RUFUS BAILEY May 10, 1977
[Begin Interview]
Interviewer: This will be reel one for the coal. This is May the ninth. We’ll be
starting the coal country on May tenth. And these will be synching (??) interviews. And this is reel one. Okay, we’re rolling here for quality test. What we’ll have to do is switch back–[Two or three recordings overlapping at the beginning of this interview.]
Rufus Bailey: …two feet apart and put a whole line deep in there, and then
they’ll fill it with explosive, well whatever charge is necessary, I think–Interviewer: Testing, one, two, three four
Bailey: I think the charge around 60 percent of the depth of the hole. I think–
Interviewer: And then the, the electronically detonates it at certain set times?
Bailey: That’s right. It will start the, see there. They wire up these ten
shots. And they wire them together, and with, a, a delayed detonator. The one in the corner will go, the other will follow consecutively.Interviewer: Then once they get that down, then what’s the next step? Then they
come in with the big loader, or…Bailey: The next step when, once they blast this place, the next step, or the
most important step, is first, is to make an on-shift examination for gas. This fore boss or foreman, he comes in and tests for gas in case there should be any expose in the shots. Then after the place is pronounced safe, then the scoop moves in or loading machine or whatever is used, and they move in and start operating.Interviewer: How do they test for gas, Mr. Bailey?
Bailey: With a flame safety lamp. By using a flame safety lamp and holding it
close to the roof, then they can determine on this light if gas is present. This flame safety lamp will carry a little blaze. And if there is gas pleasant, present, there will be a blue blaze on top of this flame. And…Interviewer: You were telling us about the loading carts, or what’s the name, I
missed the name when you were explaining those out front.Bailey: That’s a scoop.
Interviewer: The scoop.
Bailey: Yeah, that’s what they call a mine scoop.
Interviewer: The, is that electric driven? How does, how does that work?
Bailey: Battery. Battery-driven.
Interviewer: Does it take a lot of…How many, could you tell me all about how
many batteries it takes, and, and how–Bailey: Yes, I think it takes eight 400-amp batteries, at a cost of about seven
thousand dollars in batteries.Interviewer: That’s quite a bit. Quite a bit.
Interviewer: Are they being charged up now. Is that what that noise is?
Bailey: No. That that you hear running, that’s the fan running. And possibly,
they may have some battery on charge. I don’t know. I didn’t notice it.Interviewer: That scoop you were telling us earlier about the different types of
mines, and I didn’t have the recorder out to get that on tape at that time.Bailey: Yeah, yeah.
Interviewer: Why don’t you tell us about that again? You were explaining the
kind of mine this is, being a small mine and, and how many men…Bailey: Th-
Interviewer: …and so forth.
Bailey: This, this, this is considered one of our small mines, which is about,
what we call a small mine is about a 200-ton mine. And this mine, they have a crew of about eight men.Interviewer: And those loaders, will, you were telling us how many ton[s] you
could get on a loader. Or…Bailey: Yes. Those loaders you can get, you can get a two hundred, full crew, on
eight-hour shifts, we’ll get about two hundred ton. One man controls that. He scoops up the coal, he moves it out, and unloads it. And of course, your face crew, you have, you have two roof bolting machines that places these roof bolts and makes the place safe. Then you have a, a drill crew of two men that comes in and drills. Then you have a fellow who charges a hole and shoots the coal out.Interviewer: Are those the roof bolts? Those, those, look like about four by
twelve-foot pieces of board …Bailey: That’s…
Interviewer: …with the bolt through?
Bailey: That’s the roof bolt cap you see there.
Interviewer: Make those on the property. Make them–
Bailey: We buy them. Buy them locally. There’s, there’s mills that makes them,
makes them, drill the holes through them.Interviewer: Mr. Bailey, you were telling me that you call this a puncher mine.
Would you explain what that is?Bailey: Yes, what we call a punch mine is a mine that drives in a depth of, of
maybe a thousand feet. Then he retreats and then we move him on around the hill, and he makes another run through, you see. We drive a series of about, a series of about six hundreds abreast. And when he drives to his destination, then, of course, we, we extract the pillars coming back. Then we move him around the hill to another setup.Interviewer: How, how thick is this coal seam here, do you imagine?
