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Wade Hall 601 Kathy Kahn “How I Got My Schoolgirl Figure Back” Kathy Kahn is a freelance journalist, author, community organizer, and country singer from the mountains of northern Georgia. Kahn conducted a series of interviews for her oral history Hillbilly Women (1985), and one of her subjects was the labor organizer Granny Hager. Born and bred in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky , Granny Hager brought an eloquent voice to the black-lung controversy of the 1960s. She tried desperately to get the coal miners of Perry County to organize a union to obtain a living wage and decent working conditions in the mines. In the selection that follows, we witness the age-old struggle between miners and mine operators through the eyes of Granny Hager. h At one time we was solid union here. But what the coal operators did, they would come around and say, “Well boys, I’m losing money, I just can’t work it this way. If you all will take a cut, we’ll work on, and if you don’t, we’re going to have to shut down.” Naturally the men would take a cut. First thing they knew, they were down to working for nothing. They were working for seven, eight dollars a day. And that’s the way the coal operators busted the union and got the men to work for nothing. So we set up. I believe it was about ’62. We set up the Appalachian Committee for Full Employment. The United Mine Workers Union in New York sent a man in here, to see what we could do undercover, see if we could get the miners organized and then bring it all out in the open. We talked up this roving picket idea, and we went to work. Where we knowed there was un-union mines, we went in time enough to catch the day shift as it went in and the night shift as it went out. We’d ask the miners to sign the checkoff, to come out with us for more money. Well, most of them would sign it, you see, and they’d turn around and go back home, they wouldn’t go back in the mine. One morning real early, we decided to leave out from the union hall in a motorcade and go out and picket. We left the union hall at two-thirty that morning to hit Southeast Coal Company in Knott County. Me and Ashford Thomas, we was riding in the front car and we dropped in over there. But when we’d got about fifteen miles from the mines, the snow was just about 601 602 The Kentucky Anthology that deep and that high. And, boy, did we have a narrow road to drop down into the mines. So me and Ashford and the rest went on. Whenever nobody else wouldn’t ride in the front car going in, me and Ashford, that was all the sense we had, we’d take the lead. So we caught the night shift as it went out and the day shift as it went in. Well, Southeast, they was a hundred and thirty-seven men a-workin’ up there. We asked them to sign the checkoff. And a hundred and thirty-six of them signed it and come back with us. There wasn’t but one that wouldn’t sign it. So now the UMW was supposed to give the union men each a twentyfive -dollar check. And from then on the union was supposed to give them fifty dollars a week to feed their families on as long as they stayed out. That evening we went back on down to the union hall. We’d always go down there after one of these runs and make our plans for the next morning. Well, we decided we’d hit Charley Combs’s mine over on Big Creek the next morning. When the morning come, we changed our mind and decided to go back up the other way again. So back we went, but we didn’t do so good this time. Just as soon as we got out of the driveway at the union hall, they was a whole bunch of highway patrols fell in behind us. And they cut in between our cars. They tried to arrest Ashford. He walked down to their car and they said something or other smart to him. He told them, he said, “If you were...

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