The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  All the rock on Laird’s arm was becoming unbearable. Four fingers had gone numb, and his thumb barely tingled. He had been trying to retrieve his mining pick from a partially collapsed coal seam when even more coal dropped on him. His hand was trapped alongside the wooden shaft of his pick, and it poked awkwardly in his face. He scraped the mine floor with his boots to find something, anything, to help extract himself from this mess, all without drawing attention from other miners. If he became known as a screw-up, he would surely lose his job.

  On the floor his boot found a steel wedge. Ordinarily, the tool was used to widen a crack in the mine headwall before setting an explosive. Now Laird needed it to save his arm. He swept the steel closer with his foot, and, with a painful reach to the ground, scrounged up the wedge with his free hand. He hacked out mucus. He fought to catch his breath. This was it.

  With all the might in his left arm, Laird rammed the wedge into the mess of rubble. Through the collapsed rock his trapped arm felt the thud. Laird slammed the wedge again, and again, and again, until the handle of his pick budged. Laird saw the movement, and thrust his shoulder hard into the handle to leverage out another inch of rock. Now his wrist could wriggle. Could he take back his hand without toppling the whole wall? The longer he waited, the more he feared his chances. Laird gathered his strength, braced himself, and pulled for dear life.

  It worked. His right arm rocketed loose, free at last, but the sudden release sent Laird flying backward onto his butt. His fingers throbbed. For this he was grateful. Pain meant they were still attached to his hand.

  “You all right?” someone called from behind.

  “I’m all right,” Laird told him. It was an automatic response, one offered without thinking. When so many other men wanted to take his job, he’d damn well better say that he was all right. Yes, the mine had given back his arm, and the whole ordeal might cost him a fingernail or two, but the truth was that he wasn’t all right. His hand was free. His life wasn’t. Six more hours until his shift ended, and he was still trapped.

  Laird returned that night to a house that was hard to call a home. His mother, Bertha, lived there only occasionally. She disappeared for months and then returned without warning. No one was quite sure where she went, but Laird was pretty sure he knew why she went.

  Mainly, it was to get away from his father, who was also a coal miner. Frank Laird had started out with some family money—a farm in Kansas, and there were even rumors of some oil wells—but he had gambled and drunk it all away. One of Laird’s earliest childhood memories was of his father stinking of booze and passed out in front of the fireplace. When his father finally came to, he complained of the heat and issued an order: “Bertha, move the fire back.” She moved herself back.

  Everyone in the family knew the one good thing about a father who was too drunk to stand: From the floor, he couldn’t hit anyone. There came to be a magic time in the family’s night when the father had guzzled enough to hit the floor, or to just swing at someone wildly and miss. That was a good night. The danger came during the father’s start-up, when his temper went bad but his aim was still good. Those were the times to be out of the house.

  In all his years, Laird could not remember his father giving him a single hug, or a pat on the head, or even saying, I love you. Laird thought this was how all fathers acted. Then he compared notes with other buddies. And he wondered.

  He wondered, for example, about the issue of his own name. It wasn’t really Dick. The official birth certificate said “Charles Laird,” but his father called him Dick Warder Laird. Turns out that Dick Warder was name of the local sheriff. The father had had enough encounters with the law to realize that he needed to do something, anything, to win a soft spot in the heart of the man who could lock him up for the night.

  Laird was the youngest of five children, and the oldest three, Cliff, Oak, and Earl, were hellions. For laughs, they sneaked snakes into beds at home and picked fights in the schoolyard. When the fighting slowed, Cliff took his traditional black tin lunchbox and painted it pink, with flowers. Want to make fun of his girly lunch box? Cliff was looking for any excuse for some kid to start an argument that might lead to a brawl.

  The parents seemed to look for any excuse to deliver a whupping, too. The oldest son, Cliff, once offered to pay fifty cents to Dick to take over his chore of hauling in kindling and coal for the fire. Cliff failed to pay up, so Dick lifted the coins off his brother’s dresser. To Laird’s mother, this was theft. She ordered Dick to return the fifty cents—and to bring her two willow switches from the creek. Laird knew those branches were intended for his backside, so he secretly used his pocketknife to slice a weakening ring around them. Sure enough, during the first lash, both switches snapped. When his mother sent him back to the creek for two sturdier switches, Laird repeated his trick, and got the same result. Fed up, his mother snatched the father’s razor strop, and, according to Laird, “She damned near killed me.”

