age 20 she was a widow with 1 small daughter. A scalp ailment led her to hair products made by Annie Malone, for whom she became a sales agent in 1905. After marrying a St. Louis newspaperman, Charles Joseph Walker, and renaming herself "Madam C.J. Walker," she used $1.25 in capital to launch what would become a cosmetics megabusiness, based in Indianapolis. Walker was, as her New York Times obituary noted, a philanthropist:She said herself two years ago that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time, not that she wanted the money for herself, but for the good she could do with it. She spent $10,000 every year for the education of young negro men and women in Southern colleges and sent six youths to Tuskegee Institute every year. She recently gave $5,000 to the National Conference on Lynching.
... 1982 (25 years ago today), the United States' Centers for Disease Control recommended that all the 2,000 residents of Times Beach, near St. Louis, leave their homes on account of dioxin contamination. The Environmental Protection Agency had just confirmed the problem, attributed to the city's spraying 10 years earlier of waste oil, which unbeknownst to anyone contained the killer chemical, onto unpaved roads. The U.S. government ended up purchasing the land, cleaning it at a cost of $200 million, and opening it in 1997 as a state park.
