THE COAL CRACKER

About the Book

    Hey! Enough about growing up on a farm or fighting your way through the tough neighborhoods of a city.  Let’s switch the setting to the Anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, where we find a quasi-fictitous Pat Devlin, a coal miner’s son, amateur detective, pool shooter, dancer; later a WWII sailor and country doctor in the early fifties.

    His hometown was a multicultured little Europe.  It was the time of the Great Depression.  Its citizens were hard working but ever-striking coal miners.  His youthful romance with Ginny, his chores, games and antics are humorously described.  A Mafia and German Bund conflict developed over control of the "numbers" game, and body parts were exchanged as the town was racked with a series of kidnappings, murders and disappearances.  One of the nocturnally departed  was Joe Hoderick, Pat’s best friend and mentor with whom he shared a graveyard secret and treasure.

    Pat entered the Navy with naivete of a Forrest Gump, but was soon educated by the likes of Dr. “knock em out first” Huckley, his first sexual encounter; Bee Gilberti,  his classy English instructor; Maria Gonzales, his Mexican dancing partner; John “Voyeur” Vasco and several of his shipmates.

    While stationed at the Bethesda Naval Hospital,  Pat exposed and almost botched a highly secret war project.  His wartime experiences as a Pharmacist Mate at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where his ship is devastated by kamikaze planes is vividly described.  

    Suddenly,  we are transferred to another tough, coal mining town where his nurse-wife and he began a General practice.  This narrative is interupted by flash backs of college and medical school that included some torid love scenes, and finally, a literally incredible ending.

About the Author

John Devers is a retired physician, who graduated from Gettysburg College and the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He practiced medicine as a rural general practitioner, and later as a city-based anesthesiologist, for a total of 40 years. He believes that much has been written about growing up on the farm, or on the tough streets of the city, but little, if anything, on what it was like being reared in a small coal-mining town of Pennsylvania, particularly during the Great Depression and World War II. It was not until his retirement in 1993 that he found the time to fulfill his ambition to write about his early life.