Jack Battuello Memoir #1 - University of Illinois Springfield

Jack Battucllo 13
But we eventually overcame them, we paid a stiff price for it. We
lost thousands of miners by process of the gun thugs, and the militia,
and the coal company thugs and so on and so forth. Many of them went
to jail-. I've been in a few jails in my life, all because of unton
activities. And if we got too loud, during that period of weakness,
we were sometimes excommunicated and run out of the comunity. I'd
like to relate as late as 1921, a condition that had attained, even
in that period when the miners were not covered by insurance of any
kind. My brother, my brother Camille, was killed in the coal mine
in 1921 and . . .
END OF TAPE ONE
A. . . , and for which the family received not one cent compensa-
tion. I would also like to relate the conditions that existed in
the coal mine in that period. It was not: unusual for the mine executives
to come to ~hc mine and conduct an investigatinn if a mule
was injured or killed. But no such investigation ever took place
when a miner was killed.
Q. That's very interestingand of course, we in this country pride
ourselves on our concept of value of human life. Would you like to
add an additional comment at this time, in light of whar you have jusr
now said?
A. Well briefly, in accordance with the social conditions and the
affairs of the world, life is about the cheapest commodity there is.
Q, 1 also recall how, sometime during my personal encounter with you
and your wife TilTie, the two of you have described to me the house
in which you lived during those days. I believe it was $in Wilsohville,
was it not? Would you describe rhe condition of the house, irs structural
condition and the degree of prctection you had f r ~ m th.e elements,
and so forth.
A. That period you're talking about was in the Depression of 1929,
and 1930 and 1931 and so on. We lived in a home, for which we paid
$5.00 a month. To describe it briefly, that is describe the house,
it was so badly constructed that really you could have thrown a fiveton
truck through the entire house and never hit a weather board.
That was rhs general condition in the mines, during the Depfes~ion~
On top of that, mechanization of the mines had caused a lot of unemployment
among the miners. As a consequence, because wr wanted to
stay together and share the bread, we agreed to a diviston of work.
Considering the mines only worked maybe two days a week and we were
on a five to one division--the mine would have to work probably five
weeks before we got a shift. It was not unusual for us to come home
with a paycheck of five dollars or ten dollars, never exceeding ren
dollars. I had many receipts in my files over the years that I earned
Jack Battuello Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield