This was written before the accident in Logan...

From Cleveland, Ohio Newspaper

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Dick Feagler - Plain Dealer Columnist

Subject: Bless the guys with the guts to dig the coal

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 Pollocks 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 good-bye 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, W.Va.

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.

Contact Dick Feagler at: dfeagler@plaind.com, 216-999-5757