| That coalfield
spirit
by
Peter Galuszka
Virginia
Business
March 2003
When it comes to the Appalachian coalfields, I always
get sentimental. Back in 1962, when I was in fourth
grade, my family moved to central West Virginia from
the Washington suburbs. My dad was retiring from the
Navy and had decided to join a medical practice in Harrison
County. Living in affluent Montgomery County, Md., my
sister and I went to a school where no one was poor
and we took French.
When
I entered fifth grade, I was in for a shock. It was
the first time I had ever dealt with poor people in
a poor state. Our arithmetic textbooks had been handed
down from pupil to pupil since they were published in
1903. Occasionally, my classmates would leave school
unexpectedly — their fathers had been killed in
coal mine accidents. On weekends, my friends and I would
hike for miles along the ugly brown gashes left by strip
miners on the hills. Coal there was high in sulfur,
so the strip mines had plenty of yellow-colored rain
puddles surrounded by the bones of small animals.
I
came to truly admire the local people. They were kind,
proud and dry-witted. But fate had gone against them.
Had their ancestors been tougher with the sharpies from
Pittsburgh and Baltimore and Knoxville when they sold
away their mineral rights, they could have had wealth
on the scale of today’s Saudi Arabia.
So,
when we at Virginia Business decided to take a look
at the coalfield region of Southwest Virginia, I took
the assignment. I had great luck with my photographer.
It just so happened that Malcolm Linton, with whom I
had worked as a correspondent in Russia, was available.
A Briton now living in New York City, Malcolm has tons
of experience in hard places. He’s seen a lot of
combat in places such as Georgia, Panama and Chechnya
and spent months traveling through sub-Sahara Africa
taking pictures of AIDS victims for Science magazine.
Ever the perfectionist, Malcolm wasn’t happy with
the first set of photos he took inside a Tazewell County
mine with me under difficult lighting conditions. So,
at his own trouble and expense he traveled back there
from New York and did it over.
We
have other adventures in this issue as well. Senior
Editor Bob Burke spent a night in a Richmond police
car patrolling a rough neighborhood for a piece on crime
in the capital. Technology writer Garry Kranz hitched
a ride on a Norfolk Southern locomotive to write about
how advanced technology keeps shipments on time.
As
for me, I saw a lot in common with the people of Southwest
Virginia and Harrison County – the same grit, determination
and generosity. How’s Harrison County doing? Well,
I went back there for a story for BusinessWeek a few
years ago. A high school friend of mine heads the county
commissioners, most of the underground mines have closed
and all of the abandoned strip mines have been cleaned
up. There are many small technology firms, and the FBI
has opened a fingerprint center, employing hundreds.
Lives there are a lot brighter today than they were
41 years ago.
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