Mining for hope
by John Gever
Dave Crawford had the rest of his life mapped out in the summer of 2004. Crawford is an underground coal miner, the iconic job in West Virginia. Then 47 years old, he figured he could take retirement in eight more years. By then he'd have enough time in unionized jobs to be eligible for a full pension and comprehensive health benefits under the United Mine Workers of America contract. He figured he'd play some golf and do some traveling.
Crawford was working in the Cannelton mine outside Smithers, W.Va., about 30 miles east of Charleston, the state's capital and largest city. He'd worked in the region's mines for more than 25 years. Cannelton's owner, Horizon Natural Resources, had financial problems (it had been in and out of bankruptcy), but the mine was one of the most productive in the nation and Crawford felt secure.
He wasn't.
That summer, Horizon closed the mine, selling it and other mines in the region to Massey Energy, a major coal operator that is primarily nonunion. Massey reopened the mine under the name Mammoth Coal Company, but Crawford and other former employees who were card-carrying UMWA members were not among those hired. (UMWA filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which agreed with the union that Massey was guilt
y of unfair labor practices. In August 2006, the board went to federal court to enforce the ruling.)After the mine closed, "there was a six-month period where I lost my job, I lost my health care, I lost my apartment, I lost my car," Crawford said. He had no family in the area: both parents were dead, his wife had been killed in a car wreck in 2000. He stayed with friends, none for very long as he tried not to wear out his welcome. When no one could put him up, he slept in the Cannelton UMWA hall.
"I had it planned out," he remembered. "With one stroke of the pen... all that was wiped out." He now expects "to work till the day I die."
When he lost the Cannelton job, Crawford wasn't very worried at first. He'd been laid off before, always getting called back or finding another mine job without much trouble. This time, there was no callback and no other jobs available -- not to him, anyway. He became convinced he had been blackballed because of his union background. He had always been a vocal union man; other miners at Cannelton called him "John L.," a reference to John L. Lewis, UMWA's fiery founder. Mining jobs that came open always went to less experienced men who weren't UMWA members.
He looked for other kinds of jobs, but the only openings paid minimum wage. He still held out hope he could get back into the mines, where he could expect to earn at least $15 an hour even in a non-union mine. He was afraid taking a minimum-wage job could make it harder to find mining work. He wasn't sure he could even live on what the available jobs paid.
It didn't seem as if things could get worse for Crawford, but they did. Losing the job also meant losing his health benefits. He put off going to the doctor until he heard about a low-income clinic in Clay County, about 30 winding, backroad miles from Smithers. His blood pressure clocked in at 190 over 132, his triglyceride level at 580 -- both way, way above normal. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes as well. Crawford said the doctor told him, "Son, you're just a walking stroke. I cannot let you leave this office" without agreeing to be treated. Crawford's life had not only fallen apart metaphorically; now he was looking at death.
When Horizon closed the Cannelton mine, Crawford said, "I figured, I'll ride this out a little bit and see what happens.... you're optimistic something's going to happen." But as the months went by, he said, "then you realize that maybe it's not going to."
"It was frustrating," he said. "I thought about leaving the state, I thought about a lot of things." But he also felt he was too old to start over in a new place or new career. So he stayed in Smithers, hoping for a break.
* * *
What happened to Crawford has, in some fashion, happened to hundreds of thousands of people in Appalachia. Companies make decisions in far-off boardrooms, leaving men and women and families with dashed expectations and no certain prospects for the future. With poverty comes social and health problems. Drug use in many Appalachian communities is as rampant as in any big-city ghetto. In rankings of disease prevalence, West Virginia is at or near the top for high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and infant mortality and low birth weight.
Against these problems, Appalachians have hope -- although as Crawford found, it is not inexhaustible.
Hope is why Dave Crawford came to be associated with a Jesuit-sponsored project and why his story is being told in this magazine.