Bailey: This coal seam is fifty-two inches, average about fifty-two inches. I
think it’s four-and-a-half feet.Interviewer: Do the, do you have electricity run in to here? Or is it just, just
on the cart itself?Bailey: No, we have electricity run in for the, for the roof bolting machine and–
Interviewer: For lighting?
Bailey: For lighting, and the roof bolting, and, and drilling. See, we have
that. But the scoop itself, it runs with batteries, so we don’t use any. But, except battery power.Interviewer: What did you move?
Bailey: What do you mean? From the–
Interviewer: That type of vehicle. Does that have a motorized, gasoline motor on
it before you went electricity?Bailey: No, we’ve never been able to use gasoline underground because the law
says no internal combustion engine shall be used underground. However, in some places now, they’re using, using gasoline, diesel. But it’s got to be put through a filtering process, of water or something to…Interviewer: Well, when were you able to introduce electricity batteries that
way? When did you perfect that?Bailey: The batteries came out, well, they, they were put in use first, the
rubber-tired haulage, that came out in the early ‘50s.Interviewer: Hmm.
Bailey: We first came out with three-wheel motors and also rubber-tired cars.
There’s one of them out there, one of those cars out there. And then we pulled it, but it was, at that time, was cable type. We used a trail cable. So then after a while, then we, then we, switched to the scoops. Well, we don’t have 100 percent scoops in this field yet. We still have rubber-tired haulage by the way of motoring cars, mine cars, see. Still have some of it. But right now, most people are using the scoops.Interviewer: But this, this, the ability to use this type of scoop does coincide
with what we were talking about coming down, with the rise of Mr. A.J. …Bailey: Dalton.
Interviewer: …Dalton and his truck, truck mining. That’s quite a story. He’s got
the place where you first started. And if we have the time, go back, and shoot that place, he might even tell us that story.Bailey: I was speaking of, of course now that scoop will load into this mine car
as well. Or you can trail it out and dump it over the hill. Now we call this a tandem car, you see it has the four wheels. The old type that just had the one wheel, I mean one wheel on side. And out here, now, is the battery. This is a junk deal. The batteries have been taken out of it. Just not used anymore, they don’t use it. They have an explosion door that the air would blow that out instead of blowing out your mine fan out there, you see. Yeah. See here, we have a mine fan right here.Interviewer: Is that ventilation purposes?
Bailey: Ventilation purposes, yeah.
Interviewer: In other words, these two things had to go in for this, this one
mine. This isn’t an old one.Bailey: That’s right.
Interviewer: Then you go move off somewhere else and do this whole thing.
Bailey: That’s right. It’s still active. This mine is still working.
Interviewer: What is the red cable hanging up there?
Bailey: It, I think that is your signal devise for your mine fan. You see, wired
into that box, and if that fan stops, it turns a red light on to where whoever’s out there can see that the fan is down, you see.Interviewer: I see.
[Interruption in tape]
Bailey: The scoop, you see.
Interviewer: There’s another power unit over there.
Bailey: That’s another power unit. Yeah. And this is your battery charger. Do
you hear buzzing here, see, it’s charging these batteries here now. And this, this right here is your battery. Your power unit. This is where you get your power from. And that other blade up there, you see this? This scoop is made on a reticulator [reticulate] type, you see. He can, he can switch at about, he can switch at a forty-five-degree angle that scoop either way, right or left. You see.Interviewer: And there’s no handwork, as such, in having to shovel the coal into
the loader or anything.Bailey: No. No. None. None whatsoever. It’s a, they, I’m a cleanup man that
shovels this spillage of loose coal, and he rounds it up in a certain place, and this scoop just picks it up.Interviewer: But there’s no loading in the mine cars?
[Interruption in tape]
Bailey: I notice here, I think this right here is, I think this is a five-foot bolt.
Interviewer: Is that a typical length, five feet?
Bailey: And it fits right underneath this, you see, to keep that bolt from
pulling up through the wood, you see. And then they insert this bolt up in the roof. And if you notice here, this is an expansion, what we call chuck, you see. See, as you tighten the bolt up, you see, it flares that.Interviewer: Same principle as those little black screws you buy in the store to
put pictures on the wall.Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. They have to meet the federal standards.
