99% Invisible - 275- Coal Hogs Work Safe

Episode Date: September 13, 2017

Coal miner stickers started out as little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s, when mining safety laws started requiring reflective materials underground, miners used those stickers to stay visible to each other in the dark mines. As time passed, the stickers evolved. They became more personal and started to tell miners’ stories. And the mine companies themselves started printing stickers for their workers. Stickers went from simple ads to signifying an identity. And as their role changed, stickers also came to serve as a kind of currency among miners. Coal Hogs Work Safe

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Ronnie Johnson still remembers the first time he went underground. He and a handful of other coal miners piled into a little trailer and descended into the mine. We were going down through there hitting the bumps and running over little rocks and stuff. And I remember laying in that little trailer and the roof was actually so close to me that the build of my heart had with almost 50 root. When they got down to the bottom, Ronnie's boss handed him a wrench and told him to open a nearby water line, but someone had forgotten to cut the water off.

The water just started spraying me. It just sprayed all in my face and all over me out of something wet and it's like I just like fell up against the real you know the wall or cold and I thought to myself what have I done. As a new minor in a dangerous industry Ronnie had to go through an intensive orientation process before this first trip underground. That's producer Irene Zhorov. Ronnie is actually my partner's father. He lives in Northern Alabama, and on a recent visit as the family cooked dinner, Ronnie and I went out to his workshop, where he

likes to sit and smoke, with only the dogs and cicadas for company. He told me about how he sat through 40 hours of training and safety classes before going down into the mines. At the end, he was issued a hard hat that identified him as a rookie. The hard hat was yellow. It was like you stood out from here to the road, you know. It was terrible. It was terrible. Was it terrible because you'd get like crap from the other men? Oh yeah, yeah. Everybody knew you were a rookie, you know.

And just, you know, practical jokes. Just nothing serious, but. In addition to this terrible yellow hard hat, the safety man at his mind also gave him a sticker. Yeah, it was this sticker right here. It's a red rhombus about two by two inches with a reflective white center. ABC and says always be careful.

But ABC was a company named Alabama byproducts Corporation. Ronnie got a few of these stickers back then. He put one in a box and one on his brand new yellow hat. This was just the beginning of Ronnie's sticker collecting. After 34 years as a minor, he now has several photo albums filled with thousands of stickers. Some are inside jokes. Some commemorate big events at work.

Lots of other coal miners across the country have collections just like Ronnie's. Miners use these stickers for safety and for communication and as a kind of currency down in the mines. It was just what coal miners did, you know. Tits collect baseball cars, you know coal mines, you know that's all you had really to collect, you know, was coal mines stickers, so.

One of the darkest of all working environments, underground mines. Since the beginning of underground mining, one of the biggest dangers in the workplace has been the darkness. Coal miners of today would shudder at the thought of using some of the early methods of coal mine illumination. Well into the era of industrial society, miners were still using open flames as their only source of light. The darkness makes accidents more likely, and even though technology has improved to make mines brighter and safer, it's still an issue. The culture of mining to a certain degree has been shaped by the level of risk involved.

Work cultures have very strong cultures, especially ones that face danger, like mining, firefighting, police work, the military, deep sea fishing, et cetera. This is Elaine Cullen. She's an occupational ethnographer, and she spent a lot of time with miners, like actually down in the mines with them.

Mining has a very strong culture and I think the reason is because people who work underground are well aware of the fact that every day you go in, you don't know if you're coming out. The first time Cullen went down into a mine, she was told that she had to have something reflective on her hard hat. There's a lot of heavy machinery moving around, from buses to the shears, roof bolters, and other tools used to extract coal. People get hit, they get run over, they get crushed by mobile equipment. And so reflective material increases the visibility of the people underground. We put strips of reflective tape on the back of our hard hats, but then it became pretty obvious that other people had other things on their hard hats, and these were stickers.

The stickers had originally been little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s, when mining safety laws started requiring reflective materials underground, miners used those stickers to stay visible to each other. But as time passed, the stickers evolved. They became more personal and started to tell miners stories. And the mine companies themselves started printing stickers for their workers. They went from simple ads to signaling and identity. These are sort of, they're symbols, symbols of the mining industry and that you're part of it, that you're a miner.

After a year in the Alabama mine, Ronnie swapped out his yellow hardhat for a black one, which meant he was no longer a rookie. With that, came more stickers. The stickers always came in twos. One went on his hard hat, which he actually brought out to show me. So where's your six inches of reflective tape? I probably covered all mine up with stickers. You can see all the album stickers on it, you know? The other sticker he saved for his growing collection. A minor showed Ronnie how to keep the stickers organized, so each week he'd sit down and put the new stickers in an album.

