Three Decades Later - The Fight for Clean Air Continues!

[Thomas3.20.2010]

Bobbie DeRamus doesn't remember things as well as she did. She's been diagnosed as being in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease, a neurological disorder devastating to short-term memory. So she thinks about the distant past. One memory that keeps coming back is when she spoke up for a ban on indoor smoking.

DeRamus, 86, of Roseburg suffered severely from the secondhand cigarette smoke she inhaled at work in the 1970s and '80s. She testified several times in front of a state Senate committee when legislators were considering what became the Oregon Indoor Clean Air Act.

The ban on indoor smoking in public buildings except in designated areas went into effect in 1983, the same year DeRamus left her job as a bookkeeper for Children's Services Division in Roseburg due to the damage secondhand smoke had done to her body.

The ban provoked strong feelings. In a Gallup poll in 1983, 55 percent of smokers agreed they should refrain from smoking around nonsmokers. But 39 percent disagreed, and about 30 percent did not believe that secondhand smoke was hazardous to nonsmokers.

The sponsor of the Indoor Clean Air Act, state Sen. Rod Monroe, D-Portland, recalled recently that there was strong public support for segregating smoking in public buildings.

Monroe said a petition drive in 1980 received 60,000 signatures, just 5,000 short of the number needed to place an initiative on the ballot. In 1981, the Legislature passed the Indoor Clean Air Act, which went into effect two years later.

 Monroe said many citizens testified before a Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Roberts, D-Portland, about the effects of secondhand smoke. He said the 1981 act was a turning point in public attitudes about smoking. The ban has since been expanded to include private workplaces, restaurants and even bars.

“Today, smokers have a hard time finding a place to smoke,” he said. “Back then, it was the other way around.”

DeRamus is proud that her testimony was a part of making that happen.

“I think I helped a lot of people, especially people allergic to smoke. I'm pretty proud of that,” she said. “I was glad for the people that were allergic to smoke and anybody else that had to put up with it.”

It was no easy task. She faced down a lobbyist from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company at a hearing and endured ridicule from coworkers, said her husband, Donald E. DeRamus, whose memories are crystal clear.

Donald DeRamus, a 92-year-old World War II veteran, said Bobbie DeRamus spoke three times before the Senate committee considering the anti-smoking law in 1981.

The third time, he recalled, she was seated across the aisle from the tobacco lobbyist, who disputed every comment she made about the effects her coworkers' cigarette smoke had on her. The lobbyist claimed her health problems were just coincidental and unrelated to her exposure to secondhand smoke.

“He was an obnoxious fellow trying to make her feel like a country bumpkin that just crawled out of the woodpile,” Donald DeRamus said.

Monroe said he remembers the lobbyist, who was a doctor from Virginia. He said he and Roberts grilled the doctor about the effects of secondhand smoke. When the doctor continued to deny secondhand smoke was harmful, Roberts asked whether smoking was harmful. When the doctor hemmed and hawed about that, Monroe said, the doctor lost credibility. 

“It just shot his whole testimony down out of the water, and the bill was passed unanimously,” he said. 

The U.S. surgeon general had warned in 1972 about the hazards of secondhand smoke. For Bobbie DeRamus, the effects were severe. They included bronchitis, migraines and sinus infections.

Donald DeRamus remembers a low point when he carried his wife into the emergency room at Douglas Community Hospital with dangerously low blood pressure. The doctor on duty was future governor John Kitzhaber.

Eventually, an irregular heartbeat caused by her allergy to smoke forced her to quit her job.

Monroe recalled that some people were smoking at the hearings on the bill. Gov. Victor Atiyeh, who was a chain smoker, signed the act after a compromise was reached which removed private workplaces from the bill, Monroe said. 

Bobbie DeRamus said her coworkers were less than sympathetic to her desire to have a smoke-free workplace. Managers isolated her in a room with no windows. She said co-workers tormented her by smoking in the room when she wasn't there and leaving cigarette butts in the wastebasket and ashes in a drawer. 

“Due to the very impolite employees, my room wasn't that nice,” she said.

Kelly Klanecky, 56, of Roseburg was a young file clerk in the Children's Services office and said she remembers several smokers harassing DeRamus.

One in particular smoked a black cigar and blew smoke in DeRamus' face, and another put a cigarette butt in a tray on her desk, Klanecky said.

“I felt like she was really targeted and alone,” Klanecky said. “We tried to support her when we could.”

DeRamus said she still doesn't understand why her co-workers treated her the way they did. “I never did anything but get sick from that smoke.”

She did have friends in the office. She said one in particular, Eileen Schroeder, who has since died, walked with her during breaks when many other employees smoked. Schroeder accompanied her to one of the Senate hearings and testified herself about the effects of secondhand smoke.

“It bothered her, too,” Bobbie DeRamus said, “but it didn't put her to bed like me.”

Klanecky called DeRamus a “trailblazer” and said she was one of the key proponents of the indoor-smoking ban from Douglas County.

“She was such an amazing lady because it was a time when everyone smoked,” Klanecky said. “With her courage and fortitude, she was really a precursor to the state banning smoking in state offices.”

DeRamus worked for Children's Services for 10 years and retired when a doctor told her to choose between her job or her life. Less than one year later, she got a pacemaker. She's now on her third pacemaker.

All 50 states today have indoor smoking bans of some kind, according to the American Cancer Society.

Said Donald DeRamus: “She's proud she lived long enough to see it go nationwide.”