Interviewer: Are those manufactured here in Kentucky, the bolts?
Bailey: No, I don’t, I don’t know that they are. They manufacture in different
places. In fact, about, there’s a lot of them that’s, that’s trucked in here from even down in Georgia, down that way. There’s factories several places that make these bolts.Interviewer: What’s the material in the sacks over there?
Bailey: That is, that is rock dust.
Interviewer: What’s it used for?
Bailey: That’s used for putting over the inside the mine to render all coal dust
down to 65 percent noncombustible. Which you check from that, you have to take analysis of that. And if it drops below, if your coal dust, if it drops any below that, why you’re in trouble.Interviewer: How is it applied? How do you use it?
Bailey: They have a machine. They have a machine that they blow it on with.
Interviewer: On the coal?
Bailey: Rock dusting machine, yeah.
Interviewer: Is this, is this, this what you used to use for cropping, rather
than this?Bailey: That’s what we used to use, and that’s what we use, some of them, now.
We use, we use some of them now kind of spot timbering, more or less for warning devices. Because if you would have excessive pressure on your roof, it would break that timber before showing up on these bolts too much, you see. We use them, we have a spot timber.Interviewer: About what year did that, did this new system of, of roof supports
come in? Roof bolting?Bailey: The roof bolting, I, I think I can, I can bring you well up to date on
that, because I was one of the first that put them into effect. [laughs] Roof bolting came in, in the nineteen and forty-seven. And the Bureau of Mines, Bureau of Mines demonstrated this. This was their plan. And so, they, they came around and we had to, we had to roof bolt the mine and then where it was a bad roof condition, we had problems of making the men believe it was safe. In many cases, we had the roof bolt sectioned to the mine and let them stay idle maybe a week before the men would trust them, you see.Interviewer: I can see why. [Bailey laughs] Because the way these big things
sitting there–Bailey: Well, you have them sitting in there, and then you, you get up and you
can see as far as your light will let you see, and not a timber’s standing. I, I’ll be frank with you now. At first, I didn’t–Interviewer: But it really freed you up for your machines to operate in there.
Didn’t it?Bailey: That’s right. That’s the, that is one of the great features of it. It,
it relieves all of the handicaps of your machine, you see. And a lot of time with conventional mining, especially, you may move in, you may blast some of those timbers out. Back a long--ways back from the face will jar them out. And then you move in with this machine. You’ve got to, you’ve got to go in and replace those timbers and then–[pause]
[Interruption in tape]
Bailey: That is operated by Mr. Salyers. Now the owner, the owner of this coal
is the lessee, the leaser of this coal, is actually the Citation Coal Corporation.Interviewer: May I interrupt you for just one moment Mr. Bailey? I hear every
time you hit the table.Bailey: Oh, is that right? Okay.
Interviewer: It carries through the mike. So. [laughter] Just don’t hit the table.
Bailey: All right. Okay.
Interviewer: Okay, go ahead.
Bailey: So, it’s the lessee, of course, leaser, is the Citation Coal
Corporation. Now at Citation Coal, they have a plan that they work out with these coal operators. They, they put in the mine, they do all the bulldozing work. They build the roads to the mines, and they install the power to the mines. And so, then they pay these operators X dollars per ton to mine this coal and deliver it to their railroad tipples. Which really, they are an independent operator. So, we have, we don’t only have this one, they have about eight other mines under the same policies and plans.Interviewer: In what respect are they independent? In the, only the equipment?
Bailey: Yes, they, they furnish their own equipment. And the, the company has,
Citation, has no investment so far as the mine’s concerned, other than just putting in the mine. That’s the only investment they have in it.Interviewer: Will there be some mine, some very small mine operators today,
independent operators, this one that you took us to, that was one of what, thr-… Well, we, we were trying to get so that we could be able to tell people, you know, the wide range of everything from the, the small mine all the way up to the super-huge mines. Ther-, there is a cross section of mining.Bailey: Small, group of small operations makes up a large sized company. In
fact, we have, we have a number of them in this field here. We have, we have other companies who has as many as ten and twelve of these operators mining coal for them on the same basis that, that we do.Female Interviewer: Mr. Bailey, would you tell us a bit about your background in
the, in the industry? And then work up kind of to your relationship with Mr.-Interviewer: Dalton?