Wheeling Jesuit University, located in West Virginia's Northern Panhandle, has a program whose mission is to tackle the problems of Appalachia. It's called the Clifford M. Lewis, S.J., Appalachian Institute, named after the first Jesuit to be stationed in Wheeling, who was instrumental in the university's founding in 1954.
It derives its inspiration from a 1975 pastoral letter issued jointly by the Catholic bishops of the Appalachian region, "This Land is Home to Me." Subtitled "Powerlessness in Appalachia," the letter condemned the economic and social forces that have conspired to make Appalachia a seemingly permanent island of poverty in the world's richest nation. The letter also contained a message of hope, that the people of the region could and would fight back.
"More and more people recognize that a new social order is being born. Indeed, the Spirit of God presses us to this recognition," the bishops wrote. "We do not understand it all, but we know we are part of it -- in Appalachia -- in our nation -- across the world.... Hopefully, this letter, itself a product of dialogue, will start a process, wherein the Catholic community can join together with people of good will throughout the region to reflect on and act for a more just society."
The institute was founded in 2002 with Fr. Joseph Hacala, S.J., as director. Not long afterward, Fr. Hacala was named interim president of WJU, and a new director was needed. Fr. Hacala recruited Jill Kriesky, Ph.D., from West Virginia University's Extension Service, where she had been professor of labor studies and later directed the university's service learning program.
In her first days on the job, Kriesky recalled, "We had a meeting of everyone who at that point was involved [with the institute]," including Fr. Hacala and Davitt McAteer, WJU's vice president of sponsored programs. The purpose was to decide what the Appalachian Institute was going to do.
The group decided on several broad focus areas, and then discussed specific projects within each area. One of the focus areas was health. McAteer, who had headed the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration during the Bill Clinton presidency, mentioned a landmark 1946 government report on coal miners' health led by Rear Adm. Joel T. Boone. The Boone Report was heavily illustrated with photographs.
The idea of a 60th-anniversary followup quickly emerged, Kriesky said. The institute didn't have the staff to research and publish a whole new report. However, "we knew what we could do is gather existing information." The institute could also hire a photographer, using money from a Rockefeller Foundation grant, who would go to the coalfields to capture modern conditions. The new photos could be juxtaposed with images from the Boone Report.
The photographer would be Earl Dotter, who had worked for UMWA's in-house magazine and later won awards for his photos of occupational subjects. Because of his stint with the union, Dotter was already intimately familiar with the coalfields, and also with the Boone report. He seemed like an ideal choice for what Kriesky had in mind.
So it was that in July 2005, when Dave Crawford visited the Clay medical clinic and later lay in a makeshift bed at the Cannelton UMWA hall, Dotter was there to record it.
* * *
Just a few weeks later, Crawford's life hit bottom and began to turn around. The day after his car was repossessed, he heard of an opening at a nonunion mine called Selah in Campbell's Creek, just east of Charleston. He persuaded a friend to give him a ride there and he filled out an application. The manager told him the owner had said not to hire him. Crawford replied, "I'm not here as a union organizer or anything else, I'm here as a coal miner. Give me a chance. Give me two or three weeks. If you don't like the way I work, just shake your head yes or no. If you shake your head no, I'll just pack my stuff and leave. You won't have to fire me." Crawford started work at Selah in August 2005, and he has worked continuously ever since.
His health improved as well. Crawford turned out to be the kind of patient doctors adore. He takes the medications the Clay clinic suggested, and now his diabetes is under control and his blood pressure and triglycerides are back in the normal range. He also follows the dietary advice the clinic gave him. Previously, he had lived primarily on fast food and other fatty, sugary snacks. (He said his typical miner's lunch had consisted of candy bars and Ding Dongs.) Now he eats multiple small meals and while he still eats pizza, it's an occasional treat instead of a staple. He's lost 29 pounds. He's still a burly man, but he looks to be in better shape than some professional athletes. He says he may even try to give up cigarettes at some point.
