AN OUR STORY Book
“Artifacts of the week” photos and the accompanying narrations are drawn from Facebook posts written over nearly three years. They are designed to tell Our Story in a style consistent with social media–genre gleefully including a bit of humor or an occasional poke of the proverbial bear. I have farmed for more than half a century and have no fondness for sacred cows…or bears!
Scattered throughout this collection, readers will find more lengthy narratives that could easily fill several volumes…but do not. Readers are asked to view these as appetizers.
Enjoy your tour of the Our Story Traveling Museum!
Acknowledgements
This customary obligatory page offers an opportunity to thank those who have made this work possible while absolving them of any blame for errors of the author. Consider it done.
Countless miners and descendants of miners have shared stories and artifacts that make the Our Story Traveling Museum possible. A chance meeting with William C. Blizzard led to the 2004 publication of WHEN MINERS MARCH, the definitive history of the Unionization Battles of the early 20th century. His fathers’s gold watch was arguably the first item in our museum. Joy Lynn shared stories from Whipple and a piece of ESAU scrip that refutes those who deny the reality of Our Story. Chris Fabrey published UNDER A CLOUDLESS SKY in 2017 and opened the door to telling Our Story truthfully through fiction.
A small cadre of dedicated scholars and activists banded together to make this book real. Michael and Carrie Kline have devoted their lives to collecting Our Stories, Mary Hott did her own research and powerfully tells Our Story with DEVIL IN THE HILLS — A Coal Country Reckoning — tunes that speak truth. Lonormi Manual’s THE PRICE OF BREAD AND SHOES offers a compelling read that is true to Our Story, Bob Henry Baber, one of the infamous Soup Bean Poets and long time friend to union miners, provided invaluable help in designing our museum. The authors of WRITTEN IN BLOOD exposed both untold stories and the censors guilty of suppressing them.
Two decades of effort have yielded several books and this Traveling Museum. None would have become real without selfless contributors, editors and techies. Tom Rhule and Leesa McVay pushed Blizzards’s work to reality. Craig O’Hara and PM Press patiently nursed both WHEN MINERS MARCH and WRITTEN IN BLOOD to publication and kept them in print.
If you are touring the Our Story Traveling Museum from the comfort of your home, or phone or car, thank webmaster Betty Dorsey. She makes it possible for us to travel through cyberspace.