Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300436
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Meanwhile, Pittston attorneys presented Circuit Judge Donald McGlothlin Jr. with evidence that strikers were violating his orders. On July 27, he fined the UMW $4.5 million for strike-related violence. Strikers complained that was almost 100 times what the U.S. government had fined Pittston after the 1983 explosion that killed seven miners at McClure.
In all, fines against the UMW were closing in on $8 million.
Yet the strikers' resolve never seemed to wither.
UMW attorney Jim Vergara of Hopewell spent much of the summer in McGlothlin's courtroom. "You'd come out of court after you're fined $6 million or $10 million or $20 million and as the attorney, you have to feel a bit depressed. You're thinking, `Have I really messed this thing up?' and people sitting in the audience come up and thank you. I'm thinking, `I'd rather you cuss me out, say what a dumb lawyer I am,' but they're thanking you for trying. I've had clients whose cases I've won who haven't thanked me."
With Marty Hudson sidelined by his pledge not to encourage law-breaking, UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts took over the strike. Jackie Stump looks back on that as another rallying point. "Never before in the history of the Mine Workers that I know of did you have the vice president, one of the top line officers, come down here and live with the strike. You can put your faith in someone like that."
St. Paul lawyer Frank Kilgore has another explanation for why Roberts took over. The strikers weren't losing their resolve, but some were starting to lose patience, Kilgore says. "He knew the cap was about to blow off because the men were restless."
\ OLD MEN WHO ALWAYS HAVE VOTED DEMOCRATIC AND PROBABLY NEVER BROKEN A LAW in their lives sat in front of country stores, cursing Gov. Gerald Baliles for sending state police to escort Pittston trucks.
Some strikers left little to the imagination about their preferred methods. "If those state troopers left, all we'd need would be about 48 hours and we'd probably use only three or six of that, and we could end this strike," grumbled striker Freeman Artrip.
Even people with more peaceful intentions were on edge.
Wherever they went, uniformed men were watching them.
To start with, there was Pittston's security, the Vance guards. No one had to see the well-fortified sniper's nest they built atop the McClure warehouse to know they meant business.
Other companies that had hired them called them the most disciplined security force they'd used. Nevertheless, dark stories about Vance circulated.
Three days after Carmen Mullins spoke at a rally, her father says, two men wearing blue jump suits and black boots - the Vance uniform - showed up at the house. They said nothing, simply prowled around the yard, wielding cameras. Carl Mullins confronted one on the back porch. "I said, `May I help you?' He stood at attention, never said a word. For 15 to 20 seconds, not a word came out of his mouth. I come through the house and lo and behold, there was another one [in the front yard]. He had a zoom lens. They never spoke one word, never blinked their eyes."
Carl Mullins broke the silence. "I said, `This is private property and around here, people who trespass like to get shot.' Then they made an about-face."
"If they see you at the Piggly Wiggly, they'll pull out behind you," said Linda Addair, a miner's daughter from Abingdon. "Sometimes they'll get in front of you and slow down and when you try to pass, they speed up just to agitate you."
Strikers never could document their allegations against the guards, and the company disputed them. But even if untrue, the rumors charged the air.
And then there was the state police. Even law-abiding citizens were intimidated by the presence of so many troopers.
"You got to the point, we all felt we were either all prisoners, or there was a war going on," says Dickenson County Commonwealth's Attorney Gerald Gray.
Roberts concedes the police indirectly helped the union's civil disobedience campaign. If so many troopers deterred strikers from resorting to widespread violence, they no doubt deterred replacement workers and security guards from free-lancing as well, Roberts believes.
Nevertheless, the police escorts of Pittston trucks grated on the nerves. Often there were Vance guards and state troopers riding shotgun in the same convoy, giving the impression that the police were no different from Pittston's private force.
And throughout the coalfields, people complained that the troopers were spying on them, harassing them.
When former Dickenson County Supervisor Bill Patton was showing around a reporter from New York, he says troopers took a special interest in the journalist's out-of-state car - and followed it 500 feet up Patton's 2,000-foot driveway.
Once, troopers even arrested a nun.
Bernadette Kenny - "Sister Bernie" to most - was well known, often delivering medical supplies from St. Mary's Hospital in Norton to far-flung health clinics in her Winnebago motor home. On July 12, she was headed for the home of a pregnant woman.
But all Trooper James Elmore knew was that she was lumbering along at 5 mph to 10 mph on a winding Dickenson County road, holding up a coal truck and other traffic. She wore a camouflage armband. And she apparently was flustered by the trooper.
Before long, Kenny found herself in jail.
