Finish Gum Boots

1959 started out to be a good year for Denise and me, We had gotten enough money together to buy a house. I was working five day a week at the mines and was working overtime as a mechanic. We bought an old two story house in an quiet neighborhood. There were retired people on both sides of us. Before we moved in Denise threw all of her time and energy into making it into the home she had in mind. Up came the old carpets and she polished the old white oak floors till they looked like new. There was a old fire place in the living room and she had it replaced with a beautiful white brick one. The whole house needed to be painted and we started on that. My father spent a life time fixing up old Consol Coal Company houses that we rented so he volunteered to help us.The kitchen was his project. He put down inlaid linoleum and started painting the wood work.

Chico our Poodle loved the new house, he spent hours going up and down the stairs and inspecting everything. The back garden was fenced in and he could run off the lead there and that is where Denise started a life long hobby, flower gardening.

Just before we moved in I got the first clue of what a bad year we were going to have. My father was painting in the kitchen and he said his back was hurting and he was going to go home. Now this was a man who had his big toe and the one next to it cut off in the mines and had the stubs sown up and never missed a days work. I started worrying about him. The week after we moved in my mother called and said my father wasn't able to go to work and I had better come and see about him. When Denise and I got there she was in the basement doing a washing and my father was in bed in terrible pain. I was working afternoon shift so I told my mother to get some help and get him to a doctor. The next morning my mother called and said his doctor sent him to see a surgeon, Dr Morgan. In 1959 there weren't any cat scans or ultrasounds, they were going to do a exploratory operation. Denise and I went to the hospital and after the operation Dr Morgan told us he had bowel cancer and it had spread to the liver and there wasn't any thing they could do for him. I knew I was going to lose my father but it took a while for every thing to sink in. My father was 55 years old and was too young for social security or a United Mine Workers pension. my parents had never saved a dime, they rented a house and all they had was what ever his last pay check would be. There was only one thing to do we moved them in with us. The operation made him much worse and the doctor said that was not unusual, he was going to have to have a morphine shot every four hours. My Mother was hopeless for doing anything for him so it was up to Denise and I. Since I would be gone ten hours at a time working Denise had to learn to give him shots. Dr Morgan had us practice on oranges. I didn't have any trouble but it was hard for Denise to stick that needle in him. After a couple of months we would give him a shot and he would sleep but when he woke up he would have terrible pain and it would be too soon to give the next shot. One night at 4 AM he asked me to fill the needle and give him enough morphine to end it. I went and talked to Dr Morgan and he said for me to talk to the United Mine Workers and he would see if they could get him in a nursing home. He was transferred to the nursing home and they were better able to manage his pain but he couldn't eat. One day when I visited him before I went to work he took my hand and told me he wouldn't be there when I got back. I said I would stay with him and he said " don't miss a shifts work you and Denise need the money." That was the last thing he said to me and when I got to the mines the lamp man told me they wanted me back at the nursing home. For the rest of my working career when I didn't feel like going to work I would remember what he said and I would go. My Mother had worked selling clothes in the company store so she got a job in a dress shop and moved out to an apartment.

When Denise and I thought we were getting our life's straightened out, I went to work one afternoon and there were a lot of miners standing around in the parking lot. I saw Big John walking down through the parking lot. He was an old Hungarian who came to America forty years earlier and went to work in the mine. He sat down on the bumper of a car and pulled off his hard toe, rubber mine boots. He stood up and threw them in the creek and yelled "Finish gum boots". I jumped out and ask what was going on. They told me there had been a big lay off. I knew I was the youngest mechanic and I had finished gum boots with Big John.

I walked up to the mine office and saw Harry Turner the mine Superintendent he told me the layoff was permanent and he was being transferred to the new mine at Loveridge. He said when they got the mine into production he would give me a job if he could but not to wait I had better look for work. On the drive home I knew I had to pull my self together and figure out how to tell Denise that we were going to lose the house that she had put all of the money into that she had brought from England and someone was going to end up with a house she put all of that work into. I had brought her to this god forsaken place and I had to do it but it was the hardest thing I ever did.

Now you know why I didn't want to write this.

Ross

Finish Gum Boots 2

I knew it hurt Denise to find out she was going to lose her house but the British didn't build an empire quitting when the going got tough. She was always right beside me the whole next year. I decided we would take things one thing at a time, like the football coach who says "We will play them one game at a time." Now how the hell else are you going to do it.