What's this one? That's the Grand Reaper, it looks like, don't you? keep the stickers organized. So each week he'd sit down and put the new stickers in an album. What's this one? That's the Graham Reaper, it looks like, don't it? It says UMWA, actually a union sticker. I'm sure it's got something to do with Black Long. Managers and the safety man at his mind gave him stickers with the mind name on them, and his union gave him stickers with union messages on them. One of his favorite stickers has the state of Alabama outlined in red, and inside it says, Alabama coal miner. That's kind of a pride thing, though. You know, Alabama coal miner.

As he gained more experience, he got stickers commemorating his accomplishments. He worked at a company early on that counted the amount of coal mined by the number of cars filled during a shift. Something like 100 cars was OK. But Ronnie has a sticker that says his team mined 150 cars in one shift. And then these stickers says 150 car club with a little playboy bunny on there. He also has one commemorating 225 cars in a shift,

which is a big deal. You can have a big run in the next night, you're outside and all the guys that didn't have such a good run or whatever and your boss is going around giving you these stickers and it was just kind of been a sin if thing. A number of major mind safety laws were passed in the US, and Elaine Cohen started working at a new agency that was responsible for studying and enforcing safety in the mines. For years, she researched mining culture. In the 2000s, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of Federal Agency hired her to develop a safety training program for coal miners. By that time, she knew who she was dealing with. So she knew she might be facing some skepticism from the miners she was trying to reach. I don't look like a miner. I'm a woman,

and most of them are not. So getting them to work with me, especially when I was a representative of the federal government, and you know, they are a little dairty to, you know, work with the government. But Elaine had seen that the miners were really into these stickers, and she figured she could use them to gain their trust and to convey messages about safety. But she knew just putting work safe on a sticker wouldn't cut it. She needed something to grab the miners' attention.

We were working out in Eastern Kentucky. It was a mining community with deep cultural ties to coal, and she started to notice something. She'd be walking along with the safety guy. And as we would approach another miner, he would squeal like a pig. I finally asked him, I said, Jesse, what's going on here? Why are they doing that? And he said, oh, they're just saying they know I'm a coalhog. And I said, what is a coalhog? And he's a coalhog is hungry for coal, greedy for coal.

Can't ever get enough. Meaning that you're a good minor. So Elaine took the idea and designed a sticker with a big muscular pig with a hard hat on, and it says coalhogs work safe. So what we were doing is putting those two ideas together, that you can be a coalhog, but you can also work safely. The miners loved it. Oh gosh, I think we printed 3,000 to begin with, and I have I have one little packet left that I'm kind of keeping as a you know, keep safe. Some of Colin's other designs were duds. Her team made one with a dead canary. Canaries were once used to check for bad air in a mine, but that was a long time ago, and the younger miners didn't get it. Other stickers catering to

the raunchy humor in the mines didn't pass muster with her bosses in the federal government. For example, they designed one sticker to remind miners to check for gas in the mines. So, this one was at the back end of a donkey and had the donkey kind of looking back at you and it said, don't be an ass, check for gas. And kind of had this little cloud coming out. Gas can be really dangerous underground and donkeys were once used to carry coal out of the mines. No, oh boy, the folks in Washington didn't like that one, but the miners loved it.

Unless Elaine visited your mine, it'd be hard to get one of these stickers. A lot of the stickers were specialized or localized depending on what organization or company designed them. That's part of what made collecting them fun. I have over 26,000 different stickers in my collection. And I've kind of come to believe that you either are a collector or you're not. And if you're not a collector, you just don't get it. And if you are a collector, you just really can help yourself. This is Lenny Hanner.

And I'm a coal miner from Southern Illinois. Lenny has worked in coal mines for 40 years. He's a major sticker collector. At the height of his collecting in the 1980s, he'd exchanged stickers with other collectors across the country and go to sticker swaps almost every weekend. Those are meetups where miners exchanged pieces. Lenny says unique stickers were like currency in the mines, a way to buy or sell favors and help. For instance, say you're a trucker and you rolled up to the mines with a big load of supplies. You asked some of the miners to help you unload. The first thing they wanted to know is, do you have any stickers? Without stickers, the miners wouldn't exactly rush to help. So they all learned that they had stickers in that truck when they arrived, and that's

tend to get unloaded a whole lot faster that way. Lenny still works from mining company, but above ground these days. He lives in an old mining town and a house that was once owned by a mining company, and he's got a full room devoted to mining memorabilia. I'm married to the most understanding woman in the world. He keeps his stickers in 27 albums organized by type of sticker. The ones printed by mining companies, the ones equipment manufacturers gave out,

the ones focused on safety and union issues. Some of them are especially sentimental. I have a sticker that I got from a friend of mine and he recently passed away and I have just a couple stickers in my collection that really make me think of him when I see them. The sticker albums function just like photo albums, reminding minors of their milestones and stories. They are just little pieces of our history, of our past little momentos. I guess maybe like a postcard if you travel that you might pick up a postcard that reminds you of something from the past. We can just see our past mining history there on the pages of the album.

