Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Herron 41
would hold that slick stuff from falling down. Now they don't do that.
They put a bolt up in there and they have a piece of slab iron and they
put that up there and it holds it up. I know if I was still a coal miner
today, I would get lost.
Q: I was always curious--aren't you taking a chance of digging down in
hopes that you'll find coal or was there some way that you could detect
that there was actually coal?
A: Oh, they know, they drill, the same way that they drill for oil.
They drill test holes and they get those casings, every time they take a
casing out they analyze it, see what it is. They know, they can tell how
deep that coal is and some places, I have seen them where the coal vein
was nine feet deep. The contour of a coal mine is similar to the contour
of the land above. You can tell where creeks are and they have hills
down in the coal mine. I used to drive a mule out here at Peabody Coal
Mine and when we were out at the southwest part of the underground, and
we'd get to the top of the hill and when we started down, well, I had
what they called spragues, about that big around and about that long.
And he'd slip that in the holes of the wheels and we'd slip that in there
and then we would just slide down and we'd slip that in there on two
wheels and it would just slide down. Two wheels were on the one side
running and we would put one sprague in the car and two and another and
depending on the size of the hill and you'd go down the hill and that
mule had to outrun that car to keep him from--he was an his own.
Q: Did mules get killed down there?
A: Oh, lots of times. Then you'd get on the back car and as a rule you
would hold your head down a little bit to kind of make a light for the
mule as much as you could. But then when you got down, you'd get off and
just jump on the front end and you would ride down this bumper there and
one foot on the chair here and one foot on the bumper and one hand on the
mule's rump. Sometimes those mules were mean and they would kick you.
Sometimes there were a lot of good mules and sometimes you would find a
mean one.
Q: Did you ever get kicked by a mule?
A: Oh, yes, I was kicked by a mule on the farm. That's their only
weapon.
Q: These lights you had on your hats, What were they, battery operated
or were they, . . .
A: They used to be what they called sunshine kind of a salve like, more
like a vaseline, that they would put in there and they had a big torch on
it and a baffle on the back so the flame wouldn't come over your head.
Q: A baffle?
A: A baffle over your head so that the flame, the torch wouldn't come
over your back over your head. And then they got to where they used
carbide lights, a little lamp about this big. And you'd unscrew a part