Female Interviewer: Dalton, yes.
Bailey: Well, of course that’s going back. My own background, that’s going back
a long, long story. Now I began coal mining when I was thirteen years old on a part-time, part-time basis. What I mean, in, in those days, why the, we only had a seven-months school in a one-room schoolhouse, you see, you might say. And of course, I would work in the mines the off time from school, which is five months.Now I started out, I started out in mining as, you would call a trapper. Of
course, you, you people can understand what a trapper means in the coal mine. Now that, a trapper is someone who attends a ventilation door in a mine where they have animal haulage. They pull this cord with mules and ponies. And this trap door divides a current that ventilates this mine, you see. And of course, they have to have an attendant there to open this door when this haulage comes through, you see.Course, later on then, of course, later, I advanced myself up to a, a coal
loader. That’s someone who drills and blasts and loads the coal into the mine car with a shovel, you see.Interviewer: Since we’re also going to be showing historic stills that the
Historic Society has gathered to show the progress of mining, could you tell us a little bit more about, about what the mines were like when you worked as a, as a trap boy? As a trapper.Bailey: Yes. I can, I can bring you up on that. Now when I was a trapper boy,
they were, they were but few mines in the country. They might, they were limited the mines. And of course, then the, this coal was loaded direct in the railroad cars. We had no, there was no processing of the coal. Everything was loaded just straight run of mine, you might call it. And so, as the years go by, we developed a mining machine. The owner cut the coal. And we developed electric handheld drills to drill the coal, instead of having to crank it up like with an auger, you see. And then we, those days, we used black powder and squibs. So, we’ve gotten away from that. We got up to, to fuse. And then, of course, later on, we developed up to electric detonators. That speeded, that speeded the operations up considerably.And so, then we, we were in the process of hand loading, back in the early days.
And so, we advanced from that to, to conventional type loading. Loading with loading machines, and with even the continuous miners. And so, then we, we’ve gone from that for the small mines especially who can’t afford a continuous miner, why we have gone to scoops, like we saw over there. We, we went into scoops. And then in the, in the large or medium size mine, we use the scoops, and they use a belt line to convey this coal out of the mine, you see. And this, this punch mine, they don’t use a belt line in a punch mine, you see. They use it in the deep mines. Mines that will go maybe two or three thousand, or maybe a mile under the hill, they use belt lines for it.Interviewer: When the, on the belt line, no, going back to the punch mine that
we saw, you said that those carts will, they’ll be mining a thousand feet from the, from the face of the hill, going that far?Bailey: They’ll go that far, yeah. They’ll go a thousand feet efficiently, the
scoops will.Interviewer: Then the, let me think for a moment here. I was going to ask
something early when, the small ponies, where they, what breed of animal were they?Bailey: Well, they were just a small, they were just a small, what they’d call a
Shetland pony. That’s a pony, they couldn’t be above, couldn’t be above a forty-inch height size, the pony couldn’t.Interviewer: Was the Shetland pony used in the mines in, in England and Wales?
Was that where it was developed? Was it developed–Bailey: Yes. It was developed in, in, in the British.
Interviewer: They used mules, too, here, didn’t they? As well as…
Bailey: Yes, I spent, I spent several years driving a mule in the mines. And
I’ve used mules, what they call a sixteen-hand high mule, in mines where they only had thirty inches of coal.Interviewer: That, that would be only thirty inches high, wouldn’t it?
Bailey: [laughs] Thirty inches high. Now, the way we handle this, they used roof
drills. And we shoot this top in the trench high enough for this mule to travel. [phone interruption] Excuse me. In order, in order to make it convenient for this animal haulage, see, the labors, the coal loader would push their cars out to where you could be reached to this mule. This mule only traveled a main circuit, you see.Interviewer: So, I thought when you were talking about a trench, they cut a very
narrow slot and the animal just, the head and shoulders were just above–Bailey: Well, it was an arch. They shot an arch out a groove.
[pause]
Bailey: Until about 1919 and 19 and 20. So 1920, I was elected by a large
company as a mine foreman, leader of the crews. So, I had no certificate. And in those days, you could, you could supervise, or boss a mine, on a, a permit issued from the State Department of Mines and Minerals, until the meeting of the next board. So that’s what I did. So, I, I got this permit to boss the mine. And I passed the examination satisfactorily. So, in that field, I started out as [a] mine foreman. Later, I was promoted to, as a superintendent. And I worked as a superintendent for several years in Kentucky and in Virginia. I worked a while in Virginia as a superintendent.And then in the, in 19 and 55, I was, I was hired by Mr. Jack Dalton, who, who
was one of the leading operators in this field here. I was hired as his assistant. And of course, that was at the place where you’d taken the picture from over on the highway. That’s, that’s where I started with Jack Dalton in 1955 there. So, I worked with him until, until 19 and 75. I was with them twenty years. So then, well, after he passed away in, in 19 and , and 59, why then I [had] taken complete charge of all operations. And so, I stayed with them until ’75, the beginning of ’75. And then I was semi-retired with them. I, they retained me, retired me, and then retained me as their consultant. I still work as their consultant. And then I was elected to the Coal Operators and Associates as executive secretary, so I’ve been there up until now.Interviewer: Quite a career.
Female Interviewer: It is. Can you expand a bit on Mr. Dalton’s operation?
Bailey: Yes. Yes, I can. Now, Mr. Dalton, well, I will go back and take a little
more time. I will go back to his beginning. Mr. Dalton was, the, he was the founder of the West Virginia Coal and Coke. That’s in Logan County in West Virginia. He put in those mines, and he stayed with them, which that was in the early ‘20s. He stayed with them in 1928, he had quite a holding in there. He was offered 28 mill…[End Side A. Begin Side B.]
Bailey: [inaudible] twenty-eight million dollars for his operations at that
time. Turned it down. So, he held on, the Depression hit, he left out of Logan, West Virginia with only enough money to pay his bus fare into Huntington. So, he later on then he decided he would go into the, the service station business a while. So, he had Huntington across on the high side on the route 7, he leased a vacant lot at the end of the bridge. And he didn’t have the money to buy the equipment of it, so he goes to a junkyard and buys an old used tank and dug the hole and buried the tank himself and put him up a hand pump and pumped gas by hand until he built himself up about fifty-one service stations in the Ohio valley and three bulk stations and including controlling interest in Ashland Oil. He set it up.Then this ’37 flood hit the Ohio Valley and floated him out of the ground and
broke him again. So, he, after a while then, why he, he came into Pikeville exploring the possibilities of leasing some coal in this area. And he ran into a coal miner on the street here and asked him if he knew of anyplace that he could lease a boundary of coal. So, this miner says, “Well, I only dig the coal. I don’t know anything about coal property. But I hear there’s a fellow here in town, a attorney, that has a lot of coal. Mr. John Klein.” So, he told him where he could find him. [pause]Interviewer: Okay. Go ahead.
Bailey: So, he, he looks up the Mr. Klein, and asks him if he had any coal to
lease. And then he told him, “Well,” he said, “I have a lot of coal. But I haven’t been leasing any.” And that was of course, that was in the, in the year of the early ‘40s, around ’41, ’42. He said, “I haven’t been leasing any. However,” he said, “I have a, I have an option on a 25-acre track [train whistle] out here on Ferguson Creek. But the option has not been exercised. So, if those people don’t take it up, I would consider letting you have it.”So, he did. He did. They didn’t take the option up. So, he leased the 25 acres
and put in the boundary coal. That’s at the location, the old metal building where you got the picture over there was the old tipple site, with the number, first mine that Jack Dalton put in. So, he put in a mine there, and from that, he got started. And the, the war got on. And the coal business picked up. And from that until nineteen and fifty, he had 305 coal mines and eight loading docks. In Pike County and Floyd and Letcher and some parts of West Virginia.Interviewer: Quite something. Are, you’re a native of Kentucky, are you not?
Bailey: Oh, yes. I was raised in Kentucky.
Interviewer: And I missed out. I, I, I guess I wasn’t recording.
