After the Fog: The Donora Story

 

 

After the Fog (2012)

 By Kathleen Shoop

CreateSpace Publishing, 405 pages.

★★★ ½

 

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have long been fascinated by the town of Donora, though it’s 20 miles south of Pittsburgh and I’ve never been there. My interest in this borough of 4,500 comes from strange places. As a kid I knew it as where baseball great Stan Musial was raised–and more recently Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr.–but the bigger draw is related to a historical event that occurred in 1948, a temperature inversion.

 

No, I’m not planning a post-retirement career in meteorology. I was in elementary school when I first heard about what happened in Donora before I was born. Donora’s proximity to Pittsburgh and location along the Monongahela River meant that it was once part of the black smoke “Mon Valley” industrial corridor devoted to zinc, iron, and steel; in its case, Donora had a very large wire factory. A temperature inversion can occur when warm air is trapped by a passing upper atmosphere cold front that “seals” the air people breathe. In essence, the black smoke, particulates, coal fumes, and other types of pollution have nowhere to go. Donora then had a population of over 13,000 and the trapped, filthy air killed 20 and sickened 6,000. I suppose one could say that such numbers aren’t a patch on the inversion in London in 1952 that killed more than 10,000 and sent ten times that many to the hospital, but Donora’s 75 percent population decline is a testament to the long-term impact (along with deindustrialization) of the toxic fog. How many places do you know that try to draw tourists to its Smog Museum?

 

Novelist Kathleen Shoop populates After the Fog with fictionalized characters, but if you read into Donora’s history you will quickly conclude that the book’s cast is a stand-in for real-life personalities. The novel revolves around Rose Pavlesic, a community nurse devoted to helping poor working-class families. She operates as a combination social worker, midwife, free medical care provider, and social statistics collector. She is also mother to two growing children, Magdalena and John(ny), and is the wife of wire worker Henry. Unlike soft-hearted Henry, Rose is as hard as a coil of multi-strand wire. As if she didn’t already have plenty on her plate, Henry’s lazy gambler brother and pampered wife live in the same household.

 

A reader’s first impression, though, is that Rose is an unsympathetic human being. She’s a nag and complainer who henpecks Henry, tries to map out her children’s futures, and stops at nothing in pursuit of things that she thinks should be. She wants Johnny, the high school football quarterback, to win a sports scholarship to college; never mind that he’d much rather be a musician. She insists on maintaining a moral family life to (over) compensate for her childhood as an orphan, and tries to badger the Sebastian family into underwriting community health services rather than the opera.

 

Rose is devoted, but like Donora she is rough around the edges. Donora is a tough town loaded with bars (not “taverns”), Catholic churches, gossipers, children wearing hand-me-downs, ethnic families, and rivalries. Even when Rose is right, her persuasion skills left much to be desired. And, as you might expect, she can’t possibly control all the things she tries to command. It doesn’t help that she holds a deep secret.

 

The weakest part of the novel is the after part of After the Fog. I’m sure the character shifts will please readers who like tidy endings, but I am suspicious of personality turnarounds–even when intervening forces dictate a Plan B. People can and do change, but not quickly. After the Fog ends on notes that seem too upbeat and convenient.

 

This was book one of Shoop’s “Donora Series.” You should definitely read it before moving onto the next installment. For the record, Rose bears some resemblance to famed public health researcher Mary Amdur (1921-98) if you can picture a less educated and less academic version of Amdur. The rich Sebastian family is a composite of the robber barons who founded U.S. Steel. If you know your history, the sort of folks who ran U.S. Steel were more prone to favor their own kind than to care about a place like Donora.

 

Rob Weir