Photo by Roe Ethridge
I started working in the mines in about ’69 or ’70, when I was 17 years old. I just worked part-time during the summer. In ’73, I hired on full-time. I worked 22 years there. I started out underground, then I moved to the outside for 18 years. I was a preparation foreman. That’s the guy who gets the coal ready to go into the railroad train. You get the rock out of it and wash it.
I’ve had two knee operations, a back operation, and open-heart surgery. I’ve had four bypasses. The knee and the back stuff was from all the lifting. They tell me I got black lung, but I don’t get anything out of it. I guess I’m still too young and breathing too good. They wait till you’re dead and then you can’t pursue it. I attribute my heart condition to my respiratory trouble—not enough oxygen in the blood. I had pneumonia in my left lung this last summer. First time I’ve had it, but my lungs are just getting weaker all the time.
I thought I was having another heart attack when that pneumonia kicked in. It was right over my left lung. I got down to the hospital and they found out it was walking pneumonia. But all the ailments go together. What it amounts to is this: We gave our health up for a lump of coal.
You can’t get shit off them. I been trying to fight for compensation, but you can’t get a thing off the mines. You can get disability, Social Security, but nothing from the mines.
My dad worked 37 years in the mines, but he worked 23 years at a union mine. The last part of his life he worked at the same mine that I did. He’s crippled from the chest down now and he’s getting nothing from the non-union place where we worked together. The union mine, though, is helping him out with insurance. They’re taking care of him good. The mines will just walk off and leave you so you ain’t got nothing. We were always non-union up here in Martin County. A lot of mines, when the workers would start to talk about going union, they would say, “Well, we’ll give you a dollar more an hour.” Most of the men would go for it. There’s so much money at first. People would just start buying things up right away, getting trailers, Harleys, new cars… But I got to say, back in the 70s and early 80s the mine did take care of us. When I first started there, I didn’t have shit. I went to them and said, “I need $3,000 to buy me a brand-new car.” The mine owner said, “You go get that car, son.” I said, “How am I gonna get it?” He said, “You go on down to the bank and tell them Big Daddy said to give you the money.” That’s the way it worked then! Because then he also knew that he had you. You’d be paying him back right out of your check. We had an OK time then. That was a good era. But then that mine sold out to Massey Coal.
It got to be a hassle at the end. The companies were in it for themselves. The philosophy now is, “Get the coal and get out.” It should have taken 35 or 40 years to get the coal out of the mine I worked at in Wolf Creek. They ripped it out in ten years. They bring in this big shovel that can carry an ungodly amount of tonnage in one big swoop. It’s massive. It can take the whole top of a hill off. We have floods happening in places that never flooded before, because they’re stripping so much that there are no trees to hold back the water. There ain’t nothing there now, so the water can come right through. They’re saying that they’re doing better for us by creating flatlands—they say that we can develop on it. But all they’re really helping is themselves.
Now I work out here in my shop fixing up motorcycles. I started collecting motorcycles back in the 70s, as soon as I started working in the mines. The money I made was letting me buy motorcycles. I probably had 25 or 30 of them in my life. I sold them and traded them. I learned how to work on them just by owning them. Word of mouth spread around and people started to bring me their bikes so I could change the oil or do a little work on them. They charge about $60 an hour at the shops, but I charge about $15 or a case of beer. Either one. It’s a good little hobby.
RUDY HAMMONDS
