Pat Devlin, a quasi-fictional character is developed in an accurate historical setting, to record for posterity the unique times and lives of this great, multi-cultured people in his home town of Mt. Carmel, Pa. Pat was a true, tobacco chewing, coal cracker, deeply in love with his childhood sweetheart and born with an insatiable curiosity and desire to play detective. But it is more than that. The Coal Cracker is about the scrupulous religious fervor of a Catholic education, and about the proud but strange camaraderie of its citizens that exist to this day. It is a story of puppy love, deceit and rejection; innocent times racked with violence; poverty without pity; prejudice overcome; the carnage of war and the primitive practice of medicine in the early fifties. Finally, it is a success story with a literally, incredible happy 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.
