MANNINGTON — There’s a photograph in the Dec. 6, 1968, edition of Life magazine showing a woman who wasn’t about to give up on faith. In that photograph, Juanita Mayle is singing.
Her eyes appear closed, but in acuality, she’s following the words in a hymnal.
Her image was snapped during a church service near the portal of the No. 9 Mine, near Farmington.
Mayle drove there from her home in Knottsville, Taylor County, to the coal town in northern Marion County.
That was about an hour behind the wheel on winding U.S. 250, but she wasn’t about to sit at home and wait for the news.
An explosion on Nov. 20 that year ripped through the mine. Seventy-eight miners were lost, including her husband, Hartsel Mayle.
On Sunday, several of the couple’s children — there were 17 in all and many of them still live in north-central West Virginia — again motored to the annual memorial service for those who died. Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary.
The service on the sunny, crisp fall afternoon was held on a rise of land at neighboring Mannington.
Paying respects
Around here said rise is hallowed ground, as it is believed to be atop the area of No. 9 where 19 miners still lay, entombed, hundreds of feet below. Recovery teams were never able to retrieve their remains.
Cecil Roberts, the Vietnam veteran and miner who dug his way up to the post as International President of the United Mine Workers of America, gave remarks.
So did U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a Farmington native who lost an uncle and a couple of good friends in the explosion.
With their amplified voices ringing off the surrounding hills, Roberts and Manchin railed against lawmakers and energy corporations who want to roll back the safety regulations wrought by No. 9.
Before Farmington, coal dust from mine explosions had long settled into a mourning shroud over the area — where natural forested hills shared space with the machine age.
Grim work
Down the road in Monongah, an explosion at a mine in 1907 claimed as many as 500 lives.
As many 100 of the victims may have even been children or teenagers.
By the 1920s, labor watchers and others were saying it would have been statistically safer to be roaming about on a World War I battlefield than toiling in the depths of a West Virginia coal mine — even with the bombs, bullets and mustard gas.
The mantra when mules were used in the mines went as follows:
Safety for the mule was paramount, because while a company could always hire a replacement miner, it had to buy a replacement mule.
“It’s a wonder anybody got out that mine,” Roberts said, nodding in the direction of the striking monument and its 78 names. “And now, they want to take it all away from us.”
“We’re no longer going up against coal barons,” Manchin said. “We’re fighting hedge funds and Wall Street.”
Mrs. Mayle digs in
Juanita Mayle, meanwhile, was fighting for her family.
She and Hartsel operated a working farm, on top of his employment in the mines.
“ ‘Working,’ for sure,” said their daughter, Donna Mayle, who was 16 when her father died. “Every one of us had a job to do once we got big enough.”
Donna was often in the passenger seat during those drives down U.S. 250 in the days and weeks after the disaster.
“She had every hope he was going to come out that mine alive,” the daughter said.
“That was Mom,” seconded Donna’s kid sister, Cindy Stoller.
Stoller, who has been a teacher in Preston County Schools, sadly doesn’t remember her father, she said.
She definitely remembers her mother.
Juanita Mayle was 46 when she lost her husband, but she kept the farm going, Stoller said, and she kept her kids in school. She never remarried and died in 1994.
Widows peak
Mayle, though, more than made an acquaintance with Washington, D.C.
She and the other Farmington widows made lots of trips there after the coal dust and the shock settled.
They didn’t want another mining family to go through what they did.
So they organized, lobbied and lobbied some more.
“They were heroes,” Donna Mayle said.
Heroes whose work wasn’t in vain. The Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1969.
Two years later, Hartsel Mayle’s body was finally pulled from the No. 9 mine.
