Nation: That’s What Guns Are For

At the Tiffany Mining Co. in Hocking County, Ohio, a caravan of 50 trucks and cars pulled to a halt one day last week. More than 100 striking coal miners clambered out, set fire to a nonunion coal truck and an office trailer, then swept on. In Lawrence County they overturned a pickup truck; in Jackson County they did $13,000 worth of damage to one mine’s scales. In Baldwin, Ill., another band of strikers delayed a train carrying coal to the state power company by stacking and burning railroad ties on the tracks leading into the utility’s plant. In the snow-covered hills of western Pennsylvania, roadblocks set up by striking pickets, sometimes 500 strong, forced coal-truck drivers to dump up to 100 tons at a time on the highways. Any drivers who refused could count on having their windshields smashed and their tires punctured with ice picks.

These were instances of the anger that marked the coal strike—determination by nonunion coal operators to supply waiting furnaces; determination by union miners to stop those supplies.

Small strip-mining companies that employ ten to 25 men and produce as much as 500 tons of coal a day remained open primarily by turning themselves into armed fortresses. At the Crooks strip mine, one of only two mines in southern Indiana that stayed constantly open during the strike, the trouble started in December when 300 striking miners showed up and asked Mineowner Ed Crooks to stop operations. Instead, he spent $6,000 on guns and ammunition to arm his 24 workers and hired half a dozen guards to keep watch. On the wall in the trailer that serves as the mine’s office and command post, he kept four black AR-15 semiautomatic rifles. Don Powers, superintendent at Crooks’ mine, calmly patted his own .357 Magnum revolver and asserted his view: “They got the right to strike if they want, but we got just as much right to work.” At the nearby S&S Coal Co., two guards armed with AR-15s were assisted by a German shepherd and a Doberman. Said one S&S miner: “I’m eating and they are not. If they don’t want to work they don’t have to, but they better leave me alone. That’s what those guns are for.”

The B&M Coal Dock in Rockport, Ind., which buys coal from 60-odd nonunion mines and sells it to power stations, was attacked in January, and twelve $50,000 coal trucks were destroyed. State police arrested 194 men, mostly miners from Indiana’s U.M.W. District 11. Last week any visitor was met by at least three AR-15-armed guards. In his office, which still has holes in the wall from the ax attack of the U.M.W. toughs, B&M Owner Paul Teegarden kept a 9-mm Smith & Wesson automatic pistol on his desk and a 12-gauge shotgun on the wall. Said Teegarden, who lived in his office from the beginning of the strike: “If they come again they won’t walk away.”

In Indiana, special units of the state police patrolled key intersections along highways used by coal trucks. Governor Otis Bowen assigned 350 National Guard troops to protect coal being hauled from a Public Service Indiana power plant near Evansville to another at Terre Haute, and 250 more to perform similar duty along an intentionally undisclosed coal route. Other states in the region assigned their police forces to protect coal shipments. Moreover, the Coast Guard patrolled a 42-mile “safety zone” along the Ohio River from the Cannelton Locks to Newburgh, Ind., where much of the nonunion coal was barged.

Despite police and National Guard protection, the truckers kept running scared. Many carried guns in their cabs and were in constant touch by CB radio, informing each other of the whereabouts of the roving caravans of strikers. Driver Roger Heubner, 30, had five of his eleven coal trucks burned in Boonville, Ind., in January. Last week he was carrying a 9-mm automatic pistol in his coat pocket. For Heubner, other truckers and the working coal miners, firearms had become, in effect, their union cards.