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20. No-Company Town Fights On
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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 [169 Line —— 4.0p —— Norm PgEn [169 They chose the name the other night—Dante Lives On. With or without the coal company. TWENTY No-Company Town Fights On Kathy Shearer: There were 350 houses served by the sewer. So there were almost 330 houses that did not have approved sewage disposal. There were a few septic systems in the community which may or may not have been functioning. The sewer cleared up that problem for 350 houses, so it was a major, huge project. And a lot of grant money and loan money were put into that. If the people of Dante had chosen not to accept the sewer, EPA would have shut down the town. At first, when I came here as a community worker, there were a few people such as Frank Gordon and Lucille Whitaker who understood that we had to have a sewer, but the majority of the people said, “We have a sewer. We have Lick Creek, had it all these years. What’s the big fuss?” And the government—EPA—thought differently. Lucille Whitaker: Me and my husband we worked on it and everything to get the sewage in—because the creek would get real low. It was terrible. I mean you had such an odor around your home. And we knew we had to do something. But a lot of people said, “We don’t want this sewage in here; we’ve got enough bills to pay.” I said, “This is our health problem; we need this sewage in here. We can’t go with all this.” And a lot of the elder people didn’t want to leave. And some of them wanted to sell their home, move out of the community. They couldn’t do it; they couldn’t sell their home because they didn’t have the sewage in here. That was the situation we was up against. Kathy Shearer: That was a major decision that everybody had to make at the beginning of the sewer project because some people said, “Why don’t we just take the money that we could get to put the sewer in and move everybody out, because there’s never going to be coal here again.” But in reality, you can’t get 169 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 [170 Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [170 money—at least we didn’t know how to—to get money to move people out. And in meeting people like Frank and Lucille and Jimmy Mays and other people, that was the furthest thing from their mind. You and I coming into this community see a community at its ebb. And we’re thinking, “Boy, who would want to stay here?” But they have all these memories built up over all these years and this history and these very tight bonds that form in a community, I think, where people work in a very hazardous occupation. And they’ve grown up through good times and bad times. And they’ve seen people die, and they’ve seen people suffer. And they’ve all fought together and worked together so hard to support each other. They don’t want to lose that. They don’t want to move to Castlewood or St. Paul, where they won’t know their neighbors. I interviewed two twins who have moved to St. Paul, and they said they see the same people they used to see in Dante, but they don’t speak to each other the way they did when they lived here. In St. Paul, it’s as if, “We’re formal now.” So we came to realize that. The community made us realize that. And we all agreed that we weren’t going to talk about that anymore. Dante needed a sewer; these people needed to stay here. There were a thousand people, I guess, between Dante and West Dante, whom we could serve with this new sewer. So we went full steam ahead for the sewer. Kathy Shearer and Frank Gordon: In...