Vol. 2-Interview-Kascak

8/23/72 Tape 12-2 --6-- 570 M/M George Petrushka interviewed by Denis Mercier (also M/M Joe [blank])

we get an Aide-man. Stop it! Because I says, I can't stop that and at the same time drag you. And I'm draggin' him over the ground. MP: Oh, he's good. DM: Well, if you're a miner, you've gotta be that way. M : He says, comin' home on a ship, everybody was gettin' sick, you know, they're ready to puke, and he was walkin' around with a mop, cleanin' up. I said that wouldn't be me! J : Oh, we were eleven days...And I drug that guy to the point where, well, all right, when I drug him already I had to clean my rifle, it was full of dirt and everything. So they put him on. Boy, I'm tellin' you, George, the minute the war was over, that guy was lookin' for me. GP: Yeah, I guess! J : He said, I'd a died, he says. I figured this was it, he says. Well, I says, when I went into that service, I went in there to live, too, I says. I'll shoot to kill the same way, I'd... M : Joe! Maybe he wants more information. Stop talkin'! J : We drug this man out of that gas chamber, and we gave that man a lot of encouragement, draggin' him out of there. GP: When two buddies work like that, I think one should take care of the other. I imagine if I was in his predicament, he would have came and saved me. Now if I would have went out the air hole and said, well, the hell with it, I'm not gonna go in there, how would you expect me to live my life today, knowin' that I could have saved that man and he's dead? MP: But you should see that man's hands towards George's. GP: He has fingers like sausages. MP: He has like warts, and I would say the biggest wart that you can see, and that's how his whole hands are, with warts. But he would not go for therapy, where George went to therapy. GP: No, he has two little points, that's all, on his ears. J : Yeh, his ears are burnt off. GP: Oh, yes, he was in a heck of a mess. MP: And, Doctor Turnoposky, you know he's the... M : He's the therapy doctor in the state hospital. MP: Yeh, in the hospital. He says to George, he said, I think this is the greatest thing--because I used to have to drive him up, because he couldn't even hold the wheel, that's how bad, you know, his hands were. And he said, you know, George, he says, couldn't you talk to Joe and have Joe come up. He said, boy is he gonna live with something terrible. He said, because his skin is gonna all like shrivel up, and he said it's gonna be something awful to look at. And it really got like that. But George talked to him so many times, and he says, awhh, he says, I'm not gonna bother. But George went up, oh God, for over a year for therapy. GP: Yeh, I didn't work all nineteen sixty-four, I was goin' up. DM: I take it you got some kind of compensation for this? MP: Oh, not too much. Very little. GP: I would have earned more for that one year. MP: It was just like Unemployed Compensation of some kind, you know. Very little. Oh, we struggled, I'll tell you. GP: No, they don't give you too much. J : They just raised that now. Three months ago they raised it. M : Joe, how much did you get when you were in the accident? J : When I had the rib carriage and everything out, I only got fifty-seven dollars, and I was off that month. GP: We got fifty-eight or something, ain't it?

8/23/72 Tape 12-2 --7-- 615 M/M George Petrushka interviewed by Denis Mercier (also M/M Joe [blank])

MP: I was just gonna say, we just got very little. GP: Because there was a big stink raised about it. They took... DM: Fifty-eight dollars, in nineteen-sixty three? MP: Yes, and, you know, we had two children. Well, three. We had three children to keep goin'. GP: And see, my fingers I can't close all the way, because he told me my reflexes is gone. J : The ligaments have shortened. DM: The ligaments have probably shrunk. GP: I can carry with the one finger that I hook on, you know, but if I would leave the weight on these fingers, they'll open up. That's the way I work. MP: He has no strength in them. GP: So they have me down as "partial disability". So they paid me eight dollars, was it eight dollars a week, or eight dollars every two weeks, something like that, just for partial disability. MP: Something like that. I don't remember really for sure. GP: Until I got workin'. Once I started to work, they took everything. M : Now that he's home from work, he makes notes on everything. MP: That's good. That's good. We should have... M : They ask you so much questions, that you can't even remember. So it's best. Now he's started it. MP: I said I'm so sorry that when he laid in the hospital, you know, just like a mummy--all they had was the eyes cut in the bandages and enough for his breathing at the nose, and a piece of his mouth to breathe or feed him, that's how you had to feed him, through that, just like a baby. In other words, you had to just put a little bit on a teaspoon and just push it in through them bandages to put it in his mouth, enough for him to swallow. And you had to give him something that he didn't have to chew, that he just could swallow it, you know, something soft. GP: And imagine, for eight weeks, layin' with bandages, and then a beard... MP: And, ah, I often say that I was so sorry that I didn't have somebody go in there and take a picture of that, you know? DM: How could you know, you know, how could stand to lay still that long, for one thing? You just had no choice, I guess. GP: Well... MP: Oh, they had him, ah... GP: It was gettin' so that... MP: ...doped, they were like, you know what I mean... GP: They had needles all the time. But when they took them bandages off... MP: ...they just gave them needles after needles, and they just lay there. DM: But you could still talk and think and everything... GP: Oh, yeah, through the... DM: Through the little mouth hole, yeah. GP: When they took the bandages off, first thing my hands went up like this, you know, I got a hold... MP: Oh, God is good. GP: of that, I pulled it through the hair, you know? And you should smell, stink, ogh! The nurse said to me, wait, I'm gonna get some kind of water, and she put some kind of stuff in, and then I washed it, with a washcloth, pattin' it, you know? But then I wanted a shave, and they wouldn't allow you to shave, because I had no skin on my face. MP: No, he had a special barber comin' in. His own barber, from Freeland would come in and give him a shave and a haircut.

