The Coalwood Way Read Online Free PDF

heaven. Gary was a harsh place of union strikes and bloody heads. Coalwood had steady employment, an honest company-store system, free medical and dental care, and fine, big, sturdy houses provided to each miner for only a small monthly rent. Mr. Carter allowed no union in his mine but paid the best wages in the county. He also worked hard to keep his mine safe, installing a complex ventilation system to flush out the explosive methane that seeped from the coal seams. Gary had coke ovens beside its houses, and their noxious fumes covered its hollows. The drifting smoke made children and old people sickly. Coalwood’s air, though dusty from the endless coal trains chuffing from the tipple through the center of town, was sweet in comparison. When Dad applied for work, Captain William Laird, Mr. Carter’s right-hand man, saw something in the skinny youth and took him under his wing, teaching him how to mine coal, lead men, and to ferociously love Coalwood and Mr. Carter’s social philosophy. A lot of people in town called Dad the “little Captain.”
    Mr. John Dubonnet, a Gary High School classmate of both my father and mother, began work at the Coalwood mine at the same time. Mr. Dubonnet became a fierce advocate of the United Mine Workers of America and joined the long battle to unionize the Coalwood mine. The union won its battle with Mr. Carter in 1949, causing him to sell out to a steel company in Ohio. The Carter Coal Company was renamed the Olga Coal Company, after the wife of a steel official. Five years after the unionization, the Captain retired and Dad took the mine superintendent’s job. About the same time, Mr. Dubonnet took over the union local. Two boys from Gary who’d arrived in Coalwood sharing their poverty and desperation now shared only suspicion and distrust.
    Coalwood’s houses were jammed between steep, hump-backed mountains pushed so close together a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one hill to the other. The houses were built in rows down the valleys, each row with a distinctive name: New Camp, Substation, Tipple, Six, Main Street, Coalwood Main, Club House, Snakeroot, Middletown, Mudhole, and Frog Level. Coalwood Main included the central company store (known as the Big Store), the company offices, the general superintendent’s mansion on an overlooking hill (vacant since Mr. Van Dyke had been fired), the company Club House (which was a hotel for single miners and visitors and was also used for company banquets and dances), the company churches (the preachers were company men), offices for the company doctor and dentist (still provided free to miners and their families), and the federal post office. When visitors drove over Welch Mountain, the first row they encountered was New Camp on the left followed by Substation on the right. Coming in over Coalwood Mountain from Caretta and War brought visitors past Six and then the mine tipple, where the coal was loaded into waiting railcars. Our house, a big four-bedroom, two-story wood-frame house, was at the intersection of Tipple and Substation Rows.
    It seemed to me that life in Coalwood was timeless, that forever men and their sons and their sons coming behind them would tramp to the mine to gouge out the coal. But soon after Dad took his position as the mine superintendent, nearly everything about Coalwood began to change. The biggest change was when the steel company sold the houses. If a Coalwood miner wanted to stay in town, he had to buy his house or leave. The selling of the houses came in the spring of 1959 when I was a junior in high school. Within a few months, the sale was accomplished except for two houses, ours and the general superintendent’s, both of which remained company property. The churches were also sold off, along with the utilities. For the first time in six decades of existence, Coalwood was no longer a pure company town, and strangers began to appear in our midst.
    Before the houses were sold, when a man lost his