Gino Dottori

At first it took her her husband and now she has also been afflicted, but Mary Dottori is not willing to give up and let asbestos win.
“Now I’m also suffering the consequences, because the dust that my husband brought home with him on his clothes and hair penetrated my lungs too — I have asbestosis and that is making my life very difficult,” she says.
It’s hard for her to choke back the tears as she tells her story. The 66-year-old had to endure a tragedy, but her voice remains strong. “I suffered a lot, but I’m so angry that I want to scream from the top of the world what they have done to us.”
Her husband, Gino Lorenzo Dottori, died 12 years ago, killed at 73 by lung cancer. Nobody had ever told him what the risks were when in 1955 he was hired as a foreman by Capsite, a company in Sarnia that was producing asbestos insulated pipes for the Lambton County petrochemical industry.
The two Italian-Canadians weren’t the only ones who shared the same destiny in Sarnia.
“There are a lot of Italians here and many of them suffered as we did,” she says.
Today, Dottori is a member of Victims of Chemical Valley, an organization that fights against the exportation of asbestos.
Like many other of his co-workers, Gino Dottori was coming home from work literally covered with asbestos’ fibers and dust.
“His hair used to be beautiful, black and wavy, and I remember that every night I cleaned it for him before going in the living room. It always ended up the same way — with the two of us completely full of that dust,” she says recalling a moment of tenderness that has now put her in danger.
In those days, there was no protection in the plant, and the company failed to warn anyone that this material was hazardous.
“They let them eat that dust,” she says today, still angry.
No one had ever warned Gino who, ignorant of the risks, would have his wife and his oldest daugther meet him at the plant.
“Nobody told us anything, so our little girl used to come there and play with those pipes.”

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