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

Experience the Art of John Wilson at MFA Boston

 

My Brother

 

 

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson

Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

Through June 22, 2025

 

There is a small portrait at the Smith College Museum of Arts that has long captivated me. It’s titled “My Brother,” a young man named Frederick, whose older sibling was John Wilson (1922-2015). I show it here but if you live in Western Massachusetts and can see it later this summer at Smith, do so. As you can see, the MFA lighting puts a lot of sheen on the painting, a constant problem for museum portraits of black people.

 

 

"Nefertiti"

 

That said, get yourself to Boston in the next month to see Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson. Wilson spent much of his life in the Roxbury section of Boston depicting black street life, social issues, his family, and self-portraits. As is the case with most black artists, he fixated upon racism, prejudice, and injustices, though his primary goal was always to show–as the title of the MFA show suggests–the humanity of African Americans and the dignity of their everyday lives. 

 

"Streetcar Scene." This man is on his way to work at the Navy yard.

 

The MFA show is the largest show yet of Wilson’s work. That’s not to say this is a huge exhibition. Wilson is at long last getting his due as major artist. The MFA spotlights paintings, drawings, book illustrations, and sculptures from his 60 years of making art. Only now is Wilson being considered in the same breath as better known black artists such as Romare Beardon and Jacob Lawrence.

 

John Wilson was born in Roxbury but his parents were from what was then the colony of British Guiana (now Guyana). They lived a middle-class existence there, as two generations of Wilsons managed sugar refineries. They immigrated to Boston shortly before John was born.

 

John Wilson had intriguing influences before finding his own style. He studied with surrealist Fernand Léger in Paris and he also developed a deep admiration for the works of Mexican muralist José Orozco. It’s always interesting to see how artists channeled their influences for a time and then gave nods to them in more subtle ways. 

 

Leger influences

 

 

Wilson, not Leger

"Worker" Note Orozco influences

 

Given the intractable problems of race in the United States, though, it comes as no surprise that Wilson used his brushes, pens, and chisels to comment upon what, in 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal dubbed “an American dilemma.” In the 1940s, Wilson contributed illustrations dealing with racism for the leftist publication New Masses, a communist art and political journal. Please note that, at the time, the Communist Party USA was a legal political party that drew tens of thousands of voters during the Great Depression and World War II when the Soviet Union and the USA were allies. From what we can determine, Wilson’s politics settled into more of a socialist democratic position. 

 

"Study for Lynching, 1946"

 

Black Despair 1946

"The Incident" 1952

 

Racism was all the more personal for Wilson given his marriage to white Bronx College graduate Julie Kowtich in 1951. Suffice it to say that Boston wasn’t the most welcoming city for an interracial couple with biracial children in the 1950s, 60s, and beyond. They often had to drive in separate cars and decamped to Mexico for five years to make art and gain a reprieve from discrimination. Wilson painted his children from time to time and these are some of the more touching works in the show. 

 

Julie and Erica"

 

MLK (maquette)

Wilson lived to the ripe old age of 93. This means he got to see the flowering of the civil rights movement. His statue of Martin Luther King Jr. graces the U.S. Capitol and a maquette of that work is in the exhibit. Perhaps the best way of thinking of Wilson as a black artist is the show’s largest work, a sculpture often jocularly called “Big Head.” Wilson had a better name that bespeaks the fact that African Americans have endured and aren’t going away: “Eternal Presence.”

 

"Eternal Presence"

 

 

Rob Weir

Rififi the Standard for Heist Films?

 

 

 Rififi (1955/2000)

Directed by Jules Dassin

Pathé, 122 minutes, not-rated

Black & white; in English, French, Italian with subtitles

★★★★ ½

 

 

Rififi is considered one of the greatest heist films ever made and has been heralded for other reasons as well. It was released in France in 1955, but its director Jules Dassin was an American blacklisted during the Red Scare for refusing to reveal his political views or those of his friends. The film is based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton, but was altered because Dassin felt Le Breton was racist—not to mention there was no way Dassin could depict the novel’s necrophilia. The novel depicted mobsters as Arabs and Berbers; Dassin’s heavy, Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovic), is instead vaguely Germanic. Even then Dassin had to make a few cuts to get the script past the censorious Catholic League of Decency, which worried the heist would inspire copycats. Several countries banned it for the same reason.

 

 “Rififi” means violent show of force and takes its name from a war in the 1920s between Berbers and Spain. Dassin ordered cinematographer Philippe Agostini to shoot only in overcast or foul weather because he wanted the film’s tones bathed in grey in order to show the seedy side of post-World War II Paris. Agostini followed orders brilliantly. Few film noirs use sharp angles, shadows, and contrast as well as Rififi. Paris appears as a mobbed-up city in which a few hustlers have wealth to throw around in nightclubs, but most citizens are living close to the margins. The latter includes Jo the Swede (Carl Mohner), a smalltime thief, who recently endured a five-year stretch in prison and finds his former girlfriend Mado (Magali Noel) is now the paramour of a bigtime crook, Grutter (Lupovic). Jo tries to win back Mado, but in a distressing scene beats her when she tells Jo he can’t keep her in a mink and luxury.

 

Jo contemplates a smash-and-grab at a jewelry store, as he has few prospects of moving out of his shabby apartment. He contacts aging underworld friend Tony (Jean Servais), who has a better idea: break into the jewelry store, bag really valuable jewels, and fence them through a London contact. They also enlist a master safecracker, Mario Farrati (Robert Manuel), an egotistical Italian with a lust for women. Their problem is that the store has state-of-the-art security.

 

That dilemma leads to the film’s most innovative half hour. After careful stakeouts, the crew assembles duplicate systems and figures out how to bypass them. The scheme shifts to an overnight job involving an assault of the store from above. There is a half hour of near-complete silence to detail the intricacies of the burglary. After watching it, you can understand why some feared Dassin had provided a how-to guide for a successful theft. Indeed, the plan was brilliant. Almost all the t’s are crossed and all the i’s are dotted.

 

Another controversial element in Rififi is Jo’s invocation of the criminals’ code of honor, a veritable imperative despite Jo’s reluctance to implement it. Criminality notwithstanding, Rififi was hailed for its “humanity.” It was a huge success and, in Dassin’s mind, a blow that helped erode McCarthyism and the blacklist. Ironically, it also inspired other directors to scour Le Breton’s backlist for story ideas.

 

Rififi was one of the great noir films. I will caution, though, that it is a period piece in the respect that you are likely to find the nightclub songs and its shadow screen dances rally naff. (You can tell it’s French in that nudity can be inferred in the female dancer!) I’m not sure what Dassin had in mind with these scenes beyond showing the decadence of those with money to burn. To speculate, he might have sought to imbue Rafifi with bit “hipness” at a time in which Beatnik culture was en vogue. If those scenes bug you, go ahead and fast forward them; you’ll not miss anything important.

 

To add a contemporary footnote, watching this Jules Dassin film is a warning that banning art hurts the censors and the audience they think they are protecting more than a creative mind willing to defy arbitrary power. It was eventually released in North America and the rest, as they say, is history. If you liked Oceans Eleven but don’t need to see “stars” or color on your screen, Rififi is a far better film. That's why it was re-released.

 

Rob Weir