This book presents the public relations and community outreach challenges of a public relations manager at an oil refinery. These challenges are also present at any manufacturing facility that is adjacent to a neighborhood or commercial area. It features a young public relations manager's efforts to deal with a reluctant refinery manager who has little interest in having a plan that better explains the operation to those stakeholders and offers a series of plant tours and community activities with plant personnel. Due to a series of operational incidents and upsets that occur at the refinery that causes the neighborhood, city and media to question the refinery's ability to operate in a safe and responsible manner. Unless there is improvement, the community threatens to force the refinery to close. In a series of these public relations crises, the public relations manager's ability to deal with them creates a better understanding and appreciation for his plans to bring the refinery management practices and the community together as cooperative partners rather as hostile opponents. A torrid and intimate relationship with a local reporter brings on an awakening of his previous conservative lifestyle and helps him deal with his ongoing inner struggles about either continuing in a public relations career or returning to journalism.
About the Author: A native of southeast Missouri, he attended Southeast Missouri State College and received his BS degree in accounting in 1956. He then went to work with Shell Oil Company in St. Louis, Missouri as a Treasury Management Trainee. On military leave from Shell, he served in the U.S. Navy as a staff officer with a NATO command, The Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic in Norfolk, VA. In 1960, he returned from active duty back to Shell where he held a series of supervisory and managerial assignments in retail marketing, real estate development and public affairs. Munger retired from Shell Oil Company as its West Coast Public Affairs Manager in 1991. After retirement, he became a crisis communications and media consultant. IN 1997, he moved to Flagstaff and became fully engaged as a community activist and the author of four books, a memoir, "Momma, Don't Ya Want Me to Learn Nothin'?", his life growing up in southeast Missouri during the 40s and 50s. His subsequent books, all fiction, "The Elegant Mentor," "Leaving New Madrid" and "Return to Osage Beach." His current book "The Smell Of Money" will be his fifth book in six years. Royalties from these books and the present, The Smell of Money, go to his mother's endowed scholarship at Southeast Missouri State University. Shell Oil Company Foundation matches those royalties one-to-one.