8/23/72 Tape 12-2 --8-- 650 M/M George Petrushka interviewed by Denis Mercier (also Joe [blank])

DM: How do you shave skin that is not there? GP: Well, just... MP: Well, do you know what, by the time he got his first shave, he had a beard like you have. DM: He probably did. MP: Till all that had to heal up underneath. Oh, yes. GP: And that rotten stuff, I could pull, get a hold of it, like this here, and pull it off, there'd be hair in there and everything. Ha! Ha! MP: They had to wait til everything healed up, so they couldn't touch his face. GP: Yeah, that was a tough one. DM: I don't know where to go from here. M : When you see hell, you can't go any further. DM: I was gonna say, we can only go up from this, that's one good thing. MP: I hope in the rest of the time that I have to live, that I never, never have to see something , or go through that, because you sit back and you wonder, now how could you? Now here's an example. My cousin from Trenton, New Jersey, her husband was hurt on the highway. Three men were working on the highway--you know, he's like a foreman on the highway. And an eighteen year old boy come down with this car and hit into them, killed the two men... DM: Oh, yeah, that's right! MP: Did you hear about that? DM: You said that, yes. And how does he live with himself? MP: And so, they thought that they would have to amputate his arms, so I just sat down and wrote her a nice letter, and I told her about how I understand what she is going through, you know, but I said Stella, I said, the only thing you can do, you have to give a person like that a lot of love and let them know. I said, not only you, but your children, your whole family. You have to let them know that you love them, and you want them to get better and you want them to come home. And I said, you have to do that, not only once, you have to do that every day. And I said, they get that they want to come home, they want to get better. So... GP: Like the miners, when they go inside, they don't know if they're gonna come out. DM: That's what I mean. I think I'd like to talk a little bit more about that with you. How do they feel about that? Because it is one of the most dangerous jobs, was, at least. GP: You think, they have a fire boss, now he goes through every miner's working place, and he has to test for gas. And when he tells, you, your place is safe, you can go in there and work, but then you have a safety lamp, and you go in right after him, and you test it yourself. DM: If you're a miner, you're a contract miner, you also have a safety lamp? GP: Oh, yes. They wonder how the gas got in that chamber. We generally drill eighteen feet of a hole in the center of a pillar, because you're goin' on the blind. You don't know what's ahead of you. Maybe there's water, if you should fire, maybe you, you know, drown the place out. You don't know what amount of water is back there. DM: That's what I mean. Every time you fire, you should check again, right? GP: That's right. So when we go to take a cut of coal out, we drill a center hole, eighteen feet long, see. Now when we were drillin' this one, I remember this morning because we put three six-foot sections. You drill six feet, then you take the drill off and put another section on and drill six more. The second section we were goin', it was about ten feet. The old drill went in about, you know, four or five inches, we got that jar, all at

8/23/72 Tape 12-2 --9-- 698 M/M George Petrushka interviewed by Denis Mercier (also Joe [blank])