With no income we had to cut our expenses to a minimum. You would be surprised how much help you get. The United States Government quit collecting income tax. The Gas station where I bought gas to go to work quit sending me a bill. There were a lot of businesses who quit sending us bills. The house payment was our biggest bill and we knew it had to go so we got a realtor and put it up for sale.The realtor brought a lot of people to look at the house and half of them were my mothers friends who were so poor they couldn't buy a free onion but they came and poked through our stuff. It was awful. Then the realtor told us we would have to have a termite inspection to comply with the law and of course the inspector brought a board with holes in it and said he found it in our basement and would have to treat the whole house to give us a certificate. When we sold the house the bank charged us an early payment fee. It's good business to kick people when there down, if you kick them when their on their feet you might get a punch in the nose. We lost a basket of money and most of it was the money Denise brought from England.

We rented a old house with a coal furnace and my mother moved in to share expenses. I knew things couldn't get worse than this. It was time to look for a job so I started at the West Virginia unemployment office. Everyone knows it's hopeless to look for a job in WV when the mines are laying off because that's the only place to work. A very nice man at the unemployment office told me he would give me some addresses in Chicago where I could apply for a job. Looking back I realize that if I was in Chicago I wouldn't be bothering him and that is why he sent me there. I was desperate so we packed the old 55 Ford and left Chico with a vet and headed for that toddling town. The only thing I remember about that trip is there aren't any hills in Ohio and Indiana is as flat as a pancake. I also found out that Jim Croce was right when he wrote Leroy Brown and said "Down on The south side of Chicago it's the baddest part of town and if you go down there you had better beware period". I didn't get a job in Chicago. We stopped in Akron Ohio on the way home and a cousin of mine told me where I could get a job. Bingo, I got the job making aluminum siding. I would work two weeks for half price and no benefits and if they liked me I would get the job. The first day a guy told me they will not like you because when you're gone they can get another guy for half price. I worked like hell and you guessed it they didn't like me. So we headed back to Fairmont and at least Chico was glad to see us.

The next morning I saw an ad in the paper for some one to be in a partner in the auto repair business. I called the guy and he said he had all of the equipment and a license to run a West Virginia inspection station but didn't have the money to rent a garage. Scott was a 60 year Old man who weighed about 250 pounds and was dumb as a wedge but seemed to know a lot about car repair so I decided to give it a shot. We rented a one stall garage with a pit to get under the cars and a small Office. S&J auto repair was in business. We got a lot of repair work but it was like pulling teeth to collect the money. Scott's son was an Army recruiter and he got a Army vehicle maintenance contract for us and we started making enough to buy groceries and pay the rent. One day that summer a guy showed up from John's used cars and he talked to Scott. Scott got a small piece of equipment with a little motor on it, out of his tool box. and they went out to the car that John was driving. I saw Scott get in the front seat and go to work under the dash board. I went out to see what he was doing, he was rolling back the mileage on the car. I said to Scott, this has to be illegal and he said every used car dealer does it. We started doing all of the state inspections on John's cars and I insisted we do them by the book. If you had stopped by John's used car lot in 1959 you would have seen that every car had a up to date inspection sticker on it and had been driven exactly 35000 miles.

When the weather was starting to get cold John stopped by our Garage and told me he had bought the filling station across from his used car lot and wanted me to manage it for him. I tried to negotiate with him but to John it was a minimum wage job. He had a point because the only one I would be managing was me. I took the job because it was a steady pay check and there wasn't any thing steady with Scott. I sold Scott my half of the business for what I paid for it. nothing. There was a lot of hard work at Johns filling station you would be surprised at how many cars that had only been driven 35000 miles needed repairs. It was a bigger job than I could handle so Denise took over the book work and record keeping for me. Then one afternoon Denise called from home and told me Harry Turner the Mine Superintendent at Loveridge wanted to talk to me. I told her I would be home as soon as I could. I hung up the phone and sat down at the desk and cried. After a while I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, turned off the lights, locked the door and walked across the street to the used car lot and gave John the keys and told him I quit. He wanted to negotiate but this time I didn't want to. When I got home and told Denise what I had done she thought I had lost my mind but I knew Harry wasn't calling me to Loveridge to pass the time of day.

I drove to Loveridge and Harry told me he was hiring three mechanics and he picked me because of my mine rescue experience and I would have to join the rescue team. The mine that I had worked at was an all DC electric mine and Loveridge was going to be AC and they would send me to school to learn AC. There would be a hydraulic school and schools on Joy continuous miners. I would have to agree to go to the schools. I thought I had died and gone to heaven and I thanked God I had joined the mine rescue team at mine 93. Having said that, you didn't grow up on the streets of a coal mining camp in the 1930s and not know which end's up. Harry Turner didn't hire me because he though I was going to school and become an electrician and be a great asset for Consol Coal Company. He hired me because I was dumb enough to go into a coal mine that was on fire and exploding and try to save it for the company. What Harry didn't Know was I wasn't that dumb but that I was that desperate. I joined the Mine Rescue Team.