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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [123 Line —— 4.0p —— Norm PgEn [123 Which side are you on, brother? FIFTEEN The Pittston Strike of 1989–90 Dink Shackleford: I remember strikes growing up, and there was picket lines, and it was tough for me at school. My dad used to tell me, “Pick one side or the other.” There’s no middle ground on this: “Which side are you on, brother?” the old song goes.1 There’s no straddling the fence. But as long as you picked one side or the other, people respected it. You had an admiration, and it was okay. Dad’s mine was union, but Uncle Tommy was the president of the union at that time. Really, my dad and them saw the union as a way that all their workers could get a retirement plan, and enter the union and work their final days, final fifteen, twenty years, get that union retirement. My uncle Red, on the other hand, was an outlaw in the family. He used to go company thug awhile, and then he would go union thug awhile. And, boy, he was just looked down upon in the family circles. Culturally and socially, he was just unacceptable. But if you picked one side or the other, it was okay. Some of my uncles picked the union side. As long as you picked one side and stood by it, you were okay, that was respected, and everybody knew where you stood. My dad when he was little one time—I told you he was an orphan—they grew up in this coal camp, and there had been a big gun battle. Virgie, I think, was the name of the coal camp over in Harlan County, “Bloody Harlan” Kentucky. And there had been several people died and got killed. My uncle Dink, who I’m named after, crawled out of the house and crawled down the road and stole a machine gun from a dead guy and got back to the house. And after the gun battle, they sold it the next day. And he said they paid the rent for three or four months with that machine-gun money and stayed there for three more months before they had to go live with a relative. So he was kind of creative. 123 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [124 Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [124 And my dad, for the orphan that he was and started working in the mines when he was fourteen years old, went to Berea for a year and a half and had to come back home and work. He couldn’t make it on his own. So he was a pretty well educated man for the ’30s, 1930s, and pushed education on me. Of course, he didn’t think my sisters needed to go to school. They were just women and why do you need to go to school? You were just going to get married and have kids, in his mind. And they never pushed school. My mother didn’t want me to go to school. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done, I was getting in the car to go to East Tennessee State, and she was holding my arm saying, “Please don’t go.” And I had to kind of pull away from her and go to college. That’s one of my worst memories I have is doing that. It was the hardest thing I ever done, and yet it was the best thing I ever done, because it opened doors for me and the opportunities for me to go on and achieve and develop a career. But my sisters really had it rough. My older brother and sister, my brother Joe and my sister Sue were on the bus, and the school bus driver was going to put Joe off because my dad was a company man and put Joe off the bus, and my sister Sue hit him in the back of the head with a baseball bat, and knocked him out...

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