There’s something about mining, and miners. We view those who go deep in the ground in a certain way, the way the Irish think of the men who go to sea.
We all the time hear of people getting killed or terribly injured at work. There are a lot of dangerous professions, and life itself is not risk-free. But when we hear of a mine disaster the cold water takes a special path down our spines.
That’s especially true around here, and even more true in the countryside around here. My part of the world is as steeped in the history and artifacts of mining, coal mining, as any in the country.
Old timers around here already know this, but even a lot of local people don’t. People new to the area may never have heard of the worst mining disaster in Ohio history, the one that took place 80 years ago.
The particulars of the explosion in the Sunday Creek Coal Company No. 6 Mine in Millfield on November 5, 1930, are chillingly familiar to those of us who followed the news out of West Virginia last week. The Sunday Creek mine was what miners call a “gassy” hole in the ground. Along with the coal came a lot of methane gas. On that cold Wednesday morning there was a spark between a chafed wire on a mine trolley and the trolley rail. The methane ignited. The mine shaft became like the barrel of a cannon, full of fire and pressure and smoke.
The explosion killed 82 miners, among them some company executives who were there to look at improvements that had been made to make the mine safer. Miraculously, 19 miners were found alive nine hours later in a shaft off the main one, three miles into the hill. One who survived, George Rasp, said the force of the explosion had blown him more than 100 feet down the shaft and said he was saved by his wife’s apron, “which I had brought from home this morning to tie around my face because the air had been so bad lately.” He dipped it in coffee from a lunch bucket and crawled on hands and knees to an air shaft that allowed him to escape.
The mine reopened and produced coal for another 15 years. The list of those killed in 1930 includes many surnames still common in Athens County. The explosion left many widows and fatherless children.
Those killed included many fathers and sons, which wasn’t especially unusual at the time and, truth be known, isn’t today. In the interviews with relatives we heard last week, it was common to hear that yes, he was a miner, and so was his daddy and his daddy’s daddy, and all his brothers. Coal mining is a way of life that spans many generations. There are whole communities where mining is everything.
From an obituary listing in the Sunday Creek disaster we find this: “John T. Butsko age 26 was the son of Andrew Butsko age 54 … a loader in the coal mine. John was a motorman in the coal mine; he lived in Millfield with his father and siblings: Brothers Andrew, age 22, a loader in the mine, Stephen, age 20, a loader in the mine, Joseph, 18, a loader in the mine …”
Many of the victims had moved here from Hungary or Russia. Russian emigre George Keish and his sons William, 22, and Stanley, 17, were among the dead.
As tragic as the stories are — and even cursory examination of the details show tragedy piled atop tragedy — they are in their way almost statistics. They don’t tell us much of the way of life experienced, embraced, by the miners and their families who would be miners, too, or marry miners.
Such a culture it is. We do not have songs and movies called “Office-Copier-Supplies Salesman’s Daughter,” but we surely all know “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Kathy Mattea’s moving album is called “Coal,” not “University,” or even “Newspaper.” “Big John” is not about a computer programmer. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s signature song, “Sixteen Tons,” is about a coal loader.
Nor is it a matter of overly romanticizing those who dig deep holes in the ground, then crawl down in them, to work in the heat and the gas and the smell and the dust and the dirt so that when we flip the switch the light comes on. Instead, it has to do with a difficult life which any day can bring what November 5, 1930, brought to Millfield, or what the day after Easter 2010 brought to a small mine town in West Virginia.
Anymore, when I think of miners, I think of my friend Skip, a poet who lives near here, who spent a lot of years in the job of securing the ceiling, holding up the big slabs of shale so they wouldn’t come down on those pulling the coal from the seam. He’s a great big man and tough as they come.
Now he grows things, and I believe it would give him pain to swat a fly. Maybe he was always like that. Maybe life where good times are hard and hard times are harder shaped him. I have to remember to ask him.
But I know this: there’s something about mining, and miners.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.