malfunction grew worse until the system collapsed with an incendiary blast. It was a small miracle that nobody was killed—the explosion tore a gaping hole in the side of the boiler. The unit was shut down in a panic, the valves were closed to stop the flow of oil and prevent a fire that could have engulfed the property. The salaried supervisors went out and inspected the boiler. It was a total loss.
A manager came into Paulson’s office and told him the news. The boiler couldn’t be fixed, the manager said, at least not without help from the unionized operators who ran the machines. Koch would need to bring the operators back from the picket line for the repair job. “He said, ‘We’ve lost the strike. I want my operators back,’ ” Paulson recalled. “And I said to him, ‘If you believe that, hit the effing road.’ ”
Paulson again called one of his friends in Texas, waking him in the middle of the night. He said he needed an urgent favor and told his friend about the explosion. Paulson’s old friend hustled a team together and got them on a plane to Minneapolis. From there, the team was flown by helicopter into the refinery. The unit was up and running again within about a week.
At night, before he went to bed, Paulson walked around the refinery to make sure his men were doing well. He dropped into the monitoring rooms where the men were staring at screens, gaunt from spending unending hours on the job. The pressure on them was tremendous. Everyone knew that there was a potential catastrophe waiting to happen every minute of every day. The boiler explosion was proof of that. Now, with a skeleton crew overseeing them, the boilers were firing and pumping out superheated, flammable fuels throughout the refinery. It was almost reckless to run the refinery so short-staffed, when just a few minutes of inattention could get people killed. One employee quit after suffering from exhaustion and an anxiety attack that left him nearly catatonic.
When Paulson walked his rounds at night, he made sure to exude confidence to keep the spirits of his employees high. “They said it was very important, my demeanor, during that strike,” Paulson recalled. “One of our salespeople, during that time, he called me Patton. He said, ‘All you lack are those two ivory-handled revolvers.’ ”
* * *
Weeks passed. The men on the picket line kept their positions at all hours. They choked off truck traffic going into the refinery. But standing outside the refinery gates, they could see that the fractionating towers were still spewing steam, and the flare towers were still shooting out flames.
The picket line was not able to stop every truck. Paulson’s workers from Texas and Oklahoma passed in and out of the refinery. Even some of the local nonunion truck drivers began to break the picket line, delivering and gathering fuel.
Ernie Tromberg, an OCAW employee who worked in one of the fractionating towers, watched the anger boil over among his coworkers as “scab” drivers approached. The union men stood in front of the trucks and waved their placards. But the scab trucks inched forward slowly, haltingly, heading into the refinery. Tromberg saw his coworkers assemble “jacks,” thorny balls made of outward-facing metal spikes and nails, and throw them on the ground in front of approaching trucks. Paulson estimates that Koch spent $100,000 (or about $593,000 when adjusted for inflation in 2018), to replace truck tires in the first few months of the strike alone.
Koch Refinery hired a private company called Wackenhut to police the gates, and the private guards looked like teenagers with rented badges. They only made the picketers angrier. Tromberg was standing near a truck as it passed when he heard the unmistakable tink of a jack being thrown into the truck’s wheel well. A young Wackenhut guard approached Tromberg from behind and accused him of throwing the jack. The guard escorted Tromberg over to a state police trooper, but the officer said there was nothing he could do because he hadn’t witnessed the event. Tromberg saw that the Wackenhut guards were helpless to do much of anything, and the picketers realized it.
An atmosphere of lawlessness began to surround the picket line. When scab drivers edged closer to the gates, the union men jumped up on the running boards of the trucks and pounded on the windows. When that didn’t stop the trucks, they grew more violent. “We had some pretty tough guys working there. They