. He's the kind of guy that if an oil company wanted to put a rig up out in the Pacific Ocean, he was one of those that was in a boat at that location to keep them from putting that rig in. He had done that kind of action. He was sitting in the audience with my husband and I. The auditorium was packed. I didn't look at the two-page agenda, but when Lambereaux called the meeting to order, and we had T.V. cameras and all the media there, he said, we'll take the first thing on the agenda. It wasn't us. We were at the tail end. And, for some reason I jumped up and, I'm not a Roberts Rules person, my board will tell you that very quickly. I'm not very efficient in using Roberts Rules. But something said, go get 'em Myrt, they're out of order. So I told Mr. Lambereaux, and he was kind of a very, well he was or is, a very egotistical type of person, and I had had some [unintelligible] with him previously. I told him, Mr. Lambereaux, you're out of order. What do you mean, Ms. Jones? I said, according to Roberts Rules you're supposed to take old business first, and this is new business that you've got on the agenda. And besides, you remember, Mr. Watson, I called you and told you that there were three of us that wanted to be heard first. Mr. Watson said, yes you did. Mr. Lambereaux said, we're going to take a five minute break. So I sat back down. My knees were shaking and I was shaking. Norman said, "How in the world did you do that?" I said, "I didn't do it, but they were out of order." At least I felt they were. So, old Lambereaux comes back and he said, "We're going to have Ms. Jones and her other two people come up first and then we'll hear the rest." So I told Norman, I said Norman, go get 'em. That was our first real expert witness that got up, and he lambasted the oil companies. He said you can't cluster. If it hadn't been for their ineptness and their manipulating we wouldn't have had their blowout in Santa Barbara. They violated the law.

Interviewer: This is still Save Our Bay?

M.J.: You know, I don't remember. You've got all that information in. . .

Interviewer: Right.

M.J.: . . .the Archives, yeah. Those dates, somewhere in that period I did join the Audubon Society. I don't remember when I started speaking at that period for the Audubon.

Interviewer: Do you recall if the Linzeys had already established some records and files for the Audubon Society?

M.J.: Yeah. Those records are also in the Archives, the Linzeys records. The incorporation papers are, all this stuff that Alicia gave me years ago, is in the Archives. I put all of that stuff in. I've had no help and that's why its been such a mess maybe for you to go through. All the Linzeys materials that she gave me is in the Archives.

Interviewer: Basically you've taken it upon yourself to establish all those files and records and maintained them?

M.J.: Yeah.

Interviewer: In the past twenty years they haven't been handed around to other various members for them to keep or anything like that?

M.J.: Not to keep. Often times I had individuals, students from South, or other schools asking for materials on different issues, and then I would sort out materials and loan that material to them and they would in turn return it back, but I was always holding on to these, hoping someday that something could be done to provide a secure place for them. And thank goodness, Michael Thomason came up with the idea of putting them in the Archives.

Interviewer: So I guess the Linzeys basically initiated keeping the basic records, the charter and the basic resolutions that were initiated, and then when you joined . . . so basically they've been maintained by the Linzeys and yourself for the entire history.

M.J.: Right, there was very few records from the Linzeys, maybe one box full, maybe two box[es] full. Alicia pulled a fast one on me. When she got me to join the Audubon Society she immediately put me on the board of directors. She liked the way I handled myself, I guess, and she especially liked one remark that I made. I learned, see we had Audubon wildlife films back in those days, and they made the remark at the board that they were losing three to four hundred dollars a year putting on this program for the public. They had, I think, five films, and they were very costly films, but it was a community project. It was well attended. So, I said, "Well, why don't you go out and get money from sponsors?" Alicia said, "I don't know how to do that, do you?" I said, "I've never done it but I feel sure I can." "Okay, Myrt, you go get some sponsors." And I did. I got what they call conscience money. I got the industries to put up a couple of thousand dollars. That kind of got the film program on a good budgetary basis. Then, when the next election came up, she said, "Myrt, I would like to nominate you as president." I said, "I don't want to be president, I want to be just an Indian where I can do pretty much what I want to." "And besides, I don't know birds." In fact, I called the egret a swan. She said, "No Myrt, it's an egret." I said, "See, you don't want me to be president." "Oh Myrt, we'll work with you, we'll teach you, we'll help you." I said, "I'll give it a trial basis if I'm elected." I was elected and I've been president ever since.

Interviewer: [It] sounds like the files have basically been used as a reference library for people who need to research a certain area or are interested in something.