Bailey: In 1915.
Interviewer: 1915. Coal mining’s changed a great deal.
Bailey: Yes, it has. It’s cha-, it’s changed considerably now. In those days, in
those days, coal mining, we only expected about four-and-a-half tons per payroll man. So, that has advanced now to state, or an average of twenty-six-and-a-half tons per payroll man. So, modern equipment has advanced it that far.Interviewer: I imagine in addition to the advancement of getting more coal out,
and more per man, there have been quite a few advances in well change of life for the miners themselves, and for the coal operators. The miners, do they make more today than they did in the early days?Bailey: Yes, they make, they make much more now than they did in the early days.
Now in the early days, if a miner, if a miner made, I’m speaking of the time at which I began, if the miner made two dollars and a quarter a day, he, he was making big money. The fact about it– [train whistle]Interviewer: I’ve got a train going by. Let me hold on if I may. [pause] Before
the train came through, you were telling us about the difference between then and now regarding what a miner made and, and how, how well he’s doing today as opposed to–Bailey: Well in those days, the miner was making two to two dollars and a
quarter, two and a half a day, something like that. And today, the average miner today is making around sixty dollars a day. So that’s your difference. Plus, the other fringe benefits. There are no comparisons, of course. No way to compare it.Interviewer: The–
[pause in recording]
Bailey: I think that the coal miner is about the best paid labor there is. But
I, I don’t think a comparison is as great. I think the factory workers at that time were making more than the coal miners. So now, I think your coal miners are making more than the factory worker.Interviewer: The–
[pause in recording]
Bailey: Yes, that, that dry drill is used by, well, it was more manpowered. It
was a drill on the principle of a wood auger. Used what you call a breastplate. You put that breastplate across your stomach, and put pressure against this drill, it has that crank, and drill it up.Interviewer: Could you do that standing up? Or did you have to do it on your knees?
Bailey: Well, in many cases, you had it on your knees. Because you, hiking in
thirty inches of coal, you couldn’t stand up. [laughs]Interviewer: Pretty difficult work.
Bailey: Now I’ve seen, this thirty-inch coal, we’ve had miners, I’ve saw it
happen time and again. Those miners would crawl in this thirty-inch coal, perhaps a mile or more under the hill. Even, I, I’ve seen them with their lunch buckets. What I mean a bucket, it wasn’t a kit. It was a lunch bucket. Carrying that in their mouth. Going in on their hands and knees. Saw it happen again. There’s no such thing as a labor trip. You didn’t have a labor trip. You didn’t have a trip car a man could load up in and haul him back into the mine. Because if you did, he couldn’t get out of this car once he got in there.Interviewer: Because the sides of the car were so, size…
Bailey: Drag the roof. No room to get out.
Interviewer: In terms of increasing need for mechanization and everything.
Bailey: Well, I think that now so far as production is concerned, the small
operators now are, they’re mining, the small operators are mining about 70 percent of the, of the coal in Kentucky. And of course, the small operators are, are like all, even the large ones, they’re improving their equipment. Getting more modern equipment all the time. And I would say, speaking of the deep mining now, the surface mining, I, I have my doubts of some of the smaller surface mining operators staying in on, on account of this federal stripmine bill. I’m doubting some of them. They can’t afford in the first place to get, to buy their equipment. They don’t have sufficient reserves for it to buy it if they had the money, you see, they ain’t [are not] going to do it. But the big mine, I would say the big mine, will continue to improve right on.Interviewer: The conditions of mining–
Bailey: It is, well, the condition itself of course is the same, but the methods
for taking care of these conditions has improved tremendously now. We work, we work in seams of coal now that in the early days was abandoned. It was classed not workable. You couldn’t work the seams. So now they’ve come up with, with modern equipment, roof bolting machines, roof support, that we don’t pay that any mind.Interviewer: What were some of the conditions? Can you explain how modern
equipment has allowed more coal to be taken out?Bailey: Well, in the, in the early days, we had a bad, if we had a bad roof
condition, shale, or heavy draw slate. It may be a seam, that a, a thirty- or thirty-six-inch seam that would not offer clearance, would not allow cross-collar support, timbers. It couldn’t be held with, with straight timbers, like we looked at across the way. It couldn’t be held by them. You had to have a cross, cross section, cross collar. Cross that, your height wouldn’t prevent it. And, and the cost would not allow taking this one out, you see. Would not loan it out. The cost wouldn’t allow that. Too expensive.And so, by the, by the use of roof bolting machines, we have eliminated that.
