Small Town, Big Oil: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the Richest Man in the World--And Won by
David W. Moore (New York, N.Y. : Diversion Books, 2018).
Never underestimate the underdog.
In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle
Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to
build an oil refinery on the narrow New Hampshire coast, in the town of
Durham. At the time, it would have cost $600 million to build and was
expected to generate 400,000 barrels of oil per day, making it the
largest oil refinery in the world. The project was vigorously supported
by the governor, Meldrim Thomson, and by William Loeb, the notorious
publisher of the only statewide newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader.
But three women vehemently opposed the project--Nancy Sandberg, the
town leader who founded and headed Save Our Shores; Dudley Dudley, the
freshman state rep who took the fight to the state legislature; and
Phyllis Bennett, the publisher of the local newspaper that alerted the
public to Onassis' secret acquisition of the land. Small Town, Big Oil is
the story of how the residents of Durham, led by these three women,
out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, the media,
and the Onassis cartel to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most
humiliating defeat of his business career, and spare the New Hampshire
seacoast from becoming an industrial wasteland.-- Publisher's blurb.
Join David Moore on
Tuesday, April 24, 2018 at 7:00pm at the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter to discuss his book!
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