M.J.: No, mainly it's been material that I've gathered to help me get the facts in order for me to represent the society. I would tell the board what issues I would like for us to get into or what issues were going on and how I felt like, if we went a certain way, I would get direction from the board. They let me have a pretty free hand. I only had problems with two issues that I recall from the board. I really wanted to go the other way but the board reigned me in as the president. That was, they didn't want to join in with the suit against the reconstruction of the Dauphin Island bridge because we had some members that lived on Dauphin Island on the board and we had the attorney that was filing the lawsuit against the bridge, so it was a conflict. We kept out of that as a society, but as an individual I had my other ideas and feelings. The other thing that we didn't get involved in was the Tenn-Tom Waterway lawsuit. Birmingham Audubon and I think National Audubon and some others went after some section of the Tenn-Tom Waterway, and I felt very strongly that that was a boondoggle. See, I was on a citizen advisory committee at that time with the COE and I knew how bad it was, economically and environmentally and culturally. The board said no, we can't do that because it's such a hot potato. The Mobile Press Register and all these people down here support the Tenn-Tom and it would be bad for us to get involved. So, as a president I had to back away. As an individual I could do pretty much what I wanted to.

Interviewer: Can you explain to me a little bit how you categorized all the files. They don't seem to be in a chronological order, it's more a categorized order . . .

M.J.: Yeah.

Interviewer: . . . of different areas that you've been interested in, different parts that the Audubon Society's been involved in. That seems to be the way it is.

M.J.: It had to be issues in order for me to keep up with it. Because they're not chronologically in order is because I didn't have the time, I didn't have the people. It was a lot of support with the board, and in most instances it was not a lot of individual support in keeping these files and working with me on projects. Once in awhile I'd get some help from professionals or from some of the members, but, in reality, I just stuffed the material in a folder and keep it in the issue categories.

Interviewer: What we try to do at the archives is maintain any files received in the original order that the originator used.

M.J.: Don't necessarily do that [chuckles], not on these.

Interviewer: Usually that's what we try to do because that gives you, for people down the road years from now, it gives them an indication of how the organization worked and functioned, so we try to maintain things in the order that you actually used them.

M.J.: You're talking about chronologically now?

Interviewer: No, in the order that you actually used them, every day use. Right now we maintain everything in the exact order that you've given it to us.

M.J.: I think in the future the historians are going to realize that I was not that capable of keeping it in a chronological issue-oriented order. It was just, I was just lucky to be able to keep all these documents in the first place.

Interviewer: Do you know if any documents have been removed or withheld or been used by anyone, that aren't in the files now?

M.J.: Okay, the only documents. . .there's been nothing withheld except some up-to-date stuff that I'm still involved in. If anyone is reviewing some of these issues or documents and they need more up-to-date information, then they can contact me. For my own library I still have to maintain some of these documents myself. The majority is now in the archives. But nothing's been withheld.

Interviewer: This is a question not pertaining to the records but is about the society: do you feel that it is possible for industry and environmentalists to work together, is it possible to have progress and protect the environment at the same time, to work hand-in-hand?

M.J.: Yeah, that's what we've been saying for years. If we were brought into the process it would be a more balanced approach to protecting the environment and allowing proper growth. We've said that for years. We know we're going to have growth and we're going to have development, but we want proper growth and development to protect the natural resources, to protect the human life, and we want industry to respect and also our agencies, we've had more problems with agencies than industry, we've worked with industry on a lot of occasions. In fact, at our annual banquets and awards, we have given industry our annual coveted plaque because of something that they've done to improve their processes or to protect the environment. We've given one to Ceiba-Geigy, Scott Paper Company, Degussa. Ceiba-Geigy because they are a superfund site. They have caused a lot of problems but they are now trying to improve their processes, not only because they realize they can't continue to impact on the environment, but it's economics and good public relations. They were the first to build above-ground storage facilities, moving away from [unintelligible] lagoons into above-ground. . .the one of them that did the project, the [unintelligible], the material ran into the channel, they did have some uplifting and they had to redredge and place it somewhere else. A young fellow left the Corps and he went into business for himself, and he called me up several years later: "Myrt, how would you like to go up into the delta with us, Fish and Wildlife and some others are going to check a place they're going to put a keyhole slip in." I said, "Gee, I'd like to go with you." It wasn't a surprise. And so we went on up there. It was real nice, and the Fish and Wildlife people got out at the site and he and I were sitting in a boat and I asked him, I said, "Why are you so friendly with me?" He used to hate me [chuckles]. He said, "Well, Myrt, I've learned to respect you. I resented you because here I had to go to school all those years to get my degree in geology and you can speak my language and understand what is being said, and I resented your knowledge."

Interviewer: You've educated yourself over the last twenty years.

