Start of a Legend?

Oneida (pop. 500) and Sheppton (pop. 1,100) are bleak little towns about a mile apart in the worked-out anthracite fields of eastern Pennsylvania. The women age fast while their men scrabble for a living in bootleg mines--tiny, independent operations that ignore rigid safety standards. From one such mine, dug into the side of the hill that separates Oneida and Sheppton, two men were rescued last week after nearly 14 incredible days of imprisonment beneath the earth's surface.

David Fellin, 58, a co-owner of the single-entry mine, was running his operation on two three-man shifts. On Tuesday, Aug. 13, Fellin, Louis Bova, 54, and Henry Throne, 28, who was new to the job, descended 330 ft. into the ground, began loading coal. Then the roof fell in. Bova was separated by rock and debris from Fellin and Throne. He shouted through the rubble that his hip had been hurt. After that, he was heard no more.

Blue Light. In their underground prison Fellin and Throne crawled in the darkness, shivered with cold, kept trying to rouse an answer from Bova in vain.

In their fear, they suffered hallucinations: once, both thought they saw two men with them in the cavern; Fellin and Throne called for a light and the men vanished. Another time they saw a door rimmed in blue light, with marble steps behind. At one point Throne screamed: "Davy, I'm going home! I'm going alone if you don't want to come." They drank brackish, sulphurous water, ate the bark off timbers that had been used to shore up the roof.

After five days, rescue workers finally succeeded in drilling a small hole to the trapped miners. A microphone was lowered, and Fellin and Throne crawled toward it, crying: "Here we come! Here we come!" But at that very moment, when they thought their rescue was imminent, their ordeal was less than half over.

Food, flashlights and tools could be sent down to them. These sustained life--and sanity. But the passage that had been drilled was not nearly wide enough in diameter for a human body, no matter how emaciated, to pass through it. In trying to drill a shaft wide enough, the rescuers ran into endless, maddening failures. While families and friends of the trapped miners, along with more than 200 newsmen, gathered around in agonized vigil, the rescue team's drill bit deeper toward Fellin and Throne. With every turn of that drill the danger increased that the rescue efforts would cave in what remained of the roof of that underground, pick-hewn grotto in which Fellin, Throne and, surely not too many feet away, Lou Bova, had been trapped.

Finally, delicately, near the end of the eleventh day, the drill bit nuzzled through the underground prison's rooftop. Now the diameter of the rescue shaft had to be widened to 18 in. Then on the 14th day, down through that shaft came two pairs of coveralls, to which parachute harnesses had been sewed. Fellin and Throne wordlessly put on the costumes, smeared each other with grease that had also been lowered to them. Throne went first, attaching his harness to a line from a hoist on the surface. A few minutes later Dave Fellin surfaced, bearded, grizzly and happy, singing: "She'll be comin' round the mountain . . ."

Another Sound. To the townsfolk, Fellin and Throne were heroes. Indeed, to men everywhere, their indomitable will to survive was the stuff of which legends are made. But toward week's end, the wreathed smiles began turning to grim criticisms. Fellin complained that he and Throne could have been saved in five days, not 14, if only the rescuers had gone properly about their business. In turn, Pennsylvania's Deputy Secretary of Mines Gordon Smith, who directed rescue operations around the clock, leveled a blast at Fellin. "The miners in this operation," said he, "were removing pillars of coal left all these years to support a worked-out mine. Fellin showed he doesn't know all there is to know about mining by getting himself in this predicament." These contentions made even more chilling the sound of another drill as rescue workers tried to reach Louis Bova--or his body.

In Moab, Utah, an unexplained explosion trapped 25 men 2,700 ft. deep in one of the world's biggest potash mines. Seven workers built a barricade of tubing and burlap to trap pockets of fresh air for themselves while rescuers gingerly worked their way down into the shaft. The seven were saved--but 18 others perished.

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