He shares a two-bedroom unit with his girlfriend, Melissa, and her five-month-old boy, Preston. On a recent morning -- his personal time, as he reports for work at Selah at about 2:30 p.m. -- Crawford alternately dandles him and tells visitors about his daily routine.
He shows them the lunch and snacks he's packed to take into the mine: a handful of granola bars, a ham sandwich, peanuts in the shell. He'll go to the mine and change out of his T-shirt and sweatpants into heavy hard-toe boots and a navy blue jumpsuit with reflectorized orange stripes.
Getting from the mine mouth to the wall where he and his crew will be working takes about 45 minutes. This is the kind of mine that burrows more or less horizontally into a mountainside, following a coal seam until either it or the mountain gives out. It's a four-mile ride on a "mantrip," a squat car that rides on the same rails on which the roughly 1,500 tons of coal mined on Crawford's shift will exit. His main job is to operate a shuttle car that moves coal and equipment around in the mine. He'll leave the mine about midnight. There's no bathhouse at Selah, so he'll wash off the coal dust when he gets home, about 12:30 or 1:00 a.m.
Having the Selah job may be saving his life. It includes a health plan with a prescription drug benefit. Crawford said he now pays $17.50 for medications that would otherwise cost more than $650. That would be hard to afford even on his good miner's pay.
* * *
Being photographed by Dotter didn't contribute directly to Crawford's return to a normal, happy life. Rather, his participation has helped advance the institute's mission to lay the groundwork for a different type of society, in which what happened to Crawford is no longer the norm for people in Appalachia.
The eventual product was a free-standing photo exhibit including 68 images by Dotter and another 38 from the Boone Report, as well as 10 pages of supporting text. It debuted in January 2006 in downtown Wheeling's Artisan Center, which celebrates the city's industrial heritage. It later traveled to the AFL-CIO's national headquarters in Washington, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Cultural Center in Charleston, and other venues in Appalachia.
"In the region, it's really been organic," Kriesky said. "People see it in one location and they've been able to have it shown in another."
It can also be viewed online (at http://www3.cet.edu/appalachianinstitute), and Kriesky has been able to incorporate portions of it in other Appalachian Institute programs.
In addition to health, the institute's other focus areas are education, jobs and economic development, and hope.
That word again, hope. Kriesky said it made the list in large part due to a conversation she once had with a WVU extension agent in one of the state's most poverty-stricken southern counties. She was trying to place WVU students in community-based service projects, and suggested it might be a good idea to include students from the agent's own county. She recalled his reply: "No, don't send me any students from here to do these projects. They can't see the world here as ever being any different than it is." In other words, he was telling her, the region's youth had lost hope.
Moreover, Kriesky said, she felt the institute should do more than focus on practical problems such as education and jobs: "As a Jesuit institution, there should be a spiritual issue attached to the institute. Hope is a spiritual issue."
The institute's primary project in the hope area has been another photo exhibit. Kriesky said some of the earlier hope-related ideas "didn't really take off." But they led to further discussions, at which another idea came up: "What if we did a series of interviews with activists in the community to help us understand how they remain hopeful?"
Kriesky got together with two people she knew from her WVU days: Ric MacDowell, an extension agent and professional photographer in Lincoln County, southwest of Charleston, and Rick Wilson of the American Friends Service Committee's West Virginia Economic Justice Program. Both had seen the loss of hope in Appalachia first-hand, yet maintained seemingly endless reserves of their own.
Said Wilson, "It's not given to us to change the world completely, [but] you can do incremental things and that's where you should get hope from."
MacDowell pointed out that while hope is not sufficient in itself, it's a necessary starting point for a grassroots movement. "If you can't create the capacity [for change] in the people who live up in the hollow, I don't see how the issue can be solved." Engendering hope, he added, "moves toward activism."
They settled on a photo-text exhibit as the best format. The plan was to combine quotes from the activiest interviews with photographs, most of which were contributed by MacDowell. They would be displayed on 19 large easel-mounted panels, making the exhibit portable. Wilson wrote a booklet with additional material; with more text and fewer photographs, it supplements the exhibit and can also stand on its own.
