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Array
(
[sid] => 14007
[catid] => 1
[aid] => Mick
[title] => Coal Was King
[time] => 2003-03-10 05:30:00
[hometext] =>
[bodytext] => Coal was King in these mountains for many
a year. My grandfather owned a coalmine… back then owning a mine meant you had a hole dug in the ground, hand hewn timbers keeping the roof from caving in on top of you as you laid flat on your stomach or back, often in an inch or two of water, with a pick and shovel digging enough coal out of the mountain to keep your family warm another night possibly two. If you were lucky, and found a good vein, you might have a high enough roof to drive a small pony and a wooden sled into your mine to bring the coal out, If not, you did like my grandfather and father did and carried coal out of the mine in burlap sacks. Having a coal mine then didn’t mean you had money, just that your family might stay warm through cold Winter nights, no central heat, just a pot-bellied stove or a shared fire grate. This was in the Forties and Fifties when a lot of people in the mountains where Coal was King still lived in mining towns or coal camps as they were known. Called coal camps because the coal companies would often build a town near their mines. A town of identical, cheap clapboard houses for the miners’ families…All the house they could afford, seeing as they were paid not with money but coal company script, worthless, only good for company housing, only accepted, at the company store. Generations fell into the coal camp trap, sons joined fathers deep underground for twelve hour days . Sons became fathers, and their sons joined them still working hours on end only to end up deeper in debt to the coal company, providing an endless supply of virtually free labor for the mines to exploit Even today, you can drive through Southeastern Kentucky towns and see identical rows of frame houses, lining both sides of the streets in what was once a company town. The mines got the easy money out and left the towns they built for profit to live or die without the one-time King. Coal was King in those mountains for many years. My grandfather worked in the mines as a young boy, coal mining was a dangerous business, even more than it is today. At that time, all the coal mining in the mountains was done deep underground in hand dug mines where teams of small ponies pulled carts of coal out of the earth’s bowels in rail carts riding on miniature railroad tracks. These small ponies were worth their weight in gold, a pony would sell for two or three times what a saddle horse did simply because of the amount of coal the pony would pull out of the mine in its life. My great-uncles weren’t miners they farmed, growing acres and acres of corn they sold to the miners living in the camps miners would buy corn not to eat, but drink. My great-uncles and others like them would raise their crop and then spend weeks turning the corn into whiskey or moonshine as it was better known. They would ride their horses to the camps with loaded “Four gallon bags”, saddle bags that held two gallon jars of ‘shine on each side. At the camps, the miners paid my uncles with what they had, not with money, just coal company script, but it bought the family things they could not make. things like coal oil for lanterns, back then electricity had yet to find its way into the mountains. It bought ‘wheat lights’ they wore on hard hats as they mined enough coal to keep the family warm for a winter, and things like candy and oranges for the children, come Christmas time, my dad often tells how special it was to get candy, you didn’t just grab a candy bar at the convenient store coming home from work back when he was a child. When my father came home from ‘Nam, he saved enough to buy a used coal truck The coal truck owners were contract labor their trucks, numbered based upon seniority, at one time my father and grandfather had trucks two and three, this was a couple of years before the last big ‘coal boom’ in the mountains, my father worked all day and then came home to work most of the night just to keep his truck running. He sometimes tells the story of my mother throwing his dinner out the front door, plate and all because he was still working on that truck two hours after supper was ready. His driver wrecked the coal truck one day, and that was the end of my father’s truck what he got from the insurance company was enough to either pay off the loan for the truck or fix it. Dad paid the bank, sold the truck. It was bought not for its parts, but for its number. He could not see a future worth continuing with the truck Two years later, coal truck owners in the mountains were making a hundred thousand a year after they paid their driver and all the bills for the truck. Dad was working for the coal company by then, he spent years working on a dragline shovel, driving a rock truck, and running a drill. Where else was a college dropout going to make forty to sixty grand a year? From the mid Seventies through the late Eighties, coal was truly King in the Eastern Kentucky mountains, In Breathitt, Perry, Knott, Leslie, and Letcher counties more than twenty mines that each provided over two thousand jobs, high paying jobs, the highest paying jobs that people in that area had ever seen. Cadillacs, satellite dishes, and boats all set in the yards of new brick homes, homes much fancier than any of the ones where their owners grew up. Much fancier, and much more expensive, but all the area banks always had money for coal miners New Cadillacs had to be had at least every two years, boats had to be faster than anything else on the lake. And since they owned boats, they had to have lake cabins, the banks had no problem financing the miners’ dreams, remember, coal was king Not quite all the coal miners and coal truck owners fell into this money trap, but most ended up really no better off than their forefathers who had owed their souls to the company store. This generation’s company store had only been hidden in a nice brick exterior downtown changing its name and means of operation. I watched my father and grandfather bring money home and knew I would follow down their path so high school was just a joke what good was algebra going to be mining coal? I wasn’t the only one, who felt this way. If I did make it to college as my parents demanded, the small private school in town’s most prominent degree was in mining technology and the vocational school taught heavy equipment, what else was there but mining? Coal was King in the Southeastern Kentucky mountains we called home. I left high school two weeks early, going through U. S. Army basic training at the age of seventeen, some excitement before spending life just like my father and grandfathers before me, fourteen hour days, driving a coal truck or some other piece of equipment for Falcon Coal or which ever coal company was hiring that week. But I came home to a changed world. Plunging oil prices provided a cheaper, cleaner alternative to King Coal. There ended up not being any mining jobs for me or very few others of my generation as coal companies laid off workers and trucks, the twenty or so mines dwindled, fewer surviving every year as OPEC continued to offer cheaper oil. Soon all the strip mines were gone, only the ‘deep mines’, going miles and miles underground remained, and they were cut to skeleton crews, as forty thousand jobs became less than four hundred. In the midst of all this, cars were stolen and houses burned as miners, who lived paycheck to paycheck simply by the grace of the bankers, lost everything they owned, insurance companies got stuck with millions of dollars worth of claims, forced to pay the banks what the miners now could not. [comments] => 1 [counter] => 202 [topic] => 31 [informant] => Jim_Cundiff [notes] => [ihome] => 0 [alanguage] => english [acomm] => 0 [haspoll] => 0 [pollID] => 0 [score] => 5 [ratings] => 1 [editpoem] => 1 [associated] => [topicname] => StoryPoetry )
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