The West Virginia Coal Miner

   

The West Virginia Coal Miner statue stands in honor and in recognition of the men and women who have devoted a career, some a lifetime, towards providing the state, nation, and world with low-cost reliable household and industrial energy. The statue designed and sculpted by native West Virginian Dr. Burl Jones is located directly outside the Main Capitol Building, near the Cultural Center and the West Virginia War Veterans Memorial.

The coal miners work place

 

Hallways are held up by pillars of coal reinforced with timber

Dark as a Dungeon Merle Travis

 

Inside the mine

   

Breaker Boys

Boys would start work at the mines as a breaker boy, move into the mines and sometimes end as an old man breaker.

REV . JOHN McDOWELL a man who was once a miner. 

"I’m twelve years old, goin' on thirteen," said the boy to the boss of the breaker. He didn't look more than ten, and he was only nine, but the law said he must be twelve to get a job. He was one of a multitude of the 16,000 youngsters of the mines, who, because miners' families are large and their pay comparatively small, they start in the breaker before many boys have passed their primary schooling. From the time he enters the breaker there is a rule of progress that is almost always followed. Once a miner and twice a breaker boy, the upward growth of boy to man, breaker boy to miner, the descent from manhood to old age, from miner to breaker boy: that is the rule. So the nine-year old boy who is "twelve, goin' on thirteen," starts in the breaker. He gets from fifty to seventy cents for ten hours' work. He rises at 5:30 o'clock in the morning, puts on his working clothes, always soaked with dust, eats his breakfast, and by seven o'clock he has climbed the dark and dusty stairway to the screen room where he works. He sits on a hard bench built across a long chute through which passes a steady stream of broken coal. From the coal he must pick the pieces of slate or rock. It is not a hard life but it is confining and irksome. Sitting on his uncomfortable seat, bending constantly over the passing stream of coal, his hands soon become cut and scarred by the sharp pieces of slate and coal, while his finger nails are soon worn to the quick from contact with the iron chute. The air he breathes is saturated with the coal dust, and as a rule the breaker is fiercely hot in summer and intensely cold in winter.

Billie Darlington was born in Powellton, WV, a coal camp next to Elkridge but somewhat larger. Billie moved from Powellton and grew up in coal camps in Fayette County. He graduated  from Montgomery High School in 1949 and worked in the coal mine at Deepwater. He joined the Navy and re enlisted in the United States Air Force and retired as a Chief Master Sergeant, the highest enlisted rank possible.

I grew up the son of a coal miner, I worked in the coal mines for a short time.

Billie "Buck" Darlington

Powellton, Fayette County, WV

My name is Billie Calvin Darlington (I was named Billy, but when I went to enlist in the Navy, I didn’t take my birth certificate with me.  I went to the State House, in Charleston, West Virginia, to get a copy of my birth certificate.  The lady who filled it out spelled my name 'Billie’.  All of my official records have been that way ever since).

I was born in Powellton, Fayette County, West Virginia, on the 8th day of February, 1931.  My Mom was Nellie Roach Workman.  My Dad was Francis Marion Darlington (named for the Swamp Fox of Revolutionary War fame).  I have one younger sister; Frances Ruth Darlington Miller.  We have two brothers, Jimmy Lee Darlington, and Bobby Gene Darlington who are dead.  A sister, unnamed, was stillborn.  I am descended, on my Mother’s side, from Ethan Allen, also of Revolutionary War fame.

My Dad called me Buckaroo when I was small.  Mom shortened that to Buck; that’s what she called me all my life, until she died.

I was born at home; most people were, in those days.  We lived in a little four room house (kitchen, living room, two bedrooms) and there was a path across the back yard that led to the outhouse.  We did have water in the kitchen; pretty luxurious for the time and place.  There was an icebox on the back porch that was supposed to keep milk, butter, eggs and such, cool.  Our little house was set between two larger, two story boarding houses.  Mrs. Wade ran one; Sophia Moreno ran the other.

Mrs. Wade’s boarders were all Anglo-Saxon.  Elderly folks, for the most part.  Quiet and genteel.  One, Oscar Noble, was a railroad conductor.  He smoked a pipe that he filled from a tobacco tin.  When the tin was empty; he would put one of those flat lollipops, with the paper looped handle, in it and throw it over the fence for me to find.  I spent a lot of time in that part of the yard; a big thicket of Lilacs was my favorite place to play.

Sophia Moreno was Russian; her husband, Louie, was Spanish.  I remember Sophia as blonde and beautiful.  She was much younger than Mrs. Wade and her boarders were certainly different.  Her boarders were all coal miners.  Most, if not all of them, were from Eastern Europe.  They drank, gambled, and fought all of the time.  Once, Sophia’s husband, Louie, had to leap from an upstairs window to escape a young giant of a Lithuanian who had caught him cheating at cards.  I would sit on the coal house, (no electrical, natural gas or oil fired furnaces then, just open fire places and coal burning stoves) and talk to the miners next door.  Both Mom and Dad told me that I would speak Polish, Russian, Italian, and other languages that the miners taught me.  I remembered some of the words but not the talking with the miners.  Years later, when I was a teenager, I tried some of my remembered Polish on a man who lived near us.  He lighted up like a Christmas tree.  Whatever I said must not have been too bad.

Sophia’s boarders would get drunk; she would chew them out for their behavior, and they would get mad and move out. They would go up the road, their work clothes in their arms and dragging along on the ground.  A few days later, when they were sober and missing the food at Sophia’s, they would come back.  She always let them move back in.

Among my first memories was riding my tricycle and seeing a snake go under our house.  I told my Mom and Dad.  Dad crawled under the house and came back out with a big black snake.  He was holding the snake just behind its head and it was wrapped all around his arm.  With his free hand, he unwrapped the snake from his arm, and then snapped it like a bullwhip.  The snake’s head came off.  Dad tried to throw the snake into the creek but it draped across the electrical power lines in front of our house.  It hung there for a long time.

The Ridenour’s lived a couple of doors below us.  They had a cow that stayed mostly in a barn under a big tree behind their house.  I was fascinated by the cow.  Too, they made their own apple butter.  The day would start off with big fires being built in the backyard.  Then big zinc washtubs of apples, peeled and cored beforehand, would be cooked with spices until they reached the stage of perfection.  The fires would burn all day while apple butter was put into jars and more apples were prepared and cooked.

I remember when the Labor Train, that hauled miners up the valley to work and back down the valley to home at night, exploded.  The explosion was caused by crown sheet failure, not uncommon with steam driven railroad engines.

Mom’s attention was attracted by loud voices in the road in front of our house.  It was still dark, in the early morning, the second day after Christmas, 1934.  When she went to the door to see what was happening, she was told by miners, running down the road,  that the Labor Train had exploded and everyone on it killed.  This was, obviously, not true.  The runners had been on the train.

My Mom and Sophia, from next door, both with husbands on the train, started up the road to see if they could hear news of them.  They were stopped by State Police and told that they could not go any farther than they were, still nearly a mile from the scene of the wreck.  They came back home.  I can remember my Mom walking the floor, worried about my Dad.

There was no word of Dad until he came home late that afternoon.  He was one of a handful of men who had worked to remove the dead and injured from the wreckage of the train’s engine and the first coach adjacent to the engine.  Most of the men had left immediately after the explosion occurred.  Others built up fires and just stood around talking.  A mere handful had retained the presence of mind to act rationally.  A man named Otis Brogan, living near the spot where the explosion had happened, opened his home to the injured.  With temperatures below zero and the injured soaking wet from steam and water from the engine’s boiler, he probably saved many lives that morning.  He was truly a Good Samaritan.

 There were eleven bodies, covered with blankets, laid out beside the little creek that ran under the railroad track near the wrecked train.  One wife went from blanket-covered form to blanket-covered form, turning back the blankets and looking into the dead faces.  She found her husband’s face among them.  She covered him back up, then buried her own face in the skirt of her apron and walked slowly away.

