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by: AL McCloud Blaine,
West Virginia, a small Mineral County, West Virginia town, nestled in a
valley on the Maryland border, separated by the Potomac River, from the
larger town of Kitzmiller, Maryland.
My hometown. Both
towns were once flourishing coal mining towns, much like the California
gold rush towns during the 1800s. Coal
mining was the number one employment. Mines and tipples could be seen operating all through the
valleys. If you didn’t
work in the mines, then you were probably driving a coal truck,
delivering coal as fuel for heating stoves, or cutting pulp wood. Kitzmiller
and Blaine were basically one town, sharing the same post office in
Kitzmiller, divided only by state jurisdictions.
The friends we grew up with went to different schools, had
different drivers license, paid taxes to different states, and something
we have all forgotten - different draft boards.
Another distinguishing factor however, if you lived on the West
Virginia side, God forbid, you were a hillbilly. Now
that the stage is set, my name is Al McCloud, retired Senior Master
Sergeant, USAF, and presently employed by the Federal Communications
Commission in Washington, DC. I
graduated from Elk Garden High School, Elk Garden, WV in 1965, obtained
an Associates Degree from the University of Maryland and a Bachelors
Degree in Human Relations from Golden Gate University, San Francisco,
California. The United States Air Force, a “great way of life” for
twenty-four years, provided me with the opportunity to continue my
education and travel. There
were two rows of house in Blaine, one above the Western Maryland
Railroad, and one below. We
lived at the end of the row, as we used to call it, “below the
tracks.” Approximately
twenty-five yards from our house was a coal tipple and the Western
Maryland railroad track. Another
fifty yards were three huge holding tanks for Texaco gasoline.
Fifty yards to the north was the Potomac River, polluted by the
red sulpher water runoffs from the mines.
During the coal heyday, no less than twenty trucks a day would
back up on the tipple and unload coal into railroad cars.
Dust would plume up and fall over everything in the wind’s
path. This dust would often
settle in the houses as well. No
less than three long freight trains a day, loaded with coal, would pass
within twenty-five yards of our house. We made it a game counting the coal cars, sometimes exceeding
one hundred cars. Gasoline
trucks made several trips a day to deliver fuel to local gas stations. Railroad
tankers would unload the fuel through underground pipes to the holding
tanks. Those tank cars unloaded less than fifty yards from our house
and even closer to our neighbors houses.
The smell of fuel and coal always was in the air. Sometimes
I feel that my whole family should be tested for black lung because of
the many years subjected to the dust from coal dumping, the freight
trains, and the dust kicked up by the trucks on the black dirt road. To top this off, as most West Virginians are well aware of,
our homes were heated by coal, with most stoves sitting in the living
room. Early morning hours,
on a cold fall or winter morning, would find coal and wood smoke
hovering over the valley from the early risers, most headed for the
mines. The smell of burning
coal in the house went unnoticed; it was a way of life.
My grandparents cooked on the old coal heating cooking
stoves until the day they died. I
had decided early on in my life that coal mining would not be my way of
life. The closest I ever
got to the mine was the entrance. I
was not going to waste an education to spend my life inside a cold, wet,
dark mountain, shoveling coal for a living and in most cases, except on
weekends, never seeing the light of day. There
was always somebody getting hurt or killed from mining accidents.
My mother lost three cousins in the same mining accident.
Seeing these men in caskets, laid out in the same living room,
made me even more determined to find a different way of life. Both
my grandfathers were retired by the time I could start remembering them,
but the toll that mining took on them was devastating.
I’m pretty sure that their retirements were early because of
their medical conditions. They
both were hunched over from spending their life working in four foot
holes in the ground, manually shoveling coal into mining cars, and
making very little money to show for it.
Both contracted the dreadful black lung disease and died early
deaths before enjoying any of the compensation that they so deserved.
The Black Lung Act fortunately provided continuing compensation
for the spouses. Watching
these men die a slow death was painful.
They could not walk far without having to stop, rest, and catch
their breath. Sometimes
they would cough up a black phlegm from their coal dust infested lungs.
But these were the men who helped build these towns and have left
generations to carry on the name, and for some, the occupation. Two
of those men carrying on that tradition were my dad and brother.
My dad, Lee “Pete” McCloud, was born into a coal miner’s
family in 1916. He was the
second of nine children born to John Henry McCloud and Jessie Belle
McCloud. Quitting school
after the eighth grade, he started working around the mines, picking
rock from coal on a conveyer belt for seventy-five cents a day.
