To read yesterday's installment click here.
We come from a long line of colliers, but I never would have guessed that I would wind up in the industry. During the 1970s, I remember my father always being laid off and standing on the picket line. Times were tough for us in those days, but I look back on it and realise how good we had it compared to my poor grandmother’s family, who lived in a Kentucky shack.
My father was always cranky, irritable and just plain unhappy in those days. The 1980s saw many mines shut down. The general consensus was that coal was finished. By the end of that decade, a young man would be hard pressed to find a job in the industry. There were too many experienced, panelled miners out of work. A “new hire” was unheard of in those days.
The teachers in my high school preached college to us. Our parents (those of us in my generation growing up in this area) told us to go to school and make something out of ourselves. My dad would always tell me that I was very smart, and he was glad that I would never have to do what he did to earn a living. I can understand everyone’s concern and why their attitude was the way it was at that time, but fate has a funny way of playing tricks on us all. After joining the Marine Corps at 17 I began college at California University of Pennsylvania in 1993. I did this for eight years on and off, working jobs including timber, construction, auto mechanics and bar tending.
I ended up married during this time and in need of more wages. I had just started back to college, now in my senior year, and was tending bar when one night a patron, Frank Puzella, (who later became a good friend) waltzed into the bar and announced that he had just got hired back into the mines. Frank had just gotten hired to work for JC Construction out of Fairmont, WV, and was doing track installation at Dunkard Mine. He said, during the course of the conversation, that the owner of the outfit (Paul Tenney) was having a difficult time in keeping dependable workers. I told Frank that I would be dependable if I had a job like that. He told me what I needed to do to enter the field, and that he would talk to Paul Tenney about me. Paul Tenney was a huge boxing fan, and I was a professional fighter just prior to this. I fought amateur golden gloves and was a top boxer in my platoon in the Marines.
Frank told Paul Tenney about me and he was impressed, not by my resume but by the fact that I was a professional athlete. Paul told Frank that if I took my 40-hour class and passed that he would hire me. I passed the class and started in May 2001 at Maple Creek Mine, Spinner Shaft. At this time, JC Construction was United Mine Workers’ Construction Workers. We were contracted to perform recovery work (track, trolley and belt lines) and mine construction (belt lines, cribs and walls). Some of our crew was panelled from up north, around the Johnstown area.
I was assigned to an older fellow, Bill Chapel, from whom I learnt much. The crew nicknamed me the “little boxer”, as Paul Tenney made it known at Maple Creek that I had fought pro, so I was sort of a novelty. However, we struggled at that mine, not only with bad jobs, but also with the regular miners of the mine. We fought many battles and I learned the woes of being a contractor.
We worked until September when a fall in the bleeder of the new longwall panel forced Maple Creek to lay men off. The set-up face was just about complete and mining had not begun when this occurred. Maple Creek could not mine with the longwall, so our contract became voided and we were all laid off.
Paul Tenney took a chance as an owner/operator and opened a mine back up in Buchannon, WV. Most of us from the construction crew were called to work there. My wife and I could not afford for me to stay in Buchannon and it was too far to drive. I turned the job down at that particular mine, which is now known as the Sago Mine. Paul could not make a go of it, so he closed it and sold out. Someone else bought it and it recently made history (God rest their souls). Wow. Fate is funny.
I was out of the mines and back to bartending when another patron got me hired to work for DANA Mining, which is owned by the Laurijta family of Morgantown, WV. I was hired to run buggy in the Titus Mine (imagine that, my grandfather’s mine!). I started at Titus in April 2002 on the dayshift crew.
My first day on the buggy was not very productive, but rather, destructive. I smashed my own cable twice, getting all the leads both times. I learned to make a splice under the direction of the mechanic electrician. I also knocked out a crib that was built up at the face, three times.
The part of the mine that we were working still had various sized entries. We were mining in an old development area. It was not uncommon to have an 18-foot entry, which required cribs or posts, and the next to be 14 foot. Trying to run buggy in a place like that, where the crosscuts were sort of staggered to boot, was difficult, even for an experienced operator. I found myself kneeling at the makeshift feeder (an old buggy cut in two with no crusher) with a short-handled sledgehammer. My task was to drag off the big rocks and bust them up. I became the crusher that did not exist on our feeder. Needless to say, after two weeks of this, I never got another cable when running that buggy!
The experience at Titus Mine for me was valuable. Aside from lack of ventilation, low roof, mud and water, I did learn many things. I learned how to splice cable, how to move power and splice belt, how to operate a scoop, how to run buggy and how to operate the front-end loader in the yard. Most of all, I learned to watch out for myself, because no one there was going to do it for me. For the most part, the conditions were bad. The top was only about 42 inches, and the bottom was fireclay and water (mud). The drive to Titus (50-plus miles one way), the low wages ($11.50 per hour) and the meagre benefits caused me to seek other employment. I left mining for 14 months.
Story continues tomorrow.