At the hospital, the injured were being examined and treated as soon as the doctor could reach them.  When Bill Manus was approached, he told the doctor to take the others first, he wasn’t that badly hurt.  When the doctor finished treating all the rest he returned to find Bill Manus dead.  Did he, somehow, know?  This is how legends are born.

Jess Persinger was a close friend of my Mom and Dad.  He was a bachelor and took Sunday dinner with them quite often.  He died as he was being carried into the hospital. My Dad told me that Jess only owned one shirt and that my Mom would wash it for him when he visited.

The Fireman and the Engineer were blown far from their cab.  One was found in the creek on the left of the track; the other was in the creek on the other side.  Both had died instantly.

When the valley counted up its loss; there were 19 who had died.  My Dad took me to the site of the wreck, half a century after the hills were rocked by the thunder of the exploding train engine, and told me all that I have told here.  He told of how the electric wires on poles beside the track had been broken and how the arcing wires lighted up the dark morning with blue fire.  He showed me a small house that had been struck by the flying cab of the engine; tearing off the corner of a bedroom where small children were sleeping. The children were uninjured.  

I remember the long lines of cars when the funerals of the dead were conducted at the church near our home.  There weren’t that many cars around our neck of the woods in those days and to see so many of them gathered together in one place was noteworthy indeed.

Dad had originally been aboard the front coach, in which nearly everyone was killed or seriously injured.  Then, an acquaintance came by and told him that his brother-in-law, Orville Workman, was in the last (third) coach.  Dad got up and went back to sit with Uncle Orville and, in so doing, probably saved his life.

I remember my Uncle Harold stopping at our house when he came to Powellton to go to the movies.  He was a teenager then.  He had a bandage on his finger, with a fake nail that appeared to be stuck through his finger.  My Dad had installed a new handle in the pick that he used to dig coal.  He placed it in a washtub, with water in it, to soak and tighten the handle.  I came along, picked up the pick, and stuck it through the bottom of the tub.  I remember that Mom used that tub, with the repair in the bottom of it, for years after that happened.

I remember that my dog, a little pup named Silver, drowned in a ditch in our backyard. I remember another little dog (he belonged to the folks who lived diagonally across the road from us) who used to go nearly mad on Sunday mornings when the church bell rang.  He would howl and howl until the bell stopped ringing.

 I remember Mom putting a red sweater on me, so that she could see me, and letting me run around on the hillside behind our house.

I remember that my little brother, Bobby, and I were scared when we experienced our first Halloween.  There were goblins at the door.

What I don’t remember is being carried in a basket, on top of Mom’s head, across our backyard during floods that struck Powellton on three consecutive Sundays in 1932.  I remember that there were empty spots across the road from us where houses had been washed away during those floods.  I was about one year old, Mom told me, when the floods came.  She had waded water up to her armpits while crossing our yard.

My Dad nearly drowned in one of the floods.  He and several other men had rescued a woman and some children from a house that the water was threatening to sweep away. They were making their way along a pile of driftwood and trash that had piled up against a fence.  Dad was last in line.  The driftwood broke loose and carried him away when the others had reached safety.  He was carried completely under a house and was only able to exit the flood after being carried well down stream.

I can remember that my Dad took me to Mount Carbon, a town on the railroad down by the Kanawha River, to a baseball game.  He bought me two hot-dogs and a Coca Cola. It cost him 25 cents, he later told me.  I spent most of the afternoon playing behind the grandstand. I also remember that I was not allowed to go out of the yard by the front gate.  Once I did.  I crossed the road and went down into the creek. High adventure for a four or five year old.  Mom tanned my bottom for doing it. I don’t remember that I ever did it again.

We moved from Powellton when I was almost five years old.  We moved to Kingston, West Virginia, another coal mining town; owned completely, lock stock and barrel, by the Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company.

 Kingston, Fayette County, Hungry Hollow

We moved into a six-room house (three rooms up; three rooms down.  The house was like a ‘T’, with the cross bar in front.).  Hungry Hollow cut back into the hills behind the company store, which was just about mid-town.  We lived less than five hundred yards from the store; which was convenient, since hardly anyone in town owned an automobile.  You walked wherever you went in Kingston at that time.  I walked to school; Dad walked to work; Mom walked to the company store.

Hungry Hollow was a great place to live in the summertime.  A clear, cold, little creek ran down the hollow.  It was full of big crawfish, spring lizards, and kids trying to catch them.  We slept, in summer, with the windows open.  I would listen to the creek tumbling over the rocks on its way down the hollow until I fell asleep.  With night, a cool breeze flowed down from the hills and that made nights pleasant in Hungry Hollow.  Two huge trees, a maple and a hickory, stood in our front yard.  They shaded the entire yard and provided a cool place to play.

There was no indoor plumbing of any kind in Hungry Hollow.  All water had to be carried from a pump that was across the creek, about a hundred and fifty feet from our house.  Again, it was convenient; some families carried water for over two hundred yards.  We also had to bring in wood and coal every night to burn in the cook stove next morning.  In winter, you needed enough coal to keep the fireplaces and the stove (we had a big Warm Morning heater in the living room) going all night.  We had a two holer (outhouse) that sat up on the hill in our backyard.  Thanks to Dad, our front yard was fairly level.  He had built a wall from loose rocks across the yard, and then filled in behind it with ashes from the stove and fireplaces and from dirt that he dug from the back yard.  He sodded it over with sod that he took from the creek bank.  Soon, we had a nice level lawn where once there had been a rocky road that ran almost under our house.

Our house was built on a slope.  While the back porch and the back of the kitchen were at ground level, the front porch was at least 8 feet above ground.  There was no skirting or anything to fill in or mask the area under the house; it was wide open.  In winter the wind howled under the house and made it much harder to heat.  The area under the house never saw rain, of course.  Dry dust was inches deep.  Cats used the area as a bathroom.

We had chickens in a small pen and we raised a couple of hogs each year to slaughter as soon as it was cold enough.  These and a small vegetable garden helped out a lot.  Buying at the company store added a full 25 to 50 percent to the grocery bill and it was important to have the extra source of food.  When you had carried a five-gallon bucket of feed several hundred yards up the hollow a couple of times a day you definitely felt that you had earned the extra rations.

Next door lived the Chapmans.  There were Charlie and Mindy, the parents, and eight girls and two boys.  A family of twelve, living in a four-room house (two up, two down). The Chapman girls were all, without exception, attractive.  Some dipped snuff.  My Mom had always taught me that boys were stronger than girls and that I should not hit them.  One day, in a fit of anger, I set out to demonstrate how much stronger I was to Hazel Chapman.  Hazel was a couple of years older than I and she nearly beat me to death.  My Mom hadn’t said anything about the age difference.  When you are 7 or 8 years old, two years can make a big difference.  

Charlie Chapman kept bees.  He had 20 or 25 hives of them on the hill below his house.  He also had a going hog producing program up in the hollow past the houses.  His brood sow was huge, so long and heavy that she was sway backed.  She normally had litters of 12 to 15 piglets.  Charlie killed and ate her when she started to eat her young. Mindy Chapman’s mother, Old Mammaw, would always come to stay awhile just after the hogs were killed each fall. The Chapman’s had several big gardens farther up in the hollow, beyond the last house.  The path up the hollow was narrow, crowded on both sides by blackberry thickets for much of its length. The blackberry bushes provided an almost endless supply of fat, juicy berries in season.  Another thing that they provided was lots of Copperhead snakes that lived in among them.  I would creep along the path, searching out every leaf and twig to make sure that it wasn’t a snake.

