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My father worked in the mill’s stockrooms and the electric motor shop. It was there that asthma caught me in my first year and plagued me for decades. Fortunately, my parents decided to move us farther away from the towering smokestacks that fouled Monessen and the Monongahela River Valley.
Somewhat safer was the town, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Though not as smoke choked as Monessen, it was surrounded by smoldering coke ovens and cramped little coal camps when I first arrived there: Dorothy, St. Vincent’s Shaft, Lloydsville, Whitney, Hostetter, Lycippus, and so many others. Even now, decades later, coal trains rumble through Latrobe late at night on their way to electric power plants downriver near Pittsburgh. But Latrobe is now known more for its golf legend (Arnold Palmer) and its beer (Rolling Rock) than for its coal and steel, which are still produced there, albeit on much smaller scales than in the 1950s.
When I was growing up in Latrobe, we heard shocking reports of collapses of local coal mines that injured miners and sometimes buried them forever. Often we heard of sudden and rather mysterious explosions in the mills, and of other industrial accidents. I remember how the Loyalhanna Creek drained Latrobe like an open sewer—sulfurous and toxic with vomit-colored effluence from the coal mines, steel mills, and tool and die works. Filthy brown floodwaters from heavy rains in late winter flushed under the town’s bridges—sometimes even over them—with flotsam of derelict farm wagons, miner’s sheds, railroad ties, carcasses of chickens, hogs, and cows, and masses of strangely buoyant metal debris from the strip mines and mills. Low-lying coal camps—Dorothy and St. Vincent’s Shaft among them—flooded out and had to be evacuated until the floodwaters receded. Coal miners’ families were crammed into wood rowboats and pulled to higher ground by the miners and local firemen. At times like these, our teachers and our newspapers would remind us that flash floods were part of our cultural legacy in coal mining and steelmaking country. They told us yet again of an infamous flash flood in 1889 that killed more than 2,000 residents in and around Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when an earthen dam collapsed and released millions of tons of coal-mine wastewater onto low-lying coal camps. This incident had special relevance for us because Johnstown is only thirty miles “upriver” from Latrobe, and our hard-nosed high-school football teams occasionally battled theirs.2