residents who had gotten sick. dave and sandy lutgens both remembered eating a salad in their restaurant before getting ill. hundreds of their customers and most of their employees became ill too. at the county health department nurse diane kerr contacted everyone who fell ill and discovered they had all eaten a salad from one of ten local restaurants. most of the people seemed to have eaten potato salad. at another restaurant most of the people seemed to have eaten a green salad. and so what was going on? they looked at common suppliers of food. they looked, you know, where did everybody get their lettuce? where did everybody get this? where did everybody get that? we couldn t find one source of cucumbers or lettuce or of meat or of anything that would explain all those restaurants being contaminated at once. dr. michael skeels runs the laboratory that processed samples from the dalles salmonella outbreak.