Coal & Irony ^

Enoch Kuklinskie Jr. was 35, married and a coal bootlegger. He and his 60-year-old father got their livings from a hole on a mountainside north of Shamokin in the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. The hole was on Stevens Coal Co. property which was not being worked. Like 3,500 other unemployed miners around Shamokin, the Kuklinskies mined coal on company property, called themselves bootleggers. The company called them thieves. Like the others they made about $4 a day digging coal out of abandoned shafts, selling it to independent truckers. And like other bootleggers they never bothered much about timbering the shafts. If the company tried to drive them away, as it occasionally did, by dynamiting their holes, the bootleggers had a trick of staying in the holes, daring the company men to use their dynamite.

One morning last week Enoch Kuklinskie and his father were working with pick & wheelbarrow about 65 ft. below the surface when they heard the rotten timbering begin to crack. They filled up the wheelbarrow once more. On the way out Father Kuklinskie heard the earth breaking up over his head, felt it falling on his shoulders. He ran, dragging his pick to safety. But in one glance backward he saw Son Enoch flop under the wheelbarrow as the avalanche of coal and rock descended.

Hastily to Superintendent George H. Jones of Stevens Coal's Cameron Colliery ran 60 dirty men, pleading for help for their fellow bootlegger. Well aware of the irony of having thieves beg aid from their victims, Superintendent Jones barked: "He is one of your own people, why not get him out yourselves?"

But a trapped miner was a trapped miner, and Superintendent Jones called his foreman, assembled timber, tackle and a squad of miners for the rescue. All that day and the following night the rescuers could hear faint sounds from Enoch Kuklinskie. They were afraid that wet clay dripping from the shaft walls would fill up the air holes in the rubble before they reached him. Next morning they got him free, hoisted him out of the shaft on a board.

Superintendent Jones promptly mustered another crew of company miners for another purpose. On North Mountain they went from one bootleg coal hole to another, grimly dynamited every one. Before Enoch Kuklinskie died of a broken back that evening Stevens Coal Co.'s Shamokin properties were sealed against illegal entry for a long time.

Coal bootlegging is a Depression answer to mass unemployment. The entire U. S. anthracite industry is concentrated in 500 sq. mi. in Pennsylvania. In this one-industry area the closing of a big colliery may end the only payroll in a coal town. One by one the collieries have been closed because the U. S. now burns less than two-thirds the anthracite it used ten years ago. For this there are many reasons, including strikes, high prices and poor merchandising, which have conspired to advance the competitive position of fuels like oils, gas, coke. In 1924 total anthracite sales were 80,300,000 tons. Last year they were roughly 52,000,000 tons.

Thrown out of their only possible jobs, the miners at first merely went trespassing for their family fuel. But it was not long before the possibilities of an "honest" living turned them to serious mining. In small groups they rigged up ramshackle hoists, belted crude shakers to old automobiles, chopped down any handy trees for what little underground timbering they did. Their mines are death traps, conforming to no health or safety laws.

For markets bootleggers use independent truckers, who load at the mouth of the bootleg mine, deliver throughout the East. Last winter 2,500 tons of bootleg coal per day was pouring into the New York City area alone. In some cities bootleg coal has completely disrupted ordinary distribution because truckers undercut local coal men by $2 per ton. With 15,000 miners and 5,000 truckers at work, the bootleg coal industry now accounts for nearly 10% of total U. S. anthracite production.

Bootleg sales last year are estimated at $32,000,000. And while legally there is no doubt that bootleggers are simply stealing coal from other people's property, the illicit business has brought back at least a semblance of prosperity to the blighted coal towns. Local sympathy is with the bootleggers. Dynamite for their work can be bought at almost any hotdog stand. Law officers will not arrest, grand juries will not indict, petit juries will not convict.

There have been cases of one bootlegger suing another for trespassing on "his" property. The same Stevens Coal Co. that rescued Enoch Kuklinskie last week once sent a steamshovel to begin stripping operations preparatory to open pit mining, had it blown up by indignant bootleggers already on the spot. At least one bootlegger has sued a company for seizing its own coal on its own property from the bootlegger's pile.

Pennsylvania's Governor Earle, like Governor Pinchot before him, is on the bootleggers' side. Urgent pleas from the operators for state intervention in the form of state police have been ignored, and the operators have talked of taking their case to the Federal Government on the ground that the State is unable to enforce law & order. Politics being what it is, they are unlikely to get much comfort from President Roosevelt.

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