Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300437
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Strike leader Eddie Burke looked for a way to rejuvenate the strike.
He wanted something that would give union families a rallying point, something that would underscore the commitment to non-violence, something that would grab national attention.
If he could embarrass Pittston, so much the better.
\ BURKE IS INTENTIONALLY VAGUE ABOUT THE PLAN'S ORIGINS. "A couple of people said, `What if?,' then two people went to two more, they expanded it to two more at most." But everyone agrees Burke was the guiding force.
What they came up with was a plan to seize the giant Moss 3 prep plant near Carbo.
It was dangerous, to be sure.
The plant was protected by Vance guards. Pittston claimed the guards were unarmed, but the strikers didn't believe it.
If the strikers could get past the guards, what would happen once they were inside? Would the guards regroup and come after them? Would state police?
Still, if the plan succeeded . . .
The takeover plan was the strike's most closely guarded secret. Burke, as regional director, was the highest-ranking official involved. Roberts didn't find out about the plan until a few hours before; Trumka didn't find out until the men were inside.
Burke and team leaders Doug Collier, Rick Blaylock and Mike Burdiss spent three or four weeks planning the operation. They even gave it a code name: Operation Flintstone, for the time United Autoworkers seized a Fisher body plant in Flint, Mich., in 1937 and held it 44 days.
In many ways, it was like organizing a military operation.
First was intelligence.
Burke had miners casually, but carefully, quiz company supervisors. "When do they bring in the new batch of guards? Why don't they guard the lower end down there any more? Have they given up on us there? They just don't use that no more?"
Burke and others talked to people who were familiar with Moss 3 and pieced together a floor-by-floor design.
Next came planning.
Burke assigned people to measure driving times from place to place. "They didn't know what they were doing it for," he says, but the union men were glad to supply the information.
They also had to figure out what the occupiers would need once inside. Someone bought 105 backpacks and blaze orange vests. They packed each with 10 days' worth of rations and supplies - "things like powders, lotions to keep your skin from cracking up, dried fruit and playing cards, Bibles, checkers, a little TV and radio."
Recruiting was next. Burke wanted the takeover team to represent miners not only from Virginia but also West Virginia and Kentucky, where the strike had received less attention. He also tried to assess who had the most faith in civil disobedience, the most determination to see the takeover through, and who could keep cool. He also tried to take into account the men's personal and legal situations. Could their families stand for them to be away? Would being arrested jeopardize any pending court cases?
Finally, Burke drew up a list of 125 people. Except for the team leaders, the only one with advance warning was the Rev. Jim Sessions, the executive coordinator of the Knoxville-based Commission on Religion in Appalachia, an interdenominational group that had been rounding up religious support for the miners.
Burke arranged for each man to buy a single share of Pittston stock, so they could claim to be shareholders inspecting their property. It wouldn't make a bit of difference legally, but would look good in the media.
On Saturday, Sept. 16, the calls went out. Report to Camp Solidarity at 2 p.m. Sunday.
Sunday, Sept. 17: Day 1
Burke spent Saturday making last-minute preparations. Then he and Rick Blaylock drove to Charleston, W.Va., to spend the night with their families.
When he got up early Sunday, Burke didn't tell his wife what he was hoping to do. Blaylock was equally circumspect. "I told my wife she'd receive a call later that day, informing her. They called her and told her they made it in. She didn't know. In what?"
When Burke got to Virginia, he broke the word to someone else who didn't know: Cecil Roberts. Roberts quizzed Burke about his plans and was satisfied. "I thought it was a very marvelous idea," Roberts says.
At 2 p.m. Sunday, strikers trooped to union halls. They'd been instructed to bring a coat and a sandwich; it might be a long evening. At the same time, Burke's 125 recruits were assembling at Camp Solidarity.
Burke and the team leaders went over each man, culling those with pending court cases or family obligations. Finally, the group was whittled down to 100 - 95 miners, the four union staff members and Sessions.
Then it was time to suit up. "If you could have seen the expressions on their faces when we pulled up the U-Haul with 105 backpacks and the orange vests . . ." Burke recalls.
That's when the men found out what they had volunteered for.
No one backed out.
\ WHEN THE MEETINGS AT THE UNION HALLS BROKE UP, strikers were told to head for Moss 3. Throughout the coalfields, caravans of cars and trucks began winding over the mountains.