We’re roof bolting even shale top, we’re roof bolting so-called horsebacks in the top. And the roof bolt is the answer to, to all the weak roof we used to have. Couldn’t work at all. So now all those seams are working.Interviewer: What is the horse, you said a horse buckle was the term you used?
Bailey: A horseback. Now we have that is, that is overlapping the ridges of the
slate. It will have a feather edge on one side, and maybe the other side will be ten foot thick. And they lap over each other. And they’re undetected. You can’t detect them. Well, you can detect them by sound system, but you don’t know, by sounding roof. But you don’t know, you still don’t know the extent of it. And so, roof bolts, they bond this together by drilling up through on four-inch centers, the roof bolt creates a bond to this. It’s just like a slab of concrete. I have these roof bolts. I’ve had this top to give down three or four inches. And I, may be eighteen or twenty inches thick. I’ve drilled in these roof bolts and tightened up on that bolt with a torque wrench and have pulled that top secure back up in this place.Interviewer: Huh, that’s interesting.
[pause in recording]
Bailey: Well, of course now some of the mines, some of the mines, maybe some of
the bigger mines do that. They have an incentive plan that helps them a lot in that. You know, a lot of people, a lot of companies will give bonuses, they’ll give prizes, they’ll give a lot of things. Anything for an incentive to cause these men to, to go after it. You know it’s only in nature that we all, we like to be given a little something for nothing, you know.” [laughs]Interviewer: What I was referring to, mainly, was you said back in furnishing
that, to me that was…[pause]
Bailey: Yeah. We set up, Mr. Dalton did, [me] myself. In fact, they set, I put
that plan into effect. Just, furnishing the equipment for these mines, buying the needed equipment, whatever they needed, and then just assign this mine to a group of men, maybe eight or ten men. So-called gain workers. They all shared and shared alike in the profits. We’d pay them X dollars per ton to put this in the coal tipples, and then they divided their money themselves. So, we ran into a little problem with that because of some slackers trying to tear up that. And then we started other methods of just releasing it to them, their own responsibility.Interviewer: Are you familiar with the
[pause]
Bailey: Yes. I can see where they’re going to be, we’re going to have a, a labor
problem with miners. Men to work the mines. Back in the 1969, when the Mine Health and Safety Law went into effect, the average age of our miners was forty-eight years. That’s a small mine, you see, because we had, see, the larger companies were pick, picking younger men for their mines on account of the machinery. And the little mine was picking the older ones because of their, they couldn’t handle this equipment, and they were hand loading and so forth, and they could handle their jobs.So, when this black lung law came out, that cut that age limit down to
thirty-four years. And going on like it is now, I would predict that in a matter of a few years, that age limit is going to drop down to, down into twenties somewhere.Interviewer: When, have most of the miners come, most of the labor force for the
mines come from Kentucky? In the Kentucky area? Most of the miners been from Kentucky?Bailey: Mostly, yes, mostly from Kentucky. Yeah. We get the, we get the, the
majority of our labor in Pike County is from Kentucky.Female Interviewer: Mr. Bailey, in terms of the trend, what does that mean in
terms of training and education?Bailey: That means that our mine labor are going to have to come from the
colleges now. We have a college here, have a mine technology class of about 120 technology students. And they’re training them, the companies now, the larger companies has got, has got orders in to them. Fast as they’re graduate, they want to take them and put them in mines. And they’re going to have to come from the college.And now we have something else we’re a little bit scared of right now is since
they have, since they have federal mandatory training and state mandatory training, we have a little fear now that the, that the women are going to come in there and be doing the--most of the mining. [laughing]Interviewer: Do you think it’s possible?
Bailey: Possible, quite possible.
