Fire in the Hole

Archie Mullins and son, Terry Fire in the Hole by Terry Mullins Archie Mullins, a native ofKanawha County, West Virginia, worked a short period of time in the West Virginia coal mines when he was a young man. He comes from a family of coal miners, but spent most of his working life in glass factories. The working life of Mullins and his brothers in many ways parallels the changes in the economy of the region. His older brothers, French and Green Mullins, spent their whole lives as miners. Archie Mullins worked briefly in the mines, moved on to factory work, and eventually became a supervisor in a Libby-Owens-Ford glass factory. His younger brother, Gene Kirkpatrick, never worked in the mines, taking a factoryjob with an Owens-Illinois bottle plant immediately out of high school. By 1949, mechanization and automation were coming to the mines with resulting changes in working conditions and productivity. The pace of automation has quickened , and today's coal miner has a safer, tamer job than his predecessors. Still, there's something mysterious about descending into the earth to make a living. Listen now to Archie Mullins ... 57 Tom Dillon, my father-in-law, lived in Glen Rogers and he knew Ward Stewart, a mine foreman who was superintendent of the night shift. I needed a job. So I went over there and got a job through Ward Stewart. Kopperston is where I worked, near Oceana, West Virginia. I don't remember how many employees they had but they ran three shifts, six days a week most of the time. And they had two seams of coal; the lower seam was 44 inches and they used pan lines to mine the coal out, and it was all loaded by hand on a pan line. The drill boy is the guy that does the shooting and all. I was the drill boy. And you got a drill, I forgot how much it weighed, but it's pretty heavy; you put it on your shoulder. It's electrical, DC power. And you've got an auger with a detachable bit on it, so you can sharpen it. You put this bit on the end of the auger with a pin through it, and you drill. The man running the cutting machine starts out over here on the right-hand side, and you start on the left there where you won't be in his way. You drill holes about every six or eight feet apart, just depends on how you want it. Start off over on the right side and you drill holes about every eight feet, about the full-length of the bit, which is 7-1/2 feet. You drill one about a foot from the top of the seam, and then you drop down under that and you drill another hole. And you drill a pair of holes all the way across and when you get close to the man running the cutter, you just quit, move back, and go around him. By the time he's got the coal cut, I've got all the holes drilled. In the meantime, I've made dummies out of rock dust. I've got paper rolled up in a little roll and I fill it full of rock dust, and I crimp the ends. They're about a root long, and I got a whole stack of them made here in advance. In your spare time you make those. Everybody else moves the pan line up against the face of the coal where he cut it, then they timber it up with safety timbers to keep the top from falling in. Now while they're doing that, I get my powder and the ax and I start over there where I started at first, and I put a dummy in there first—that's packing. Then I put my powder in. It's not dynamite, it's powder. Dynamite blows up, powder blows down. Do you understand that? We used Monnel. I don't know whether that's a brand name or what it is, but it's powder. So, when you get how ever...