Burke had sent instructions on when the strikers were to pass certain points along the way. If the strikers were ahead of schedule, they were to hold up. He didn't want anyone getting to Moss 3 too soon. The strikers were told to be inconspicuous. No camouflage. No horn-honking. No one had any idea what the secrecy was about, but they didn't protest. A group of West Virginia miners came to a halt outside Lebanon, waiting for their assigned time before making the final climb over Copper Ridge. Meanwhile, Burke had given different instructions to some Westmoreland miners. They were told to drive to McClure and make as much commotion as possible. The Westmoreland miners performed their task with noisy enthusiasm. State troopers alarmed by the sudden outburst swarmed around the miners, precisely what Burke hoped they'd do.
Burke hoped to catch the police unaware in another way, too. The troopers always changed shifts at 3 p.m., so he set the raid for 4, hoping to surprise the troopers after the day shift was away from the scene and before the night shift had settled in.
At 3, a half-dozen reporters, tipped off the day before that something was going to happen, gathered on a back-country gravel road near Camp Solidarity. They were the regulars who had covered the strike from the beginning - from newspapers in Bristol, Kingsport, Norton and Roanoke, and TV stations in Bristol and Roanoke. They were accustomed to getting calls from the union to show up for unspecified "news events."
Soon Joe Corcoran, the UMW's spokesman, showed up and told them what was about to happen. The reporters stared at each other. What kind of madness had they found themselves in the middle of? Should they alert the state police? What were the ethics of this?
Corcoran instructed the reporters to stay put until they saw the buses carrying the takeover team coming. Then they were to pull out in front. That way, he explained, the photographers would be able to set up in time to catch the raid. But he had another motive. He wanted to make sure the reporters didn't congregate at the plant in time to tip off police.
\ THERE WERE ONLY 10 TROOPERS ON DUTY in all of Russell County that afternoon.
Two were Clifford Davidson and Don Blankenship, who had just come on duty. Normally they worked in Craig County and Montgomery County, respectively.
They were patrolling through Cleveland, a small town about six miles east of Moss 3, when something caught their eye. "We'd just come out on patrol and we saw them all there," Davidson says. "We saw them gathering out at the ball field." It was one of the union locals breaking up its meeting.
Davidson and Blankenship were surprised because day shift troopers always notified the night shift if there had been a gathering of some kind. And what a gathering this was - 300 to 400 cars, with about two people per car.
Davidson and Blankenship got on the radio.
Before they knew it, the strikers had jumped in their cars and trucks and were pulling out. They didn't seem to be going home, either. Everyone was going west, toward Moss 3.
"After everybody pulled out, we followed them," Davidson says. "We were the last ones to get there. We didn't see them go in."
\ BILL PATTON ARRIVED AT DISTRICT OFFICES IN CASTLEWOOD at 3:45 p.m. and was briefed. He was to call as many elected officials around the state as possible, give them the union side of the story and assure them that the occupiers were peaceful.
Besides being a county supervisor for 20 years, Patton had once been a union lobbyist in Richmond. He was a Democratic war horse, a guy any statewide candidate hoping to carry Dickenson County got to know early. One candidate Patton had helped introduce early in his political career was Gerald Baliles. But now Patton cursed Baliles' name. "Jerry Baliles has slept in my house, he's ate my food and he's drank my liquor - and now he's sent his state troopers down here to arrest me," Patton told any visiting politicians who would listen.
Now it was time to put his contacts to work. "I called home and had my wife go through my desk and get numbers I'd had for years, home numbers. I called all night."
\ TROOPER EARL HAMILTON FROM ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY WAS ON DUTY OUTSIDE MOSS 3. One minute the road was empty, the picket lines deserted. The next, he was sitting in the middle of a traffic jam.
Hamilton pulled over to see where the people were going. "It's kind of like a train: You wait till it passes by before you know where they're going.'
He couldn't see the strikers doing anything wrong. He also couldn't see the bus and two moving vans pull up and disgorge 100 men in orange vests and backpacks - 99 of whom marched across the bridge into the plant grounds. (The 100th man got sick from the ride and dropped out).
\ BURKE'S HEART WAS PUMPING WILDLY as he led the men onto Pittston property. Behind him, the crowd started cheering. "You didn't know what you're walking into. We thought the element of surprise would overwhelm anyone on the other side. The big thing, we were worried about over-reaction. That's why we wore the vests, went in with hands up, that's why I was blaring on the bullhorn, `This is peaceful.' "
Burke had tried to plan for everything.
