ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 29, 1996 TAG: 9610290046
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: MERRIMAC
SOURCE: MARGARET BROWN SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
As the hymn, "Precious Memories, How They Linger," rang out across the tables adorned with simple garden flowers, Montgomery County coal-mining families gathered to recall a few of their own precious remembrances.
The families, whose members and kin once worked at places like the Great Valley, Coal Bank and Merrimac mines, honored coal miners' wives and widows at a dinner Sunday sponsored by the Coal Mining Heritage Association of Montgomery County.
It was the latest major event in a nearly 3-year-old surge of interest in Montgomery County's coal mining history, this time to recognize the unique partnership of coal miners and their wives, organizers said.
The families trickled in early, dressed in their Sunday best. Many lingered over the artifacts collected by Fred "Cody" Lawson, who proudly showed off a 100-year-old carbide headlamp and separated the compartments of an aluminum dinner bucket to show how it was packed with water at the bottom, a cold lunch of pinto beans and biscuits in the middle and cake or pie in the top.
Fairview Community Church's the Rev. Jimmie Lee Price, a coal miner's son, explained that a coal miner's wife packed her husband's dinner bucket with love, knowing that she might be sending him to his death. "With faith, prayer and grace, she believed he would return at day's end," Price said.
Hazel Hodge and her sister, Virginia Smith, showed pictures of the house where they were born. The little three-room structure, built around 1900, belonged to the coal company where their daddy worked, and it cost $3 a month to rent. It was brown (because it was never painted, Virginia said) with a tin roof and a potbellied stove. The family raised pigs, and they had a cow that ran loose but showed up to be milked.
They felt rich, however, because their parents often took in guests down on their luck. "We also had a car and a floor-model RCA radio that ran off a car battery," Hazel said. "We helped the poor and never thought we were poor."
Over fried chicken, beef, barbecue, macaroni and cheese, green beans, sweet potatoes and dessert, the families talked of the lingering memories. Nods and murmurs of "Amen" and "That's right" echoed across the room as they shared stories of a good life.
Lossie Huffman, 84, recalled that she and her husband "done real good." The mother of eight children, she raised hogs and canned vegetables to help put food on the table. Lee and Vera Linkous, married 58 years ("although my wife is still 39," Lee joked), both nodded and said they survived and didn't think anything about it.
Price recalled the woman's role as a full partner in a marriage: "My mother picked fruit, grew vegetables, made clothes on her treadle sewing machine and repaired shoes with a hammer and tacks. She was a minister, too, who made sure we all got our Bible lessons. And she was a doctor and a nurse. With love and kerosene and torn strips from Pillsbury sacks, she bandaged our cuts."
Esther "Queen" Jones, the daughter and widow of a coal miner, remembered days full of work and love. As a child, her daddy made the fire in the morning, then fed the hogs and shelled the corn for the chickens while her mother cooked breakfast, packed his lunch and sent him off. The kids fed the livestock before school.
"The best part of my day," she said, "was waiting on my daddy to come home. I'd carry his lunch bucket home and eat an old cold biscuit he'd left for me. That was love, for him to think about a little girl waiting on that old cold biscuit."
One coal miner's son, Sam Huff, had trouble waiting for his daddy to come home. "I was always hanging around the mines, getting into trouble," he said. "They'd run me off, but I'd slip around again. Then one day, I heard the boss say, 'I wonder whose boy that is?' I thought, oh, brother, I was due for correction. You got corrected in my day when you did something wrong."
People nodded and said, "uh-huh."
James Sherman, from a family of 14, said he doesn't know how his mother prepared two meals a day for them all. "Those were good days," he said. "You rolled up your sleeves, worked hard and learned to be respectful to your community." More nods from the crowd.
Steve DeHart, 41, whose parents were both from coal-mining families, wants the memories to linger, for the legacy to live on. "I love the camaraderie here," he said, looking around at everyone. "I wish my father could have lived to see this. For the first time, I'm seeing that it's OK to say this is my heritage."
Dallas Linkous, a coal miner's son who worked with his daddy in the mines, understood. "Today's sort of magic," he said. "You can see that coal dust gets in your blood."
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: LORA GORDON/Special to The Roanoke Times. 1. Martha Huffby CNB(center) points to a photo of the old Merrimac Mine tipple as she,
her husband, Sam Huff (left), and their daughter Sharon Huff
Spradlin talk about the old mine. 2. Lossie Huffman listens quietly
as a speaker talks of the dedication and courage shown by the women
who were married to the men who worked the mines. color.