Word: shafted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...vine-covered hills around their village. The black-streaked yellow ore has brought them steady jobs, tidy red brick houses and a measure of happiness, but in recent years it has brought a creeping fear: What if the supply of sulphur should run out? As the mine shaft plunged deeper and deeper into the earth, even Cabernardi's Communists went regularly to the little parish church to pray to St. Barbara that the seam might last forever...
...company had hired, the union refused to listen to him. Half an hour later, 200 miners just reaching the end of the second shift in the mine below refused to come to the surface. Communist Santorelli raced to join them. "We will not come up," he shouted, as the shaft elevator descended, "until the company revokes the firings...
...after day Gino and his companions stayed down in the damp, hot (104°) shaft, 1,600 feet below the green vineyards of Cabernardi. They bedded down in mule stalls, took walks along dark tunnels lit only by their battery-fed cap lamps, and relaxed with Communist papers sent down from the shaft head. On the surface, their families camped forlornly near -barbed-wire enclosures redolent with the rotten-egg smell of sulphur furnaces. A constant stream of baskets containing fish, cheese, soup and meat passed through the gate to be sent below. With the baskets went an occasional note...
...Stale Shaft. As Communist labor leaders throughout Italy tried to whip the miners' cause into a general strike, other villagers in Cabernardi became disillusioned. "The workers," declared one Demo-Christian union official, "are not staying down of their own free will. It is a result of Communist pressure, making a political issue of an economic problem." Last week, as an old miner scrawled the number 34 on the calendar at the shaft head, the company ordered two of the four pumps feeding air into the mine cut off. Wine, liquor and cigarettes were removed from the food baskets going...
...shaft was sunk, and into it was built an Otis elevator big enough to hold stretcher and wheelchair cases. This cost $50,000. Airlocks were installed in the mine to seal in "curative" gases. To keep the procession of health-seekers in order, there is a flossy reception room where each visitor gets a number assigning him to a seat in the 85-ft. lateral. Downtown, a cashier handles the payoff: $100 for each visitor, which entitles him to four one-hour sessions underground...