People besieged court officials demanding her release. Before the afternoon was over, Judge Williams was forced to order her release on an unsecured bond.
The ultimate irony: It turned out that the truck behind Kenny wasn't a Pittston vehicle. Because Williams' order applied only to Pittston, the charges were thrown out.
The UMW was quick to seize on Kenny's arrest. The image of troopers arresting a nun delivering medical supplies became a powerful one, especially in Northern states with large Catholic populations.
But ordinary citizens also found themselves attracting the attention of state police.
One day, Dickenson prosecutor Gray drove his family to Virginia Beach for the weekend.
As he drove past McClure No. 1, he suggested his son wave an American flag at the strikers. "Immediately two state troopers pulled out and followed me for five miles," Gray says. "The fact that the act of waving an American flag was [suspicious was] enough to get you thinking, `This is like an occupied territory.' "
\ VIRGINIA STATE TROOPERS TELL A DIFFERENT STORY.
If folks in the coalfields felt occupied, the troopers felt surrounded. They never knew what would happen next - or which direction it would come from.
"They kept trying to promote this peaceful image," Sgt. Joe Peters says. "There wasn't anything peaceful about it. It was probably one of the most violent strikes out there for years."
Jackrocks weren't the worst of it. In some cases, he says, "They were throwing railroad spikes through windshields."
Any gathering of men or women in camouflage, whether outside a country store or at a Little League ball field, was reason to be suspicious.
For Trooper Roger Warden of Roanoke County, the most stressful part was "running the gantlet on Route 652," a main coal-hauling route. Troopers were always waiting to be ambushed, "waiting for the next rock to sling off the mountain."
Although his car never was hit, a truck directly in front of him was hit. "That's your tense part," Warden says. "They're overrating the part of picking up people [during the mass arrests], because that's controlled. The ambush part was the worst, because you don't know what to expect."
UMW President Richard Trumka ordered an end to the wildcat sympathy strikes in mid-July. But miners from across the country continued to pour into the coalfields and jam the roads.
State police were helpless to deal with the "tourists."
"Large groups of people would congregate, then the next thing you know, there would be broken windshields and jackrocks thrown in the road," Peters says. "You'd need to take troopers and tell them to disperse. And always, in the back of your mind, you'd wonder, `Are they going to disperse or are we going to have to arrest them?' "
In late summer, strikers started similar tactics at nighttime. Groups would begin congregating at 9 or 10 p.m., waiting to tie up the replacement workers at shift change. It was hard for troopers to see people at night, and that added to the stress.
The thing that bothered Peters most wasn't the strikers but the animosity shown by local law enforcement toward troopers. Sheriffs in the coalfields knew who elected them, and made sure the strikers knew it, extending them every courtesy when state police brought them to the local jails.
Sometimes they'd let the troopers know it, too. "They wouldn't support you," Peters says. "I heard you'd pass them [while the other cops were in uniform on duty] and they'd give you the thumbs down sign like the miners did."
Other times, troopers would arrest people for various crimes of violence - throwing rocks was perhaps the most common - only to have them feted as heroes at the local jails.
Dickenson County Sheriff Avery Phipps was especially genial to the UMW. Whenever he had out-of-state union sympathizers in his jail, he called former Supervisor Bill Patton to bail them out.
\ TO HEAR PAT SPEER TELL IT, the people of Greenwich fell in love with the miners who were there every day in front of Pittston. "Hardly a day went by that folks didn't come up on the [picket] line with coffee, $100 bills, Yankee tickets," recalls the UMW organizer in Connecticut.
Pittston's newspaper ads tried to portray miners as "crazy, rock-throwing people," Speer says, but the people in Greenwich saw instead a bunch of gentle men and women with their families. "They were gracious and polite and deeply religious."
Greenwich might have a blue-blood image, but it also had its pockets of blue-collar folks who didn't like Pittston, either.
Street vendors sold the miners sandwiches at half-price. People showered the strikers with food. "They'd just pull up at the red light and holler come pick up the drinks, fruit, cookies, everything," recalls Teresa Hughes, a miner's wife from St. Paul.
Jeannette and Roger Colley of Clintwood picketed in Greenwich for 13 weeks, and made lots of friends. She keeps in touch with several - an Italian woman who drove a lunch wagon and gave the miners leftovers, an Italian man who worked in a delicatessen who sent a present for her grandchild at Christmas.
\ THE MOST MOVING MOMENT OF THE STRIKE IN GREENWICH CAME JUNE 30.
Some 350 miners, relatives and their new friends in Greenwich paraded from First United Methodist Church through the streets bearing white crosses with the names of UMW members who had died in the mines or from black lung. They consecrated the crosses in a memorial service at the church. Then they marched over to Pittston, planted the crosses and a microphone on the front lawn, and let the company have it.