Across the creek from us lived Cecil Townsend.  His front porch was at least 15 feet above the ground.  Cecil was a coal miner, like just about everybody else who lived in Kingston.  When the miners went to work, they were pulled up the mountain on a hoist car.  Hoist cars held 10 to 12 miners on open seats, like steps.  There was no top or sides; you could fall off or be rained on if the fates so chose. One night Cecil was on the hoist car, being hoisted up the mountain.  This was a trip  of a quarter mile or more and almost straight up.  The cable, that pulled the car, broke loose.  All of the miners except Cecil sat tight (probably too shocked and scared to act).  Cecil, announcing that he intended to live, jumped off the car into the dark.  He landed in a gully that was nothing but big rocks and boulders.  Someone at the bottom of the hill knew what had happened and switched the run-a-way hoist car onto the track used to haul coal from the mine.  The car ran a long way but was stopped with no injuries to those who had stayed with it.  Cecil Townsend lost both of his legs.  He spent most of his time after that sitting on his back porch, shooting at birds in the trees behind his house with a .22 rifle. I remember that the kids who lived in the hollow were fascinated by, and afraid of, Cecil’s artificial legs.  When he was sitting in the swing on his front porch, a half dozen or so of us would take a seat on his bottom step.  Then we would move up, one step at a time, until we had reached the top.  Nobody spoke.  We just sort of looked sidewise at Cecil.  He would sit there, a little smile on his face.  He knew the game that we were playing and he played it with us.  After a proper length of time had passed, Cecil would slowly raise one of his pant legs.  As soon as we saw that leg with the holes in it, we were off the steps and running as though pursued by the devil himself.  Cecil would laugh and laugh.

Cecil had a brother-in-law who was about 17-18 years old.  He was overbearing and a bully, constantly picking on kids smaller and younger than himself.  Albert was his name.  The kids in Hungry Hollow had our hero.  His name was Charles Shaw.  Charles was about the same age as Albert but, in just about everything else, the dead opposite of Albert.  He looked after and protected the younger kids who lived in Hungry Hollow. Once Albert came to visit his sister.  The first time he started to pick on one of us kids, Charles challenged him.  Charles was shorter and lighter than Albert, but he never hesitated.  It wasn’t long until Albert retreated, yelling and making threats, with blood streaming from a badly smashed nose.  He never bothered the Hungry Hollow kids again.  The last time I saw Charles, he was well advanced with Hodgkin’s Disease.  I wish that I had told him then that he had always been my hero. Another story about Albert.  Every outhouse in town had a trap door in back.  A dump truck, with a big tank built into it, would come around at night, during the summer, and empty the pits under the outhouses.  Several of the older, bigger teenage boys would be hired to work with the truck.  Albert was one of these.  The contents of the pit would be dipped out into a big tub, then the tub would be carried to the truck and dumped into the tank.  When the tank was full, the truck would be driven several miles below town, backed out onto a ramp, which had been built in one of the hollows, and dumped. There was a door on the back of the tank that had to be unlatched in order to dump the contents.  Albert went alongside the truck and unlatched the door.  Then, Albert fell from the ramp into several nights’ work that had already been dumped into the hollow.  That’s not all; the truck dumped its full load on top of him.  He took off all of his clothes and threw them away.  Then he went down into the creek, at the bottom of the hollow, and scrubbed himself raw.  It was already daylight and the sun coming up when the truck stopped in front of Albert’s parents home.  There weren’t many people abroad yet that morning but those who were soon spread the word about Albert streaking, stark naked, from the truck to his front door.

Charlie Chapman was one of several men that I knew who had blue freckles on his face.  The freckles were caused by bits of coal having been blasted into the skin of his face while working in the mines.  Lots of men died in the mines.  Some were killed in rock falls.  Some were killed when gases exploded.  Some died because they had gone into a pocket of gas and had no oxygen to breathe.  The mine, almost without exception, marked those who lived.  They limped from being caught in machinery or from being covered by rocks and slate falling from the roof of the mine.  They had missing fingers, arms or legs.  They had a blind eye or were missing teeth.   Some had broken noses and scarred faces.

I can’t imagine a better place for a kid to grow up than Kingston in the 1930s and 1940s.  Drugs were unheard of.  No such thing as the teenage gangs that now exist was known then.  Groups of kids stuck together out of common interests but crime was not one of them.  The grown-ups had a tolerant, half amused outlook on us and the things that we did.  For instance, on Halloween Night, we took the town apart.  Most gates ended up in the creek that ran through the middle of town.  Bridges that crossed that creek were most likely thrown down into the creek bed.  Some outhouses were overturned but the big two holers were just too heavy for most of us to handle.  Hardly anyone got upset.  The company that owned the town would send work crews around to put things right and that was the end of it.  If you were a boy between the ages of 8 and 15, you were expected to get into all the mischief that your imagination could cook up every Halloween Night.  Nobody was harmed.  No homes were damaged.  Nobody endangered.  And it only happened that one night each year.  The coal company allowed us that and we obeyed the rules.

I can remember only two exceptions to these rules.  One night, several of us were coming from the schoolyard, headed toward the store.  Junior Sprouse I think it was, picked up a dead cat, fairly well advanced into decay, and threw it on a porch.  That was, at least, his intention.  Someone opened the front door just as he released the cat and it flew through the door and ended up all the way in the back of the house, in the kitchen.  We ran away so fast that I don’t even remember hearing the screams of rage and indignation. Another time, some boys (not me, honest) leaned a heavy timber against a man’s door and then knocked on the door.  As soon as he turned the doorknob and unlatched the door, the weight of the timber drove the door back into his face and knocked him across the room.  It must have scared him half to death but he wasn’t seriously hurt.

 We all carried slingshots, made from rubber automobile inner tubes and a forked stick. Most of us were deadly with those things and carried them slung around our necks, ready for instant use.  We always had a pocket full of round rocks for use with the slingshots.  A few marbles or ball bearings were special and were kept separate from the other ammunition.  I’ve no doubt that people could have been killed with the slingshots.  I know that some especially vicious dogs, that gave us constant trouble, were.  I’ve seen ball bearings shot through the shell of a big snapping turtle; a human skull is no thicker or tougher.  

The coal that was dug from the mines at the very head of the valley was hauled by a small steam engine, called The Dinky, along a track high up on the hill above Kingston.  The Dinky pulled three standard sized railroad cars, gondolas, to the tipple. The tipple was a big, loud, dirty plant where the coal was separated as to size and loaded into cars that were taken away by an engine of The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.  There was a thing called a ‘shaker’ in the tipple.  It literally shook all of the coal and acted like a flour sifter, to separate the different sized lumps of coal.  It could be heard all over town when it was operating.

Inside the tipple, walkways, ladders and steps led up, down and in every direction.  Just about every boy in Kingston knew the inside of the tipple as well as he knew his own back yard.  Sparrows nested in the tipple by the hundreds.  On weekends, when the tipple wasn’t operating, dozens of young, budding hunters would be prowling the catwalks and ladders, looking for sparrows to shoot with their BB guns.

In one of the hollows a small lake had formed.  It was called The Dinky Pond. The Dinky Pond was filled with about five feet of a brown/green, stinking mixture of water, rotting vegetation, and dead and rotting frogs and snakes.  The bottom of the pond was some three feet or more of soft mud.  The banks of the Dinky Pond were steep, almost straight up, except for one corner where a small flat area had been formed by dirt and gravel that had washed down from the track bed.  A narrow path, hardly a foot wide, ran all the way around the pond from here.  The banks were clay and were very slippery when it rained. Thousands of big Bullfrogs and hundreds of big water snakes lived in the Dinky Pond.  Almost any time of day, in summer, there were boys at the Dinky Pond.  It was considered to be great fun to kill the snakes that crawled out onto the banks.  Many people caught and ate the huge bullfrogs that filled the pond.  There were so many of them as to make no sport of catching them.  A lot of boys shot them with air rifles and threw them into the water.  It added much to the pond’s atmosphere.

Frankie Martin was a small black boy, about 10-12 years old.  He was just about the friendliest kid in town.  We called him Frankie Moses, because his Dad was Mose Martin, a much liked and respected man.  Frankie was an only child.  One summer afternoon, Frankie and another young boy were at the pond, just the two of them. Frankie fell into the pond.  He couldn’t get back out because of the slippery banks.  I don’t think that he could swim.  The other boy ran for help.  Several men came back with him.  There was no sign of Frankie.  The men went into the pond and found Frankie.  But, they were too late.  Frankie was dead.  He had drowned.  His funeral was one of the largest ever in Kingston and caused comment for years after because there had been as many white people as there were black people at the funeral.

