Oral History Interview with Frances Turner

FRANCES TURNER

[Begin Interview]

Male: in this county, that seven and a half million-dollar plant that’s not been built yet. Said I designed it, I laid it out–

[pause in recording]

Turner: in the company. In other words, the man who was commonly called the superintendent, sometimes the manager. Of course, his family ranked first in that coal camp because he was in charge of everything. And then the hierarchy came on down from one echelon to another, depending upon what your position. His assistant, and then, I would say, after that you were through the actual executives, that perhaps the a--the accounting department, and their families, and then the engineers, their families. The teachers, who were company employees, also, in the period I’m speaking of, in the ‘20s. Then from the teachers on down, I really imagine it would be the people who had white collar jobs, like people who worked in the company store or the fountain, or in some way did not work in or about the mines.

Interviewer: Okay. Pause for a second.

Turner: Could I...

[pause in recording]

Turner: They actually were soda fountains. That is, I don’t remember any that sold food. I cannot think what people did in those days for hamburgers and hotdogs. I guess they did without. But actually, they sold ice cream and, ice cream, and various kinds of confections altogether. And this was, by the way, a very good position. To be manager, you worked on a salary. But of course, you had to show a profit if you kept your job. But the soda fountain was sort of a social center for gathering. Not only for the young folks, but for anyone who dropped by to see who’s in the fountain, and to have a carbonated drink of some kind. And to spend a few minutes loafing there as we might do at the corner drugstore.

Interviewer: The...

Turner: Well, really, I would say they were more of a Baskin-Robbins than they were the drugstore. Because the company store, and usually a large camp would have two, or even more, company stores. They’d have the main store, or the folks used to call it the big store, and then they would have a smaller outlet [outlet]. Now, for instance, the main store would sell furniture, hardware, drugs, nonprescription drugs, clothing, as well as food. Anything you might want, even the miners’ tools. But then there would be outlets, if it was a big coal camp, where the get, for, they handled, well, primarily, groceries. And of course, anything that was to be sold other than confections to, the best I can remember, was sold at the company store. And there’s another job that I forgot when I was mentioning the social levels. Of course, I said white collar jobs. But being the manager of the company store, or manager, general manager of all the company stores in that camp, was quite a good job. Was one of the better paid, more responsible jobs.

Interviewer: Were the–

[pause in recording]

Turner: I am not sure of the length of the day, but I think it was an eight-hour day. I am not sure of that. I know they were not unionized, because I can remember when they became unionized. So, at the time we’re talking of, when I was actually a little girl, in maybe the middle grades, we’d say, I would not be sure, I’d be afraid to state, but on the weekends, there was the movies. We didn’t mention the fact that along with the soda fountain, usually next door, there was the theater, it was called. And it was the movies. And of course, these were every night. There was a movie every night in the week. Many people– [pause]

Interviewer: Okay, this will be reel number six. And it’s May tenth. And we’re in Price, talking with Mrs., Mrs. Turner. Yeah, you were telling us about entertainment. And one of the things that was popular in a coal town was going to the movies. So, if you’d just sort of start with that.

Turner: Well, the company seldom, the company owned and equipped the movies, the movie houses, but they seldom operated them themselves. Usually, the movie would have to be leased to one of the officials, and then he would run it independently. Someone would sell tickets, someone to run the projector, and someone to choose the films that were going to be shown. And some, these were silent movies. And of course, someone to play the piano down front. Yes, to play the piano. And someone who played the piano down front in the summer happened to be my sister, when she’d be home from school. The movies, the people that I remember was a, a William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Babe Daniels, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, probably many are escaping me. I [am] thinking, yes, Rudolph Valentino. I think the whole camp went into mourning when Rudolph Valentino died. Because everybody was– [pause]

Interviewer: Give us the Rudolph Valentino line again and...

Turner: Oh, I think that the camp went into mourning, particularly the feminine side of the camp, when Rudolph Valentino died. Such an untimely matter. I don’t think the men thought it was so untimely, but the ladies did. Because he was everybody’s hero at that time. I’m also thinking of another very prominent star. At that time, he was prominent, his name hasn’t lasted so well, who died young that way. Wallace Reed. And I remember that everybody was talking about Wallace Reed had died and what a tragic thing this was. So, without television, and without radio, which we have now, the movies were a source of entertainment. And, I guess, a cultural source, also, at that time. Because people were exposed to other cultures, who had been somewhat isolated in our creeks and hollows up to that time. To get a bigger crowd out, I don’t remember whether it was every night, but one or two nights a week, they ran a, what we would call a continued story, or a serial. And you saw two reels before the, the mo-, the feature film of the night began, you saw two reels. They always left Pearl White either tied to a railroad track, or a saw about to descend upon her. And you had to go back the next time to see how she recovered from the train crash or the railroad wreck or whatever was going to happen to her. It’s, the seating, the children all sat down front. And I guess that the parents maybe sat, more or less gravitated to the middle of the house. And probably the courting couples sat in the back row, center, and left side. And in the two particular movies that I’m thinking of, the black people sat in the right. This is the days, you remember, of segregation. And the black who turned out, as well as the whites, sat in the right aisle, to the right of the aisle of the center section.

