David DeKok has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 1 narrator, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Fire Underground.
Fire Underground
Summary
How an underground fire turned a Pennsylvania community into a ghost town. On May 27, 1962, a fire set to clean up the town dump outside Centralia, Pennsylvania, spread by accident into abandoned coal mines beneath the small town. This spawned the environmental disaster known around the world today as the Centralia Mine Fire. Journalist David DeKok, the author of this book, reported on the mine fire from 1976-86, when the fire was at its peak. Clouds of steam rose from the earth and the ground could collapse without warning, as it did on Valentine's Day of 1981, nearly killing a 12-year-old boy, Todd Domboski. That the fire reached this critical mass was due to years of government incompetence. The early projects by the state of Pennsylvania in 1962-63 to stop the fire all ran out of money before the job could be done. The U.S. Bureau of Mines built an underground barrier in the late 1960s to keep the fire out of Centralia, but it began failing by the mid-1970s. A misguided decision by the federal government in 1978 to close a vent pit left open by the state in 1963 to pull the fire away from Centralia sealed the town's doom. As the fire worsened, Centralia's people - some of whose families had been there for five generations - struggled with the daily reality of clanging gas alarms and sick children. They began to fight among themselves over what to do. In 1983, as the world watched, they voted 2-1 to accept a federal government offer to relocate all of them. By 2000, all but a half dozen of the thousand who had lived there in 1980 were gone, along with their homes and churches. Centralia exists mainly in memory today. Nature is reclaiming the blocks where homes once stood. Tourists come from around the world to see the town with the underground fire and especially the wrecked highway, split open by that fire. It was a tragedy that did not have to happen.
©2010 David DeKok (P)2016 David DeKok and Eddie Frierson
The Epidemic
Summary
The Epidemic tells the true story one of the last and worst typhoid epidemics in America, occurring in the early winter of 1903 in Ithaca, NY, home of Cornell University. At least 85 people died in the epidemic, including 29 Cornell students. More than 10 percent of Ithaca's 13,000 citizens contracted typhoid, mostly from drinking the town's water. As a prosperous university town, Ithaca had more doctors than anywhere in New York state outside of Manhattan, but that was of little help. There was no real cure. You suffered for three weeks and either died horribly or got better, but even survivors could be left physically ruined and financially destitute. Typhoid was nearing the end of a long run as a worldwide killer of rich and poor alike, but that end - brought about in the 20th century by water chlorination and antibiotics - would not come soon enough for Ithaca.
Written as a nonfiction medical thriller, The Epidemic traces the outbreak to William T. Morris' acquisition of Ithaca Water Works in 1902 from the wealthy and prominent Treman family in Ithaca. He paid too much for the water company, in part because he wanted to move his business operations to Ithaca so he could live near his close friend, Ebenezer M. Treman. The deal was rejected by Wall Street banks, but Cornell University - whose board was controlled by Morris' friends - came through with enough financing to close the deal. Forced to raise revenue and cut costs, Morris decided to build a new dam and reservoir on Six Mile Creek above Ithaca. Some of the workers he hired brought the typhoid to Ithaca.
The Epidemic details Ithaca's existential struggle to survive, examining medical procedures of the era, how the epidemic was finally broken, and who the heroes and villains were. Cornell students took matters into their own hands, demanding that the university provide clean bottled water. This story was a tragedy, but the listener will find many sparks of hope and goodness.
©2011 David DeKok (P)2018 David DeKok and DWAR38 Productions
Murder in the Stacks
Summary
On the day after Thanksgiving in 1969, Betsy Aardsma, a 22-year-old graduate student in English at Penn State University, was stabbed to death in the stacks of Pattee Library at the university's main campus in the small town of State College. For more than 40 years, her murder went unsolved. Aardsma was smart, pretty and kind, and the Pennsylvania State Police could not figure out why anyone would want to kill her. This book reveals the story behind what has been a scary mystery for generations of Penn State students, naming the likely killer and explaining why the police failed to bring Richard Haefner, also a Penn State graduate student, to justice. Much of the blame goes to Penn State itself, and especially to the killer's thesis adviser. The suspected killer, who died in 2002, was a pedophile who sought out women as cover for what he was. Although there is no known link between Haefner and Jerry Sandusky, the notorious former assistant football coach at Penn State, the listener will learn that more than one pedophile found a safe haven at the school during the same years. More than a simple true crime story, the book weaves together the events, culture, and attitudes of the late 1960s, memorializing Betsy Aardsma and her time and place in history.
©2014 David DeKok (P)2015 David DeKok