An unforgettable person was Robert Watts.  He was at least 75, maybe 85 years old.  He may have been, in fact he probably was, born a slave.  He was not a large man and what little hair he had left was snow white.  His feet and legs bothered him a great deal and he walked slowly and limped badly.  Nobody called him Mister Watts, or Mister Robert, as was and still is common in the South.  He was black, and racial prejudice still had an iron grip on the adult world.   To them he was Old Bob Watts; to us kids he was very special. He taught many of us to fish.  Each day, when the weather was fit for a man of his years to be out and about, along about mid-day; you would see him on his way to Paint Creek.  He would be walking along the railroad track; that was the most direct route to the creek. He would be carrying a cane pole about 8 feet long, with his fishing line wrapped around the small end, the hook stuck in the end of the pole to keep the line from coming loose.  He also carried a 10-quart zinc water bucket.  In the bucket would be his lunch, a couple of biscuits in a brown paper bag.  On the way home anything that he had caught would replace his lunch in the bucket.  More than likely a kid or two, somewhere along the way to the creek, would join him.  If not then, he would surely see them sometime during the day. He taught us that small fish were to be thrown back into the creek, not left on the bank to die.  He used to say that he didn’t see any fish on the creek bank and that he didn’t know why we were constantly taking our lines out of the water.  He didn’t tolerate swearing or filthy talk of any kind.  No big kid bullied a smaller kid in his presence.  He treated us all, black or white, like his own beloved grandchildren. He not only taught us to fish; he taught us what a decent human being was.  Old Bob Watts was what his God, not man, had made him.  He was a gentleman, in every sense of the word.

Another unforgettable person, whose influence has helped to shape my life every day since first I knew her, was Sue Courtney.  She taught English at Kingston High School and presided over the study hall.  I had two study hall periods, back to back, the last two periods of the day my sophomore year.  After I had done the next days assignments I had nothing to do.  Miss Courtney let me play her big 12-inch recordings of classical music.  She taught me that there was more to music than banjos and fiddles.  I have always been grateful for that.

The custodian of our high school and elementary school was ‘Smokey Stover’.  He was called that because of the Sunday comics Fire Fighter character who was so popular at the time. I never knew his first name but Stover really was his last name.  Smokey had fashioned himself an ‘office’ in the furnace room of the high school gymnasium.  In an area about 12 feet square, behind the furnace, he had installed a few cast off chairs.  This is where he spent his non-busy periods and where some of us were permitted to sit with him on winter weekends.  He would fire up the furnaces and get things warm and cozy on Sunday evenings for school the next day.  A handful of boys were granted the privilege  of sitting and talking with Smokey and listening to his stories.  He was not an educated man but he had an inbred dignity that would have done honor to a king.  He never addressed any of us as anything but ‘Lad’.  He never raised his voice but no display of bad manners or insulting or profane talk was permitted in Smokey’s place.

We moved from Kingston five weeks before my sophomore year of high school ended. We moved to Deepwater, West Virginia, down on the banks of the Great Kanawha River.

Deepwater

  

It is rare for a kid to move from one town to another and to find that his new home must have been created with him in mind. That was Deepwater. Dad always had a boat, a big, heavy, wooden, homemade ‘john boat’.  John boats are flat bottomed.  Both ends are square, with the bow being less wide and slightly turned up. They are almost indestructible and you really have to work hard at turning one over.  Being wood, they are, of course, unsinkable.  No safer boat could be found for a boy to venture forth onto a river in. I practically lived in and on the river in the summertime. If I wasn’t swimming with the other boys, I’d be off by myself, fishing or just moving along the river in the boat, much like a Sunday driver out to see the sights. And there were sights to see. Big Herons waded in the quiet backwaters. Huge turtles would slide off of the banks as you glided silently along under the willows. Sometimes, small, harmless water snakes by the dozen would rain down out of the willows as you moved under them. They were just trying to escape. After the river had been high and had receded, fish could sometimes be found trapped in pools, formed when the river was in flood. The biggest fish that I ever caught came from such a pool.  I killed it with a rock. My Dad always had a trotline or two in the river. They supplied us with a constant supply of fresh fish.  He would use mussels, from the river, as bait. One of my favorite pass-times was diving for mussels for Dad to use on the trotlines. I would anchor the boat in a quiet backwater, with four to six feet of water and a mud bottom. I’d dive down and swim along the bottom, running my hands along on top of the mud, feeling for mussels.  They feel just like rocks sticking up out of the mud. When I found one, I’d swish it around in the water to wash the mud off and then throw it into the boat. There were some big Gar Fish that hung around the still back waters. They had snouts like an alligator, filled with long, sharp teeth. I kept a nervous eye on them while I was diving, although I never heard of them biting anybody. I’d work until I had 50 or 75 mussels and then take them home. Usually, I’d just dump them into the river by the boat dock. They would burrow into the mud and stay right there. Dad could get them as he needed them. Dad and I would gig fish at night. Rather, he would gig them; I just ran the motor for him. He had a 5 ½ horse power motor that he would attach to the stern board of the john boat. He had rigged an automobile headlight just under the water on the front of the boat. When hooked up to a car battery, it lighted up the whole bottom of the river. He had a homemade gig, with five prongs, that had a handle made of hickory about 8 feet long and more than an inch thick. It was practically unbreakable. We ran in 3 to 5 feet of clear water. Fish swimming along in front of the boat appeared to be floating in mid-air. We gigged mostly catfish (got several in the 20 pound range) and red tailed suckers. The catfish were too big to fry really. They are best at one to two pounds. The suckers were full of hair-like bones.

Miss Janie Massey, an older black lady who lived near the Baptist church, was happy to get all of the fish, any kind, that we gave her. One night we gave her 300 pounds of fresh caught fish.  She would grind all of the fish up together, after cleaning them and removing the larger bones. Then she would season them, with pepper and other spices, form them into cakes and deep fry them. Then, she hung her sign out on the front porch and cars started stopping by and folks came walking in to buy Miss Janie’s fish cake sandwiches. The morning after our son Mike was born, I was walking past Miss Janie’s house, on my way to Montgomery to see Peg and our baby.  She came out on her porch and yelled at me, “You needn’t walk so high up in the air; I knows you’se a Daddy”.  She is one of the people who have filled my life with such wonderful memories.

Everett Perkins was the head coach at Montgomery High School.  He also taught an Economics class the first period each morning. Each morning, he would go down the roster of students in his class and ask, “Did you do your homework”?  One morning, I answered, “No”. He asked, “Why not”? I said, “I just didn’t feel like doing it”. He looked at me for a long time; then he said, “You get an ‘A’ for honesty; but don’t try that again”.

The railroad depot was a long, gray building which resembled nothing so much as a railroad boxcar. It had windows in one end. There was a window in the very end of the building and one window in each sidewall, near the end. The building was only about ten feet wide and maybe fifty feet long. It was divided into two rooms. One was where the railroad’s business was transacted. The other had been a passenger waiting room when the passenger trains still stopped in Deepwater.  Now, it was used for storage. Bob Helton was one of the telegraph operators who worked at the depot. On weekends or at night, when he was working, I would stop in to talk and keep him company. I sat on the small safe that stood beneath one of the windows. There was a time, during my late teens, when I shared more of my thoughts with him than with anyone else. Bob and I shared one great love. We both smoked a pipe. I would drop in at the depot at ten o’clock or so at night; he would offer me his tobacco or, if I were trying a new brand, I’d offer him mine. Then, we would light up and spend an hour or two talking about whatever came to mind. One afternoon, probably on a weekend, we were talking and he took out a case in which there were two beautiful pipes, two Huntleigh Briars. One had a straight stem and the other was curved.  He said that his sister had given them to him. He said that he had tried to smoke the curved one but that the edge of the stem was too sharp and had cut his mouth.  Then he asked me if I would like to have the other.  I took it.  I used my pocket knife to round off the edges and I filled and smoked it.  Years later, while in England, I remembered that pipe and was able to repay his generosity by bringing him back a Meerschaum Pipe, carved in the form of a Sultan’s head.

