OSAGE — Did John Powley have time to think about the baby that was still in his wife’s belly?
What about Jack Jones, the piano teacher? Was he mulling over songs and lessons? While Jones wasn’t formally trained as a music educator, he sure knew his way around those 88 keys, black and white.
And he happily taught all those coal camp kids, black and white, how to run up and down them, pounding out that boogie-woogie, eight beats to the bar.
At 2:25 p.m., on Tuesday, May 12, 1942, it ended for both men — just like that.
That was when a piece of machinery sent an electrical arc into a methane-clouded cranny of the Christopher No. 3 Mine, which was a centerpiece of the Osage coal camp at Scotts Run, near Morgantown.
The explosion tore through three sections of the mine, causing cave-ins and an even deadlier build-up of poisonous gases in the aftermath.
Investigators speculated that Powley, Jones and 51 other miners were killed outright by the blast.
Three other co-workers, those investigators said, were found to have suffocated to death as those aforementioned gases fouled the air in the ruined mine.
Saturday, the community of Osage gathered to remember, for the 80th anniversary of the disaster.
The event was hosted by the Scotts Run Museum and Trail Inc., which is headquartered at Osage.
“This is the first year we’ve marked the anniversary,” said Mary Jane Coulter, the museum’s director. “It’s pretty special.”
Attendees mingled and ate plates of pork and beans and potato salad.
The Caribbean lilt of a steel drum ensemble shared sonic space with a cover of Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ after Midnight,” performed by another singer and guitarist on the bill.
Sarah Little smiled at the musical mashup: That’s just Osage being its eclectic self, the 98-year-old said.
Little — “Sister Sarah,” to all who know her — grew up in the camp and spent several years away living and working in the Washington, D.C., area before coming back home.
“This was a great place,” she said, remembering her girlhood in the camp. “Everybody got along.”
After all, she said, that’s what you do when you’re living in a Mountain State Melting Pot.
Whites from across West Virginia and Appalachia resided in those Osage company houses on the hill when the mines were humming.
Their neighbors were Blacks up from Alabama, Italians over from Calabria and other sojourners from across oceans and borders — all here to carve their purchase of the American dream from the coal that ran, lattice-like, under the soil.
Alice Powley Demastus is the daughter John Powley never got to see. She was born two months after her dad, her uncle and her grandfather perished in the mine.
These days, she makes her home in Pinehurst, N.C., but as she says, there’s always a little bit of Osage in her heart.
She couldn’t help but brush a tear as she regarded a memorial listing the names of the 56 lost.
“I wouldn’t have missed this afternoon for anything.”
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