"If any shots were fired, everybody would go down on one knee and proceed on command." The men were equipped with gas masks and heavy gloves. If the guards responded with tear gas, men were assigned to pick up the canisters and toss them aside. Others carried plastic bottles with ammonia. If the guards sicced dogs on the men, they were to squirt the dogs' eyes.
A final precaution: A helicopter whirred overhead, filming the takeover in case something went wrong and the union needed evidence to absolve itself.
Two guards were standing at the other end of the bridge.
Burke barked on the bullhorn that the men were unarmed stockholders coming to inspect their holdings. "We're not scared," Burke said. "You're not scared when you're right."
The guards hopped into a pick-up and skedaddled away.
Burke and his men were across the bridge. Now just 200 open yards lay between the occupiers and the plant, a six-story complex that rose incongruously out of the hollow like something from a science fiction movie. And there wasn't a guard in sight.
Overtaken by events - and people - Trooper Earl Hamilton was simply another spectator. Troopers Davidson and Blankenship pulled up, but they were too late.
Davidson felt helpless. "We needed more men. We could have blocked the gate if we'd had more people down there."
He also felt angry. "They had violated the law in front of us. . . . And it don't help a lot when you see the news media go in with them."
\ THE 99 RAIDERS CLIMBED THE PLANT'S NARROW STEEL STAIRWAYS to the fourth-floor control room. Any supervisors they encountered, they told to leave.
Within 20 minutes, the strikers were in control.
And they appeared intent on staying a while. They locked themselves in the control room with padlocks and steel cables.
Eddie Burke didn't know what would happen. His idea simply was to get in and get attention. For that reason, the union made no specific demands, except a general wish that Pittston negotiate "in good faith."
How and when the occupiers left, that was up to UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts.
He was outside, urging everyone to stay all night but also to stay calm. "We don't want anybody to do anything really stupid. Your leaders are out on a limb on this."
\ OUTSIDE MOSS 3, THE STATE POLICE WERE WORRIED.
"We thought we were going to have to go in there and arrest them," Davidson says.
It wasn't a pleasant prospect. First the troopers would have to make their way through the crowd. If they could do that, next they'd have to climb four flights of stairs to reach the occupiers - and then probably carry them back down.
The troopers were tense.
"Any time you confront a large group of people like was there that day, you don't know what they're going to do," Sgt. Joe Peters says. "The people in charge of the union would brief the people [outside] on what was happening. You'd listen and try and plan accordingly. I felt like if we would have gone in to arrest those people who were trespassing, the purpose of the people outside was to try and prevent that."
Calls went out throughout the state for more troopers. Until they arrived, Peters and other supervisors could do little but stand by and watch.
Since it was Sunday and no coal trucks were going into Moss 3, the occupiers and the crowd outside weren't blocking anyone. "Technically, the only law they were violating was being there," Peters says. "You can't do a lot of things for people simply being there."
Still, Peters knew the occupation would have to come to a head. "You didn't know what it was going to take to end it. . . . You were expecting it to get violent, yeah. Your police training and experience tells you, they kept saying they weren't going to come out, so at some point we would have had to have gone in there and take them out."
\ MIKE ODOM HAD JUST RETURNED FROM TAKING HIS SON BACK TO COLLEGE when he got the call. "I immediately went to the scene and was pretty much at the scene around the clock for four days. I wanted to make sure that cool heads prevailed."
His first concern was for 13 Pittston workers who were still trapped inside.
The company had made plans for such a takeover, he says. The primary point: Don't provoke a confrontation.
\ ABOUT 6 P.M., THE OCCUPIERS WALKED ONTO A BALCONY outside the control room and shouted union slogans to the crowd. A cheer went up when someone on the roof spray-painted "UMWA forever" in yard-high white letters.
Just before 7, Roberts escorted two troopers and Walt Crickmer, superintendent of Pittston's Moss 3 division, on an inspection of the plant. Crickmer emerged satisfied that the occupiers hadn't done any damage. About an hour later, troopers cleared a path through the crowd and the 13 Pittston workers who had been inside drove out.
Troopers blocked the roads to keep more people from driving in, but that proved only a temporary deterrent. People parked cars miles away and simply melted into the woods, coming out again at the plant. By night, the crowd had swelled to more than 2,000.
