Don't Shoot the Birds
My father worked for West Kentucky Coal Company in 1950 and was responsible for covert operations at a large mine south of Providence, Kentucky. He was making good money and my mother was always redesigning the house. One project was to dig a cellar under the current house. During the final stages of construction there were quite a few ash blocks in the unfinished basement. Many of my friends took me blocks and built two blocks, one in every corner of the basement. Then we got our BB guns and we faced a fight. I was beaten in the back until I found out that the other side was shooting the wall behind me and the BB was moving around that cellar like madness. No one was hurt, but that ended BB B's in the basement.
My father will take me to the mines often and give me small jobs to keep me busy. Before taking over with the West Kentucky Coal Company, my father owns a small mine south of the city on the highway. 109. This was a shallow mine on the side of a hill and they used a small machete to pull the coal car out of the mine. I remember my father giving me a saw and a tube to watch, and I worked all day on this tube and I do not remember if I finished work. The mine went under the highway. 109 During one of the many additional caves in the mine highway. Fell in creating a big bump in the way.
The mine was the biggest operation to a large extent, where they froze the coal to me so that the heavy load becomes heavy and then comes with equipment underground. The tunnels then start on both sides of the cuts, avoiding the need to dig the cliffs to reach the coal. Modern equipment was used in the new mine and I was interested in a front loader. It had large arms in the front that were sweeping the coal overhead and on the carrier that was going back. Electric coal cars will return under the carrier to be loaded. One day while barefoot, I jumped on the front of the loader, felt the DC stream and bounce right again. If you have stepped on him with one foot still on the ground, I'm sure he would have killed me.
Dad let me paste the broken electrical cables that ran into mine for the equipment. We fooled the broken wire and tied it into a square knot and a few inches. Then take a roll of electrostatic rubber tape and roll the joint with the viscous side of the outbound tape. This was so you could roll the tape roll quickly around the paste until the entire roll of the tape was used. This would stand the stress by pulling wet mines.
The mother was putting her eye on a larger house just half the block up the hill in Barbour Street. It was a three story house and one of the best in town at the time. In 1951 we were made available and entered. It was fantastic, we had all our own rooms. The upstairs was previously a three-room apartment, and the kitchen was just to the right at the top of the stairs. The main bedroom was directly in front of the stairs and down to the front porch. The second bed room was on the left at the top of the stairs. My sisters got to the bedroom on the left, our parents were converted into a large bedroom and kitchen into a small bedroom for me.
The kitchen bedroom was large, and my bed was under the window overlooking the sun terrace on the side of the house. The roof on the solar terrace was flat and I could get out of my window and on the roof for a great view of the night sky. The kitchen sink remained, so I had running water in my bedroom too. Under the basin there was a loose panel removed to my secret test place. I entered the fire chimney through the middle of my bedroom and created a dressing room next to the tub and a great place to hide.
The house was heated by coal. In the downstairs corner room was the oven and charcoal room. Sliding on the side of the house allows the coal to be emptied. You could slide the sleigh into the house. The father installed a feeding feeder to feed the small coal in the bottom of the oven, and once or twice we had to extract the clinker that would accumulate from burning coal. A boiler on the stove is supplied the steam to the radiators in each room of the house. My mom reshaped the house and created an arch between the dining room and the modern kitchen on the middle floor. She also added on the large back porch and was checked. We had a Perm stone attached above the house and looked like a rock house.
There was a garage on the right side of the house. The driving method around the left side led back to the side of daylight in the basement. Concrete floor under the back porch with only one step down to the full basement. The back yard was large with a drainage channel in the middle. Space for the garden on the other side of the trench. I built nine nine-square-foot lots on a flat roof, and sometimes I had a second floor made of tobacco sticks.
The field behind the house was an old tobacco barn and a shallow pool that was a great place to play. The tobacco sticks are about half a square inch long and about 5 feet long. They used it to put it through the many wooden beams in the long barn and to hang tobacco on it. The barn was no longer used and was filled with tobacco sticks. We climbed the rafters and stacked the sticks on the floors. We also used them in the work of rafts for ponds and building fortresses. At one point, Gary Tomei, a neighboring neighbor, dug a long trench and using sticks, cardboard and scrap plates, put a roof over the ditch and covered it with dirt. I made a wonderful tunnel and hid.
My father was aware of all the old coal mines that were under the city, and when our health tank failed, he brought a rig and dug into the old mine tunnel. When the pit hit the coal belt, my father knew he was in the center of a column left to support the ceiling. Cut a few sticks of dynamite down the hole and slam the side of the shaft into the mine. After that we did not have a problem with the sewage tank again.
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