These union men clearly had no idea who they were dealing with.
* * *
Bernard Paulson was prepared. He had set up a cot in his office, a cot where he would sleep for most of the next nine months, rarely leaving the refinery, rarely leaving his post. He had also stockpiled food. The refinery had a large cafeteria near the office building, and when the union workers walked off the job, Paulson gave an order that the cafeteria was to be open twenty-four hours a day. A skeleton crew of nonunion workers would be living inside the refinery gates, and Paulson made sure that the cafeteria was open to them whenever they needed to eat. And they would need to eat at odd times during the strike because there weren’t going to be any more eight-hour shifts. Running the refinery would now be an around-the-clock job. There wouldn’t be regular mealtimes.
Paulson did more than just stockpile food. He had also quietly built the workforce he needed. Many members of this new workforce were the nonunion supervisors who worked at the refinery. They would each now do the job of two or three men, working sixteen-hour shifts. But even that wouldn’t be enough. So Paulson started making phone calls back to Texas, back to the oil-patch state where Paulson had friends and employees who thought the world of him. He called these old friends and asked them to come up to Minnesota to work. Shortly after the picket line was erected outside the refinery gates, Paulson arranged for helicopters to fly these workers into the refinery. The helicopters swooped in low over the refinery fences and landed on the refinery grounds to drop off his new workers from Texas and Oklahoma and other states where unions were not only rare but widely hated. Inside the main office building, Paulson converted a large room in the basement into a barracks for the new workers.
On the picket line, the OCAW men watched as the helicopters passed over them, hovered, and landed inside, delivering the workers who would replace them. The picket line was becoming symbolic.
But even with Paulson’s new workforce, it wasn’t easy to keep the refinery going. Paulson needed to run giant machines called reformers, for example, which made a vital chemical for Koch’s fuel products. The reformers could not be started with the simple press of a button, however. They needed tank loads of hydrogen to spark their ignition. After running out of hydrogen, Paulson knew he couldn’t convince any local truckers to break the picket line and deliver more to him. So he called some old friends of his at Amoco, and they told him about a solution: he could use natural gas—which came into the refinery via pipeline—to ignite the reformers. It was a tricky, complicated process, but Paulson and his team figured out how to make it work. Soon he had all the reformers firing, and the fractionating towers were running at full steam.
On the first night of the strike, however, one of the boiler units—the large furnaces that superheated oil before it was sent to the fractioning towers—wasn’t working right. The mechanical problems inside the boiler went unnoticed for many hours because the unit was understaffed. Usually the boiler was monitored by three employees, but Paulson had to run the unit with fewer. The boiler 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 would open the doors and pull out drivers,” recalled Lowell Payton, a unionized worker who picketed outside the gates.