Del. Jack Kennedy, D-Norton, was in his law office that afternoon when Patton called. All through the evening, Kennedy kept in contact with Baliles' chief of staff, Andrew Fogarty, in Richmond, telling him that the union "wanted to work this out amicably."
For now, no action was planned.
The governor, whose reaction Patton had feared, seemed unconcerned. Speech writer G.C. Morse was with Baliles at a conference in Delaware and remembers how little impact the takeover had on the governor. "We didn't discuss it a single time at the meeting. And a lot of time you can tell from the troopers [accompanying the governor] if something was going on at home."
Not this time.
So as night came, the occupiers bedded down in a transformer room, lulled to sleep by the hum of 4,160 volts of electricity and the certainty that, all over the country, newspaper presses were rolling out their story.
Monday, Sept. 18: Day 2
Before dawn was the worst time.
That's when the occupiers figured the police would strike. But Monday's dawn came uneventfully.
Rick Blaylock went out on the balcony. "When the fog and stuff lifted, you could see outside, kids and different groups out there, clear up and down the road for as far as you could see.
"We thought if we could get that kind of support, we can stay here 100 days."
Roberts hopped in the back of a pickup. "The Pittston cleaning plant, which is partially owned by the United Mine Workers, is in excellent shape," he declared. A loud cheer. He thanked the people for standing by the men inside, or in this case, standing between them and the police. "The way I've got it figured, we'll all just go [to jail] before they do," Roberts said. Another cheer. "We'll go non-violent," he quickly added. "You've listened to us. Please continue to listen to us."
There was a different feel to this crowd than in the strike's early days. There was the tension of a siege, a conviction that they had forced the strike into a decisive stage, that it was to be won or lost here. "I think it's the best thing we've done," said Harley Wilson of Splashdam. "I believe it'll get attention all over the country."
If the police did move, it would take a lot of discipline to control the crowd. Eddie Burke may have plotted the takeover, but now Roberts had the toughest task.
His first job was to figure out how to feed all the people now that troopers had sealed off the roads.
At Camp Solidarity, Ruby Dishman had her own ideas. She loaded a pickup with food and assured union officials she'd be able to get past the police. And she did - by taking a tiny mountain road the troopers probably didn't know existed. "We came down a back road right at the tipple," she brags. The troopers looked at her, and her truckload of food, incredulously. "I said I live back in the mountains and I make moonshine."
Bill Patton was working on a more permanent - and more political - solution. "I got hold of someone high up and they [the troopers] moved out of there," he says. He won't say who.
With the roads open, more people poured in.
Inside the plant, the occupiers had one question: "When are they coming to get us?"
When the troopers came, the occupiers would go peacefully, Burke says. "We were all prepared to go out any time, because we didn't want anybody hurt." But until the summons came, there was little to do but wait - and try to make a maze of steel girders and coal-crunching machinery seem like home.
Intent on showing their respect for Pittston property, the occupiers had even brought coins for the Coke machine, but it was empty. Strikers toted trash bags, cleaning up after themselves. They cut the tops off gallon milk jugs to use as spittoons for chewing tobacco.
But dirt was everywhere - coal so pulverized by the huge grinding machine that it was nothing more than dust. Hands turned black without touching anything. Pittston didn't make the occupiers any more pleasant; the company cut the water. When toilets filled with a stomach-heaving stench, the miners were forced to urinate off the third-floor roof.
The food was as terrible as the conditions. The menu for the K-rations sounded impressive - spaghetti and meatballs, pork, chicken and rice, even chicken a la king. But the latter proved inedible - "chicken a la commode" the men called it - and other selections were only marginally better.
Despite the hardships, Sessions says, "the spirit was always terrific. It was high; people were funny. You know, it was almost like being in a football locker room."
Not until late Monday afternoon did Sam Sanders, the plant superintendent, and a police escort inform the men that they were trespassing, a legal step necessary before troopers could evict anyone.
Night fell. The men felt sure they'd made it through another day. Or had they? "Every evening, as it got darker, you'd say, `They're surely not going to bust us in the dark,'" Sessions says.
That night, the union smuggled pizza to the men. And some found ways to make the control room more comfortable. They used plastic milk and water jugs for pillows. One man found some ropes, strung them over the steel I-beams and fashioned a makeshift hammock from a rubber floor mat.
Tuesday, Sept. 19: Day 3
"Gooooooooood moooooooorning, Virginia!" a miner sang out. His buddies broke into a chorus of rooster calls.
