Six months ago, Phyllis Seward talked about her childhood in Turner Station while staring at the inky water that  surrounds her community opposite the Sparrows Point steel mill.

“I remember so well how we used to have diving parties here. You could swim far out and still see bottom.”

Her breath was labored but her voice, a rich alto when she sang in church, was still strong as she described her efforts to get Baltimore County and state politicians to “acknowledge that pollution is here in Turner Station, acknowledge that we have been involved in an environmental injustice.”

On Wednesday night, more than 100 Turners residents and a handful of health and environmental advocates paid tribute to her life as she lay at New Shiloh Baptist Church, having lost her battle with cancer she was convinced had a connection to the steel plant.

She was honored across two hours of testimonials and song for her wisdom, humor, perseverance, dedication and a very tart tongue.

“She said the things people wanted to say but didn’t,” said Lewis Winston, president of the Turners Recreation Council for which Phyllis served as corresponding secretary.

“She was feisty and full of it,” laughed Rosalie Spence. “But here’s the secret – her heart was pure putty.”

“What impressed me was her strong advocacy for the community. She was always working to help people in her anti-cancer and environmental efforts,” Russell Donnelly, chairman of the South Eastern Communities Against Pollution, added after the service.

Cancer Survivor

Phyllis was born in 1944 in Turner Station (sometimes written as Turner’s Station), then a segregated black community tucked between Dundalk and Sollers Point.

Like nearly all the men there, her father had come to work at the steel mill across Bear Creek. “My father died from cancer. His two brothers died of cancer, and my Uncle Earl died of cancer. All of them worked at Beth Steel,” she told me last December.

• Polluting Turner Station and Dundalk: A Maryland tradition (5/31/09)

After graduating from University of Maryland Eastern Shore, she returned to Turner with the idea of teaching. Then one day, she felt a sharp pain in her rib cage when lifting a basket of laundry. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and, at age 25, underwent a radical mastectomy.

Back then, recalled her niece, Maxine Thompson, nobody talked about cancer, especially breast cancer. But as part of her recovery, Phyllis knew she not only had to talk about it, but also help others get through the terrible ordeal.

“I had to turn it into a positive experience,” she later said in an article about cancer survivors. “When you are in tune with your body, you are in tune with the world.”

Focusing on Pollution

Phyllis increasingly devoted herself to health issues, volunteering for the American Cancer Society while working as an instructional assistant for children with special needs at White Oak Elementary School.

She became convinced that the overriding health issue in the greater Dundalk area was pollution, a legacy of the decades of intense industrial development that included aluminum, paint, coke tar as well as steel manufacturing.

Phyllis despaired over setbacks in recent years as Bethlehem Steel and successor companies built a large landfill opposite Turner Station.

“I looked up one day and there was this hill that was never there before,” she said as we walked along Bear Creek and observed Greys Landfill across the water.

“I inquired about it at meetings, and I was told it was a landfill for the clean-up from Sparrows Point. In other words, they were cleaning up all the polluted soil and dumping it by the creek next to our community. That’s not cleaning up. That’s moving it around.”

Phyllis didn’t claim to know all the names of the hazardous chemicals buried in the landfill (among them, arsenic, benzene, cadmium, chromium, cyanide, lead, mercury and nickel), but she did know that when she approached county and state politicians for help, she’d get the runaround.

“Nobody in power wants to let us know what’s in the water and in the ground. Nobody wants to study the high incidence of cancer in Turner Station,” she told me.

“Don’t cry for me”

Maxine took up her aunt’s fight at the Wednesday service, reminding the mourners, “Phyllis is not the first and will not be the last victim of cancer in this community. She didn’t smoke and look what happened to her – she died of lung cancer.”

There are many challenges ahead. Still on the table is a proposal for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at the former Sparrows Point shipyard. And the Maryland Port Administration is moving ahead with plans to dump harbor dredgings at the south tip of the steel plant.

“Until we stick together and stand together, our community is going to be under attack,” Maxine said.

Another speaker reminded the audience of the tart words that Phyllis would inevitably say were she still among them:

“Don’t cry for me. Keep it moving.”

• Mark Reutter is the author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (1988, updated edition 2004).