But perhaps the most effective part of the Greenwich campaign was the constant pressure it put on Pittston executives.
Strikers seemed to be everywhere in town. "We painted it with camouflage," Speer says.
When they went to church, some heard sermons from their priests and ministers against their company. When they commuted to and from work, they ran into strikers passing out leaflets. Strikers even showed up at a company softball game, holding a silent vigil one night in late August. Another time, at Speer's direction, townspeople started beeping their horns outside Pittston headquarters to show support for the miners. "It started sounding like Times Square on New Year's Eve," Speer says.
Jeanette Colley was picketing one day when she handed her literature to a distinguished-looking man who walked by.
He said he'd thought he'd already seen it.
It was Paul Douglas.
"He told me his daughter had got married," Colley recalls. "He was a nice person to talk to, considering what we were going through at the time."
Another day, Joe Farrell, Pittston's top coal executive, drove up to the picket line in his BMW. When Roger Colley tried to hand him a leaflet, Farrell invited him into his car and they chatted for 15 minutes.
One way or another, Speer brought an Appalachian strike to New England. "Pittston had unlimited power up here. We took that away. I would like to think it made the Pittston executives reflect deeply."
The Rev. Ed Deyton, minister of Diamond Hill United Methodist Church in Greenwich, thinks it did. "I think it jarred the Pittston company people who just kind of assumed this would be a safe haven from the strike. There was just no escape. They just couldn't get away from it."
\ ON JULY 19, UMW PRESIDENT RICHARD TRUMKA TOLD THE WEEKLY RALLY IN THE COALFIELDS that the union's next move would be to pressure Pittston's board of directors.
The UMW zeroed in on William Craig, vice chairman of Shawmut Bank in Boston.
First, Trumka lobbied Boston City Council to pull its money out of the bank.
Craig and other bank officials protested that he was representing only himself, not the bank, on the board.
But the bank was one of New England's largest and made a useful target.
Soon, not only did Boston pull most of its money out of Shawmut, so did the cities of Cambridge and Somerville plus various union pension funds - about $280 million in all.
That was just the beginning.
Miners picketed Craig's home. They also found supporters in Boston's laundry workers' union and the restaurant and hotel workers union. In September, 35 sympathizers occupied a Shawmut branch and refused to leave. Fourteen people were arrested; more importantly, the story got good play in the Boston media.
Finally, in October, the union scored a victory even it hadn't expected: Craig announced he would take early retirement. Bank officials insisted it had nothing to do with the strike, but that didn't matter. Appearances count for everything.
Ken Zinn, who ran the UMW's corporate campaign, says Craig's resignation was a turning point. "It sent a very strong message to the board of directors that there was a personal cost" to the strike. "What we did in this campaign was take the coal mines to him in Boston and it cost him."
Craig wasn't alone. Miners or their supporters picketed other Pittston directors - in New Jersey, in Kentucky, in Florida, in California, wherever.
"A lot of the labor leaders around the country told me they'd heard that other companies wanted to get Pittston to get things squared away, because we were stirring up the labor movement like it hadn't been since the 1920s," says former Dickenson County Supervisor Bill Patton.
Politicians started to take a keener interest, too.
The U.S. representative from the Virginia coalfields, Rick Boucher, convened a group of 20 coal-state congressmen.
The Missouri congressman who chaired the U.S. House subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations launched an investigation of the strike that produced a report concluding U.S. labor laws were biased against the union.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, introduced a bill that would force Pittston to contribute to the industrywide trust fund for health benefits.
But for all the political figures who were getting involved, one refused: Gov. Gerald Baliles.
Baliles stuck to his insistence that he could do nothing to bring the two sides together.
Speech writer G.C. Morse and others close to Baliles suggested that the governor ought to make a trip to the coalfields to show his concern for the communities. Baliles said he agreed, but he wouldn't go.
The tragedy, Morse says, is that, until the strike, Baliles had shown more interest in Southwest Virginia than any other governor.
"We invested enormous political capital in going to the Southwest to find ways to diversify that economy . . . But from the moment the strike started in April, he never went back. I told him again and again it would be tragic if he would end his term without going back to Southwest Virginia. But there was something about Baliles, in his personality, that just deplored the idea of confrontation."
Plus, the governor's staff was convinced that the strikers were not simply emotional, they were dangerous.
Whenever discussion of Baliles traveling to the coalfields came up, chief of staff Andrew Fogarty would intervene with a chilling question: "What if the governor gets shot?"
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