“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever.” – Tom Stopppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
More than fifty years ago, two grandparents died on the same day. It was the last day of summer, and the first time anyone close to me had died.
A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.– Leonard Lipton / Peter Yarrow
Released in Jan. 1963, Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” soon topped the charts.
I remember those first thoughts about dying. It was the spring of 1963 and I was nine years old. Grandma and Grandpa Morris lived in a large, white, country home west of Enumclaw on McHugh Street. The radio played in the background. The number one song was “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul & Mary. It’s a children’s song wrapped in fabled lyrics released during the height of the folk era. I’d heard it before, but never fully absorbed this line: “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.” My tenth birthday would be in a month or so.
Grandma (Nina Marie Morris) was in the early stages of dementia which even a boy could recognize. She was easily confused. One day, Billy Hawthorne (the son of Grandma’s part-time caregiver) and I played a cruel trick on her by hiding in the closet. We watched her search for us in vain. After frantic calls we reappeared, only to see a vacant look of despair on her bewildered face. Mom explained she had hardening of the arteries, causing blood to flow slowly to her brain, meaning she couldn’t think as clearly as before. She was ill and wouldn’t get better. I felt bad about our trick.
Grandpa and Grandma – Jack and Marie Morris, a night on the town in San Francisco, 1959.
The song ended but a feeling lingered – I wouldn’t be a little boy much longer. Just like Jackie Paper, my imaginary dragons and toy soldiers would soon be gone. Those wistful feelings of melancholy floated in the wind like the down of a dandelion.
One evening that summer, I lay in bed. It was a Friday or Saturday night. Next to my bed was a cheap AM radio. Late at night, I spun the dial picking up a distant station in Salt Lake City and listened to the final innings of a baseball game. It ended and the nightly news was read – “At 12:01 a.m., a convicted murderer on death row will be executed by firing squad. Growing tired I turned off the radio and saw a blindfolded prisoner led to a brick courtyard. The moment passed but the memory remained – a boy, the radio, a distant broadcast, the bleakness of death.
Bad posture, Billy at Grandma & Grandpa Morris home, Spring 1967.
In the 14th year of my life, the grim reaper appeared. It was 1967. Music defined my world and I delighted in its sounds. Newspapers called it the “summer of love.” For me it was a summer of friends, family, fun . . . and Sgt. Pepper. Each morning brought new sounds and adventures. The sun shone day after rainless day, for so long it set a record – 67 days without rain. The bluest skies you’d ever seen were in Seattle.
That September, I entered the final year of junior high as a 9th grader. Three weeks later that cozy world was disquieted by the death of two grandparents: Grandma Morris and Papa Kombol. On the same day, my father lost his father, and my mother lost her mother. In a way, this double death was a tonic for both parents. They told us kids of feeling like orphans, leaning on each other – weathering funerals and wakes, one after the other. September 21st was the last day of summer . . . and the autumn of my youth.
Papa Tony Kombol and Grandma Nina Marie Morris died on the same day.
Both grandparents were elderly: 82 and 77, yet important fixtures in life. Papa (Tony Kombol) babysat me when I was four and five. Mom dropped me off at their home near Elk Coal where I’d follow Papa doing chores, fixing lunch, then put me down for a nap. Legally blind from a 1925 coal mining accident, he stayed home while Grandma Lulu taught school in nearby Selleck. Needing to be near Enumclaw’s medical facilities, Papa stayed at our home the last few weeks of his life.
Grandma Morris was the first person I remember reading to me. We flipped through “Two Little Miners” so many times I could picture each page. I boarded an airplane for the first time in late June 1962, a Boeing 707, when she and Grandpa took me to San Francisco. We braved chilly Candlestick Park and watched my first major league baseball game. The Giants won the pennant that season.
When in San Francisco Grandpa always stayed at the Maurice, a businessman’s Hotel near Union Square where that day we had our shoes shined, July 1962.
We dined in the Starlight Room of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, celebrating great-aunt Ruth’s 75th birthday . . . and my 9th. I still have the menu dated July 3, 1962. Two weeks earlier, Tony Bennett released the song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
Great Aunt Ruth’s birthday was July 4th and mine July 5th, so Grandpa Morris took us to the restaurant at Sir Francis Drake Hotel. It was a fancy place with the date printed at the top of the menu. The waiter gave it to me as a souvenir.
In later years Grandma Morris was confined to the Bethesda Manor nursing home not far from our home, falling deeper into the darkness of dementia. Mom visited her daily, sometimes twice. I’d go on occasion, but in time she no longer knew me.
