Word: soft-coal
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Deep in West Virginia's soft-coal region, where tough miners and their families have lived for decades along the narrow mountain valleys known as hollows, Buffalo Creek Hollow (see map) echoes the contours of the twisting, snakelike stream from which it takes its name. It is one of the most densely settled areas of Logan County, with a dozen coal mines and more than 10% of the population. Not much wider than a football field at some points, the hollow forms a natural funnel from the dam to the Guyandot River 17 miles away. Often, a heavy rainfall...
...members are vociferously and increasingly critical of the union's cooperation with the coal industry. Their partnership has made U.S. coal miners by far the best-paid in the world (average: $7,000 a year) and created an industry so highly mechanized that American coal is cheaper than the domestic product in most of Europe -even in Newcastle. Yet cooperation can go too far. In 1968, the union was found to be conspiring with the Consolidation Coal Co. to create a monopoly in the soft-coal industry and was ordered to pay half of the $7,300,000 damages...
...Germany, it appears as if the war were only yesterday." The countryside, with its villages, horse-drawn carts and unmechanized farms, looks as if the clock had been turned back 30 or 40 years. The highways are potholed and traffic ranges from light to nonexistent. The blue haze of soft-coal smoke seems to shroud the cities, adding to the ever-present smells of cabbage and disinfectant. The cautious satirists in East Berlin's Distel (Thistle) cabaret suggested one socialist solution for some of East Germany's ills: nose plugs...
Post-Civil War America was a graceless murk of brownstones, soft-coal soot and ungainly walnut furniture. It was Victorian without even the fun of having royalty, and Critic Lewis Mumford summed up the period in a phrase, "the Brown Decades." By contrast, Europe attracted droves of artists in search of more romantic sensibilities. Of these exiles, none found herself more at home in France, while remaining essentially as American as a Henry James heroine, than Mary Cassatt. As her palette brightened, she became the only U.S. expatriate accepted by the fiercely iconoclastic French impressionists, and was invited to show...
...umpiring keep the majors well supplied with raw stock. "It's an unnatural life," says Umpire Augie Donatelli, who came out of the Pennsylvania coal country and took up umpiring after washing out of class D professional ball. "But have you ever been miles deep in a soft-coal mine? Umpiring gets rough, but whenever it does, I say to myself, 'Augie, this is better than the mines...