When a neighbor handed me a small book, "Small Town, Big Oil" written by a University of New Hampshire faculty member (David Moore) the only reason I opened it was the photo of Dudley Dudley, about whom I'd heard various things over the years but I never really knew exactly why she was locally famous--something to do with Aristotle Onassis, which sounded to me like some myth: What would Aristotle Onassis want with New Hampshire? Could Onassis even find New Hampshire on a map?
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| Dudley Dudley: Don't Tread on Me |
It turned out to be one of those books which actually kept me up all night--and I had work the next day--but I literally, could not stop turning pages.
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| Onassis |
Turns out, Aristotle Onassis did know where New Hampshire was and as part of a scheme to gain control over oil transport, he seized on the idea of creating his own mega refinery, which he decided to place in Durham New Hampshire, the largest oil refinery of all time, in the entire world, five times as big as anything in New Jersey.
Onassis's shipping wealth was closely embroiled in shipping oil and the oil producers more or less had him by the tender parts and this effort was part of his idea to go into the oil refining business himself and shuck the shackles of the oil barons.
To do this, he decided he'd ship oil in massive amounts to the Isles of Shoals, pump it from that depot under the water in a 15 mile pipeline to Rye and from there another 20 miles to Durham Point, hard by the Great Bay.
From this, emerged a saga which makes "Silkwood" and "Erin Brockavich" look like nursery rhymes, as the Onassis plan needed all sorts of co-conspirators from the governor of New Hampshire, a Georgia transplant named Meldrin Thomson, to the creepy, venomous William Loeb III, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader.
Moore structures his book masterfully, introducing each of the key players and then mixing them together as we see the struggle unfold.
Dudley Dudley--her first name was Dudley and she married a guy name Dudley (and you'll never convince me that wasn't half the attraction)--had just been elected to her first term in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, where Loeb thought no woman belonged. He never referred to her as anything other than Mrs. Dudley, because, after all, that's what she was, nothing more than a housewife trying to play in the big leagues of state government. But Dudley proved to have a few important qualities: She was clearly tenacious and not easy to intimidate and she was shrewd enough to realize if she tried to oppose an oil refinery by appealing to environmental concerns Loeb would quickly label her a tree hugger and blow her away. So she chose to frame the argument as an issue of local control: Durham should not be forced to accept an oil refinery against the wishes of the local residents. But to demonstrate the locals were actually opposed to this guaranteed environmental rape, Dudley would require help from the locals and some mechanism to get the word out. That's where Ms. Sandberg and Ms. Bennett came in.
Of course, the governor immediately cried out this was NIMBY and no local town should have the right to deny to the state this cornucopia of largesse, which, with the country in the middle of an oil crisis, with gas prices through the roof and long lines at the gas pumps, seemed irresistible. Onassis and his gang of expensive suits promised Durham residents would no longer have to pay property taxes owing to the revenues from the oil refinery and there would be thousands of good jobs at the refinery. Newmarket residents seemed all for it and wanted the refinery there. Gas station owners shut down their pumps, telling residents to vote for the refinery if they wanted gas for their cars.
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| Phyllis Bennett |
Of course, none of this ever really happens when oil refineries come to town, and Phyllis Bennett, who had moved up from Baltimore to start a humble, weekly local paper, Publick Occurences, wrote extensively about how this sales pitch was clearly bogus and a con job. Turns out even if you have an oilrefinery next door, your own local gas station does not get cheap and plentiful gas for you and the taxes the oil refinery pays do not reduce your town's property taxes and there are very few jobs for locals at the refinery.
Bennett's story is in some ways the most dramatic and built for Hollywood of the three women: She had moved to New Hampshire to pursue her dream of publishing a newspaper which really mattered and her husband was her partner in this, but not long after they started her husband started an affair with a young, pretty staff intern so as her own battle with William Loeb and the governor erupted, Phyllis was faced with the dissolution of her marriage. Just to really complicate things, the intern was the only one on staff who knew how to work the machine which actually allowed them to print the paper, so Phyllis had to keep her on staff just to get her stuff in print. (This was before computers emerged a decade later.)
And then there was Nancy Sandberg, who described herself as a housewife, tending her garden, when mysterious men in expensive suits showed up trying to buy property from her which they said was for a house on the Bay, when, in fact, this was part of a plot to buy up contiguous plats of land for the oil refinery. Nancy started a local activist group: Save Our Shores, which would play a pivotal role in getting the town of Durham to vote to reject the Onassis bid.
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| William Loeb III |
All this happened back around 1974 and as unlikely as most David vs Goliath stories are, this one actually happened and the three women managed to defeat Onassis.
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| Meldrin Thomson |
Onassis died the next year, and had he not, the battle may have been waged for longer and the locals ground down by big money and the battle won by the bad guys.
Dudley Dudley went on to fight the Seabrook Nuclear Plant but she lost that one.
She did, however, along with Nancy Sandberg and Phyllis Bennett manage to save the Great Bay from the inevitable oil despoliation which would have accompanied the refinery and more likely the underwater oil pipelines.
The cast of characters is hard to resist: William Loeb whose editorials cast Dudley Dudley as an elitist dilettante, likely Communist intent on denying an economic bonanza to the state just to satisfy her liberal inclinations to stick it to the common man. Mildren Thomson who never met a billionaire he didn't want to serve and exploit for his own benefit. The list goes on.
But the most surprising characters are not the villains. They are the ordinary extraordinary women who found themselves at the tip of the spear and decided to thrust and parry right back and to not take a step backward.
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