Except for a three year stint in the Army during World War
II (1942-45), chasing the Germans out of Italy, he worked in the mines
until the mid 1970s. That
was about the time that the Black Lung benefit packages were being
processed. Talk about a
bureaucratic goat rope. At
that time, the people processing this paperwork acted like it was their
money. It took at least two
years before my dad was approved for the benefits, and he could finally
get out of the mines. He
did get compensated though from the original filing date. After
the war, dad married Dorothy Willis in 1946.
She too was from a coal mining family.
Mom was one of ten children born to Walter and Vernia Willis of
Oakmont, WV. Mom and dad
raised a family of three boys and one girl on a miner’s pay.
I remember my dad going to work sick, mostly with lower back
pain, because the money was needed and there was no such thing as
getting paid for sick day. If
you were sick, you did not get paid, and you might not have a job the
next day. Today, miners get
paid more for one hour than my dad got paid for a day, in some cases two
days, and believe me, whatever they get is not enough for this type of
employment. Growing
up in a coal miner’s family was hard, but it built character. You definitely knew the value of a dollar.
Dad was always working, no time for play.
He would work all day in the mine, come home, and work until dark
in the garden. Mom would
work all day in the house, cleaning, washing clothes, cooking, doing
everything moms did. Weekends
would find us visiting relatives, going swimming, or hunting.
During the summer, when I wasn’t working on a farm, I was
usually playing baseball or swimming. My
dad was a strong man, a true mountain man and a non-smoker, so the black
lung did not affect him as badly as it did the smokers, especially my
grandfathers. What I
remember most about the effect of the coal dust was the coughing up of
black phlegm and shortness of breath.
I never once realized that the dust was in his lungs until I
became aware of the Black Lung Act. I’m
not even sure my dad knew the effects of inhaling the dust and gases all
day. His buddies that were
smokers have long passed. In
the early 70s, my dad, in his mid fifties, was in a mining accident near
Kitzmiller. He was pinned
between a motor car and a coal car, breaking his hip.
He was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, of which he called
a rest. Dad is now 86
and is still strong for his age, although hampered now by the shortness
of breath and pain in his legs from not being able to walk as far as he
used to. His hearing has
deteriorated from being subjected to the many years of dynamite blasts
in the mines and the explosions from two years of war in Italy during
World War II. My mom says
he still occasionally coughs up the coal dust, twenty-seven years after
leaving the mines. My
brother Marvin is presently working in a mine near Kingwood, West
Virginia. He has been a
miner for over 20 years. He
too will soon be tested for black lung in Morgantown, WV.
At six-foot two, it makes it hard and awkward to work in a mine
with a four foot clearance. Now,
at age 49, he is starting to feel the effects that every miner
experiences from working in such conditions – back pain, stiff joints,
and of course shortness of breath.
I asked him about the masks they wear and he told me that you
cannot imagine what the filters look like when they come out of the
mine. Now, think about your
lungs being that filter. Double
the damage for smokers. It’s
a shame that many miners died a black lung death - lives that could have
been prolonged had corporate America invested more money into safety
rather than their pockets. As
I stated before, coming from a coal mining family built character.
It also creates a bond - a bond that lasts throughout your
lifetime, no matter how far you stray from the mining country.
I sat glued to the television watching the rescue of the Quecreek miners.
Although I never worked in a mine, I have been there, saw the
deaths, the agony, the pain, and the suffering that comes with this
occupation, especially during the pre-modern mining days.
But even with modern equipment, it is still a
dangerous job and only the brave and strong need apply.
There is no place for weaklings in a coal mine.
You have to want-to-be there, not have-to-be there, because as
the Somerset, Pennsylvania accident proved, this is a job of teamwork.
Your buddy’s life depends on you, and you depend on your buddy. A
Somerset Hospital official had this to say about the rescued miners, "The
coal miners around here, they're a tough breed, living through this and
enduring it, to a lot of people it's not a surprise."
I would add that his statement pretty much describes all coal
miners. The following website has a great five part series on black lung disease, http://www.courier-journal.com/dust/. It starts out by stating that “every year, black lung disease kills almost 1,500 people who have worked in the nation's coal mines. It's as if the Titanic sank every year, and no ships came to the rescue. While that long-ago disaster continues to fascinate the nation, the miners slip into cold, early graves almost unnoticed.” How true this is. Up until the mid 70s, deaths in the coal towns, unless caused by mining disasters, were attributed to “natural causes”. Now we know better, but according to this report, current coal dust tests are corrupted, much like the rest of corporate America. There may be inconsistencies or errors, but all in all, a very good program for the men and women working America’s most dangerous job – mining. end
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