The desk clerk at the motel in Fairmont had to look twice.
“Huh?” he wondered. “What the heck was that?”
The paperclips and pens collected in that old coffee mug of his actually vibrated.
As he remembered, it was a slight, whispered whump — if, say, he had let his open palm smack lightly down on his desk — but the source of it all, some 15 miles to the north of this Marion County city and hundreds of feet underground, was anything but.
It was a cold Wednesday morning, 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 20, 1968, when Consolidation Coal Co.’s No. 9 Mine at Farmington blew.
That’s when 78 men, 54 years ago, became martyrs for an industry not known for safe working conditions.
The victims of No. 9 were West Virginia coal mining, and West Virginia history, in microcosm.
They were the sons and grandsons of immigrants who crossed oceans to carve their purchase of the American dream, in coal. Italy, Russia. Eastern Europe.
They were Appalachian kids and not-kids-anymore from the hills and hollows, and they knew what it was like to actually work for a living.
One of No. 9’s victims that morning was getting ready to do more of that, above ground.
He had put in his notice and was happily looking forward to a new life as a gas station owner. The ribbon-cutting was set for that Saturday.
Another, not yet 20, had been on the job for just eight days.
With Vietnam on his horizon, this particular young man was just happy, for the moment, to be employed full-time with a full-time paycheck — as he didn’t like the idea of being cooped up in a college classroom.
Methane and other deadly gases swirling in the subterranean air sparked the horror.
When the Llewellyn Portal blew, it set off a fatal chain reaction, and the explosions that followed caused the mine to collapse in on itself.
Those who weren’t taken by the concussion of the blasts, or who weren’t buried or crushed in the ensuing cave-ins, could only sit there, in fouled air, waiting to die.
Seventy-eight victims.
Seventy-eight funerals.
Seventy-eight families left to regard the void.
Miraculously, 21 miners survived that day.
Nineteen of the 78 who didn’t remain entombed in the ruined mine, for a half-century of forever.
Crews determined for their recovery simply, wrenchingly, couldn’t get to them.
‘It’s more meaningful, when you’re actually there’
At 1 p.m. today, a memorial service for the fallen of No. 9 will be at the Llewellyn Portal site where the first of the horrific explosions ripped through on that cold, long-ago morning.
It will be the first time since 2019 that the service will be held in person, said Adam Frye, a United Mine Workers of America field representative whose District 31 office is hosting the event.
“We’ve been holding it virtually because of COVID,” he said Friday. “It’ll be good to have people out there again. It’s more meaningful, when you’re actually there.”
The actual site, where the portal entrance was located and where many of the entombed miners are still believed to be, sits on a rise of land at the Flat Run area just north of neighboring Mannington.
A small park hugs the land and leads up to a striking memorial in marble etched with 78 names.
On the anniversary three years ago, the place was full. Frye expects more of the same today.
‘That’s just how it works’
People came out to place wreaths in honor during the 2019 service.
Chevrolet and Dodge pickup trucks with pro-union bumper stickers were parked along the side of the road leading up to the park.
Retired miners with their WVU caps, bifocals and walking sticks, greeted one another.
“Tadpole!”
“Well, hey, Jerry. How’s it’s going, brother?”
Adorned in his black robe, and with his flowing beard going with the late-autumn bluster, the Rev. Rodney Torbic, a Serbian Orthodox priest, shook hands and greeted everyone walking up to the marble with the names.
There was coffee, hot chocolate, plates of cookies — and a social studies fair-looking poster board with grim photocopies of No. 9 newspaper accounts.
Cecil Roberts, the international president of the United Mine Workers of America, raised holy hell against those intent on separating miners from their pensions and health benefits.
Down the road, as the bells of St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church pealed 78 times, Sharon Clelland, who lost her dad in the disaster, let her rich, alto ring off the hills in song: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Chris Varner held his 2-year-old daughter close and took it all in.
Varner, then 26, was one of the younger contingent of coal miners at the memorial that day.
He grew up in Hundred, Wetzel County, and entertained college after high school. He thought about jobs and careers. Then, he put on a miner’s helmet.
Gazing at those names etched in eternity, he said he wasn’t sure if he was being pragmatic or fatalistic about the whims, circumstances and forces that put them there.
“They didn’t have to die,” he said.
“But when they did, they forced the changes that made the rest of us safer. That’s just how it works in coal mining.”
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