As the national cemeteries fill with the veterans of World War II, remember those who died on the home front.
Remember the Alday-Parker clan, which began migrating north in 1942 from Bainbridge, Ga., looking for work.They found it here at Union Asbestos & Rubber Co., which was operating around the clock to supply Navy yards along the East Coast with insulation.
Five men in the family joined UNARCO, and each eventually died from asbestos they inhaled and ingested there. They also carried death home with them - two women in the family died of lung problems, a son died of lung cancer and other descendants report lungs scarred by asbestos.
All were victims of a national industrial policy that gave lip service to workplace safety but really demanded production at almost any cost.
Benny Parker ran an oven that baked insulation slabs that were sprayed with asbestos fibers. "When he came home, he looked like he was in spun glass," his son Al recalls. "The fibers stuck to his clothes."
His wife always shook Benny's pants out before washing them, thereby launching asbestos fibers into the air. They lodged in family members' lungs, causing a variety of health effects - ranging from asbestosis to cancer - that appeared years later.
Sometimes, Al got the special treat of visiting his father's workplace.
"It looked like there was angel's hair all over the place, only thicker" he said of the asbestos. "It hung down from the rafters and beams. The air was hazy with it."
Plant manager Robert Cryor became worried after the plant doctor found several cases of incipient asbestosis, an incapacitating and deadly disease caused by asbestos dust in the lungs.
But the workers, Al notes, "were trapped in their jobs." The government made it clear that anyone who quit a top-priority plant like UNARCO's would be drafted.
Cryor offered workers a nickel-an-hour bonus if they wore masks, and asked them to line their nostrils with petroleum jelly and drink milk to line their stomachs.
It didn't help. By 1977, Benny Parker's asbestos-filled lungs were more than half gone. He needed oxygen after walking two blocks and withered to 70 pounds by the time he died in 1983 of lung cancer brought on by asbestosis.
His son remembers him lying in bed "with a tube as big as a damn garden hose sticking out of his side," the fluid draining from his lung black as tar.
A study of 877 of the 933 men who worked at UNARCO during the war found lung cancer rates seven times that of the general population. By 1991, two thirds of the men who worked at UNARCO between 1941 and the plant's shutdown in 1954 had died; more than half had cancer. They included Cryor, the plant manager, and four managers under him.
The danger wasn't limited to UNARCO workers and families. The factory's air was vented onto a junkyard next door. The owner later died of mesothelioma; even the junkyard dog died of asbestosis.
Today, 13 years after asbestos-related claims forced it into bankruptcy court, UNARCO still operates under the legal protection of a court-approved reorganization plan.
A workers' lawsuit, which accuses UNARCO of concealing the health risks, is still in court; only one of the Alday-Parkers has been compensated.
Al Parker, 58, now lives in Chesapeake, Va. He has asbestos scars on his lungs, which are examined each year. He says he feels fine, but has bitter memories of UNARCO and its award-winning production record.
"We lost half the men in our family there," he says. "Basically, anyone that worked there died."