EXCERPT:
Paul Paslawsky (of Coaldale) worked for 33 years at the No. 8 colliery in Coaldale. He showed a visitor the scar on his left arm.
'I was lifting a rock up to throw it in the car and it slipped, and it cut me right there,` he said.
He often worked 800 feet underground.
`We drilled so many holes. Me and my buddy would tamp them with powder. We hooked the lines up and pushed the battery down, and we'd hear all the coal coming down the chute,` he recalled.
Paslawsky checked the gas levels in the mine by holding up a safety lantern.
`When I would go in in the morning, I would go up the chute 300 feet, maybe a little more, and check for gas,` he said. `When you see the flame going higher, get the hell down from there. There's gas there.`
It was methane gas that could ignite.
One day his work buddy was hurt when he neglected to perform the chore. `I was off that day. It was Christmas,` he said. `When the gas went off, he got thrown around all right.`
His memories are punctuated by hard coughs that snatch his breath away.
FULL ARTICLE:
To have heard Mike Sabron croon the old Irish ballad `Danny Boy` was a gift --a sweet melodious treasure.
But as the years passed, black lung disease tightened its grip on the retired Panther Valley coal miner. The poignant lyrics, once sung in a voice strong and rich, are now carried along on thin, raspy breaths.
Black lung, the brutal legacy of years of inhaling coal dust, is but one of the common bonds that bind Sabron with fellow retired coal miners Stanley Stanek and Paul Paslawsky.
The three are the final surviving members of the Last of the Panther Valley Deep Coal Miners Club. Sabron helped found the group when the last Panther Valley mine closed in 1972.
`We started out with 22 members,` Sabron whispered. `Now it's only us.`
Frank J. Karnish, president of the Panther Creek Valley Foundation, the group that operates the Lansford No. 9 Coal Mine and Museum at the site of the Lanscoal No. 9 coal mine, said the club is unique.
`Those three individuals not only represent the Lanscoal miners, they represent just about every coal miner in the Panther Valley,` he said. `Sure there are other miners stilll alive, but that club was based on Lanscoal.
`They maintain a very important camaraderie. They are typical really of every miner that ever worked in the Panther Valley or anthracite fields.`
Sabron, 88, and Stanek, 81, who live in Summit Hill, are buddies, so close they often finish each other's sentences. Paslawsky, 89, lives in Coaldale.
Most days, he sits quietly in the lobby of his apartment building, watching as people and days pass by.
Paslawsky speaks slowly and quietly. Before each short sentence, he draws a shallow breath, as much air as he can inhale. One lung is deflated, he said.
His memory is growing dim; he occasionally struggles to recall the names of friends and details of his 36 years of coal mining.
He smiled when asked of his coal mining memories. `If I were to tell you all that stuff, it would take about a year,` he said in a voice softened and thickened by decades of exposure to coal dust.
Paslawsky worked for 33 years at the No. 8 colliery in Coaldale. He showed a visitor the scar on his left arm.
`I was lifting a rock up to throw it in the car and it slipped, and it cut me right there,` he said.
He often worked 800 feet underground.
`We drilled so many holes. Me and my buddy would tamp them with powder. We hooked the lines up and pushed the battery down, and we'd hear all the coal coming down the chute,` he recalled.
Paslawsky checked the gas levels in the mine by holding up a safety lantern.
`When I would go in in the morning, I would go up the chute 300 feet, maybe a little more, and check for gas,` he said. `When you see the flame going higher, get the hell down from there. There's gas there.`
It was methane gas that could ignite.
One day his work buddy was hurt when he neglected to perform the chore. `I was off that day. It was Christmas,` he said. `When the gas went off, he got thrown around all right.`
His memories are punctuated by hard coughs that snatch his breath away.
One recent day, Sabron and Stanek sit in Sabron's immaculate, austere kitchen.
A picture of the Holy Family hangs on a wall. A hunk of coal sits atop the dishwasher. The gleaming white appliances are vintage and spotless.
The house is comfortable, yet longs for a woman's touch.
Sabron's wife, Edyth Tee, whom he married in 1936, died of cancer 16 years ago.
`She was a saint,` he said of the woman who was named Miss Panther Valley in 1934 and later bore him five children.
They met in 1933, just before Sabron left for an 18-month stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps. President Roosevelt formed the corps in 1933 to provide work for young men during the Great Depression. The corps built bridges and improved state parks and forests.
