Employees received approximately ten dollars a week for working seventy hours. In 1934 they organized Local Union No. 510 and went on strike. The men wanted more money for shorter hours. Mr. Haldeman refused to meet with union representatives. Court documents quoted him as saying: “I will shut the damn thing down, and let it sit there, and possibly the rust will eat it up.”
The Rowan County judge sent a detachment of the National Guard to the brickyard, along with seventy-five local “deputies.” Plant operations resumed. Thirty-six men were denied a return to work. All of their names had appeared on a secret list obtained by a private investigator working for the company. In 1938 Kentucky Fire Brick lost a lawsuit filed on behalf of those men. Incensed at being legally forced to reinstate his workers, Mr. Haldeman sold the company to U.S. Steel. Included in the sale were the elementary school, parts of the railroad, a blacktopped portion of the old Main Road, several houses, vast acres of mined-out land, and in a very real sense, the people who lived there. Able-bodied men with families moved elsewhere for jobs. Most of the people who stayed had a disability, owned their own land outright, or received a military pension.
The surnames of the men named in the 1938 lawsuit were as follows: Adkins, Bailey, Christian, Davis, Eldridge, Evans, Glover, Hall, Hogge, Lewis, Messer, Oney, Parker, Pettit, Rakes, Sparks, Sturgell, Stinson, Sparkman, Stamper, Sammon, Stewart, Thomas, White, and Wilson. I recognize every name, having grown up with their descendants.
My understanding of the town’s decline was simple—ungrateful workers were to blame. I didn’t realize until much later that all the profits from Kentucky Fire Brick went out of state and that families didn’t own the mineral rights to their property. Lunsford Pitt Haldeman was the scion of a wealthy Ohio family who inherited Kentucky land. Under pressure to become an entrepreneur, he hired a childhood friend to run the company while he stayed in Ohio.
My hometown was nothing more than a business enterprise. When its profitability began to wane, L. P. Haldeman quickly rid himself of the responsibility. He never actually lived in the town that bore his name, and certainly not in our house. He left no spirit for my father to talk with. But like a ghost, his unseen presence was strongly felt. The remaining evidence of the despotic town founder is his last name on thousands of bricks, each one as chipped and battered as the people he abandoned.
Chapter Thirteen
THE KITCHEN had an electric stove with an array of buttons for controlling heat—extra-low, low, medium, medium-high, high, extra-high. Pressing one button automatically popped free the others. The newfangled space-age system fascinated me, and I discerned a relationship between the letters on the buttons and the intensity of heat. My mother explained the alphabet. At age five I taught myself to read other kitchen items: sugar, flour, salt, Jif, Kraft, Velveeta, Frigidaire, and Osterizer.
During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration built my elementary school from huge blocks of sandstone transported by rail from nearby Bluestone Quarry. As with all structures in Appalachia, geography dictated location. The school sat in a wide holler flanked by steep hills. Our playground was half an acre of rock and dirt with no basketball hoop, monkey bars, or swing set. Our only rules were to stay out of the creek and the road.
We began each day by pledging allegiance to the flag, then reciting the Lord’s Prayer. For the next ten minutes we stood by our desks and sang patriotic songs and hymns. I took everything literally and was a serious though naive thinker. We often sang the spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” I believed this was actual truth, that God was a giant, big enough to hold the Earth in his palm. The darkness of night was a result of God putting the world in his pants pocket. Stars perplexed me. They appeared to be holes in the fabric of God’s pants, allowing the entrance of light. I believed God’s clothing would be better than mine. My mother washed our family’s clothes once a week, and it made sense that God’s mom did, too. Therefore, I concluded, stars were evidence of a tissue in God’s pocket that went through the wash. He was all-powerful and all-knowing, but his mother wasn’t. It was she who forgot to remove the tissue from God’s pants.