M.J.: Yeah, I've read all these books, well not all of them, but the majority of them. I put fictional books up when I first got started and started reading the Environmental Impact Statements because they're fascinating. I learned to see what it was they weren't saying instead of what it was they were really saying. I did self-educate myself. When a new [unintelligible] came along they found some kind of loophole and they dissolved that. Like I said, we did, in the Tenn-Tom Waterway we were given information and we were able to help stop the COE and the State Docks from channelizing the lower Tombigbee River. There was a very small study done, very weak study done called the Kearney (?) report, and we were given copies of it because we were on this committee. And I read it and I went back and blasted the COE at the next meeting, I said, "You've got to be kidding!" I said, "We can't afford to channelize that snake-like river system in order to make that a super highway on these economics, on these projected economics by Kearney." I said, "He doesn't know what he's talking about." I said, "You channelize that Tombigbee water system and you're going to bring flood waters straight on into Mobile, you'll be under water." That was one of the things I said. The sediment loads was another thing. And I said, "This Kearney report should be just torn up." Well, anyway, you'll notice when you look at the map, there is no channelized Tombigbee River south of, what, Demopolis, I think it is. So, being on the citizen advisory committee helped us get the information together and get Congress to back away from supporting that.

The Theodore Ship Channel was another advisory committee that I was on. Alicia was involved. This was way back there then. I was on the citizen advisory committee and we came out against the island out in the bay, because we felt that if they were going to dredge that ship channel into the Theodore Industrial Park, they should take that material and utilize it, put it on shore, keep it out of the bay, because the shallow productive bay bottoms would be lost. We didn't know the long-term consequences on the fishery resources. We didn't know the circulatory and the hydrological pattern changes. It's proven to be true that they shouldn't have put the island there because it's very costly to dredge that channel every couple of years and I'm told, this morning, that they had diked the island up to twenty feet in height. It's going to sink, and when it sinks, it's going to fill in the bay even more. It's very shallow. A lot of the sailboats that used to could sail around it can't do it because of their keels. The one thing that came out of the island that was not planned for on the proposal was the birds. When those brown pelicans nested and they were in danger, the COE realized that they had a problem. When you go out there now, I've forgotten how many species, gulls, terns, skimmers, brown pelicans, nest and raise hundreds of thousands of birds out there. And the Corps has to meet certain, well, the pelicans are now threatened, but they still have to take precautions to allow for those birds.

Interviewer: We have a lot of official documents and agency records and so on in your files. Are those routinely sent to you or do you have to request those type of files?

M.J.: Both. I received a lot of documents from a lot of these agencies just because I'm a contact. The board members have used them, some of the board members have used them in the past for different things. And, like I said, the students in the classrooms, in Mobile and Baldwin counties, have used the documents. I've attended a lot of conferences all over, and a variety of conferences: "The World After Nuclear War" was one of my most exciting. Carl Sagan was there and there were thousands of people in the place. Carl Sagan and his scientists recorded their findings: if they had a nuclear explosion, or several nuclear explosions, that we would end up with potential for nuclear winter. That means birds would be no more like we know it now. Then the next day, they had a satellite from Moscow, and they had scientists from Moscow projected on the wall, and we could talk to those people. So, I got up to the microphone and Dr. Sagan said, he put certain requirements on the questions, and I've forgotten what I asked, but my question came close to violating what he had said. So I asked the question and Dr. Sagan said, "Well, I don't know, look, I don't know if the Russians want to answer that." The Russians said, "No, we'd be glad to answer that lady's question," whatever it was. That was one of my most exciting conferences. Of course all of that information is in the Archives.

I've attended National Audubon conferences. The first conference I went to when I first got started fighting Mobil, EPA financed my trip, and some others, to a think tank. Now here's a dumb housewife going to a think tank, you know, with economists, sociologists, you know, all these guys that talk with graphs and their little sticks. We were on top of a mountain in Rensselaerville, New York -- beautiful area. We're talking about the social aspects of an oil spill. I'm going up there to try to gather information that I can use, and the economists get up there with their dialogue and their little graphs -- sociologists, and they're talking way above my head. I don't know a thing they're saying, I can't understand a thing. I raised my hand and I said, "I'm sorry, I came these thousands of miles to learn and I do not understand a word you're saying." I said, "I'd appreciate it if you'd put your graphs up and your little stick up and talk to us, in layman's terms, so that I can get something out of this trip." And these people around me said, "Me too, me too." So they did and we were finally able to start the communication going. If it hadn't of been for funding back in those days to send those of us that wanted to get involved and get education, like EPA, Conservation Foundation, to send us to clean water conferences, clean air conferences, so forth, then that would have made my learning process a great deal more difficult. And you make a lot of contacts that way too, and in essence, I've got a loose network all over the country in different issues that I know I can contact. So it's been exciting.

Interviewer: Well, it's eleven o'clock and we've been in here about fifty minutes now. Unless there's anything in particular you want to add, I'd like to end the interview.

M.J.: Yeah, I would like to say that I really am pleased with what I've been able to do with direction from my board, with all of the society, because if they had not given me support and given me leeway, then my hands would have been tied. That has to come first because of these individuals that's been on the board and their concern for protection for the environment, we've been able to do a lot. The second thing that I want to say is because Michael Thomason wrote and said that I had a goldmine in these records and he wanted to save them. I think he's doing the community a great service by getting them out of my house and letting the house get back to a normal level, and making these records available for anyone that would like to use them.

Interviewer: Okay, Myrt Jones, thank you very much.