Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9401280087
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-14 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
His vivid photograph has earned a measure of renown during the 48 years since it was taken. "Study in Tragedy" - as it was called in the original newspaper caption - has been reprinted in national publications and exhibited in museums.
Over time, the picture has given thousands of viewers a fresh emotional jolt without disclosing the identity of the little boy with such fearful eyes.
Roanoke Times photographer Howard Hammersley found him on a grim spring day watching the recovery of bodies after an explosion killed 12 coal miners near McCoy.
Hammersley took the boy's picture without learning his name. Ever since, Robert Douglas "Doug" Breeden's face has been anonymously famous.
This month, the Roanoke Times & World-News reprinted "Study in Tragedy" with an article on coal mining in Montgomery County. We asked readers to telephone if they recognized the child.
That request prompted a slew of calls from present and former residents of McCoy - site of the deadly Great Valley Anthracite Mine - and their kinfolk.
"McCoy people already knew who it was, especially the older people," said Ann Breeden Stultz.
Stultz, Doug Breeden's younger sister, called the newspaper to identify the photograph. So did Roberta Breeden, his wife, and Gertrude Breeden, his mother, and several others.
The photograph originally ran in the Roanoke Times on April 19, 1946, the morning after the accident. A clipping of it had circulated in the Breeden family for years.
But none had seen it recently. And none of the Breedens - not even Doug himself - knew he became a national poster child of sorts soon after the mining disaster.
Two weeks after the explosion, Hammersley's photograph was reprinted on the cover of the United Mine Workers Journal under the headline "One Reason for a Health and Welfare Fund."
That same week, The Militant, a socialist newspaper published in New York, ran the photo and the headline "12 More Miners Killed By Greed of Operators."
"It's amazing to me," said Breeden, now 50 and a grandfather living on Rock Road in Montgomery County.
"I always knew the picture existed. But I figured it had been in the paper that one time."
Like many other families who lived in company housing in McCoy and worked in the coal mines, the Breedens were a large, close-knit group. Doug was the second oldest of Brady and Gertrude Breeden's 12 children.
On the day of the explosion, Brady Breeden unexpectedly missed work. Otherwise, he probably would have been killed, Doug said.
Doug Breeden's mother, Gertrude, who is 75 and lives in Montgomery County, remembers the day. She says Doug, then not quite 3, was playing with other children when all the commotion began.
"He got to running," she said. "I guess he wanted to see what was going on. He sat right there until they got all the miners out."
That is where Hammersley found him, grimy - "The kids always played near that dirty old tipple," his mother said - and tousle-haired - "I hadn't had my first haircut yet," Doug said.
Hammersley drove from Roanoke to cover the mine accident with reporter Melville "Buster" Carico, who was to become one of the state's legendary political reporters.
"I didn't even know there was a mine in Montgomery County until that explosion," recalled Carico, 77, now retired and living in Botetourt County.
They found an extraordinary story. The photos and words that Hammersley and Carico produced are vivid and poignant.
Carico says he doesn't recall covering the mine accident. But he does remember attending the miners' funerals several days later. "That was one of the saddest things I ever saw," he said.
Hammersley donated his many award-wining photographs to his alma mater, Roanoke College, before his death in 1992. Among them was the photo of the little unidentified boy.
His collection, including "Study in Tragedy," has been exhibited at many locations over the years.
And he will be properly identified whenever the picture is exhibited again, said Linda Miller, Roanoke College's archivist.
Of his childhood growing up in McCoy, Breeden recalled: "We were just poor, that's all, but we did good. We had plenty to eat."
Coal mining defined his father's working life. After the McCoy explosion virtually shut down the Great Valley mine, Brady Breeden took his family to West Virginia and kept on working underground.
He survived another mine explosion in West Virginia. But the coal dust he inhaled darkened his lungs, and he died of emphysema in 1971 at age 53 - "Way before his time," Doug said.
Despite his father's early death and the family's subsequent hardship, Doug Breeden says he is "real proud of being from a mining family."
"I'd have probably been a miner, too, if the mines hadn't blowed up and played out."
Instead, Breeden has worked as a farmer and a roofer. Family financial constraints meant "I didn't get a whole lot of schooling."
Bad luck struck about eight years ago when, as an employee of Radford University, he fell and badly injured his back and left leg. Now disabled, he takes treatment for the pain and uses a cane to get around.
He and his wife, Roberta, who still works for Radford University, raised four children. He lives "a good, simple life" at the top of a steep driveway in a house decorated with photographs of their three granddaughters.
Doug Breeden has always been both a dependable brother and surrogate father to his siblings, says sister Ann Stultz.
Doug and Ann say their close-knit family was bonded by their experience growing up in the mining town at McCoy.
There, Doug says, "When you had a friend, you never lost them. They never forgot you, even if you moved away."
Ann Stultz, who works with many other offspring of Montgomery County miners at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, said the mysterious photograph was the talk of her co-workers on the day after it was published this month.
Never having seen the photograph before, she said it was very emotional to realize that "Study in Tragedy" depicted her big brother.
"His eyes still look the same. He still has the same serious look. I can't look at the photograph and help but wonder what he's thinking."
"He's more than just a little boy now," Miller, the Roanoke College archivist, said of the photograph. "Now he has a history, too.
by CNB