Interviewer: Ok, what was, any particular remembrances of , of Sundays, which I assume were days off for everyone.

Turner: The better coal companies, the ones who looked out a little better perhaps for their employees, built, when they built these camps, they also built churches. Now usually there were only two denominations. That would be Catholic and Protestant. And then different groups, the splinter groups of Protestantism would use the Protestant church. And the priest would come in from the nearest town that had a full-time priest, like every so many Sundays, and conduct services, christenings, and this type of thing, other than Mass and confession, at the Catholic church. And they had their own cemetery as well as the Protestant church had cemeteries.

Interviewer: Where, what were the homes like for the miners?

Another interviewer: In relation to that, I wanted, you were talking about segregation–

Turner: The schools, in the housing in the camps, in the pool rooms, the fountains that I mentioned before. Everywhere. We were much richer those days because we had two of everything. We had the colored fountain, we called it. That was before the days, you know, that they preferred to be called blacks. So, we, the polite people referred to the Negro as colored. And so we had what was called the colored fountain, the colored pool room. And, in other words, we had a colored boarding house for single men or men who were away from their families. They had the same privileges, and the same things exactly. Other than the theater, I can’t think of anywhere that, you know, that we used a common building in that way. We had colored teachers who were brought in by the company.

Interviewer: Coming back to Sundays now, entertainment on Sundays or outings in the ‘20s, and you might mention the time when you told what a miner’s outing might be as opposed to, anyone could probably imagine what an executive might be doing, or the white-collar jobs. But.

Turner: You better cut that back in a minute. [pause] the schools in the coal camps were probably superior to those in the county system. Because the company had the money to employ better educated people as teachers. They had men who interviewed these people. There was no political aspects or tones at all to the employment of a principal and the teachers. It was strictly on a basis of qualifications. And then after they were hired on a basis of how well they succeeded. They also had the money to build comfortable buildings, which I went to school from, all my life that I went to school in a company, which would be through the eighth grade, we had furnaces, we had forced air heat, we had washrooms. We had any luxury other than television and a swimming pool, I would say, that modern, so-called modern schools in our poor counties, have now. The matter of finance was a difference. I remember when I was a child, once that we had at least six or seven teachers in our---about a ten or twelve teacher school, who were from Virginia. I don’t remember why the exodus of teachers, but I suspect that one or two came, probably wrote friends, and at one time we had any number of people from the same county in Virginia teaching in our coal camp school. And one of these girls, I remember, was my piano teacher. So, we were fortunate in the coal camps that we did have. We had playground equipment fully as good as any I have seen in our county and kept up far better than any I’ve seen where the county is expected to take care of everything. The company, of course, paid for the playground equipment. We had musical instruments, we had libraries. When I learned to read, I had access to a library. But this library was bought and taken care of by the coal company. So perhaps the coal company schools were far advanced over those of the local school board because, as a matter of finance, and it was a matter, perhaps, also, of the people themselves were more progressive, the executives were more progressive, because they were usually somewhat better educated than the average person to be in that position. And you could not hire the level of employee that they wanted and bring him into a camp with his children unless you had something to offer his children, you see. So, this wasn’t only that they were doing something for the people. I’m not sure that was their idea at all, the stockholders and so forth. But their idea was to get a better class of employees, which was good business in the long run.

Interviewer: When the...