It was Tuesday. Still no sign of the police.
Nevertheless, the men packed up everything, just as they did every morning. "Because we didn't know," Burke says.
But while he and the other men had been sleeping, the attorneys had been busy.
At 9 a.m., U.S. marshals arrived to serve subpoenas on Cecil Roberts, two other union leaders outside the plant and two inside - Burke and Blaylock.
Roberts told the crowd he'd defy the subpoena. "I probably don't have time to go to court this evening," he said.
Behind the scenes, the police were trying to defuse the confrontation.
One police official called Russell County Commonwealth's Attorney Dennis Jones, to see if he could talk to Roberts and Mike Odom and find any middle ground.
There was none. Roberts pre- sented what he called a list of suggestions, not demands. Several were acceptable to Pittston but two or three weren't, Jones says, and Roberts' proposal had been all-or-nothing. Although Pittston seemed flexible in private, in public it took a hard line. By Tuesday afternoon, Odom was denouncing the occupiers as "common terrorists."
At the court hearing, no mention was made that the five union leaders weren't there. Instead, union attorney argued that they hadn't been given sufficient notice of the hearing. Amid the legal sparring, Williams also searched for a way to end the takeover.
What would it take to get the men out? If some prominent person calls for face-to-face meetings between Douglas and Trumka, the union attorneys said.
Williams had planned to order the occupiers to leave within 24 hours, but the union attorney pleaded for a delay.
The judge agreed to delay any action until morning.
That night, a friend called Eddie Burke's wife to let her know how the occupation was going. Occupation? "My wife reads the papers, watches the news, she didn't know we had taken Moss 3," Burke says. "It got great coverage from Richmond to Knoxville, but Charleston - nothing."
Something was amiss.
Wed., Sept. 20: Day 4
Wednesday came.
The miners spray-painted another message on the outside of the plant: "Day 4."
Judge Williams was sitting in Abingdon, ready to bring the takeover to a close.
The union attorney asked for another delay. They seemed convinced that Baliles or somebody was going to make a statement that would make the hearing unnecessary.
The hearing was brief. The day before, Williams had been ready to issue an order giving the strikers 24 hours to get out. But because he'd granted the union a delay until this morning, he couldn't give the occupiers that much time now. His order: They had until 7 p.m. to "walk out honorably."
"If they don't, I don't know what the consequences will be," he said. "I can visualize a lot of things that are unpleasant."
For starters, there would be a $600,000 fine against the UMW for each day the occupation continued. Plus jail terms for the five union leaders.
Williams was being magnanimous in offering amnesty. And privately, he intended to grant the union even more time to get out.
"We're not going in there tonight," Williams told law enforcement officers. "It would be disastrous. So let's just make our plans. If they're not out of there tonight, you go in in the morning."
When Williams went back to his office, a surprise was waiting for him. Several surprises, in fact.
First came a call from Frank Kilgore, the St. Paul attorney who was representing union members in their civil disobedience cases. Kilgore had been calling Richmond. He hadn't gotten through to Baliles, but he had talked to Secretary of Economic Development Curry Roberts. He had offered a deal: If Baliles would set a time, date and place for a meeting between Trumka and Douglas, the men would leave the plant. Even if Pittston refused to come, the men still would leave. Curry Roberts wasn't interested. Baliles had already asked both men to bargain and he wasn't going to say anything further, Roberts said.
So Kilgore tried Williams. "They wanted me to call the governor," he recalls. Kilgore even asked Williams to issue a statement. But Williams felt he couldn't do that. He passed on Kilgore's suggestion.
Then he got another call. "It was someone in the Department of Labor," Williams says. The caller said, "You know, Douglas and Trumka have been meeting since Sunday."
Since Sunday? That was the night the union had seized Moss 3 and demanded that Douglas meet with Trumka. But now, Williams learned, Douglas and Trumka had met secretly that very night - at an international coal conference in Toronto.
The takeover had been a dangerous enterprise, but it was made more dangerous by the fact that it was plotted by mid-level staffers who never breathed a word to higher-ups. As a result, here was one danger they could not have counted on - the possibility that it would undermine Trumka's secret talks with Douglas. As it turns out, both Trumka and Douglas had learned about the takeover before they got together that night, and it hadn't stopped the meeting. But suppose it had? Suppose Douglas had decided to use it against Trumka? The takeover could have wrecked the meeting with Douglas that Trumka had been seeking so long.
