Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300424
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELD PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Gary joined his big brother Bob on the picket line about dawn. About 90 men were there. "We were just standing around," Gary recalls. "We hadn't seen one of the leaders."
They wouldn't. The troopers swooped in shortly after 6 a.m., arrested the men and packed them onto four buses.
The Baileys thought their day was over. Instead, it was just beginning.
The buses set out for Clintwood. But, mindful of how strikers had blocked the main highway on Monday, the troopers took the buses over the back roads.
Some of the roads were so twisting that the buses had trouble negotiating the turns. Several times the buses had to back up and try again.
One bus got stuck. The troopers took out chains, tied it to the bus in front and pulled the vehicle free. Inside, the strikers looked on fearfully as the buses stuck out over a precipice.
The standard 25-minute ride to Clintwood turned into three hours - and ended up coming into town from the other side, from the west.
The police had outsmarted themselves. The roundabout route gave union supporters more than enough time to mass in Clintwood.
At Yates Gap, outside town, the buses stopped for an hour and a half until the police could rush 60 additional troopers into town.
That wasn't enough.
\ DOWN THE STREET AT THE ODD SHOP, Carol Deckard started getting ready for another day of protest.
She called stores to ask them to close.
They quickly agreed.
Deckard went to Hardee's to see if it would donate food for the men. It supplied 400 biscuits - butter biscuits, though. "The girls up there didn't like that," Deckard says, "so they took up a collection of $50 and got some sausages so the men could have something besides butter biscuits."
\ WHEN THE BUSES EASED INTO DOWNTOWN CLINTWOOD, 400 people were at the courthouse. "People were hollering and cheering," Bob Bailey says. "What law they had stood by the buses." Even so, "people started shaking them from side to side and people inside started shaking them from side to side."
After the rope escapes from the courthouse on Monday, troopers weren't sure what might happen.
"They claimed for our own safety they wouldn't unload us there, so they took us out to the [elementary] school," Bob Bailey says. "We sat there for an hour trying to figure out what to do."
The troopers talked of processing the prisoners at the school, but school officials wouldn't let them. After an hour's wait, the buses pulled out again, headed north. Destination: unknown.
A diligent Hardee's employee followed the procession. He'd been told to deliver biscuits to the men. Of course, he didn't know then how long that would take.
Just outside Haysi, the buses, running low, pulled into a gas station. The man at the station, William Garrett, refused service. The men in the buses cheered. His attorney, Frank Kilgore, says that from then on, troopers persecuted Garrett, eventually charging him with throwing rocks. When the case came to court, a Vance guard was flown in from California to testify, but the assailant the guard described looked nothing like Garrett; the case was dismissed.
For now, though, the procession rolled into Buchanan County. At Vansant, the buses pulled into a police office, where at last they could gas up at the solitary pump.
The strikers had been asking all morning for the troopers to let them go to the bathroom. This seemed the perfect spot. The troopers refused.
"They let the dogs out of the car to go to the bathroom but wouldn't let us," Bailey says. "Some of the buses - they used it on the bus, but we couldn't do it on my bus. Some guy had his wife. You don't do that in front of somebody's wife."
On the others, the strikers delighted in watching the urine on the floor trickle to the front, where the troopers were, whenever the buses went downhill.
The procession pulled out of Vansant.
People came onto their front porches to watch. Some shouted "kidnappers" at the troopers.
About 2 p.m., eight hours after the men were arrested, they arrived at the Blackford Correctional Center in Honaker.
Right behind them was the man from Hardee's. The biscuits were long since cold, but that didn't matter. It was the first thing the men had had to eat since breakfast.
But first, they had to stand in line to get into the bathroom.
\ ABOUT 12:45 P.M., SIX EMPTY COAL TRUCKS lumbered out of the plant and headed back to the mines. The pickets and their wives hooted "Scab!"
A mile down the road, the convoy came to a halt. The road was blocked.
The strikers had parked their cars and trucks on a bridge, locked their doors and walked away.
The troopers wrote tickets, but that didn't make the vehicles move.
Police called a tow truck. The first man summoned to the scene took one look at what he was getting into and left. So the troopers called Harry Hamilton in St. Paul.
Troopers flanked him as he backed his wrecker up to the first pickup in the blockade. Dozens of miners looked on - and shouted.
"Don't forget, you've got to live here after this strike is over," one man hollered.
Hamilton busied himself hooking up the pickup.
"Please don't, Harry," another striker pleaded. "We bring our trucks and cars to you, Harry. Please don't."
Hamilton stood up. "I know what you're saying. I don't like what I'm doing." But he was getting so little work these days, he explained, he couldn't afford to pass up the money the state was offering.
"When we win this thing, there'll be money flowing," the striker said. "Do like the other man did, Harry. Go on home."
Hamilton stopped. He slumped on the edge of the bridge and buried his face in his hands. "Let me sit and think a minute."
The strikers became silent. Finally, Hamilton rose. And started gathering up his equipment. The strikers cheered.
A trooper spoke privately to Hamilton. He shook his head. "I know. I'm losing either way I go," he said.
As he was leaving, strikers shoved money through his truck window.
To pay for gas, they explained.
The road stayed blocked for four hours. Then the strikers called it quits and drove home.
They probably didn't realize it, but the strikers should have been grateful to the police. When union men had tried this trick during the Massey strike, West Virginia State Police hadn't done a thing. The replacement truckers had slammed through the blockade, igniting violence that took years to burn itself out. The union men in Virginia could cuss the troopers all they wanted. But on this day, it was the troopers, by swarming over the blockade and trying to find a tow truck to haul the vehicles away, who helped make the UMW's strategy of civil disobedience work.
by CNB