Word: mineralized
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...addition, it is U.M.W. policy that when just one picket from a struck mine appears at another mine, the workers there also must walk off the job. Even some union members have doubts about this tactic. Complains Fred Voithofer, 49, a miner in Greene County, Pa.: "Guys from out of state showed up and shut us down three times last summer. One had a gun. No way I'm going to argue with that kind of thing, but it's dead wrong. The company treats us well, and we shouldn't be penalized when some other company...
...Pond Gap, W.Va., a miner's wife walked into the general store, passed the potbellied, coal-burning stove and went to the back, where she opened a nervous conversation with Proprietor Virgil Huddleston. Finally, she got to the point. Her mother-in-law was coughing up blood and needed to go to the hospital, but the family could not afford to send her. Would Huddleston advance her a loan? He dug $50 out of his pocket. "As long as I've got it," he said, "I'm happy to help...
...good customers up to $600 before in strike times," says David Howard, a grocer in Masontown, Pa., "and we'll do it again, just as long as we possibly can." Bars are doing brisker business than before. Remarks Tilly Bohan, manager of the Trocadero in Masontown: "They say miners come into this world poor and go out poor, but I never saw the day that, strike or no strike, a miner couldn't come up with money for a beer...
Solidarity is essential to the miner's mystique. Only another miner, he feels, can understand his tribulations. He is sure he is engaged in as tough a job as exists on earth-or under it. That is the source of his strength. "It's never dull when you're down below," says Jerold Hamrick of Kelley's Creek Hollow, W.Va. "You're some place where man has never been before. Fifty years' experience won't hold the top up. The rock has no respect for anyone. But it's in my blood...
...Thus the miner is distrustful of anything outside the hills, hollows and coal that make up 17's turf-an individual who is suspicious of Government, big corporations, journalists and almost anything urban. The U.M.W. is seen as a family union, always to be believed in and loved. But the union's present national leaders must earn fealty. If they back off from promises, wildcats result, and assertions like that of Mike Adkins, 33, are heard: "Up here, on the creek, nobody tells me when to work and when not to work." But when the leaders demand something...