  His sister was not spared, either. Laird returned home one day to find his mother and a young Alice in the throes of some indecipherable argument. The back-and-forth continued until the mother hoisted the little girl by the legs and dunked her headfirst into the backyard rain barrel. The mother pulled the girl out, pigtails dripping, and demanded: “Are you going to do it again?” The girl didn’t answer. Back into the barrel went the girl’s head, but again there was no answer. The mother delivered another dunking, and another, until finally Alice, still hanging upside down and sopping wet, replied, “No, Mother.”

  For long stretches during the Great Depression, Laird’s family of seven lived on $1 a day. On his walks from school, Laird picked up spilled coal along the train tracks for the night’s heat. The one boyhood Christmas present Laird could remember, a red Radio Flyer wagon, was given to Dick mainly to increase the amount of coal he could lug home. Years later, at age twelve, Laird had improved on his red wagon by converting an old mine dynamite box into a coal-hauling wheelbarrow. His invention was soon copied by dozens of neighborhood buddies. Their fathers couldn’t fully support a family on a coal-mining paycheck, so the kids scrambled to help out with coal-mining scraps.

  Hard times also forced Laird to scrounge food. In the summer, he topped off his coal wagon or wheelbarrow with dandelion greens for that night’s dinner. He caught squirrels and rabbits with boxes, snares, and pit traps. When the family was especially hungry, Laird had tied a kernel of corn to a kite string and cast it out like a fishing line toward the property next door. More than once he had reeled in that night’s dinner—the neighbor’s chicken.

  Nothing went to waste. When a mule at the coal mine broke its leg, Laird’s father was ordered by the bosses to shoot and kill it. Instead, Laird’s father tried the impossible. He started nursing it back to health. After several weeks, the leg healed enough for the mule to try kicking down a fence. That broke the leg all over again. The mule became stew.

  Laird’s boyhood passed without joy or roots. On his downward spiral of poker and alcohol, his father had moved the family at least ten times through the coal towns of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio before Dick Laird was even six years old. Laird couldn’t remember much about each stop except the names: Harrisville, Dog Run, Basil Stop, Clarksburg, Fredericktown, Clarington, Vestaburg, Bellaire. They were ramshackle places within about a hundred miles of each other, and all rife with the feeling of desperation. Most Laird family moves came because the work had run out. Sometimes, however, the family was run out. Oak and Cliff had learned to sneak into the hills to make moonshine, which made them popular with some neighbors but not with the law. With all the moves and all the run-ins with law enforcement, the Laird family had built up a deep distrust of outsiders.

  The one stable thing in Dick Laird’s life was school. He loved it. The classroom was his refuge, the one safe spot where no one beat him or ridiculed him or screamed at him. It also was the only place in his life that offered him a routine: the bell clanging to start the day; the hallway sc
ramble to separate rooms for history, geography, math, and English; the recess games of marbles, baseball, and, with the arrival of new European immigrants, soccer. Laird’s favorite, music class, was held in the room called the Chapel. His voice was clear and strong. He had a knack for memorizing songs, but stood out among classmates for another reason. Laird was a fainter. All students in choir were required to stand, and by the time the choir assembled every Friday, Laird had run out of food and energy. “There he goes again,” called the kids in the choir when Laird plopped over. After a few weeks, his teacher had learned to put Laird in the front row, where he was easier to catch on his way down. Even better, the choir teacher began making sure Laird had something for lunch that day. With a stale old bun or biscuit in Laird’s belly, the fainting stopped.

  His teachers showed him how to be meticulous. He stood up straight, kept his shirt tucked in, and looked adults in the eye. He made sure his desk was in order. He took pains to use precise handwriting. He wasn’t the greatest reader, but he did enjoy math, with all its order and logic and certain answers. He got Bs but pushed for As. When his father was drinking, and his mother was disappearing, and his brothers were moonshining, and the whole family was pulling up roots again and again and again, school just made sense to Dick Laird.

