Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300399
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On company grounds, the blue jump-suited guards of Vance Security pa trolled, their eyes shielded behind sunglasses and video cameras.
The strikers cursed them as "gun thugs" and "mercenaries," the high-tech heirs of the Baldwin-Felts detectives that companies imported during the organizing campaigns of the '20s and '30s. Soldier of Fortune magazine glamorized the Vance guards as thrill-seeking ex-military men who'd found the next best thing to a shooting war. That chagrined former Secret Service agent Chuck Vance, who prided himself on his men's professionalism. From its first job in the Massey strike, Vance Security had grown into a $10 million-a-year company with a roster of Fortune 500 clients; at the National Archives, Vance men guarded the U.S. Constitution.
Across the road, a small army of state police troopers kept equally close watch. It was a thankless assignment that few looked forward to. But when they joined, Virginia troopers knew that sooner or later they'd be sent to the coalfields for strike duty.
Now, Gov. Gerald Baliles faced the state's first coal strike since 1981, John Dalton's last year in office. Like Dalton, Baliles was a favorite of the business establishment. But unlike the Republican Dalton, Democrat Baliles had some ties to labor - he'd been endorsed by the UMW four years earlier. Still, he never had a doubt about how he'd respond to a miners' strike. "He would frequently list John Dalton as the model he was going to follow - send lots of troopers down and they would hold the violence down," former Baliles aide G.C. Morse says.
Between those forces lay an unbroken sea of camouflage as strikers massed on the picket lines in hunting garb. Pittston Coal's new president, Mike Odom, who'd been in office since Jan. 1, immediately branded the unexpected crowd at McClure and the pickets' fashion statement as "militaristic," evidence of the union's violent intent.
UMW spokesman Joe Corcoran threw a fit; that's what he'd been saying all along. Indeed, the camouflage uniform had grown out of Massey. There, replacement drivers learned that all they had to do to finger an assailant was identify strikers by their clothing. "One evening in Mingo County a truck driver came up to state police and said, `The guy in the plaid shirt threw a rock at me,' " union leader Eddie Burke remembers. "Well, there were 15 of us in plaid shirts. How can you tell which one? We even took a group photograph."
The union got the picture; it instructed its men to adopt a uniform, one that just happened to be fit for lurking in the weeds. Corcoran tried to get the union to ditch the camouflage in the Pittston strike for something less threatening, but it was too late. Organizer John Cox was already in the field, talking up the dress code.
The mass gathering on the picket line was another lesson learned from Massey - this way Marty Hudson and other leaders could keep an eye on their men. Drawn up in a tense stand-off, the strike seemed ready to boil over into violence. For the first few days, though, the union men did little but jeer as replacements went through the gates. Still, it was hard to keep miners from taking matters into their own hands.
Over the next week, jackrocks - two nails welded together so one point always sticks up - started showing up on the roads. On April 10, gunfire blasted a transformer at Lambert Fork, knocking out power to the mine. A truck convoy headed for the giant Moss No. 3 preparation plant near Carbo rounded a turn in the road and "ran into a barrage of rocks that hit us like a hailstorm," trucker Richard Adams testified.
Pittston went to court, just like Massey had, to break up the mass pickets.
On April 12, Donald McGlothlin Jr. - circuit judge for Dickenson and Russell counties, son of a prominent coalfield family - entered his first strike ruling: The union could station only 10 pickets along the 10-mile route from Lambert Fork to Moss 3.
\ EDNA SAULS WAS ONLY VAGUELY AWARE OF LIFE outside her Russell County hollow.
Her six brothers had gone into the mines; her two sisters had married miners. So had she. She measured her days by the rhythm of the coal trains. Her mobile home sat a few yards from the Norfolk and Western tracks where the loaded trains slow to a stop to pick up an extra engine for the long pull over the mountain.
Then the Pittston contract ran out. One day in 1988 her husband, Doug, asked if she'd be willing to help the union. The next thing she knew, Lambert Fork Local 1426 had formed a ladies' auxiliary and elected her president. The women were mad as hell about the company cutting health benefits.
In Edna Sauls, they found a leader.
Before long, Sauls was traveling to Connecticut to set up informational pickets outside Pittston headquarters and to Richmond to do the same outside Crestar Bank, which had lent the company $5 million - a strike fund, the union called it. What she found outside her friendly hollow shocked her. "Everybody's not like we were raised. I didn't realize there were people in the world that just didn't care about people."
Even before the strike started, she and other union women got together to brainstorm other ways to help.
By then, it didn't surprise anyone who knew her what Edna Sauls and her friends came up with.
Or that the women acted before the men did.
\ ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 18, 37 WIVES, WIDOWS AND daughters of miners gathered in Lebanon for instructions from Marty Hudson, then piled into vans and pickup trucks.
They drove past the Russell County Courthouse they'd later come to know so well, past the shopping mall and fast-food strip. At the edge of town, they made a hard left past a picket shack and headed up the driveway that led to Pittston's hilltop headquarters.
The driveway was unguarded. At the top of the hill, Sauls and three others jumped out and dashed to grab the office doors before security guards did. The women needn't have hurried.
The only person in the lobby was a receptionist. The women marched past the American and Virginia flags at the building's entrance, across the red "Pittston Coal" floor mats on the flagstone floor - and sat down.
The receptionist jumped up and asked if the women were demonstrating. The women burst into "We Shall Not Be Moved."
Just like that, the UMW had seized Pittston's headquarters - with women.
\ STRIKE LEADERS ASSIGNED TO WORK WITH THE WOMEN had talked up civil disobedience, but Edna Sauls insists the takeover plot was homegrown.
They ran the idea past union officials. The officials were receptive, but told the women they'd have to make up their own minds about what they were willing to do.
Sauls had no doubts. Taking over Pittston's office wasn't any worse than what the company had done by cutting off health care to union families, she believed.
Hudson was delighted. Some strike leaders still had doubts about whether civil disobedience would work; this would make a good test.
A trial run with women was brilliant, too, Hudson thought. It would generate publicity and embarrass Pittston. It would get the women involved and perhaps galvanize community support.
It also might show up the men.
UMW officials trained the women on how to deal with the press and on the finer points of the law, so they'd know the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony. "When we went into Pittston we had no intention of damaging anything," Sauls says. "We knew we were trespassing but we had no intention of destroying anything."
Hudson commandeered a pay phone at the convenience store across the road and delivered regular reports to UMW headquarters in Washington.
Things went so smoothly even he was shocked.
\ PITTSTON COAL PRESIDENT MIKE ODOM WAS OUT when the women arrived. He returned 20 or 30 minutes later to confront the strike's first crisis.
He wasn't surprised; he had expected the union to try something like this. Odom called his department heads together; they concluded the women weren't interfering with work. Besides, "their singing is preferable to the Muzak," Odom said. Did Odom consider calling in police? "It never crossed my mind," he says.
He knew how to play the PR game, too.
TV crews from as far away as Roanoke and newspaper reporters from as far away as Richmond jostled for position. Despite their briefings, the women were uncomfortable with the media. The women were more than happy to recite the union line, but they identified themselves only as "Daughters of Mother Jones," the legendary turn-of-the-century organizer. "Pittston has been unfair to our men," said a woman who called herself Daughter No. 13.
At lunchtime, union supporters arrived with soft drinks and pizzas and headed up the hill. A guard blocked the driveway. Hudson stepped in to negotiate. "We met halfway up Pittston's hill," he says. Retirees began unloading the food. The guard warned them not to enter the property, but the strikers walked up the hill anyway.
All but one did, anyway. He rolled.
Gail Gentry had lost the use of his legs when he was crushed by a rock in a Pittston mine in 1978. Now he was in a wheelchair, his legs withered but his arms strong. He plopped soft drinks in his lap and began wheeling up the hill, a 200-yard trip.
When he rolled into the lobby, the women cheered. Some cried.
About 4 p.m., another truck arrived, loaded with blankets and pillows. A guard asked the strikers not to go into the building, so they complied. Sort of. They dumped the bed clothes in the foyer.
Mike Odom was becoming concerned. He worried about being responsible for the demonstrators camped out in his lobby, a concern heightened by the fact that one woman was seven months pregnant.
At 4:30 p.m., company officials went home and turned the watch over to state police. The women settled in with a dinner of hamburgers and french fries. That night, they busied themselves writing an open letter to Pittston Chairman Paul Douglas.
\ THE NEXT MORNING, THE WOMEN'S SITDOWN WAS splashed in headlines across the state.
"It let me know what you can do with civil disobedience," Hudson says.
From then on, he says, the women became "the backbone of the strike."
Hudson used the women's audacity to prod the men - and keep them committed to civil disobedience. "I used it on the picket line," Hudson says, throwing out reminders like "the women did this."
Their point made, at 4 p.m. the women came out - holding their hands above their heads, singing union songs.
Husbands and others waited at the foot of the hill, some with tears in their eyes. Families hugged and kissed. Then Barry Miller of Davenport, whose wife, Darlene, had been one of the occupiers, led the group in prayer.
He asked God to show Pittston the error of its ways.
by CNB