Good ole days
I’ve been writing posts for several months, and some people who have visited my site may read some of my posts, but doesn’t have a clue who or where exactly I’m from. So I decided that this is what this post will be about. I’m a Coal River boy, borned and lived my whole life in this river valley, and it takes mountains to make valleys. I’m a 52 year old, retired, 30 years underground coal miner. 22 years I ran a shuttle car, which hauls coal underground, and damn good I what I did. And the other years I did just about everything else in the mines. I remember working for Armco Steel, Montcoal #7 UMWA mine, which opened in 1956, and was bought by Massey Energy in 1994, and closed a year later. When I worked for Armco, in 1980, they sponsored us communities with a softball league, with uniforms, built us 3 nice fields, all with lights for night games, that was some good times, good games, and a whole lot of good partying. I don’t know why some of the miners didn’t choose to pursue careers as ball players, because there were a lot of great players. But that’s the way it was growing up in the coalfields. If you were a guy, it was about a 95% chance that you were going to work in the mines. And we played ball just like we worked, hated to lose, and wanting to be the best. I myself suffered a broken nose, both shoulders separated, and just stayed tore all to hell. I tell my wife Linda, that I’m to young to feel this old. Communities flourished, while families of the miners operated the bussiness in the small towns scattered up and down Coal River. Rivals of local high schools football games were big, and drew large crowds on Friday nights. Hunting was one of the most important thing in a lot of guys life. Everyone wanted the biggest wall hanger in the valley, you know, one of those record bucks. It was truely some of the best years of my life in the 80’s. Unaware what our beloved Coal River valley would end up like just a handful of years ahead. In 1980 the whole valley, like communities through out the coal fields was UMWA country. In 1982, Elk Run Coal, a Massey company made it’s first appearance in Sylvester, began mining, and building a coal processing plant within 500 yards of my home in 1985. Knowing that this operation stuck out like a sore thumb in union territory, we spent an entire year, everyday standing on picket lines, in hopes of organizing this one operation known then as A.T. Massey Coal, but because of terrible strategy by the international and the leadership of the UMWA, we failed to organize this operation. Little did the union know, that this very time in history, that the failure at Elk Run would open the flood gates for Massey Energy to continue their union busting take over of the coalfields of southern West Virginia. I just want to make it clear, I’m going to write several posts, but I’m going to do it in years, like one post will be of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s 80’s 90’s, and then up to the present time of my life living on the Coal River. It just happen that I started with the 80’s, they were on my mind at the time I’m writing this post. But now there are no softball teams to be found, the three softball fields have been covered in weeds, the high school football rivalries are gone, because two of the high schools have been torn down, rivalries which had been going on since the 20’s that I know of, it was a tradition, our tradition that is gone forever. The towns don’t flourshing anymore, one could call them run down ghost towns now. But not only are the high schools, the towns, and a lot of our communities are gone forever, there is a lot more that is gone forever that I will get to in later posts. But the 80’s were a good time, it’s just hard, if not impossible to see anything that resembles the good ole days. Mountainsaver.