Williams was furious.
He called the union attorneys to his office. "You all have sat here this morning and you've used me, you've used the secretary of labor, you've used the governor," Williams said. "And I am satisfied that some of you sitting here in this room knew this.
"All I got was stone cold silence," Williams recalls. "Later on, the union attorneys came to me and told me, `You know, we were sworn to secrecy and we couldn't tell you.'"
Meanwhile, state police made their plans to storm Moss 3 in the morning. The troopers' Salem office called the Roanoke County Sheriff's Department and asked to borrow the county's "Rabbit Tool" - a hydraulic device used to break dead-bolt locks and pop open locked doors, especially steel ones.
The curious Roanoke County authorities quizzed the troopers on why they needed the equipment, but all they would say was: "We need it out west."
\ AT 1 P.M. WEDNESDAY, U.S. MARSHAL WAYNE BEAMAN ARRIVED AT MOSS 3 with four troopers to serve Williams' order. When people saw the uniformed men, the crowd tensed.
The union supporters rushed to block Beaman's way.
Cecil Roberts and John Cox walked across the road to greet Beaman. "Wake you up, Cecil?" Beaman asked the tired-looking Roberts. They shook hands.
The crowd relaxed.
Beaman noticed that Cox was wearing a T-shirt that identified him as a Vietnam vet.
"I'm one, too," Beaman said.
There was a smile of recognition between the two men. Beaman handed Cox the court order.
"I don't know whether to thank you or not," Cox joked.
They turned and Roberts led the marshal and troopers into Moss 3. They had to run a gantlet of miners chanting "Union! Union! Union!"
When Roberts and Beaman returned to the plant entrance, the UMW vice president raised a clenched fist and the crowd cried, "Ce-cil! Ce-cil! Ce-cil!"
Now the clock was officially ticking. Six hours until Williams' deadline. Would the men leave? It didn't look that way. Roberts hopped into the back of a pickup and told the crowd that if somebody had to be arrested, the leaders would be the first, but that the occupation would continue.
\ THE CROWD WAS MORE THAN 3,000 STRONG AND GROWING. Miners from Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia were rushing in. And more were on the way.
Many of the people who arrived Sunday night hadn't gone home. "You ought to be here about 1 o'clock in the morning," said Eddie Calo of Lick Creek, "and you'll see some of the hardest sleep you've ever seen. The first night, I slept in the front of a truck. The next night I slept in the back seat of a car."
By Wednesday, relatives and neighbors had brought in the comforts of home. Some strikers reclined in easy chairs or lawn chairs. Mattresses were spread out by the ditch. Two booths were set up to dish out food from Camp Solidarity.
In some ways, the mood was festive. People sat in the beds of their pickups and played cards. A bluegrass band plunked an old-time tune. When the band took a break, someone with different musical tastes commandeered the PA system. The speakers blasted out Tom Petty's rock song, "I Won't Back Down."
No one seemed ready to. Rumors swept the crowd. Troopers planned to fly in by helicopter and storm the building. Troopers would ride in on the train. Troopers would seal off the roads and starve the strikers out.
Yet the longer the people waited, the more determined they seemed to become. There was a sense of immunity, of strength in numbers.
"You see what I think about the risk, don't you?" asked Roy Castle of Castlewood. He pointed to his camouflage cap, which bore a button: "Proudly Arrested."
Castle said he was prepared to die. "I won't move. Let 'em bring the National Guard. I won't move."
\ THE DEADLINE CAME CLOSER. On previous nights, the police had kept a close watch on the plant entrance, bathing the crowd with floodlights. But on this night, the police - on Williams' order - took down the lights and pulled out of the area completely. He wanted to make things as easy on the union as possible.
At 6:30, the occupiers came out on top of the plant and saluted the crowd.
Jim Sessions addressed the crowd through a bullhorn. "Reunite us all soon that we may return to our work and our families, not only with a decent just contract, but with a new covenant between our company and our communities," Sessions prayed.
The crowd sang hymns and chanted slogans. The judge's deadline passed. Nothing happened. The men went back inside the plant. Darkness descended. The rally apparently was over, although a band continued to pick by the light of a lantern. Everyone seemed set to spend another night sleeping outside - and inside - Moss 3.
Behind the scenes, things were more complicated.
