My sincere thanks to Roger Philpot for permission
to use the photographs on this page. Please visit
Roger's World for some interesting reading,
pictures and history of coal mining.

Bless the guys with the guts to dig the coal!
by Dick Feagler - Plain Dealer Columnist

We often make fun of West Virginia. I was raised to do so.
From our fancy, sophisticated perch on the top of Ohio,
we saw West Virginians as hillbillies and hicks.

When we walked into a diner and saw a woman behind
the counter, working her tail off, hair in a beehive, extra
polite, spanking-white uniform, speaking with a drawl, we
thought, "West Virginia." And we looked down on that
good woman. And thought, "hillbilly."

Was the makeup wrong? Was the body too thin? Maybe the
map on the face told too many hardscrabble stories. People
in our part of the state - Italians and Polacks and Irish and
whatever - have always looked askance at the folks from
West Virginia, the same way they once looked askance at
each other.

But this week, if you walked across the floor to turn your
thermostat up, you were risking a coal miner's life. Half
of America's energy comes from coal - much of it from
West Virginia mines.

A coal miner buries himself alive each day. He kisses his
family goodbye and rides a bucket two miles into the earth.
There he toils until they pull him up and he goes home for
a hug and supper.

I guess we don't think too much about what keeps the lights
on. Why should we? We are, after all, so smart. We take so
many things for granted. But the power behind that electricity
is those guys in the mines.

Almost 40 years ago, I traveled with photographer Ted
Schneider, Jr. to one of the worst coal mine disasters in
history. Farmington, West Virginia.

Ninety-nine miners were entombed by an explosion.
Seventy-eight died. Schneider and I talked to the widows.
We talked to the local undertaker, a guy named Blaine
Toothman, about how he was out of body bags and was
ordering more from other towns in the state.

We covered all the announcements from the coal company
union representative. Bulletins came every four hours.
Families went home and slept and then dragged themselves
back to a barren room with a microphone at the front of
it. The news from the mike was always the same: No news.
Still trapped.

There weren't as many media then. Now the media
outnumber reality - reality meaning the real people
with heartbreak at stake. Media are the people who
surround them looking to pick up a sound bite and carry
it home to feed a hungry 24-hour format.

We have, since those days, smothered reality. We've bent it
and shaped it into something useful. If somebody doesn't cry
enough, move the camera to somebody who does. If an
overweight mother cries too much, look for her telegenic
daughter. In the age of television, we audition catastrophe.

Back then in Farmington, we found the principal of a local
high school who was furious.

"We try to teach them," he said. "We do our best to educate
them - to give them a way out. But they all go back down in
the same damned mines."

Schneider took a photo from a cemetery on a hill.. It
showed the gravestones of the miners who had gone to
that high school and died in that town. And then we left.
But I took a piece of West Virginia with me, and I carry
it to this day. They are tough down there in West
Virginia. They are nothing to make fun of.

They have pride. They shift for themselves.
And they ask for nothing.

They are the best of America. After last week's disaster
at the Sago Mine, the miners said they wanted to go back
underground to work. That high school principal, if he
hasn't retired, is probably still frustrated.

But I saw some miners interviewed. One of them
explained that the mines were in his blood. And that
his fellow miners were his brothers. And that you
don't just quit.

God bless the hillbilly hicks.
They are the pilot light of America.

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