Over the coming weeks, I began to imagine life without parents. It was the year Mom stopped tucking me in and saying nighttime prayers together. Alone in bed, save for a pink teddy bear won at the Puyallup Fair, I thought of the future. One day Mom and Dad will surely die, just like Grandma and Papa. A profound sense of sorrow consumed me. Visualizing their deaths, I cried myself to sleep each night. I tried to figure a way out – what if they never died? Maybe I’d die first and be spared the heartache? Whatever scenario I concocted, the end was always the same – falling asleep to tears. The end of their lives and my childhood hung in the balance. But I knew not how or when.
Unbeknownst to me, the thoughts of that 14-year-old boy were long ago known by Stoic philosophers. The anticipation of hardship softens its eventual blow. A Stoic prepares for the future by focusing on the worst possible outcome, a Latin principle called premeditation of adversity. Seneca advised his followers to rehearse ruinous scenarios “in your mind – exile, torture, war, shipwreck,” thereby robbing the future of its awful bite.
By morning, I was awakened by Mom and skipped downstairs to find a hearty breakfast on the kitchen table. Jean and I walked to the Junior High, a three-story, brick building four blocks away. There I roamed halls, diagrammed sentences, and played with friends after school.
The male tear ducts shrink as boys become men. It becomes more difficult for men to cry. Evolutionary psychologists can no doubt tell you why. My tears were gone in time. Ninth grade led to new friendships and adventures. I turned out for basketball and made the team. I raised tropical fish in an aquarium. At semester’s end, I earned my first perfect report card, all A’s. As a special treat, Dad took me to the Four Seasons in downtown Enumclaw for Chinese food. I felt pride in the glow of my father’s love.
Twelve years later, I wrote a poem to read at his funeral. The lines recalled the mournful feelings of that earlier time in life:
The last day we expected was the morning that we feared feared the nights we cried so long ago have come to rest right here. And so we’ll cry these tears of pain from sorrow we must store the tears we have are tears we’ve cried a thousand times before.
Father and son, Jack Kombol and Bill, Lyon, France, Feb 1978, a year before he died.
In February 1968, Barry and I picked copper strands from piles of rocks and sticks at the Mine #11 wash plant in Black Diamond. The wire came from blasting caps used when dynamite dislodged coal at the Rogers #3 mine. Seven years later I’d work in that mine, learning just how those wires were used. Over several weekends we collected nearly a pickup load of coiled yellow wire, then burned off the plastic coating. Dad sold the copper for 40 cents a pound at the recycling yard. It was souvenir money for us four kids to use during our family’s forthcoming trip to Europe later that spring.
We missed the last few weeks of school. In Ireland, England, Wales, and the continent we saw historic sights, tasted new foods, and explored a world far removed from our own. We also visited the embodiment of death – Dachau, the Jewish concentration camp near Munich. The visitor’s center displayed black and white photos of emaciated bodies, showing all manner of depravity.
Mom kept a journal of our trip so I know the day we visited Dachau – May 31, 1968.
The guide told of Jewish children with tattooed numbers on bony arms – herded from rail cars, not knowing their fate. We walked through the barracks, gas chambers, and crematoriums where thousands died at the hands of their Nazi henchmen. We saw death on an unimaginable scale. I’ve never forgotten that visit or the sign on the entrance gate: Arbeit macht frei. “Work sets you free.” Mom read its translation from Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day,
The sign on the gate as you enter Dachau – Work sets you free.
Three weeks after coming home, I turned 15. Four days later a boy I’d grown up with died. John Sherwood attended our Presbyterian church. His parents, Earl and Isabelle Sherwood were our youth group leaders and taught us Sunday school. John was a troubled lad who’d just flunked 10th grade. On a warm summer evening in early July, John went to a party and guzzled 190-proof Everclear from a bottle. Mr. Sherwood found his son slumped over the front seat of their car just after midnight. The Enumclaw police never figured out who provided the bottle, though some teens in town surely knew.
He was the first contemporary I’d known who died. John was 16. The coroner’s jury attributed his death to “consuming excessive amounts of liquor furnished by a person or persons unknown.” The Courier-Herald ran articles linking his death to narcotic and alcohol abuse among local youth in 1968. Glue sniffing was a particular concern that year.
The following spring our Cascadian yearbook printed his photo in remembrance, followed by a short poem:
John Sherwood’s page in our high school yearbook.