  At age fourteen, Laird was forced by his father to quit.

  Laird was crestfallen. Education was the ticket to a better life, the teachers always said, and Laird really wanted to believe the claim, even though he had never once met anyone who had actually used school as a way to break out of Appalachia. At the very least, every day he was in the classroom was a day he was not in the coal mine.

  To his father, however, that was exactly the problem. The family needed money. School didn’t pay. The mine did. It was time for the boy to start earning his keep.

  Besides, the father had put in enough years so that he personally didn’t have to dig anymore. He worked above ground, managing all the mining livestock. There were mules and ponies that hauled coal cars from seam to surface, and horses and oxen that moved even heavier loads to rail depots. Frank Laird knew he was lucky to breathe fresh air all day. The sooner his son got started underground, the better his chances to win promotion to work in the meadows above.

  First, however, Dick Laird had to start with the most grueling grunt work. That meant hiring on as a picker. These were the boys—and every picker was indeed a boy—who stooped over vast troughs of coal destined for market and stripped out the worthless chunks of slate. In town it was easy to figure out who was working as a picker. That boy had raw hands, a hunched neck, and eyes that gravitated toward the ground instead of the sky. Laird was grateful when, after a few months, he was bumped up to a better job.

  At least it was supposed to be a better job. His new assignment was working as a trapper, the kid who opened and closed underground doors for load-hauling miners. The good news was that he was upright, and, for the first time in months, his neck stopped hurting. The bad news was that standing around all day to operate doors was boring and lonely work.

  Laird was angling for his next bump up as a mule driver, which at least would have allowed his legs to move, when he caught the eye again of the mine bosses.

  Among his peers, Laird stood out. He was six feet tall, at least a forehead higher than most others who labored underground. Even more importantly, Laird had wingspan. In a coal mine, long arms were wasted on a mule driver.

  So at age sixteen, Laird started on the real deal. Like many of the better young coal miners, Laird had strength and stamina, toughness and drive, the heart to push a little harder when others slumped exhausted over their picks. But there were also traits that set him apart. He showed up clean to work and kept his tools scrubbed and organized. He listened to his foreman. He made a work plan and kept to it. In some ways, figuring out coal extraction problems deep below the surface of the earth was like figuring out fraction and decimal problems in the classroom with seventh grade math teachers. If he kept plugging away, he figured out the answer.

  At about this time, people outside the house stopped referring to him by his first name or nickname. From now on, it was Laird, just straight up Laird. Being known almost always by only his last name was one more proof that he had grown up early.

  After a few more months, the Powhatan Coal Mine turned Laird into an explosives man.

  The promotion played to Laird’s strengths, allowing him to come up with a specific routine and insisting that everyone follow it. First he ordered the shorter men on his crew to scrape out, with mining picks, a three-foot wedge at the bottom of a coal seam. Then he had the crew drill the face with a series of holes, which Laird filled with black powder charges. If Laird placed and angled each bore correctly, then his simple blast would shower tons of material onto the mine floor.

  It was rarely that easy. For starters, everyone in the mine wanted something different from him. Bosses wanted him to use less black powder, because that saved the company money. Miners, however, wanted bigger blasts, because that freed up more coal for extraction. Everyone wanted to cut the amount of time spent setting up for new detonations, but extra time to Laird meant extra safety. If there was just one unseen weakness in the wall, or too much explosive in the wrong spot, or one faulty bore angle, then everything could come crashing down on Laird’s head. Or, as he already had learned the hard way, onto his hand.

  In his two years working underground, Laird had seen plenty that went wrong—mangled fingers, crushed pelvises, smashed feet. (By the time he was sixteen, Laird himself had already broken one leg, two ribs, and four fingers, plus his nose and left foot twice.) And then there were the accidents that were much worse.

