Category: Commentary/Editorial || By

Book Review: Of Youngstown, a notorious hotbed of organized crime, talk-show host Doug Hoerth has said: "In some cities, the forces of good are constantly at war with the forces of evil. But in Youngstown, everyone gets along."

That also describes the McKeesport of John Hoerr's novel Monongahela Dusk, just released this month by Autumn House Press.

Throughout Hoerr's story --- which spans the Great Depression and World War II --- it's hard to tell the heroes from the villains.

There's the union organizer who blows up coal tipples, but draws the line at murder. There are the company police officers, sworn to keep the peace, who instead break legs first and question suspects later.

And there's the small-time racketeer who's offended when outsiders wire a car bomb on his turf. ("Who do they think they are, bombing people in my f--king town!" he rails.)

. . .

The McKeesport of Monongahela Dusk is not the misty sepia-toned city of ice cream sundaes at Isaly's, horse-drawn Menzie Dairy wagons and twinkling lights at the Memorial Theater. It's not even the carefully airbrushed "city on the go" of photos in the Mansfields' Daily News.

Instead, this is the McKeesport that my grandfathers used to remember ruefully after a few drinks --- a place where mobsters and mill bosses bought and sold politicians, vice was as plentiful as "Allegheny whitefish" on the Monongahela, and African-Americans were welcome to hold the crummiest jobs in the open hearth, but not to eat in the restaurants on Fifth Avenue.

A native of McKeesport and a former editor of Business Week, Hoerr is best known for his seminal study of the decline of steelmaking in the Mon Valley, And the Wolf Finally Came, considered a classic of labor and business history.

Another book, Harry, Tom and Father Rice, examined the connections between one-time McKeesport congressman Harry Davenport, "labor priest" Charles Owen Rice, and the communist witch-hunts of the early Cold War era.

. . .

With Monongahela Dusk, his first novel, Hoerr uses his same reporter's eye to weave a tale from his childhood memories of McKeesport. The result is a re-creation so vivid, you can feel the soot on the pages.

This is not a novel that uses florid description to tell its story; instead, Hoerr employs a journalist's simple, solid nouns and verbs, and creates a fictional world all the more realistic because of it.

Dusk is the story of Albert "Pete" Bonner, a traveling salesman for Fort Pitt Beer, who in 1937 accidentally gets entangled with Joe Miravich, an organizer for the United Mine Workers.

After foiling a plot to assassinate steel union leader Philip Murray, they wind up targets both of the criminals hired to deliver the hit, and of the mysterious steel boss --- "Mr. Buck" --- who paid for it.

. . .

Bonner and Miravich avoid immediate retribution and use wartime's prosperity to build successful (though opposing) careers, but the knowledge that "Buck" is waiting to extract his revenge hangs over their heads like a blast furnace charge that refuses to drop.

Readers need not be McKeesporters to appreciate Monongahela Dusk, though natives will enjoy the local references.

Characters see one of the legendary brawls after a McKeesport-Duquesne football game at Tech High field, steal a Pittsburgh Railways trolley for a joyride, and "play the numbers" in a candy store near the old Ringgold Street waiting room.

. . .

Although this is a fictionalized McKeesport, it doesn't take much imagination to see that stiff-necked union-busting Republican Mayor D.R. Shoaf is inspired by McKeesport's real life stiff-necked union-busting Republican Mayor George H. Lysle.

Some of the other characters are clearly inspired by real-life figures as well --- Miravich seems to be an amalgam of former Steelworkers local union presidents Tony Tomko of McKeesport and Ron Weisen of Homestead.

Incidentally, this is at least the second novel --- David Chacko's Brick Alley is the other --- set against the rackets and politics of the "good ol' days" in McKeesport.

Those novels and K.C. Constantine's Rocksburg mysteries, which are set in a thinly disguised Greensburg, tell more about life in Western Pennsylvania in the 20th century than all of Rick Sebak's specials combined.

. . .

If there's a criticism to be leveled at Monongahela Dusk, it's that Hoerr's impartial, journalistic style doesn't always allow him to imagine what's inside the heads of his characters. Instead of getting their motivation, readers are often observers watching events unfold through Hoerr's neutral eyes.

The distance makes it tough to develop an emotional bond with some characters. Bonner's attempts to ingratiate himself with McKeesport's businessmen, for instance, have less of the pathos of Willy Loman and more of the shallowness of George Babbitt.

Miravich is one of Dusk's better-rounded characters --- brooding, conflicted, torn between his ideals and his practical goals.

Some readers might also complain that the central mystery of Buck's identity is a meaningless MacGuffin, there only so that Hoerr can sketch his warts-and-all portrait of McKeesport, and that the resolution is too off-handed to be truly satisfying.

. . .

But complaining that a novel about McKeesport's rough-and-rowdy past is "too workmanlike" or "too detached" is like complaining that the Westinghouse Bridge is "too concrete-y."

It's the detail and the detachment of Hoerr's no-bull prose that make Monongahela Dusk as valuable as history as it is enjoyable as a study of a bygone era.

If the resolution lacks an "ah-ha!" moment, that's because we were there for the journey, not the destination.

And though it's been many years since Hoerr lived here, his insights about the Mon Valley ring true. During a car trip down Route 837 to Donora, Miravich's girlfriend mentions that she's never been this far away in her life: "We never even took a streetcar to Pittsburgh."

Too many of us still have that lack of curiosity today. Though the mills and the rackets have faded, the parochial attitudes persist.

Sometimes, the more things stay the same, the more they should change.