He is not dead, this friend not dead, But in the path we mortals tread Got some few, trifling steps ahead And nearer to the end; So that you too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead. – Robert Louis Stevenson
Sporting a Nehru jacket on my first day of high school as a sophomore, Sept. 1968
When you’re young, five years is practically forever. “Puff the Magic Dragon” was a distant memory. Heading to high school in September new adventures emerged. I started a job as the Saturday boy at Palmer’s mine office in Black Diamond. I joined the chess team and found a new sport calling. By summer, I’d have a driver’s license plus two more jobs to fill my days. Papa and Grandma were fading memories.
As boyhood drew to a close, a young man began to emerge. My horizons broadened. Ahead of me lay many deaths . . . relatives, classmates, and loved ones. Those first tastes of mortality would always be with me, but childhood fears were fading. A new set of adolescent anxieties gripped me soon enough. I was growing up and the world was growing bigger.
LR156b- The morning and afternoon shifts of coal miners in the front of the washhouse of the last underground coal mine in the State of Washington: the Rogers #3 Mine located at 26222 S.E. Kent-Kangley Road in Ravensdale. Front Row (L to R): Joe Ozbolt (kneeling), James Bo Williams, John Costanich (kneeling), Tony Basselli, Bill McLoughry. Back Row: Bob Morris, Bill Kombol, Barry Kombol, George Savicke, Bud Simmons, Roy Darby, John Streepy. Photo by Bob Morris, 1975.
My senior year of college was as different as night and day. It wasn’t my original plan. By day, I inhabited the rarified air of life at a university where young men and women, often preening boys and girls, proffered great thoughts fueled by a steady diet of pot and booze. At night, I worked in a coal mine with gray-haired men at jobs they’d performed their entire lives.
I was bemused by the attitudes and mindsets of the two cultures. For me, it was the best and worst of times – the most wonderful and dreadful of any span of my then young life. I was fully exhilarated and completely exhausted – a caterpillar in search of a butterfly to escape a cocoon of his own making. For years I’ve struggled to reconcile the feelings and emotions within those discordant worlds I simultaneously ingested.
I’d grown increasingly bored with college phonies fretting over which grad school to attend. I was steadily drawn to the stoic lives of coal miners. My fellow undergrads bemoaned petty stresses of their own making. Each day the miners completed the tasks set before them. The grad school gang imagined chic careers with grand salaries. The coal miners were content with life and their position in it.
In early September 1974, I prepared to return for my last year of college. Over three summers past, I worked for Palmer Coking Coal, a family-owned company. My jobs were common laboring at the Black Diamond yard and Rogers #3 mine. That mine was a succession of Rogers #1 and #2, started in 1958 and 1959 respectively. Located in Ravensdale, Rogers #3 was slated to close in less than a year. It would be the last underground coal mine in the State of Washington.
That’s me at shift’s end and covered with coal dust on one of my rare day shifts. The Rogers #3 hoist room and mine tipple are up the hill behind me. Photo by Barry Kombol, April 1975
My uncle, Jack Morris was President of Palmer. He was navigating the company’s exit from the coal business, as gracefully as possible. It was a tough time for the firm. Jack was drinking heavily, and Palmer’s fortunes were not promising. There were sharp disagreements between three uncles, Jack, Evan Morris, and Charlie Falk, who collectively led the firm. I was thankfully unaware of building tensions and unresolved rivalries. I just turned 21. Little did I know that leadership of this company would one day fall to me.
Evan Morris, Sr. on the platform beside the portal entrance into the Rogers #3 mine. The sloped tunnel descended 800 feet underground. December 1974.
Federal coal inspectors were bearing down on small mines like Palmer’s. Our operation didn’t fit the template for a subsurface coal mine. The Rogers coal seam stood nearly vertical, while most coal mines operate on horizontal planes, the way sedimentary formations containing coal seams are naturally deposited. The plate tectonic which uplifted the Cascade Mountains altered the local Ravensdale geology to a rare condition – a vein of coal tilted to more than 80º. Underground mine regulations hadn’t been written for that kind of operation.
Coal seams in this area of Ravensdale stood nearly vertical as seen in this geologic cross section. – Golder Associates.
Most men who worked at Rogers #3 were lifelong coal miners. All were in their late 50s and early 60s, except for a cousin, Bob Morris; my brother, Barry Kombol, and me. Two dozen miners had retired over the previous eight years, but enough experienced men remained allowing Palmer to finish its underground mine while honoring contracts supplying coal to State prisons. Palmer’s management was mindful of the decades those miners had worked in the industry and sensitive to union pensions that hung in the balance. A few more years would strengthen each miner’s retirement payout.
