The Coal Hole
There’s a bar around the corner from the Savoy hotel in London, The Coal Hole. It was once the coal cellar for the Savoy, hence the name. It’s located on the Strand and from the top of the street you can see down to the River Thames rolling along just a few short blocks away.
I was sitting at a table in the rear of the bar by a window that overlooked a back alley that separated the hotel and bar from the back of the Savoy Theatre. Right across the alley from where I was sitting were the theatre’s dressing rooms. The play “Peter Pan” was in progress at the time and the Indian Princesses were changing costumes with the windows wide open on that hot summer evening. We waved to one another across the alley as they changed and giggled.
This pleasant coal memory makes me think about the not so pleasant turmoil within the coal industry here in America. President Trump is promising that the miners will get their jobs back and the coal industry will flourish once again. He made that promise and signed an executive order canceling previous climate change restrictions. In a highly publicized photo, Trump is signing the order surrounded by happy, smiling coal industry representatives. I’m not sure they were actual miners more than they were labor and management representatives, but it doesn’t matter.
Trump famously said, “C’mon, fellas. You know what this is? You know what it says? You’re going back to work.” They all smiled politely.
On a very personal note, and aside from politics, global warming and air quality, I have three somewhat related observations.
One, although I am not a coal miner, coal dust is in my blood. Both my grandfathers were coal miners in southwestern Pennsylvania. All my uncles worked in the coal mines, two of them died from Black Lung Disease. My father worked along side his father in the mines as a teenager and also on the coke ovens, stoking and unloading the coke by hand, winter and summer. My dad once said that Hell would be a vacation spot. Coke is the byproduct of burning coal down to a certain point then cooling it to eliminate impurities. It was used to make a high grade of steel. The coke, and coal, were shipped by rail and river barge to be used as fuel in the giant blast furnaces at the steel mills along the Monongahela River between towns like Clairton and Duquesne toward Pittsburgh. My father and some of my uncles were lucky enough to escape the mines and land jobs in the mills both before and after WWII. Out of the frying pan into the fire.
Some years ago, I was a speaker at an AISE conference in Pittsburgh (Association of Iron and Steel Engineers). My topic and expertise was simulation training for the operators of the heavy gantry cranes used in the mills to move molten steel and other heavy, dangerous equipment.
So, I can talk with some license about these types of jobs, and the lifestyle of a coal miner, and I understand the difference between strip mining and underground shaft mines.
For reference, The mill town of Clairton, PA was depicted in the 1978 movie ‘The Deer Hunter‘ with Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, and the 1984 movie ‘Maria’s Lovers’ with Robert Mitchum, Nastassja Kinski and John Savage was filmed in Brownsville, Pa, another river town on the Monongahela, and where my grandfathers lived and worked.
The mines and the mills are all gone now. Just a few remain working at minimum capacity. It’s all gone overseas, and this is what Trump is battling over with the coal and steel industries, and the environmentalists. It’s a business not a charity, but with serious environmental implications.
I’m not sure just what President Trump thinks will come of his executive order. The jobs are gone, because the mines and the mills are gone. Those jobs are not coming back anytime soon. And who in their right mind would want to work in a coal mine or steel mill anyway? It’s the roughest, back-breaking work there is. I know it’s mostly automated now, not many pick and shovels like the old days of my grandfathers, but unless you have a management or executive position, you’re either operating heavy equipment or hand tools in a dark, dirty, dangerous and often wet environment.
But a job’s a job, and I understand and respect that. And I understand and respect any coal miner, anywhere. They’re heros.
Two, for a Christmas play talent contest in 5th grade in Brooklyn, NY, I sang Tennessee Ernie Ford’s famous ‘Sixteen Tons’ to the amazement and shock of the class, and the bewilderment of Sister Mary Eunice. This was the coal industry’s influence on me even at that early age. Everyone else was doing Christmas happy. I was doing “You load sixteen tons and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt ...” in my deepest, most serious Tennessee Ernie voice.
So, when I think of the coal industry, I have mixed emotions, which, defined, is like watching your mother-in-law back off a cliff in your new mercedes. On one hand, the coal miners are a elite group with a proud heritage ..my people, but on the other hand I wouldn’t work in a coal mine if I could avoid it.
To wrap up this trilogy, here’s the “coal hole” in which I see the coal industry’s job situation. I was substitute teaching at our local high school here in Logan, Utah. I noticed a young girl wearing a black sweat shirt with a logo on the back that said “Support Coal.” The logo was a skull and crossbones with the skull wearing a miners hard hat with headlamp, and the crossbones were a pick and shovel.
It was the perfect metaphor.
I asked her where she got the sweatshirt and she said her dad had it custom made for her. I asked if he worked in the coal mine near Price, Utah, a couple hundred miles south of Logan. She said, no he was out of work now but he had worked in the mine at Brownsville, PA. Where my grandfathers worked. When I related my Brownsville connection it didn’t have the same impact on her as it had on me. But it brought tears to my eyes in a flood of emotions.
I felt we were related by the coal dust in our veins and the coal hole from which we will never escape.
On a recent trip to the cemetery near Brownsville, where my heros are all laid to rest, I though of all these things. You can still smell coal in the air. It’s a very distinctive scent.
It never smelled so good.
John Kushma is a communication consultant and lives in Logan, Utah.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-george-kushma-379a5762
