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'Thunder on the Mountain' by David Poyer

When drilling fields became killing fields

Sunday, May 30, 1999

By Karen Carlin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Thunder on the Mountain By David Poyer Forge $25.95

David Poyer’s latest novel brings home the battles that took place between labor and management in our own back yard.

Subtitled “A Novel of 1936,” Poyer’s tale takes us to northwestern Pennsylvania’s oil country -- birthplace of Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller’s fortune. It’s the winter of 1936, the heart of the Great Depression.

W. T. Halvorsen, a young man who makes his living as a well shooter, takes a job as a foreman at Thunder Oil Company and, as “Kid Nitro,” joins the stable of boxers belonging to company owner Daniel Thunner.

Halvorsen’s life takes an unexpected turn when a deadly fire at Thunder Oil’s refinery reveals the company’s negligence concerning workers’ safety. He finds himself at first a reluctant leader in calling a strike to organize the men.

In the cold, bitter months that follow, tensions quickly escalate, parties violently clash, and Halvorsen learns how far workers, organizers and “the Company” will go to come out “winners” in the strike.

“Thunder on the Mountain,” which is Poyer’s fourth in a cycle of novels about the fictional county of Hemlock, tells the true story of laborers who sacrificed their families, reputations and often their lives in a fight to gain respect and recognition. In dramatic fashion and colorful prose, Poyer replays the violence, the fear, the miscommunications and betrayals spawned by the time.

Yet the author smartly portrays both sides of the struggle, emphasizing imperfect, multidimensional characters. Doris Golden, the CIO organizer who comes into town from New York City, is not a faultless labor-class hero. She has more than the workingmen’s interests at heart and has ulterior motives in seeing the strike through, regardless of the individuals’ costs or losses.

Although he’s arrogant and bull-headed, company owner Thunner doesn’t come off as pure evil. In addressing the workers after the fire, Thunner says, “I think of us as a family -- the Thunner family. You all know there ain’t a man who works harder than I do to keep us all eating regular. Just like any man does for his family, any man who’s a man.”

Yet Thunner’s own lavish lifestyle amid the backdrop of a polluted shantytown blinds him from realizing how he prevents the other men from providing for their families. Unconsciously, he knows he could quickly become just as destitute.

Even as he sticks to his hard-line stance, you feel sympathy for this man who is so desperate to hold on to his family business in a harsh economy that he ignores his own judgment and employs a ruthless outside strikebreaker.

And, finally, the honest and straightforward Halvorsen discovers what measures, right or wrong, he’ll resort to in order to make the laborers’ point.

Poyer, who grew up in Bradford County, has been compared to John Steinbeck, and with good cause. He knows his history, and his vivid account of a painful period in the region’s history is sure to educate and stimulate.