One day in early September, Jack pulled me aside and asked if I’d work the afternoon shift while attending college. It was my senior year where an easy slide towards graduation was a natural expectation. Jack explained I’d earn the wage rate under the United Mine Workers contract to which Palmer was bound. A Grade 2, Tipple Attendant made $45.93 per day. That UMW day rate was the equivalent of $32 per hour in today’s currency. To a money-hungry lad like me, that sounded awfully enticing. I talked it over with my folks and a decision was made.
Surface facilities at Rogers #3. The tipple to the left and load out bunkers to the right. Photo by Don Mason, early 1970s.
The afternoon shift was from 3 – 11 pm, so it made sense to live at home. My first three years of college were spent at Pi Kappa Phi, where I enjoyed the camaraderie of fraternity brothers plus the assorted characters who boarded in spare rooms. Ours was a frat house with a classical facade, good cooks, and two hot meals a day. Staying at home would make me a “townie,” so I’d only pay fraternity dues plus the meal rate for lunch, a significant saving over full room and board. I drove my parent’s 1968 Renault, an unusual car in those days – basically a Volkswagen Bug for cheapskates. The no-frills Renault got good mileage, had a stick shift on the floor, with an A.M. radio. What else could I possibly need?
My schedule was grueling. Monday through Friday, I was up at 6 am, fixing breakfast while Mom packed my evening dinner in a metal lunch bucket. I loved yogurt and back then little was sold in stores, so Mom cultured her own which I ate from a squat thermos. She, Pauline (Morris) Kombol was herself, a coal miner’s daughter.
I left Enumclaw every morning at 7 am. Traffic was light with far less congestion than today’s clogged freeways. Interstate 5 was a breeze with only occasionally slowdowns. I arrived at the University of Washington campus about 8 am, parked at the fraternity, then walked to my 8:30 class. My first break came at 9:30, so for an hour I studied at the Husky Union Building, and then sped off to my 10:30 and 11:30 classes. By 12:30 pm, I rambled back to the fraternity for lunch, studied for an hour, and left Seattle at 1:45 arriving at the Ravensdale mine by 2:45 pm.
Joe Ozbolt, left and James ‘Bo’ Williams, right inside the Rogers #3 washhouse. Photo by Charlie Falk, February 1975.
In the washhouse, I joined other miners where we changed from street clothes to working gear. There were only six miners per shift, but I was exclusively night shift so worked with alternating crews each week. We walked up a slight hill to the hoist room and met the day crew coming from the mine. Our counterparts were greeted and a light banter exchanged. The afternoon shift started at 3 pm, lasting eight hours including a dinner break. My job involved standing at a waist-high metal platform, where coal was separated from rock. It was called the picking table and I was its operator. The picking table was located in the belly of a triangular wooden structure called the tipple.
A loaded coal car is being dumped from the top of tipple into the chute below. The picking table was behind the silver-colored sheet metal above the dumptruck where waste material was collected before being hauled to the rock dump. Photo by Bill Kombol, April 1975.
The job was simple – push coal to the right and rock to the left. There was one primary goal: don’t let rocks smash your fingers, lest you wind up with a throbbing fingernail rapidly turning purple. Still, it happened, and no matter how long you sucked that pulsing finger, the pain lingered. Sometimes it hurt so much, you had to heat a sewing needle red hot then drill down through the nail to release the pounding pressure caused when blood rushed to repair the wound.
The picking table was six feet wide and about two feet deep. The left third featured a hinged trap-door balanced by a pulley and weight. When 100 pounds or more of rock accumulated on that side, a trap door released the waste material that fell into a dump truck below. The large chunks of coal which landed on the table were pushed right into a crusher and broken into small pieces.
Barry Kombol, ready at the picking table – notice how clean he is at the start of a shift. Photo by Bill Kombol, April 1975. A Moulden & Sons dump truck filling up with coal to be hauled to Palmer’s Mine #11 yard in Black Diamond for further processing. Photo by Bill Kombol, April 1975.
Above me was a chute regularly filled with coal and rock brought from the mine and dumped from the tipple above. A slanted door of thick steel, opened and closed by an electric motor, regulated how much coal came through that chute. After falling down, the coal mix vibrated over a sloped screen with square openings. The smaller-sized pieces (less than 4” in diameter) dropped onto a conveyor belt and were carried to the loadout bunker.
The slanted door on the chute had to be set to just the right level. Opened too much and excessive coal crashed down, blinding the screen, and left the picking table a cluttered mess. If the avalanche was too large you couldn’t separate the rock from coal fast enough and both ended up discarded. But when not opened enough, the screening process slowed, and the next coal car to dump was stalled, disrupting the entire operation. Getting it right was fairly easy when coal was uniform, and rocks were small. But sometimes, large chunks of sharp-angled sandstone and sedimentary rock jammed between the chute door and vibrating screen. The rocks wedged together at such awkward angles that none could break through the hatchway. The bind got so nasty that rocks were stuck even with a fully opened door.
