Hard Times (36 page)

The next day I went back to work. I took my gun with me. They cooled off. It took ’em a week, they cooled off.

In my life, I’ve found people won’t take anything. If things get real bad again, I’m afraid there’d be some millionaires made paupers because they’d take their money. They’d take it the rough way. The people are gonna take care of their families, if they’d have to shoot somebody else. And you can’t blame ‘em for that. You think I wouldn’t take what you got if you had a million dollars and I had to protect my family? I sure would. I’d take your money one way or the other. Some people don’t have courage enough to fight for what they have comin’. Until 1934, more than half the people of Logan County were scabbin’. Gives you an idea how they don’t know….

Explosions? Had one back in ’35, killed a few men. They had one in Bartley, killed 136 men. In Macbeth the same year—when was that?—a fire and explosion killed eighteen and twenty men. Then in 1947, they had an explosion that killed a couple of men.

They sent me for a job in Virginia. Shaft was fifteen hundred feet deep. I went down and looked it over and went up and didn’t go. Gas and dust. That was 1965. Supposed to have been the most safest mine in the world. They had an explosion about four months after that. Killed two men, injured nine more….

 

POSTSCRIPT:
Suddenly, a light laugh: “I remember the first radio come to Mingo County, next to Logan. Wayne Starbuck, a cousin to me, brought that in in 1934. That was a boon. It was a little job, got more squeals and squeaks than anything else. Everybody came from miles around to look at it. We didn’t have any electricity. So he hooked up two car batteries. We got ‘Grand Old Opry’ on it.”

 

MY FIRST REAL MEMORIES come about ‘31. It was simply a gut issue then: eating or not eating, living or not living. My father was a coal miner, outside a small town in Illinois. My dad, my grandfather and my uncle worked in this same mine. He had taken a cut in wages, but we were still doing pretty well. We were sitting in a ’27 Hudson, when I saw a line of men waiting near the I.C. tracks. I asked him what was the trouble. They were waiting to get something to eat.

When the mine temporarily closed down in the early Thirties, my dad had to hunt work elsewhere. He went around the state, he’d paint barns, anything.

I went to an old, country-style schoolhouse, a red-stripe. One building that had eight rows in it, one for each grade. Seven rows were quiet, while the eighth row recited. The woman teacher got the munificent sum of $30 a month. She played the organ, an old pump organ with pedals, she taught every subject, and all eight grades. This was 1929, ‘30, ’31…. At the back corner was a great pot-bellied stove that kept the place warm. It has about an acre of ground, a playground with no equipment. Out there were the toilets, three-holers, and in the winter—You remember Chic Sale?
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You had moons, crescents or stars on the doors. You’d be surprised at the number of people in rural areas that didn’t have much in this way, as late as the Thirties.

One of the greatest contributions of the WPA was the standardized outdoor toilet, with modern plumbing. (Laughs.) They built thousands of them around here. You can still see some of ’em standing. PWA built new schools and the City Hall in this town. I remember NYA. I learned a good deal of carpentry in this.

Roosevelt was idolized in that area. The county had been solidly Republican from the Civil War on. And then was Democratic till the end of Truman’s time. F.D.R. was held in awe by most people, but occasionally you’d run across someone who said: “Well, he has syphillis, and it’s gone to his brain.” The newspaper in the area hated Roosevelt, just hated him. (Laughs.)

Almost everybody was in the same boat, pretty poorly off. I remember kids who didn’t have socks. We all wore long-handles—you could get ‘em red, you could get ’em white. These boys would cut the bottoms off their long-handles and stuff ’em into the top of their shoes and make it look like they had socks

We had epidemics of typhoid and diphtheria. Houses would be placarded with signs. This one girl who came to school had had typhoid and had lost all her hair. There was absolutely no way they could purchase a wig for her. This was the shame of it. The girl had to go around bald-headed for as long as I knew her. It wasn’t the physical thing because we all got used to that. But what did it do to her inside? Along about ‘34 and ’35, the state began giving diphtheria and typhoid shots and all this sort of thing.

 

 

There were any number of Socialists in this area. Today people don’t think and discuss as much as they did in those days. I remember men with thick calluses on their hands from handling shovels. They would be discussing Daniel De Leon and Debs and Christian Socialism and Syndicalism and Anarchism. A lot of them came out of the IWW into the miners’ movement. Many were first generation, Polish, Italian, Croatian…. They changed the spelling of their names as they’ve gone along. The ones who couldn’t read, someone would read it to them. There were thousands of presses that would run off little booklets, like the group in Girard, Kansas.
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My grandfather, father and uncle were self-educated men. There were less distractions then.