 World War II

World war II occurred while we lived at Kingston.  We were still living in Hungry Hollow when it started.  I remember my Dad listening to the radio and being all excited and talking about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  None of us, of course, could have had the slightest idea of what it would mean in the days ahead.  Nobody could have foreseen that it would change the world and our lives forever.

Except for those married men with children, nearly all of the young men between 18 and 30 years of age disappeared from our town.  Coal mining was declared to be an essential war industry and most married miners were exempted from active military duty in order that they might continue to produce much needed coal.  Coal production was increased and Westerly, an abandoned town near Kingston, was renovated and reoccupied by the additional miners who were hired.

Soon, nearly everything was rationed and in short supply.  If you went to buy a new tube of toothpaste, you had to turn in your old toothpaste tube, because the materials used to make the tubes were being used to make war supplies.  Each car owner, depending on his needs, was given a ration of gasoline.  If you drove too much, say for instance you went out of town to visit family or friends a couple of times, you would run out of gasoline and you would walk everywhere you went until next month when your ration stamps would again enable you to buy gasoline.  New tires for your car were impossible to get unless you happened to be a policeman or fireman, and then you could only get them for your ‘official’ vehicle.

Everyone had a ration book.  Men, women, and kids too.  Certain ration stamps were only good on certain dates.  You got back little red or blue coin like tokens as ‘change’ if you didn’t use all of your ration points at one time.  Red tokens were for meat, butter and such.  Even soap was rationed.  The fats used in the manufacture of soap were needed to make munitions for the war effort.  People saved the fats from bacon and other meats and turned them in to collection points to aid in making bombs and shells.

Scrap was absolutely essential to the making of enough steel and other metals, especially aluminum and copper, to meet war needs.  The old cars, bed springs, stoves, appliances and tin cans that we see all along our highways today were unknown during the war.  Everything was collected from beside highways, from creek beds, from vacant lots, abandoned houses and lofts and barns.  One Boy Scout Troop pulled the rails from an old mine and turned them in.  Nothing was overlooked; everything was needed.  There was one empty lot in Kingston that had a mountain of scrap metal on it, collected by children of the town.  Kids spent their weekends and after school hours scouring the countryside for scrap to help in the war.  Wives turned in their old aluminum pans and iron skillets.  Men emptied their sheds and garages of all the junk that had piled up over the years.  Never before or since has our country banded together with such a single minded purpose.  Everything was done that might, in some way, help to win the war.

I remember that there was a garage, the one car kind, that was full of rubber boots, hot water bottles, rubber hoses, old inner tubes and tires, that had been gathered for the war

effort but had not been turned in before the war ended.  I think that stuff was still there when we moved from Kingston, four years later.

Victory Gardens were necessary to help to set the family table.  Backyards and vacant lots became vegetable patches.  Hillsides and woods were cleared and planted.  Chicken coops and hog pens multiplied wherever room could be found for them.  Hunting and fishing were no longer just sports, now they put needed food on the table.

Many things became rationed although they were not essential to the war effort.  But the plants and factories where they were made had been converted to manufacture things that were essential to the war effort.  Therefore, lessened production created a shortage of those things and placed them on the rationed list.

 I can remember seeing cars up on blocks.  They had no serviceable tires and none could be purchased.  Then too, if a part broke or wore out new parts were not available; another car went up on blocks.

Many of the homes had banners hanging in the windows with stars on them.  One star for each family member who was serving on active military duty.  A gold star showed all who passed the home that someone had given his or her life to defend the nation.

Mike Plasha was one of the better known boys in Kingston.  He operated the projector when movies were shown in our high school gym.  We didn’t have a movie theater and the high school gym was the only place with the capacity and layout to serve as a theater.  Mike was a Marine Sergeant.  He had won the Silver Star, our nation’s third highest award for gallantry, in one of the hells that men created on the islands of the Pacific.  Then, on the island of Saipan, Mike went out to help a fellow Marine who had been hit.  He was all but cut in two by a Japanese machine gun.  The man he went to save was already dead.  Mike’s body was later returned to Kingston for burial.

After the war had ended, Mike’s parents and his brothers and sister were visited by a Marine who had served with Mike for most of the time from his enlistment until his death.  He brought pictures of he and Mike and spent several days with the family telling of things that they had done and about Mike’s death.  He must have held Mike in very high regard to do such a thing.   Mike had three brothers who also served.  All survived the war.

My Dad had a friend who worked in the mines at Kingston.  He was notified that he was to report to his draft board induction center for a physical examination to determine whether he was fit for military service.  He left Kingston early in the morning, our roads weren’t the best, and didn’t return until late at night.  The next morning he was on the store porch, which served as our community center, and someone asked him how he had fared at the induction center.   He said that he had not passed the test; he had been found unfit for military duty.  When asked why, he said that tests had revealed his blood to be 50 percent alcohol and 50 percent bean soup.  Actually, he did pass the physical and did later serve in the Army.

War news was important to everyone.  The newspapers were full of it.  Not only did they feature war headlines and lead stories about our armed forces, they had little stories about individual hometown boys.  ‘So and so’, from somewhere in our county or state, was serving with a particular unit.  Victories were plastered across front pages.  Bad news was either made a little less bad or not reported at all.

News reels, at the movies, were the best.  You could actually see the cities being destroyed in the enemies country.  His wrecked machines and weapons of war lined the roads and filled the streets of strange looking, foreign towns.  Prisoners, in German or Italian uniforms, appeared mean and menacing.  Not many Japanese prisoners were shown, because not many Japanese prisoners were ever taken until the last few months of the war.  We got to see the deserts and the jungles and the oceans where world shaking events were taking place.  When we did see an American soldier who had made the last full sacrifice, there was usually only one, never the huge piles of corpses that marked the enemy’s defeats. 

Every evening, at six o’clock, my Dad joined almost every other American who wasn’t at work.  He turned on the radio and listened to the news.  Voices, sounding as though they were coming from the bottom of a well, came to us directly from London, England, or North Africa, or a ship at sea.

 We came to know the voices of President Roosevelt, Edward R. Murrow and Winston Churchill. They told us that we needed only to persevere, to continue to fight, in order to defeat the forces of evil against which the civilized world was struggling.  They told how noble our own leaders were.  They didn’t tell us how very close we came to being defeated and enslaved, as were nearly all of Europe and the Asian countries.

When victory finally was ours, we danced in the streets.  We celebrated in a million ways and in a million places.  For one last time we had done something great, something wonderful, together as one people, as one nation.  From the great cities, to the backwoods hollows, to farms on the Great Plains, we were united.  Then, we drifted apart, withdrew unto our own little worlds once more.

Bill Darlington from coal miner to Chief Master Sergeant USAF

        

My short career as a coal miner at Deep Water, Fayette County, WV

When I was nineteen years old, I went to work for the Riverton Coal Company at their Deepwater coal mines.  My Dad was head foreman.  Billy ‘Hacker’ Young went to work with me.  His Dad was Chief Electrician.  The only time I can remember that knowing someone got me special consideration for anything.  We, along with Ray McClure, were the midnight shift crew on a coal drill.  The drill bored into the side of the mountain, into a coal seam that had already been exposed by scraping away the covering dirt with a bulldozer.  As the drill cut into the coal, the coal was brought to the mouth of the hole where it fell into a conveyer belt.  The conveyer belt dumped the coal into a dump truck.  There were two trucks.  One would be filled while the other was away being dumped into mine cars.  Hacker drove the trucks.