Of course, just like with photos, some of the darker memories don't end up in the album. In 2011, after more than 30 years in the mines, my partner's dad Ronnie had an accident. We were living a thousand miles away and paced around in my living room as news trickled in. We eventually learned that his hand got pulled into a machine, and it took a finger. Down in Alabama, he was rushed to a hospital. He was told to call his wife, Deborah. At first, he didn't want to call, what happened in the mine stayed in the mine, but the nurse insisted, and Deborah happened to be nearby.

I remember Deborah looking at me when she came in the room and said, Ronnie, Johnson, how did you get so dirty? You know, like, I mean, I'd been getting that wife for years. And I guess she had never saw me. I had on my rubber boots and my face was all black and my hand was all wrapped up in the bandage. He'd never really shared much about his life in the mind with his family. I guess they had never saw me like that. I didn't tell them what I went through.

The sticker albums stacked up in his cozy house, only tell their stories to those who know how to read them. Ronnie says before he lost his finger, he'd gone 31 years without spending a night in the hospital. He'd never written in an ambulance, and never had an accident in the mind that made him lose work hours. I called up for all those 31 years and one night, you know. Ronnie never got a sticker for that.

So what do you do with a mind that's no longer productive? Lots of things that turns out. Kohlstedt tells us about his favorite examples of adaptive reuse after this. We were attracted to the coal miner stickers because it was this cool way that design and the culture of mining intersected and it brought to mind another interesting juxtaposition of design and abandoned minds that Colestead wrote about on the website, So I asked him to come in the studio and talk about it. I think a lot of people tend to have this idea that minds are these, you know, rickety, dangerous places to go, you know, with rotting timber frames holding up sections of tunnel

that could collapse on you at any moment. The reality is a lot of minds are much bigger than that and much more stable than that and really have promising futures Doing much different things than they were designed for was a good example So one example would be there's this really cool mine in Romania that was actually first mind for salt Nearly a thousand years ago and it's been used on an office of salt mine ever since so it's really deep and it's really complex And recently they decided we're gonna turn this into an attraction. So they made it a museum, they made it kind of a theme park,

you can go down there and like, boat around on the swatter and the pictures are just sort of mesmerizing. They've really lit this place up. So you can go down and really give a sense of the geology but also just have this kind of fun experience underground. Cool. Are there any in the US? Yeah, in Kansas, there's a data center.

It's a little less exciting, but a little more functional on a sort of data-to-day basis that essentially uses the natural, you know, even temperatures and the protection of this mind space, old limestone mind space, to how is it servers? And you can imagine, you know, if you're just trying to keep these servers running, you know, during any kind of weather, the perfect place is just to tuck them on the ground. Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense to me.

And there's also a research facility that is doing experiments on dark matter, far underground in South Dakota in an old gold mine. It's about a mile deep. And it turns out that there's a lot of particles that sort of just float through space and bombard our atmosphere on a pretty regular basis and Getting below the surface they can get away from a lot of that noise and have a lot more of a kind of clean experiment. Yeah, totally. Yeah That makes a ton of sense. Well, that's so cool. Yeah, and you know if they decided to destroy the universe at least they're a mile underground Yeah, I mean yeah, right? I hope the hope is that they'd only just destroy their lab and amount or something. Right. Well, there you go.

So what's your favorite example? So my favorite is probably the Louisville Mega Cabern, which is this huge, huge underground space in Louisville, Kentucky. If you buy the argument that it's now a building, it's the largest building in Kentucky at about four million square feet. And basically this mine opened in the 1930s. The dugout limestone for decades, really carved this thing out.

In the 1960s, they actually talked about using it. It's a fallout shelter in case the Cuban Missile Crisis went the wrong way. And they were planning to pack like tens of thousands of people in there. And then eventually it sort of fell into discus. And some investors came along and said, hey, we could do something with this. And they did.

Basically they bought this thing. And they started putting businesses in there. They started using it for storage because it's sort of, you know, temperature stable. It's a good place for storage. And then they did something kind of weird. And they started adding all all these kind of theme park elements to it. So you can go take tram tours of the underground,

you can go take zipline tours, there's a ropes course. At the heart of it all, one of the biggest functions is this huge, huge 300,000 plus square foot bike park. And it's like a BMX bike park with like a yellows and jumps and all that stuff. And they build those out of all the sort of fill that was already carved out and sort of laying around from the minors, right? So all they have to do is just kind of pick up the dirt here, shovel it over there, and

they can make entirely new courses. Oh, it's so cool. Yeah. And we have some pictures of these on our website. Oh, yeah, we've got a bunch of pictures and some video of this on the website. Awesome. Well, thanks so much. That's so cool. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Arina Jeroff with Delaney Hall, Tech Production and Mixed by Sri Fusaf, Music by Sean Rial. Our senior editor is Katie Mingle. Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

Rest of the staff is Avery Trouffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of radio-topia at 91.7Kale, W. San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row. In Beautiful, Downtown, Oakland, California. You can find 99% of visible and joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PIorg, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But our beautiful home on the internet, with more design stories than we could ever tell you inside this podcast is our website, 99PI.org.

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