 

 

I remember driving through one town that had less than a thousand people in it. There were ten taverns. But they always did put it away rather heavily. They were a hard-drinking society under any standards. Many of them made their home brew. One old fellow I remember would drink his own during the week. On Saturday, he would become royalty and go to town and drink what they called factory-made. (Laughs.)

My grandmother was a very saving woman. The women in our family
took care of the money. When the Depression really hit us in 1936, when the mine closed down completely, there was no income. We tried opening a filling station and went absolutely broke on that. The only livelihood these men had was mining coal. Where would you go? Down in Harlan County, Kentucky? They were out of work, too. West Frankfort? Carter-ville? They had the same problems.

Natural gas was being used, and cities began having ordinances against dirty coal in those days. This mine was simply not making a profit. The family that owned it, pretty decent people, decided to sell. The miners, bullheadedly—who could read the handwriting on the wall, anyway?—decided they would buy the mine themselves. This was ‘36 , ’37. So they sold shares of stock. They collected $33,000. The owner’s widow accepted it rather than a $38,000 bid from a St. Louis scrap dealer, who was going to close it up.

For eighteen months, these men worked for nothing to get the mine back in shape to show a profit. It started with four hundred men. The mine operated until the Fifties. By that time, only eighteen men were left….

Some people go into strip mining. Fifteen or twenty of them get together and get the mining rights from someone. Then they put a ladder and a shaft in and strip down the area. There are very few pit mines left in this state.

This area was not ready to convert to any other type of work. The people who had the money were absentee owners. There was plenty going out but nothing coming in. When the mines decided it wasn’t profitable to operate, they closed down. That took away whatever income this area had.

In the Thirties, UMW came along. The union was the only salvation the people had. It grew violent at times, quite violent. If mines did open with scabs, it wasn’t long before someone was done away with.

 

 

I can take you to a cemetery where there is only one mausoleum. Everybody else is buried underground. In this mausoleum is a miner who died in an accident at Junction City. He oft expressed himself that he had spent so many years below ground that when he died, he wanted to spend the rest of it above. This was always on their minds: an accident.

 

 

People in the Thirties did feel a bit different. When the pig-killing was going on, the farmers would kill the pigs well enough, but they’d tell the people where they buried them, and they’d go dig ‘em up and take ’em home. The farmers couldn’t sell the pigs anyway, so they weren’t out anything.

It isn’t true that people who have very little won’t share. When everybody is in the same position, they haven’t anything to hide from one another. So they share. But when prosperity comes around, you hear: Look at that son of a bitch. When he didn’t have anything, he was all right. Look at him now.

The Depression was such a shock to some people that when World War II was over—you’d hear men in the army say it: “When I get back, I’m going to get a good job, a house and a car, some money in the bank, and I’m never going to worry again. These people have passed this on to their kids.” In many cases, youngsters rebel against this.

I never heard anyone who expressed feeling that the United States Government, as it existed, was done for. It was quite the opposite. The desire to restore the country to the affluence it had. This was uppermost in people’s minds. Even the Socialists who talked about taking the corporate system out were just talking, that’s all.

If we had a severe depression today—I’m basically an optimist—I don’t think this country would survive. Many people today are rootless. When you have this rootlessness, we’re talking about the Germany of the Twenties. You’d see overt dictatorship take over. You would see your camps….

POSTSCRIPT:
“We used to talk a great deal about keeping solvent and the morality of not going into debt. I was almost thirty years old before I went into debt.”

 

 

I WOULDN’T KNOW, ’cause I never heard the word before.

 

 

I figure maybe you’re all tensed up or somethin’. That’s the only thing I could think of “depression” meanin’.

 

 

I heard about it. They didn’t have no food and money. Couldn’t keep their children fed and in clothes. People say, like a long time ago it was, coal miners worked real hard for a couple of dollars, and you couldn’t hardly get a job. Especially in my home town and places like that.

Well, we still had it hard when we come up here. I was six. My father and my mother, they told me about how hard it was to get a job up here. That’s why I tried to get him to go back to West Virginia, after I was up here a while. See, I never knowd hard times when we was down there. So I said to Dad, “Let’s go back to West Virginia.” He says, “There’s no jobs for us down there, we can’t make a living. We have to stay here.” He said: “Some days, sometimes maybe if it get easy to get jobs down there, maybe we go down there.”

It’s so damn hard. Seems like everybody’s takin’ advantage of you. See, I never heard that word “depression” before. They would all just say “hard times” to me. It is still. People around this neighborhood still has hard times. Like you see, the buildin’s are all tore up and not a decent place to live. My house isn’t fit to live in. These buildin’s ain’t no good. If we tear’em down, they ain’t gonna build new ones for us. So we have to live in’em.