LABOR: Stream of Coal

The little town of Nanty Glo* in west Pennsylvania’s Blacklick Valley lay deserted in the rain. On Roberts Street, where most of the town’s stores are, trade was at a standstill. A few women in cloth coats, hunched under umbrellas, trudged through the cold downpour that denied the spring time promise of the imperceptibly greening hills. The rain came down ceaselessly, sluicing and gurgling through the empty back yards, past privies and chicken coops, under the broken wooden sidewalks, running at last into the muddy waters of Blacklick Creek, the narrow stream that bisects the town.

Here, at Nanty Glo last week, worked some of John L. Lewis’ 550,000 unioneers, men pictured by columnists and editors as threatening forces, not as people. But they are people, and Americans.

It was 3:20 p.m. The Nanty Glo Journal had gone to press for the week. Publisher Herman Sedloff, musing in his doorway, watched a coal-dusty dog skirt a puddle, saw that the color in the Red Cross flag hanging above the middle of the street had run into a dripping, pinkish smear.

A farmer, wearing a long-billed hunting cap and corduroy pants stuffed into five-buckle arctics, shook the rain from his shoulders, entered the Nanty Glo State Bank across the street. In Suchman’s jewelry store, a few doors from the bank, a miner’s wife looked over the slim stock of watches, hunting a gift for her soldier son. The pillar of smoke that came from the main stack of the Heisley mine (one of the three within the town’s limits) fused into the rain, flattened, hung over the landscape in a grey pall. The hands of the clock outside the window of Such man’s jewelry store moved to 3:25.

Obscurely, almost as if its diminished pulse responded to a more rapid pulse within the earth, the life of Nanty Glo began to quicken. Women appeared at the doors of the almost identical, bleak, boxlike houses that line the town, the lesser wooden shacks; children and dogs ventured into the rain. At the entrance to the tunnel of the Heisley mine, the thick steel cable which miners call “the rope” began to move. After five minutes, scores of coal cars filled with miners came from beneath the earth, black as the coal they mined, only the whites of their eyes and the red of their lower lips showing through the layer of dust and grime. They looked like tired blackface minstrels with nothing to joke about.

Within an hour the town had come to life. Clean and shiny from their recent scrubbings (Said one miner: “A coal miner’s the cleanest guy in the world. Hell, he’s got to take a bath every day!”), miners walked down Roberts Street, crowded the barber shops, went in & out of the five-and-ten with their wives and children, filled the taverns with smoke and conversation. In one of the bars a soldier home on leave danced with his girl to a juke-box tune. (Nearly all of the young men in Nanty Glo have gone off to the wars.) Card games sprang up, arguments ebbed and flowed; from the Moose home came the polished rumble of bowling balls, the crash and clatter of pins. The lights of Hagan’s restaurant and the three movie houses came on in the mounting dusk, women busied themselves in kitchens, the clock outside Such-man’s jewelry store moved on to 6 o’clock, to 7, to 8—by 8:30 the lights in nearly all the miners’ homes were blacked out. (Miners start to work at 6 in the morning.) Soon, in Nanty Glo, there was no sound or movement but the emphatic rain.

Against this background of an ordinary day, the miners of Nanty Glo last week said few words about striking, fewer about John L. Lewis. Only obliquely did they discuss the problem, speaking the language of men to whom the relationship between work and living is immediate and direct. Said one, fatalistically: “That raise’ll just mean a cut to us miners. The minute we get some more money, up goes the cost of living. We’ll be just where we was or maybe worse off than ever.”

A miner’s wife documented his statement out of her own experience: “We haven’t a thing to show for the last raise or even for working six days a week—even with overtime and all. Apples cost 7¢ each, milk is up 2¢, round steak is around 45¢ a lb., butter costs 57¢ a lb., if you can get it. It costs more & more to live. We’re just about breaking even now and I just don’t know what we’ll do if things don’t get better soon.”

But the mood and psychology of Nanty Glo was perhaps best summed up by one old miner who came to Pennsylvania from Wales. Said he: “They’ve always called us radicals in Nanty Glo, but that’s just because we’re good union men. We ain’t radicals, not by a long shot. Some of us like John L. Lewis and some of us don’t. But if it comes to a showdown, we’ll lay off. That’s the only thing we can do. But no matter if we get $2 more, or just $1, it ain’t going to answer everything. All I know is that what with things going up so high, in price I mean, it’s the most a man can do to keep things going day to day. Nobody likes to work in the mines, but we don’t know anything else.”

*Welsh for “Stream of Coal.”