Moonbeam McSwine's Fate

With creams, unguents, sprays, scented waters, chlorophyll tablets and electronically-treated toilet tissues, the U.S. relentlessly wars on the odors of nature. This preoccupation with the olfactible has made social outcasts of millions who are, in the language of the ads, not dainty, including Li'l Abner's Moonbeam McSwine. The latest victim is a town--probably at the moment the most deeply disgraced town in the U.S. For, like Moonbeam McSwine, Secaucus, N.J. (pop. 9,750 people and 75,000 pigs) has B.O.

Do Horses Smell Better? Secaucus, at the heart of a vast trash-filled marsh known, euphemistically, as the Meadows, is bounded by the ever dirty Hackensack River and two sloughy creeks. Most of its small, bedraggled residential section is huddled on a hill, which rises, like a precarious reef from a mounting sea, above a tide of pigs. The citizens of Secaucus on their hill rarely sniff the full exhalation of the piggeries; but the town's neighbors do, and so do millions of travelers who pass through by rail or over the New Jersey Turnpike. For years the authorities have tried to make New Jersey's Moonbeam a little daintier. Further expansion of pig farming was forbidden in 1948 (with the result that the pigs became more & more crowded). Reluctant industry was urged to move to Secaucus, and even now plans are under way to build a race track there, possibly on the theory that horses smell better than pigs.

Last week New Jersey's Governor Alfred Driscoll struck a bitter blow at Secaucus. The town, he said, was not a good advertisement for New Jersey--not good at all. The pig farms would have to be cleaned up, "or else." He knew, he added, that it was quite feasible to raise pigs without "an accompanying stench."

Needed: Chanel. Driscoll drew an angry reply from one Henry Krajewski, 40, prominent Secaucus pig farmer and candidate for the presidency of the U.S. on the "Poor Man's Party" ticket (TIME, March 17). He scoffed at Driscoll's assertion that pigs could be raised daintily. "Sure, millionaires can do it," said Krajewski. "Doris Duke did it in Somerville. They tie perfume bottles on the pigs, but the average farmer can't afford such luxury." Furthermore, said Krajewski, it wasn't just Secaucus and it wasn't just pigs. The industrial areas near the Pulaski Skyway, he said, smell like embalming fluid: "Linden has assorted smells from paint and oil... There are chemical and acid smells, and Kopper's coke with its terrible smoke. Out in Manville, there is the asbestos smell . . . And in Newark, you should smell the markets in the morning. No one complains about them!"

Governor Driscoll retorted stiffly: "There is a vast difference between the stink that assails citizens as they cross the Meadows, and the industrial smells that occasionally accompany large-scale operations."

Agricultural experts, getting into the argument, explained that it was indeed possible to raise pigs free of undue smells, even without the perfume method, by 1) feeding them grain rather than raw garbage, and 2) giving them lots of room and air. In Secaucus the pigs get garbage, from New York's best restaurants, and are as tightly packed together as the customers at these restaurants. How Governor Driscoll and the forces of daintiness would deal with the problem remained to be seen. Meanwhile, Henry Krajewski had the last word. "Now the smell is in the ground," he said, not without a note of triumph. "They'll never get rid of it."

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