Word: coal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Tugged by his dogs, Chapman tried to dodge the blackberry bushes and oak and hickory trees revealed in the pale light of the lamp on his miner's helmet. The desperate Ray headed uphill, past a gravel road used for hauling coal. Chapman could hear him crashing through the bush. For a man who had been on the run for more than two days, Ray showed remarkable endurance. All the hours he had spent in the prison yard playing volleyball to develop his legs and lungs were paying off-for a while...
...veteran trackers who scoured the hilly forests, the twisting narrow roads, the abandoned cabins and non-working coal mines around Petros, Tenn., are a hardy tribe who know the countryside from childhood and can read it like Indian scouts. Explains Don Daugherty, 44, whose folks have lived in the Brushy area for two centuries...
...Miller is now in a much more difficult situation. Coal operators are angry because he is unwilling to curb wildcat strikes, which have increased to near-epidemic proportions in the Eastern fields. Miller has stated that he will insist on contract revisions that would give U.M.W. locals the right to strike over grievances. Miller also says he wants another big increase for the miners, but he will find the operators tight fisted. Last time around, the mineowners realized that they owed the workers a big raise to let them catch up with other unions. Now that U.M.W. wages and allowances...
Further, the U.M.W. is losing support among miners; at least 40% of the nation's coal now comes from nonunion pits and strips. If Miller sticks to his demands, the companies can switch production to the largely nonunionized fields in the West, where productivity is generally higher anyhow...
Superstripper. Then there is the saga of Frank Burford, who as recently as 1973 was making $19,000 a year. In 1976 his income was more than $4 million. He became a superstripper-of coal. A former Emory University law professor, Burford returned home to West Virginia in 1967 to liquidate his ailing father's highway-construction business. Instead, he and a cousin revved up the company, branched into trucking and started hauling coal. The partners took over a money-losing coal company and started acquiring leases on vast carboniferous acreage. When coal prices soared in the wake...