I assisted Ray McClure on the drill.  The bit that we used was 90 feet long.  It was in 6 foot sections.  As the hole was being drilled into the hill; sections of the bit would be swung into place and added to the drill.  When the drill had gone as deep as it could go, sections would be removed and swung out of the way.  There was a crane and hoist built right onto the drill.  I added and removed the bit sections.  I helped Ray move the drill when we started a new hole.  In short, I was the gopher.  Know what a gopher is?  That’s the person who has to go ‘fer’ whatever is needed.  Ray McClure was an easy man to work with.  He taught me much about responsibility to the job. 

There were lights mounted all over the drill.  They operated off of a generator mounted on the drill’s diesel engine.  They could be moved to shine where we needed them.  One lighted up the area where the drill bits were stored until needed.  A couple were directed on the hole where the drill was working.  One lighted up the face of the hill above us.  In uncovering the coal seam, a sheer cliff, well over 100 feet high in places, had been created.  Much like the highwall along highways that are built in the mountains.  It hung there over us, the top hidden in darkness, every night that we worked.

One night it was raining hard when we went to work.  There were deep holes filled with muddy water in our road and streams of mud running down the highwall.  Thunder was rolling and lightning flashing.  In the lightning flashes we could see trees alongside the road, glistening with the rain on their leaves and an occasional dead tree loomed up ghostly gray in the headlights; it was an unreal world that we were sloshing through.

Sometime around 3:00 in the morning, (the rain was coming down even harder), I heard Ray yell over the roar of the drill’s engine.  I glanced at him and he pointed up at the highwall; then he jumped off of the operator’s seat and started running away from the drill and the highwall.  When I looked, mud and small rocks were falling down into the lighted section of the cliff.  I started running after Ray; I wasn’t sure why I was running but Ray had never done anything foolish since I had known him.  I followed him.  Behind us, I heard an unbelievably loud crash.  In a flash of lightning, I saw big rocks bouncing past us.  Then, it was suddenly dark.  The lights on the drill were gone.  The drill, the conveyer, and the truck being loaded were buried under hundreds of tons of rock and mud.  Hacker was away, emptying the truck.  He was in shock when he returned and saw the wall of rock where we should have been.  He thought that we were under it until we came out of the storage shack where we had gone to wait for him.  This was the night that mud slides and flash floods blocked the railroad at Montgomery Heights.    

The Deepwater Mines II

When the drill was covered with rock and mud in the slide, Billy Young (Hacker) and I were moved inside the mine.  We went to work on the track and slate crew with Les Rodgers and ‘Mutt’ Ellis.  Both were in their late 50s, early 60s.  Les was an ordained minister.  Mutt was the personification of all that Les preached against.  How they ever managed to work together is something that I have never understood.  Our job was the laying of new rails when needed; the clean-up and removal of slate and rock when necessary; and the setting of new safety posts to keep the roof from falling.  It was simple work, for the most part; the hard lessons were those that came with being deep under the mountain.  For example:  Just a few days after we had gone inside the mine to work, we were eating our lunches.  I was seated on a large chunk of slate on one side of the tunnel.  Les, seated across from me, said, ”I wouldn’t sit there, if I were you”.  I asked him why.  He said, “Come over here”.  I did.  He threw a piece of timber against the roof under which I had been seated.  Two or three hundred pounds of slate fell from the roof.  It was a lesson which I never forgot.  I always checked the roof under which I worked or sat.

Another lesson which I learned, at Hacker’s expense, was to avoid the trolley wire which the electric locomotives needed to operate.  The wire was as thick as a man’s finger and ran along one side of the tunnel near the roof.   The tunnel was hardly higher than a man’s head when on his hands and knees.  One day, Hacker and I were cleaning up slate along the track and I heard him yell.  I looked over to see him on his back and slapping at one of his ears.  He had come in contact with the wire.  The voltage on the wire was high but the amperage was low.  There wasn’t much chance of serious injury. Just a little tingling and being very startled was all that usually happened.  Nobody had told us about this one.  I think that they had deliberately waited for one of us to get shocked; no doubt they thought that it was funny.  Actually, I thought so, too.

I remember very well that first day inside the mines.  I had gone in the mine on weekends before I went to work there but this was different.  On the weekends, with nobody working, it was quiet in the mines; you could hear the rats running around.  But with coal being blasted down; conveyer belts and pan lines running (pan lines are a form of steel conveyer); and motors (electric locomotives) pulling strings of cars through the tunnels; it was a noisy, confusing and sometimes frightening place.  Then, the one which really scared me; the mountain would shift slightly, causing dust and gravel to fall from the roof and making a grinding, cracking sound.  I feared and hated that. My cousin George worked at the mine at the same time, but in a different location. 

 

We would meet in the man-trip (a string of mining cars which hauled miners to and from the mine) each day at quitting time.  The man-trip stopped a couple of hundred yards from where the hoist car took us down the mountain, in order for the brakeman to throw a switch that would put us on the proper track.  When the man-trip stopped, George and I would jump off of the car we were in and run for the hoist car.  Only 10 men at a time could ride the hoist car down the mountain and it took about 15 minutes for it to make a round trip.  George and I, being younger and having longer legs than most of our co-workers, were almost always on the first trip down the mountain.  If you failed to make the first trip, you had an incomparable view of the river and the town of Deepwater, nearly half a mile below you, while you awaited your turn.

The Deepwater Mines III

 

The ridges from which we mined coal ran down, much as fingers stick out from the hand, from the main ridge of the mountain.  We ran a tunnel through each finger that we came to as we ran our track along parallel to the main ridge.  Inside each finger ridge, a tunnel was driven at right angles into the main ridge and the coal removed.  In the winter, those tunnels which ran straight through the finger ridges were terrible; the wind whistled through them and magnified the cold, which was already numbing.  One man, Herman Coffer, who worked just off one of these tunnels, accidentally set fire to the mine and the mountain while trying to keep warm.  That gave company officials some anxious hours.

When the tunnel from which the coal was being taken was about worked out; a new tunnel would be driven through the next ridge in line.  But first, a track had to be laid that would allow equipment and supplies to be hauled to the other tunnel.  That was the job of the track and slate crew; in other words, us.  The track already ran all the way through the current tunnel and all that we had to do was lay a new track a half mile or so along the face of the mountain.  The right of way had been bulldozed and all was ready for us.  The company had bought some used rails of the proper size and weight and we started laying track.  The first thing that we learned was that the old rails were crystallized.  If we tried to bend one, in order to go around a curve, it snapped.  So, we laid our track in a straight line and then scooted the entire track sideways until it lined up with where we wanted to go.

This was in the fall and working outside the mine was wonderful.  We worked during the day, amid the changing colors of the fall leaves.  Then, one morning in November, it started snowing.  As the day wore on, the snow fell heavier and heavier.  The temperature started dropping.  We built big fires along the track to keep warm by.  People inside the mine didn’t have our problem.  Temperatures deep inside the mine remain the same all year; about 60 degrees.  People inside the mine have no idea what is going on outside unless the motorman or his brakeman tell them.  They are the only ones, besides the foreman, who normally go in and out of the mine.  And that led to some mischief which Hacker and I were responsible for.

Just before shift change, the motorman would pick up enough empty coal cars to haul all of the off-going shift out of the mine.  Miners must ride no more than 5 to a car and nobody is allowed to ride the first car behind the motor.  That’s where any rocks shaken down are likely to fall.  The motorman came outside to where we were waiting to be taken around the mountain.  He had two cars which he had found inside the mine, clean and dry, protected from the snow that had been falling all day.  He needed several more cars.  Hacker and I hooked up some cars that we had hauled crossties in earlier that morning.  They sat empty all day outside the mine and were full to the top with snow.  We, naturally, were in the second car, the empty, dry one.  The motorman backed the cars deep into the mine; back where the miners were waiting.  There was a rush to get into the front cars; that gave you an advantage when the run for the hoist started.  They piled into the cars there in the dark and the cussing and yelling started immediately.  There was at least two feet of snow in each car.  The motorman and his brakeman got the blame for the snow job.