`I met her the night before I went to the CCC camp. She was only 16,` he said wistfully. `She was beautiful. Beautiful. She had coal-black hair. Whoever met her fell in love with her.`
Sabron is struggling through the final stages of black lung and his eyesight is rapidly deteriorating. Stanek drives him to his frequent doctor appointments and to the local senior citizens center, where they hang out.
`We do good deeds for each other,` Sabron said.
Known as `Crow,` Sabron started bagging coal soon after graduating from high school in 1931. He worked for three years before he and Stanek joined the CCC.
After his stint, he went back to bagging coal, a job that exposed him to heavy clouds of coal dust.
The coal cars would empty into hoppers. Sabron would fill bags -- 13, 17, 18, 25, 50 pounds -- by sticking the bag under the mouth of the funnel-shaped hopper. The bags were wired shut and sent via conveyor to waiting boxcars.
He stayed at the bagging plant until 1940, when he joined the No. 9 mine. The coal industry, which began to thrive in the early 1800s, helped fuel the Industrial Revolution by providing cheap and efficient heat and energy.
The mines were the backbone of the Panther Valley economy. Anthracite reigned until the early 1950s, when many home and factory owners turned to oil for energy.
Sabron stayed, working at No. 9 until it closed in 1972.
He worked many jobs. One was a mule driver. `I was almost killed a few times with them,` he said. `A mule stepped on my foot and had me pinned against the side. I tried to put a harness on him and -- he was a new one -- he just went wild.`
He also tended to the muckers, the men who shoveled loose dirt and rock as miners blasted their way into fresh veins of coal. The debris, or muck, was loaded into cars and pulled out by mules. Sabron later worked dumping coal cars and loading coal.
When the mines, then owned by Lehigh Coal and Navigation Co., temporarily closed in March 1954, Sabron painted houses and worked on an auto assembly line in Linden, N.J. He returned when they opened again in December.
The company leased the mines to other operators, the last being the Lanscoal Company, which closed them in 1972 when it could not meet government standards for safety and environmental protection and remain profitable.
The Lanscoal No. 9 mine, which opened in 1855 and closed June 22, 1972, was documented by the United Mine Workers of America as the oldest operating anthracite deep mine in the world.
Stanek went to work in the No. 6 mine in the early 1940s. He, too, worked in the mines through 1972.
Among other jobs, Stanek worked as a mucker.
`It was bulldog work,` he said. `There was five of us: One mucker boss and four hand muckers. We had to muck that up into the cars. It was hard work. Later, we had an electric mucking machine. That's when mucking was a pleasure.`
One day in 1952, Stanek was working on the east side of the mine when a pocket of methane gas exploded in the west side.
`They were driving these long holes and it was a very gassy place. They worked careless --it was the last day before vacation. They never checked for gas.`
The resulting rush of air knocked Stanek down and picked him back up, he said.
Four men died. `One guy we couldn't find. The next day, we found 16 pounds of him,` Stanek recalled. `It was a horrible experience.`
By the early 1960s, he and Sabron both worked in the No. 9 Lanscoal mine in Lansford.
Nuns from local convents would visit the mines to pray with the men and offer spiritual solace. `They would come in once a year,` Stanek said.
Every morning, the miners paused at the mine chapel and said a little prayer.
`We'd say a prayer when we came out, too,` Stanek said.
Injuries and death were common. For many years, the nearest hospital was in Ashland, Schuylkill County, hours away by horse-drawn wagon or early automobile.
`Just imagine what them poor miners went through when they were hurt,` Sabron said, shaking his head.
It is a Last of the Panther Valley Deep Coal Miners Club tradition that when a coal miner dies Stanek takes some of the lumps of coal from Panther Valley mines he has stored in his yard and arranges them in a cross on the man's coffin.
`There's 14 pieces of coal, one for each station of the cross in church,` he said.
The stations are tableaus that represent each significant marker of the day of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, from his death sentence to the placement of his body in the tomb.
Despite the hardships, the dust, danger and backbreaking labor, the men are proud of their years in the mines.
`It was the best job I ever had in my life,` Sabron said.
In 1976, he designed the coal miners monument in John F. Kennedy Park in Lansford.
A life-size coal car and names of the men who worked in the deep coal mines are etched in its granite face.
`We built this valley,` Sabron said. `The coal miners built this valley.`