"My thought was [exhibit showings] would be followed up with a town hall meeting" or similar discussion, Kriesky said, where people could discuss how to create and support hope in their own communities.
It has now been shown and discussed at numerous venues around West Virginia. In November, for example, it was incorporated into a statewide meeting of Partners in Prevention, a child abuse prevention program involving city- and county-level social service agencies.
The 35 attendees first viewed the exhibit. As she looked at one panel, a woman remarked to her companion, "Everything is so big. The church, the government, they're all so big. But it all comes back to-- you know, in West Virginia it always comes back to community."
The group then returned to the meeting room and Kriesky led them in a discussion. She asked people to talk among themselves at each table about specific aspects of hope: who provides it, what kills it, how to raise a generation capable of taking action. After about 40 minutes of animated talk, she then called on each table to report to the group as a whole. People smiled and nodded frequently as the ideas flew.
As with the coal miners' health exhibit, one showing often leads to another. In the case of Partners in Prevention, its state coordinator, Julie Pratt, said she had seen the exhibit's debut in Charleston at a major volunteerism conference and thought it would be ideal for her group.
Kriesky said demand for both exhibits has been strong, exceeding her expectations. Her time is often the limiting factor on showings, she said. (In addition to directing the institute, Kriesky also heads WJU's Service for Social Action Center, which places the university's students in community service projects.)
Yet another photo project, a follow-on to the coal miners' health exhibit, is now coming together. The first exhibit's focus was primarily rural, reflecting the geography of coal mining. In 2006, the institute commissioned a second set of photographs from Dotter, this one centering on two southern West Virginia cities, Welch and Logan. Both have seen major losses in business and population with the decline in coal mining employment. Coal mining may be the iconic job of Appalachia, but the industry now employs fewer than 20,000 people in West Virginia, out of a working population of 820,000.
The exhibit will be completed in 2007. Fr. Brian O'Donnell, S.J., research director at the Appalachia Institute, said it should function similarly to the hope project. "It isn't just an exhibit, it should be a springboard to discussion," he said. He and Kriesky hope it will play a role in helping the two cities develop new plans for a revitalized future.
She also doesn't buy into the notion that the region's problems are intractable. True, some of them stem from such factors as "a challenging geography," the rugged landscape that makes physical and even electronic access to the rest of the country difficult. "It's harder to bring in the outside world," she conceded.
But many of the old problems of Appalachia have dwindled, to be replaced by new ones. Hunger was a major issue 50 years ago; now, obesity is a bigger concern. This year's mine fatalities notwithstanding, coal mining is now much safer, although new mining technologies have created their own new problems for water quality and road safety.
With only herself and Fr. O'Donnell attached to the Appalachian Institute, Kriesky understands it can't accomplish much on its own. "We're looking at how to partner with other organizations," she said, and to educate people to help them work on problems for themselves.
One of its most effective partners to date has been the Church itself. For example, it was instrumental in helping the Bishop of the Wheeling-Charleston Diocese draft a pastoral letter on health, issued this past October. Working with the diocese's director of pastoral services, Barbara Sutton, Kriesky helped organize and digest a series of focus groups around the state that highlighted the health issues of greatest concern to West Virginians. This effort also included surveys of low- and no-cost health clinics and local parish staff to get their perspectives. The bishop's letter, "A Church that Heals," drew national attention along with strong local praise.
She deliberately took an unconventional, non-academic approach to these projects. "I just couldn't figure who would read a report on hope," she said. Although she thinks eventually the problems of Appalachia will require government action, she knew that it wouldn't be effective for the institute to work for that directly. "We also want people at the grassroots to advocate for themselves."
Even if Kriesky had the resources to develop and impose top-down solutions, she wouldn't. "The people on the ground are the ones who should have a chance to speak," she said. "Let them focus on their solutions."
-end-
Note: Ignatian Imprints is a quarterly magazine published by the Maryland Province, Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)