The Deepwater Mines IV

The earth’s crust has been fractured in countless places by quakes, thousands, perhaps millions, of years in the past.  When a tunnel reaches one of these faults, it is anybody’s guess what will happen.  There was such a fault in the mine where I worked at Deepwater, West Virginia.  The rock was so shattered for a couple of hundred feet that it was difficult to keep the roof from falling.  Each time that a rock fall did occur, the top kept getting higher and higher above the track.  When I worked there, the timbers holding up the roof resembled a high railroad trestle, going up into the darkness.  Then too, water found it’s way down through the broken up rock.  We always knew when we had reached that point; it was raining. 

Water dripped down in the mouth of each tunnel.  In the winter it would freeze.   Sometimes, there would be up to 6 inches of ice on the rails at the entrance (or exit) to each tunnel.  We would have to break the ice off in order to prevent the motor and cars from running off the rails.  Once, the water dripping down had formed icicles so long and heavy as to become a hazard to the men riding in the cars, if it should fall on them.  The brakeman had to knock the icicles down before we could pass that point.

I have never forgotten the first tunnel that we passed through.  The cars that we rode in stood no more than 30 inches above the track.  At places, the roof of that tunnel was no more than 32 inches above the track.  When going into the mine, we would lie down in the cars as we went through that tunnel.  You could grip the top of the car as the man-trip went along and, with your gloves on, your knuckles would scrub the roof in places.  Every time that we went through there I was aware that if the mountain sat down on top of those cars, there was no way that we could have been gotten out alive.  If we weren’t crushed, we would have died before enough of the mountain could be removed to free us.

The man-trip going into the mine at shift change would stop at the entrance to the first tunnel.  We were paid portal-to-portal.  That means that our pay started when we entered that first tunnel and we had to be back outside before shift change.  So we stopped and waited for the off-going shift to come out of the mine.  The two man-trips would stop side by side.  The off-going shift supervisor would brief the on-going supervisor about what had been done, what needed to be done, and any problems that might exist.  While this was going on, the men in the cars would be eyeing each other.  In winter, each car would have a pile of snowballs in it.  When the cars started to move apart, we would pelt each other with the snowballs.  Leroy Banks was a big, young man.  One morning, Leroy had a snowball as big as a wash tub lying in his car with him.  Those in the opposite car knew that they were marked men.  As soon as the man-trips started to move, they leaped out of the car.  Leroy picked the snowball up, above his head, and smashed it down on the men in the next car who weren’t expecting anything at all.  There was always something happening when the shifts met.

Some of the men were too impatient to wait for the hoist to let them down the mountain.  They ran down a path to the bottom of the hill, until one day a huge black- snake fell out of a tree on one of them.  There were fewer running down the hill after that.  

Retirement May 1978

In early 1976 the promotion cycle for Chief Master Sergeant came up. I knew that our First Sergeant had received the promotion list from Air Force Headquarters. I went into his office, when there was nobody else there, and asked him if I had been promoted.  He said, “You know that I am not allowed to tell you that”.  Then, as I was going out the door, he said, “But nobody told me that I can’t tell you to buy some Chief stripes”.  That’s how I found out that I had been promoted to the rank of Chief Master Sergeant.  There were four Chiefs promoted in the 68^th Bomb Wing.  The wing Commander held a little ceremony and presented each of us with a symbolic set of stripes. Soon after I assumed my new rank of Chief Master Sergeant I was reassigned by The Chief of Maintenance (SAC) as NCOIC, Quality Control Office, 68^th Bomb Wing. I became the Chief Inspector, insuring that the wing’s aircraft were properly maintained and safe to fly. I seldom looked at an airplane myself though; I had 27 of the most highly qualified maintenance people in the wing working for me. I replaced 3 of my 4 highest ranking inspectors (Master Sergeants) within a month.  In my opinion, they were not doing their jobs properly. Because of my rank, I performed weekend duty (it rotated around about once every 2 ½ months) as the Wing Maintenance Officer.  I supervised all efforts during the weekend to repair and maintain our aircraft, bombers and refueling tankers. It was during this time frame that the wing was involved in a major international drug smuggling caper. Our aircraft were rotating on a regular schedule to and from Southeast Asia. The aircraft were bringing the bodies of dead soldiers back from Southeast Asia to Hawaii, to be embalmed and prepared for burial.  Then our aircraft came on home. In Southeast Asia, packages of heroin were hidden inside the bodies of dead soldiers. In Hawaii, the packages were switched and hidden aboard our tankers. When the planes reached Seymour Johnson AFB, the packages were retrieved by an Air Force Master Sergeant. The scheme was discovered and the Master Sergeant was sent to prison. He lost all retirement benefits and his pension. The civilian who was masterminding the smuggling received a long prison sentence. It didn’t make a lot of difference though; his daughter and son-in-law continued to run the drug smuggling ring after he was locked up.  They found other ways to get the stuff into the country. 

Sometimes, I would accompany my inspectors during their inspections.  I was inspecting the inspectors.  That’s how I got to see how they maintained atomic bombs. First, my Chief Weapons Inspector had to call the weapons storage area and tell them that I would be with him when he came to the facility. Then, we entered a fenced in area with two gates. You went through one gate and it was locked behind you. Then the other gate opened and you entered the storage area. Never were both gates open at the same time.  We both were given badges to show that we were supposed to be there. The security, where nuclear weapons are concerned, has to be seen to be believed. When the weapons were brought to the flight line to be loaded aboard the aircraft, they were accompanied by enough armed personnel to fight a small war. There were 4 B-52s on alert at all times.  That means that they were to be off the ground within 15minutes after the horn sounded.  To do this, they were parked inside a fenced in ‘Alert Pad’. Four bombers and four tankers were there. The individual aircraft and their maintenance crews were rotated on a regular basis. The bombers had nuclear weapons aboard; they were ready for war. There were armed guards stationed at each aircraft. Only authorized people were ever permitted aboard them. The Alert Crews lived in an underground bunker. It was called “The Mole Hole”.  The alert facility had sleeping quarters; recreational areas; and a gourmet kitchen.  Naturally, I was required to inspect that area personally.  I could eat the mid-day meal at the alert dining facility for the cost of a chow hall meal.  So, each Thursday being steak day at the Mole Hole, I always timed my inspections to take place during mid-day on Thursday. I ate a steak dinner, with all the trimmings, for about $1.40. I was able to take my Dad onto the flight line. He met my commanding officer and saw the inside of a B-52. 

On the 1^st day of May 1978, I became a civilian again for the first time in almost 22 and a half years. Counting my Navy time, I had 26 years, 3 months and 19 days total active military service. I declined to have a formal retirement ceremony.  When I had been a low ranking Airman, I had had too many of my weekends messed up because I was standing honors for somebody who was retiring.  I determined that I would not make my retirement an unpleasant memory for anybody. Peg and I had bought a home in Goldsboro, prior to my retirement, and we stayed right where we were. Both of our girls had married (at the base chapel) while I was on active duty and only Mike went with us to the new house. 

I had waited nearly all my life to have a grandson to go fishing with me.  Matthew did just that.  I took him fishing for his first time.  I photographed him with the first fish that he ever caught.  I had big plans for us. But, they were not to be.  Matt enlisted in the Air Force in December of 2004.  After basic training at Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas he was assigned to Sheppard AFB, Wichita Falls, Texas for training as a hospital corpsman.