once. So, I figured there must have been a crack in the coal, in a soft seam. Then I went in through and put the other six on, pushed it through. Joe Lee, the big superintendent, the owner of the place, was right there. So he says, George, he says, you know what, he says, just take a six foot cut. In other words, generally we would take in an eight-foot cut, see? I says, okay. Well, we drilled around a six foot. After we got them in, he was there when I tamped them, and then I was already wiring them up, and I said to my buddy Joe, I said, Take the tools down, Joe, and throw them down in the safety hole, you know? So he was carrying the tools down while I was putting the copper wires together, you know. I put the one lead on, from the blasting cap, you know, and then I just reached over for the other one, you know. When I did, and this went off, it picked me up against the pillar you know, against the face of the hole. I thought, Holy Crap, the dynamite went off or something, you know, but I was laying down, not hat, no belt, it blew everything off of me, see? And all I seen was one big red flame comin' in. I thought, Oh, oh... DM: That was where, right up here? GP: In Drifton. And my buddy, Joe, I'm lookin', I pick me head up and look, and there he is, you know, down on his knees, and he's clappin' himself like this, you know. His hair is burnin', his shirt is burnin', so I thought, Oh, oh, there's somethin' terrible out there. So I looked a little further, and that one place, that safety hole we had, that thing was really burnin'. Because that was where most of the flames were. And then the air that was gettin' from the tubey was pullin' that flame right up in towards me, up in the face. Yeah, and I could of went and snuck down, I would of went down through the air hole, you know, and went down and got in the main gangway. DM: You still would have been burned up, though, wouldn't you? GP: No, I wouldn't of been burnt. DM: You mean you weren't burnt the first time, when the blast went off? GP: No, she just pinned me up agin the face of the thing, you know, and I had to lay down like this, and the flame shot right up... DM: (the women interrupt at this point) Look, if you guys want to visit, I can go. MP: No! We have to go shoppin'. What time is it? J : Twenty-five minutes to five. GP: Oh, you's got lots of time. MP: You's got lots of time. It's open til ten o'clock. M : I had a brother that was killed in the mines, too. DM: Can we hear that? M : That was a horrible death. Tell him, Joe. DM: This is really fun-time, isn't it, tellin' about all these accidents and stuff. J : Oh, that was in the [the next word is handwritten into the typed text with a question mark after it] Everdale? Mine. M : That was horrible, too. J : He used to run a motor. He used to service the miners with empty cars. And servicing these empty cars, he always had a [the next word is handwritten into the typed text with a question mark after it] patcher?. So, workin' in the mines, you are always tryin' to learn your buddy to do the same things you are doin'. He left him run the motor. Well, and the motor has to have a trolley. Whatever happened, the motor jumped, and her brother Charley was in between the cars. He lived long enough til they took him out of the mine and to a hospital, but right there on the operating table--he was crushed, the pelvis and everything was crushed. DM: You mean he was standing and the car smashed into him?

8/23/72 Tape 12-2 --10-- 745 M/M George Petrushka interviewed by Denis Mercier (also Joe [blank])

J : That's right. DM: Yeah. M : It knocked them off the motor, when that jumped off. J : Well, yeah Julia, once it jumped off, sure, but he was standing (noise of passing car here drowns out his voice) [space] and it knocked him off. He was already crushed. So then they stopped everything, they got him together, and they always have that litter down in the bottom, you know, they put you on the litter and then take you up the slope, and then in the ambulance. But that's how that happened. Just that quick. You could snap your finger... M : They were givin' him the blood transfusion one way, and the other way it was all over the floor, just comin' right out of him. J : They were tryin' to keep him alive. He was... GP: That was, just like that King that got killed down here at Number Ten. I worked down here when he got killed. DM: King? GP: The fellow they called King, yeah. They worked two shifts down there. We were on the day shift, and then when they come in I told them not to go inside, I said We got all the coal out--we left two [the next words and question mark were handwritten into this typewritten text] sheet iron in there, you know(?) (the women begin a separate conversation at this point) ...so I guess King thought, Well, boy, look at the god-darned coal hangin'-- I seen it hangin' there myself, too, you know, but I, it was too dangerous to go and get. So he went and wrapped about six sticks of dynamite, tied them together, you know, put a short fuse on that damn thing, you know on the plank. And when he fired, the damn thing just shook it, it didn't bring it down, and he gets a bar and he goes back up there and starts pullin' with the bar...so he pulled with the bar... MP: No, I have material, but I want to make myself a dress. I want to get the buttons--because I have material for him, he wants me to make him a shirt. GP: ...she gave way... MP: So I have to get buttons for him, and I'm afraid to tackle it, because I never made a shirt. GP: ...the whole pillar. I was there in the shop, and Gaddy come... [space] MP: So I have to cut it out on a different kind of material, and if I ruin it, it's all right. It's gonna cost me about seven bucks. GP: Well, I wasn't [blank], but my boy was. Dad, he said, there was a man killed down at your work. He said, The superintendent was here, he wants you to come right down right away. MP: So I have to look around for buttons. And maybe I'll get material there. GP: So, Gee I went down, you know. And then already Gaddy's men from Drifton, I mean, Joe Lee's men from Drifton were down. And then I went in and I seen Andy Helig, and I said to Andy, Andy, I said, was he tryin' to work up in the crack? He said Yeah. He said we fired up in there, he said, we thought we'd knock it down. I said, Jeez, I told you guys not to even go in there. I said What the heck you want to pull that out? So... DM: Were you the foreman? GP: No, we both acted like leaders of the men, you know. and even we put a plank across, and put "danger--keep out", you know? That your place is finished, you're not allowed to go in. So finally, I got lookin' around. I crawled away up over top of the coal, you know, and got down behind a big clump, and I figured to myself where the end of the chute would be about. So I took and then got down on my knees, and I'm pullin' this loose coal out from under a big lump,