  Though it was bad luck to talk about fatal accidents while still working underground, miners couldn’t avoid the headlines they saw in town. The bad news was steady and frequent. In just the past four years, there were 195 men lost in an explosion at the Mather No. 1 in Pennsylvania; 17 at the No. 1 at Yukon, West Virginia; 10 at the Baltimore No. 5 in Parsons, Pennsylvania; 13 at the Irvons No. 3 at Coalport, Pennsylvania; 14 at the Kingston No. 5 in Kingston, West Virginia; 46 at the Kinloch in Parnassus, Pennsylvania; 12 at Yukon in Arnettsville, West Virginia; 16 at the Pioneer in Kettle Island, Kentucky; 82 at the No. 6 in Millfield, Ohio; 38 at the Boissevain in Boissevain, Virginia; 10 at the Splashdam No. 6 in Splashdam, Virginia; 23 at the Zero in Yancey, Kentucky; 54 at the Moweaqua in Moweaqua, Illinois. To most people the mine names and numbers of deaths were a blur, but Laird was acutely aware of every accident. He felt like he was living on borrowed time.

  Coal mining remained one of the world’s most dangerous professions. In Laird’s first year of work, a total of 2,063 coal miners were reported killed on the job in the United States.

  In other words, about one of every 340 miners who started work on January 1 would be killed by the end of the year. Laird looked around the crowds of men gathering inside Powhatan every shift change and wondered which ones wouldn’t make it back out. Would it be that father? Or that buddy from school? Or would his own neck be snapped? Every trip down that long, dark, dusty shaft just increased his chances of becoming one of the 340.

  On his long walks home from the mine, Laird doubted he would even have the chance to grow up and make a living from coal. The Great Depression was ravaging business across the world, but few businesses had suffered like the U.S. coal industry. In just three years, annual production had plummeted 40 percent, from 608 million tons in 1929 to just 359 million tons in 1932. Prices plunged. Mines shuttered. In many Appalachian towns, nine out of ten coal miners were out of work. The men lucky enough to still have jobs faced pay cuts and fewer hours.

  Grasping for survival, mine owners scrambled to attack costs. That meant mechanization. The mules and oxen that used to haul coal were replaced by conveyers, trolleys, and trains. More jobs lost. Three hundred miles away, in Detroit, Henry Ford was declaring that machinery was the new messiah, but in Appalachia, swapping men for machines spa
wned anger, resentment, and mobs. Unions, weak from unemployment and fractured from political radicalization, could not mount effective opposition, and lawlessness rose. In parts of West Virginia, superintendents hired armed guards to deliver new equipment to mines.

  In the rush to dig up more coal more cheaply than ever, safety standards slipped. Laird narrowly escaped another wall collapse. Converting the coal trolley to electrical power meant that charged wires dangled from mine ceilings. Sometimes those wires fell. In air thick with coal dust, an electrified mine was one spark from catastrophe. (In fact, years later, on July 5, 1944, the Powhatan suffered one of the worst accidents in U.S. mining history. Sixty-six men were trapped underground and killed when a miner accidentally knocked a wire onto a trolley rail and ignited a flash fire. Rescuers needed 644 days to recover the bodies.)

  By his seventeenth birthday, Laird had concluded that coal mining was a dead end. He tried to punch his way out of it.

  The one tool his older brothers had shown him how to use was his fists, and Laird turned out to be a tough boxer. His reach was long, and he was skilled at withstanding punishment. He was patient. He threw few wild punches. After a full shift underground at the mine, he trained by running home. Sometimes between rounds he hacked up a wad of black mucus, but many of his opponents did the same. Within a few months, Laird had won enough matches to advance beyond the local Golden Gloves. At the regional tournament in Pittsburgh, though, trouble struck. In a pre-fight health checkup, the ring doctor discovered that Laird suffered from a heart murmur. That disqualified him from any more boxing. Boxing was yet another path that would not lead out.

  By 1933, life beyond the Powhatan mine looked as grim as life inside. Across the country, 100,000 people a week were losing their jobs, and one of every four Americans lived in a house with no regular wage earner. As many as two million Americans wandered the country homeless. Tens of thousands of people settled in cardboard shantytowns in New York’s Central Park, in Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Almost half of the nation’s 25,000 banks had failed, wiping out savings accounts of nine million people. Food riots erupted in Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, San Francisco, and central Arkansas.