"Peg" My rock

Throughout  the life that you have lived with me, there has been one vital element missing, the role that my wife has played in my life.  Now, it is time to tie my life together, to tell you how I was able to live the life that I have lived.  One reason, and one reason only, Peg was there, waiting for me to come home, giving me someplace to come home to; she cared for our children, being both mother and father to them so often when my duties took me away; she was and is the rock that has anchored me in life’s stream. In the early years, when the children were small and money was in short supply, it was Peg who managed to keep us all fed and well cared for.  It was she, from the first, who kept track of who needed to be paid, what we could afford to buy, how much money we had to spend. There were some not so good times, but there were good time also. There were the long walks in the woods in North Carolina.  Peg would be lost as soon as the first trees hid our house from view.  It became a game with me, to ask her where she thought our house was.  There was the gathering of apples and pears from the trees that once grew on the plantations which occupied the ground where Langley Air Force Base is now located in Virginia.  I don’t suppose that I ever told her so, but those were very special times for me. We cut our own Christmas tree one year, a cedar that grew not far from our home.  Actually, it was the top of the tree that we took.  I climbed the tree and was nearly scratched to death by the time I had the top off.  She was there to help drag the tree home and to decorate it. Boiling crabs that Mike and I had caught, shucking oysters that I got from one of the guys that I worked with; she was always there, sharing everything with me. Another of the things that she shared was the loneliness of the months, even years, that we were apart.  But even then, she was always there for me, in my heart and mind, reminding me that I was not alone; letting me know that somebody, somewhere cared about me.  She didn’t always have the best house to live in, in fact, some of the places were pretty miserable. She had to tend wood or coal fires to keep the kids and herself from freezing once while I was gone. Another time, I had to leave them in a house that was over the garage where the local funeral parlor kept the hearse. They would be awakened at all hours by the doors of the garage being opened and closed.  But she made each of those places into a home. She took the kids aboard an aircraft and flew half way around the world to join me on the island of Guam, not having any idea what she would find when she got there.  Whether a primitive jungle or a paradise, she had no way of knowing, but she came.  She came to make sure that the family, her family, was together and well cared for.

She is and always has been one of the most capable and talented people that I know.  An outstanding cook, able to make anything she cares to.  Keeper of the family’s financial affairs, continuing the chore that she took on over fifty years ago.  Knitting or crocheting afghans, rugs, and other things.  Sewing and making clothes for the kids.  Her abilities are without any limit that I have ever been able to discover.  I stand in awe of her, more so today than ever. So there you have the most important element in my life, the one thing that has made everything else possible and worthwhile, my wife, my Peg. 

Our Family

For more information contact Billie Darlington

    Sago mine disaster January 2006

Sago Miners Memorial Remarks
Homer Hickam January 15, 2006

Families of the Sago miners, Governor Manchin, Mrs. Manchin, Senator Byrd, Senator Rockefeller, West Virginians, friends, neighbors, all who have come here today to remember those brave men who have gone on before us, who ventured into the darkness but instead showed us the light, a light that shines on all West Virginians and the nation today:

It is a great honor to be here. I am accompanied by three men I grew up with, the rocket boys of Coalwood: Roy Lee Cooke, Jimmie O'Dell Carroll, and Billy Rose. My wife Linda, an Alabama girl, is here with me as well.

As this tragedy unfolded, the national media kept asking me: Who are these men? And why are they coal miners? And what kind of men would still mine the deep coal?

One answer came early after the miners were recovered. It was revealed that, as his life dwindled, Martin Toler had written this:

It wasn't bad. I just went to sleep. Tell all I'll see them on the other side. I love you.

In all the books I have written, I have never captured in so few words a message so powerful or eloquent: It wasn't bad. I just went to sleep. Tell all I'll see them on the other side. I love you.

I believe Mr. Toler was writing for all of the men who were with him that day. These were obviously not ordinary men.

But what made these men so extraordinary? And how did they become the men they were? Men of honor. Men you could trust. Men who practiced a dangerous profession. Men who dug coal from beneath a jealous mountain.

Part of the answer is where they lived. Look around you. This is a place where many lessons are learned, of true things that shape people as surely as rivers carve valleys, or rain melts mountains, or currents push apart the sea. Here, miners still walk with a trudging grace to and from vast, deep mines. And in the schools, the children still learn and the teachers teach, and, in snowy white churches built on hillside cuts, the preachers still preach, and God, who we have no doubt is also a West Virginian, still does his work, too. The people endure here as they always have for they understand that God has determined that there is no joy greater than hard work, and that there is no water holier than the sweat off a man's brow.

In such a place as this, a dozen men may die, but death can never destroy how they lived their lives, or why.

As I watched the events of this tragedy unfold, I kept being reminded of Coalwood, the mining town where I grew up. Back then, I thought life in that little town was pretty ordinary, even though nearly all the men who lived there worked in the mine and, all too often, some of them died or were hurt. My grandfather lost both his legs in the Coalwood mine and lived in pain until the day he died. My father lost the sight in an eye while trying to rescue trapped miners. After that he worked in the mine for fifteen more years. He died of black lung.

When I began to write my books about growing up in West Virginia , I was surprised to discover, upon reflection, that maybe it wasn't such an ordinary place at all. I realized that in a place where maybe everybody should be afraid-after all, every day the men went off to work in a deep, dark, and dangerous coal mine- instead they had adopted a philosophy of life that consisted of these basic attitudes:

We are proud of who we are. We stand up for what we believe. We keep our families together. We trust in God but rely on ourselves.

By adhering to these simple approaches to life, they became a people who were not afraid to do what had to be done, to mine the deep coal, and to do it with integrity and honor.

The first time my dad ever took me in the mine was when I was in high school. He wanted to show me where he worked, what he did for a living. I have to confess I was pretty impressed. But what I recall most of all was what he said to me while we were down there. He put his spot of light in my face and explained to me what mining meant to him. He said, "Every day, I ride the mantrip down the main line, get out and walk back into the gob and feel the air pressure on my face. I know the mine like I know a man, can sense things about it that aren't right even when everything on paper says it is. Every day there's something that needs to be done, because men will be hurt if it isn't done, or the coal the company's promised to load won't get loaded. Coal is the life blood of this country. If we fail, the country fails."

And then he said, "There's no men in the world like miners, Sonny. They're good men, strong men. The best there is. I think no matter what you do with your life, no matter where you go or who you know, you will never know such good and strong men."

Over time, though I would meet many famous people from astronauts to actors to Presidents, I came to realize my father was right. There are no better men than coal miners. And he was right about something else, too:

If coal fails, our country fails.

The American economy rests on the back of the coal miner. We could not prosper without him. God in His wisdom provided this country with an abundance of coal, and he also gave us the American coal miner who glories in his work. A television interviewer asked me to describe work in a coal mine and I called it "beautiful." He was astonished that I would say such a thing so I went on to explain that, yes, it's hard work but, when it all comes together, it's like watching and listening to a great symphony: the continuous mining machines, the shuttle cars, the roof bolters, the ventilation brattices, the conveyor belts, all in concert, all accomplishing their great task. Yes, it is a beautiful thing to see.

There is a beauty in anything well done, and that goes for a life well lived.

How and why these men died will be studied now and in the future. Many lessons will be learned. And many other miners will live because of what is learned. This is right and proper.

But how and why these men lived, that is perhaps the more important thing to be studied. We know this much for certain: They were men who loved their families. They were men who worked hard. They were men of integrity, and honor. And they were also men who laughed and knew how to tell a good story. Of course they could. They were West Virginians !

And so we come together on this day to recall these men, and to glory in their presence among us, if only for a little while. We also come in hope that this service will help the families with their great loss and to know the honor we wish to accord them.

No matter what else might be said or done concerning these events, let us forever be reminded of who these men really were and what they believed, and who their families are, and who West Virginians are, and what we believe, too.

There are those now in the world who would turn our nation into a land of fear and the frightened. It's laughable, really. How little they understand who we are, that we are still the home of the brave. They need look no further than right here in this state for proof.

For in this place, this old place, this ancient place, this glorious and beautiful and sometimes fearsome place of mountains and mines, there still lives a people like the miners of Sago and their families, people who yet believe in the old ways, the old virtues, the old truths; who still lift their heads from the darkness to the light, and say for the nation and all the world to hear:

We are proud of who we are.
We stand up for what we believe.
We keep our families together.
We trust in God.

We do what needs to be done.

We are not afraid.