Female interviewer: [ ] work [ ]
Bailey: Because of this now, here before, under, under equal rights, now with no
dis-, no disrespect to women working, fact about it, I find some of them are a lot better workers than men. But on the equal rights, several of them did go into mines on that. But at that time, we didn’t have--.[tape speeds up, tape glitch]
Interviewer: But she accomplished…
Bailey: She [ ]
Interviewer: Is it, has it only been recently that women have worked in mines
here in, in Kentucky?Bailey: Going back about three years. It started; it started back in ’74.
Female interviewer: But it’s more than tokenism? Even now?
Bailey: It’s increasing. Yeah, it’s increasing. And, and, and once this, once
this training program gets through, it will be, it will be more severe.Interviewer: The–
[pause in recording]
Bailey: In the early days they did, yes, but, but later on, going up into the
late ‘30s, they’d come out on their mine worker’s contract that the company furnish the tools. I had a lot of trouble with that myself. I remember that. [laughs]Interviewer: Well, what type of tools did the miners, let’s say, from the time
you started up till the ‘30s, what type of tools did he have to provide?Bailey: Yeah, oh, he only had to provide, provide a drill, a pick and shovel.
And also his, his safety equipment. He had to have his safety equipment shoes, and safety hat, lamp, and so forth.Interviewer: The lamps have changed…
[pause in recording]
Bailey: The earliest, the early, yes, it was a, it was a candle. We called it a
lard oil. It was just a candle stick was what it was. And then they changed from that to carbide. They used carbide. And then the carbide light had gone out, and then we used battery headlight.Interviewer: Okay. [ ]
[pause in recording]
Bailey: [coughs] Well of course right now, right now, we are on, we are on
mainly on conventional type mining. Conventional type, of course that consists of the type of mining we saw across that is conventional. Loading machines is conventional. I means that loads the coal into mine cars, shuttle car, that is conventional. And then we have a, we have a continuous miner. Now a continuous miner, is, that is, that is the most modern way of mining right now, is a continuous miner.Interviewer: Can you describe that for us?
Bailey: Yeah, a continuous miner is a machine that cuts and loads its own coal.
And it is a high-capacity machine. Now a continuous miner will, will handle normally with about an eight-man crew about a thousand tons a day, a continuous miner will. It has, it has its saw teeth, it just rakes this coal out.Interviewer: Then the, I think the general public has the impression that–
Bailey: Mining, mining methods, mining equipment now is reaching the point, and
I think it will before long, that only, only people with at least a high school education are going to be able to operate this equipment. I don’t think the old-time miner will be able to handle this type of equipment they have right now, because it’s so, so modern. Otherwise, it’s going off push button.Female Interviewer: [ ] after this. [ ]
Bailey: Well, the benefits, the benefits of this, which has worked out by the
Association, was worked out for the purpose of making it, making it so attractive for a---small mine workers that they would, wouldn’t leave the small mine and go to the larger mines on account of their, of their extra benefits that the large mines, the union mines, were carrying. So, we worked out a plan competitive with that. Which now we’re having no problem of training our miners and losing them to the larger mines.Interviewer: What other things have you been able to do through an association?
Bailey: Well, we, we’ve been able to work out the hospital plans, retirement
plans, and life insurance and disability and major medical benefits, which is, we think, is a little better than the mine workers’ union card itself.Interviewer: Okay. How about things for your own independent interest, like the
pressure on politics?Bailey: Pressure groups?
Female Interviewer: Yeah, sir.
Bailey: Well, of course, you know we’re a nonprofit organization and we don’t,
we don’t go into politics. However, we are now, we are working on a, on a co-PAC. And if we can get this co-PAC into effect which will consist of all the independent coal operators, then we’ll be able to, when we have a politician that runs for an office, we’ll be able to tell him that our committee will look into the matter if he’s going to look into ours and we can help him. Otherwise, we can’t do it. And then when we have a, we have a caller to come around soliciting campaign funds, we can refer him to the plaque on our wall saying “Here, we are in a co-PAC, we don’t contribute to no individual politicians, you see.” It does give us a good way of passing the buck. And, and the meanwhile, it gives us a good way of getting our congressman or our governor or whoever’s running for an office, we can cite him right quick unless he’s going to be favorable to us, that we have the club, you see. I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get that worked out.[laughing]
[End Interview.]
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