Late that afternoon, Cecil Roberts went in to meet with Burke and his team leaders. Someone asked Roberts what they should do. They'd gotten Pittston's attention. The longer they stayed, the greater the risk of state police or the National Guard storming the plant. Roberts was especially worried about the women and children outside. "I think we've probably run this as long as we can and we should probably leave," Roberts said.
Burke and his team leaders gathered the men together. "Cecil told us that he thought there was a time for everything" and the time had come to end the takeover, Burke recalls. "We accepted that. That wasn't a problem. I'm sure it was something some of the fellows didn't want to hear."
"People were ready to stay longer and were not sure they wanted to voluntarily leave," Sessions recalls. "No one had yet signed a contract. . . . At the same time, there was a lot of relief."
Union attorneys told Williams a few die-hards didn't want to leave, and asked for a few more hours. Williams gave them until 11.
About 8:30 p.m., the union staffers outside the plant began scurrying around mysteriously. They were talking to the people inside on the two-way radios. Reporters couldn't figure out what was going on. Were the troopers raiding the plant? Or was this all just another union game?
About 9 p.m., Richard Lovegrove of United Press International came running by and hollered: "They're out!"
Sure enough, Roberts was on the stage, flanked by Burke and Blaylock, making a speech.
And then it was over. The occupiers slipped into the crowd and disappeared. Pickups rolled up, the men got in, and the trucks rolled away. The thousands of people who only hours before had been loudly declaring they'd stay, however long it took, packed up and went home. If Cecil Roberts had declared victory, that was good enough for them.
Bill Patton drove to Moss 3. He remembers loaning quarters to some of the out-of-state supporters so they could use a pay phone. "They had to call home to stop the convoys from coming," Patton says. "There'd have been 50,000 people in there the next day if it hadn't stopped when it did."
But now no one even hung around to celebrate.
\ LATER THAT NIGHT, UMW PRESS SPOKESMAN JOE CORCORAN and most of the reporters gravitated to the bar of the Norton Holiday Inn. When the bar closed at 1 a.m., Corcoran and the reporters retired to his room, where he shared his private stash of beer and liquor.
Corcoran wasn't happy. Oh, the publicity was fine, he said - as far as it went. That was the problem.
Corcoran had wanted to turn the takeover into a national, even international, story. But the TV networks wouldn't come to the coalfields without knowing exactly what was going to happen, and Corcoran had been afraid to let too many people in on the secret. So he had invited only the "regulars." Corcoran was certain the wire services would put the story out on the national wire - as opposed to the state wire, which distributes stories only to other Virginia news organizations - and that would be attract the networks.
It didn't work that way.
The Associated Press didn't send anyone to Moss 3. The only daily papers represented were the Bristol Herald-Courier, the Kingsport Times-Herald and the Roanoke Times & World-News. AP could still use their stories. But AP picked up the Kingsport story. The story was unclear, speaking of the union staging a "sit-in" - no news in that - and not specifically saying until later that strikers had seized the plant with the intention of holding it indefinitely.
Because the Kingsport paper missed the point, so did AP in the story it sent out for publication Monday morning:
"CARBO - Ninety-nine United Mine Workers supporters yesterday staged a sit-in at Pittston Coal Group Inc.'s main preparation plant in Russell County, the union's latest move in a 5-month-old strike against the company."
No wonder the story went out only on the state wire. Even many Virginia papers didn't see much news in it. They certainly couldn't have told from the story that the UMW had seized a building, that there was a real chance police might storm it, that this was the first time in 53 years that workers had struck back at a company by taking over their work place.
The result: The takeover never became a national story.
Not until Tuesday, the third day of the takeover, did the AP send a story out nationally.
By then Hurricane Hugo was storming toward the Carolinas - so the networks had more pressing things to do.
USA Today ran only one sentence on the takeover on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal mentioned the takeover in one paragraph of a three-paragraph story on Wednesday. The Washington Post sent a reporter, but not until the takeover was nearly over. CBS acknowledged the takeover on Wednesday, just as the occupation was ending.
The New York Times didn't mention the takeover until it was over. And ABC and NBC never mentioned it, even though the UMW had besieged the networks with phone calls and videotapes of the seizure.
Corcoran cursed the UMW's misfortune. Without national coverage, this wasn't the knockout punch the union had hoped.
He was only half right.
The people who counted had heard all they needed.
Less than a month later, U.S. Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole was standing outside Moss 3.
by CNB