[pause]

Turner: Miss Kincaid will have no [ ] and it was hilarious because you talk about economics. When the mines would be closed down, when, because coal was not selling well, or the price of coal was so low that the company couldn’t produce it as a profit, the better companies would do what they call stockpile coal. That is, they would operate, as much as was possible, to keep the men groceries, at least. No luxuries, but food on the table, which they could buy at the company store if they had time in the office. What time meant was that these men had worked two days, or three days, or whatever they could give them that week. This coal, instead of being put into, into the---what we call gonds, or gondolas, and taken out of here to Russell, was stockpiled in huge piles. Then this gave some more people employment, because they had to watch these piles of coal very closely because, you see, the moisture would generate heat, and they would have fires that could not be controlled. They wouldn’t only lose all this coal, but they’d have a very dangerous situation. And they didn’t even know about pollution. But they’d have a fire situation. And I remember one job particularly was a man who worked seven days a week, and he operated a hoist, and they ran a huge, a bit like a drilling bit down into this huge mountain of coal and took the temperature so many times a day. And then they’d have to shift that coal around, which gave work to other people. But it must have put a terrible price on the coal. Then, when times became better, when the market opened up, like let’s say the lakes opened in the spring. That was always a good time in the coal business, when the shipping on the lakes could be insured again, then they simply took, I don’t know why, but we called them brown hoists in those days. Must have been a trade name or something. But anyway, they reloaded this into coal cars and shipped it out. Now much of this is still done in this area, where men would like to keep, in smaller scale, where men would like to keep things together, not let the machinery rust, not let their mines fall apart, not let their miners scatter. I noticed during the last past year when the coal business has been very bad, it’s been bad because coal has been down to like thirteen dollars a ton, I think. I noticed they were stockpiling coal at various places in this area. But it was done on a much larger scale in the late teens and the early twenties. Now I remember the boom after World War I when everybody was getting rich, of course. I’m sure that I don’t know what the wage was. I imagine ten dollars a day was probably a fabulous amount to earn, but I’m only surmising this. But I do remember that something about 1921, there must have been a, a recession. And that’s when I’m thinking about that they stockpiled the coal in order to give men a way to earn at least food money. They could let the rent go; it was a company house. They could let the power bill go, the garbage collection, the coal, which you bought from the co-, the company for fuel. All of those bills could sort of go. But groceries could only go to a certain extent. And this provided them food, and then, later on, when things were better, they could catch up their back rent and all of their back utility bills. Because we had garbage collection and all of the usual things except cable television, I guess, that we paid for. Now in one of the camps that I li-, in two of the camps that I lived in quite a while as a child, we had our own telephone exchange, too, I might mention. And this was for the various business offices and for the people, like the doctor’s office, and the executives’ homes, and the stores, and so forth. And the mine, the houses. I can’t think what they were called, where the men who were in charge at the actual mines themselves, where you could contact those men, all had telephones. And we had a small switchboard in the local exchange in the company office.

Interviewer: Was, was the main medium of exchange scrip?

Turner: One medium of exchange, and perhaps the major medium of exchange, was what we called scrip. Scrip was simply money that the company, it

was simply a, I’m sorry, I can’t think of what I want to say. Was a paper–

Interviewer: Once again.

Turner: Scrip was a medium of exchange which was actually nothing other than coupons in a little booklet. Very much today as one might get food stamps. Or as a meal ticket, if you were buying one for a week in a cafeteria. It had different denominations from five dollars down to a penny. You simply tore out this piece of paper which was stamped of what it was worth with the name of the company. Of course, the company had these printed for their use. A man, if he had what was called time in the office, if he had worked, and the company owed him money, he went to the scrip office and said that he needed, or his wife, either one, she’d show an identity card and his wife, and a number. Each man had a number. And he would show this, or she would show it, and they were given whatever that they asked for or whatever they had in the equivalent of money at that time. Then they could take this anywhere in the camp and use it the same, exactly, as money. It was not discounted. It was merely a cash advance system. Then this scrip was run through the company office each evening, much as a bank runs through the day’s transaction now and subtracted from that man’s earnings.

Interviewer: Why did they use scrip as opposed to money?

Turner: Tha- they used scrip probably, and I may be giving them a devious purpose, but probably it was because the other people could not take it. Local merchants, people who were rather enterprising and had gone to the outskirts of the camp and gone into business for themselves with a clothing store or a grocery store or someplace where money would be exchanged, had no way of turning this back into money. And so, the company had an advantage here, you see. You used company money, or scrip, at the company’s businesses.

[pause in recording]

Interviewer: Okay.

Turner: But it was much higher. I’m sure that the advan-, that the mon-, monetary advantage would be in the fact that the company’s businesses would have a higher price than the local merchant would. And they made it a profit here, also. They raised their volume, but they also were raising their market the same way. But you remember these company stores operated at quite a bit of expense. Because they took orders, they delivered. Now this was by, they always had a company stable, or barn. And they had saddle horses for the executives. And then they had teams of horses for the mines to deliver supplies. That’s a big thing around a coal camp. This business below me here used to be nothing but a supply house.

[Tape ends abruptly]