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A new commentary every Wednesday   -  SPECIAL -  February 25, 2015

THE PROSPERITY COAL MINE: A book about hard times and union wars in the coal fields

    "It is 1927. At the age of fourteen, Tommy Ross follows his brothers underground to be an apprentice in the hazardous trade of mining coal. It is doubly dangerous, for his father has been sent to organize a local union for the United Mine Workers of America in a "company owned" coal camp. 'The Prosperity Coal Company,' is a heart-breaking, glorious novel, based on actual events that occurred all across the coal belt—stretching from West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee, to the tip of southern Illinois—a time when America was on the cusp of the great depression, and union wars raged.

    It was a time when mine owners sought to keep their workers in a state of constant serfdom; working in horrifying conditions, forced to live in shack houses and in mounting debt to the 'company store.' Therein also lives a simple love story, of the mine owner's daughter and the union organizer's son." (With apologies to William Shakespeare). 

    This is the flack that I wrote on the back of my book, now being distributed by the worldwide merchandiser, Amazon.com. The novella is in sense, biographical. My grandfather, my father, my brother, seven uncles, dozens of cousins and most of my male neighbors, labored underground all of their lives. My maternal grandfather was a miner's union organizer and regular correspondent for the United Mine Workers of America Journal. I began work in a mine as an apprentice to my father three days after I was discharged from the army in 1946.

    The stories I tell in "The Prosperity Coal Company" were inspired by the coal miner's viewpoint in an earlier time—of brutal labor, close familiarity with injury, death and exploitation by the mine owners.

    On December 21st, 1951, I was living and working at a radio station in West Frankfort, Illinois, when a dual underground explosion of methane gas and coal dust occurred in Orient #2 coal mine (Google "West Frankfort mine disaster") and saw 119 of my neighbors' bodies laid out on the floor of the high school. Had the explosion occurred during the regular day shift, upwards of a thousand miners who were working in the largest underground coal mine in the world probably would have died.

    The owners and managers of the mine knew that the mine had insufficient ventilation. Regulations called for 50,000 cubic feet of  air to be circulating through all of the working places where coal was actively being mined. This is done in order to force the methane gas constantly being emitted by the ancient jungle, out the main shaft. The use of lime-rock-dust used to suppress coal dust, a hydrocarbon, from floating in the air, was also insufficient.

    The Federal and State mine examiners were derelict. They should have closed the mine until there was compliance with regulations. The local union officers knew about the dereliction. The miners knew that safety regulations concerning ventilation and use of rock dust to suppress coal dust were being ignored. Once again, familiarity with death bred contempt.

    In the year following that disaster, 120 men were killed in accidents that took them in groups and singly, by rock falls and electrocution, derailments and drownings, throughout the region. 

 THE PROSPERITY COAL COMPANY  $9.95, plus shipping  Click: http://www.amazon.com  and enter "Prosperity Coal Company" in the search window.

-Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller

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