When that happened, I rushed to the hoist room and told the operator to stop pulling cars from the mine. The hoist-man operated a large spool, six feet across upon which was wound 1,000 feet of 1” thick steel cable. It resembled a gigantic fishing reel. The cable spun through a bull-wheel atop the tipple providing leverage needed for pulling five-ton coal cars up from the bottom of the mine. After the car was dumped, the hoist operator braked against gravity, allowing the car to free-wheel down rails tracks along the 48º slope, through a mine opening called the portal.
A closeup of Bill McLoughry operating the hoist. The drum and steel cable are in the background. Photo by Barry Kombol, April 1974.
With coal cars stopped, I ran back to the picking table and turned off the vibrating screen. I climbed up and with a long metal pry bar tried dislodging rocks to coax them through the door. If that didn’t work, I’d pound repeatedly with a sledgehammer to break the burly rocks into smaller pieces that could fit through. Sometimes the clog was so bad, the hoist man joined me as we tried to get things moving. Some nights the work was so grueling my body was drained in sweat.
Hoist operators: Roy Darby, top left; Frank Manowski, top right; and Bob Morris, below.
Other nights the coal was so perfectly sized that 95% of the mix cruised through the screen. The few melon-sized chunks which dropped to the picking table were easy to handle and my job was a breeze. After screening five tons, I had plenty of idle time awaiting the next coal car’s arrival at the top of the tipple.
A bucket seat salvaged from an old sports car had been set up in the picking table chamber. Trips arrived every six to eight minutes, and I usually screened a carload in two to three minutes giving me several minutes between loads. In between, I read my textbooks perhaps a page or two, until the next car arrived. Its approach was signaled by the pitch of the whirring cable and sway of the tipple. When coal and rock crashed into the hopper above, that meant another five tons to screen.
The rail tracks leading to the portal opening, seen mid-photo as the darkest area. This photo of the portal opening into the mine was taken from atop the tipple looking down. Photo by Bill Kombol, April 1975.
From time to time, I emptied the dump truck parked below. After 10 to 12 tons of rock dropped through the trap door to the waiting dump box, I scurried down, jumped in the truck, drove to the rock dump, and emptied the load. The truck was dumped five or six times a night depending on the percentage of rock to coal. I needed to be fast, as coal cars kept emerging from the mine.
On nights when coal wasn’t hoisted, I rode a coal car 800 feet underground to work with the miners. There I performed laboring tasks – sometimes drilling coal and loading dynamite. Other nights I helped set timber props that held up the roof of the mine. Or cleaned coal spilled on rail tracks.
Bill Kombol handing John Costanich a stick of dynamite ready for loading into a drill hole. Photo by Barry Kombol, April 1974.With a long plastic pole Bill Kombol helps John Costanich (on platform above) push the dynamite to the top of the drill hole. Dummy bags were put in last to plug the hole and ensure a successful blast. Photo by Barry Kombol, April 1974.
The most mindless job was filling dummy bags with loose clay used for stemming plugs. After loading a drill hole with a dozen sticks of dynamite, the sausage-sized, clay-filled, paper bags were punched into the end of the hole. This focused the energy of the explosive force to blast intact coal into thousands of smaller pieces. Otherwise, the explosion would blow out the bottom of the drill hole, like a firecracker dud. Dummy bags were in constant use during mining, so I spent hours bagging up a week’s supply or more.
Bill Kombol filling dummy bags and placing the finished sausage-sized bags into an empty dynamite box. A “dummy bag” was a paper sack filled with clay or shale and used to stem drill holes. The dummy bag was about the same size as a dynamite stick. After the drill hole was filled with dynamite, several dummy bags were tamped tightly as stemming, so that the dynamite blast would break and loosen the coal rather than simply blow out the end of the hole. “Stemming” means to tamp, plug, or make tight, to ensure a successful shot. Photo by Barry Kombol, April 1974.
One shift, bored and alone in the crosscut, I turned off my miner’s lamp to see if my eyes could fully adjust to the dark. It was an experiment. After 10 minutes, I slowly drew my hand towards my eyes guessing ambient light would illuminate the outline of the appendage, but there was nothing – complete and total darkness. There was no sound beyond my breathing. The lack of sight and sound that far below the earth’s surface conjured feelings I’ve never forgotten.
People often asked what it was like working underground. The best part was a constant temperature somewhere around 50º. There was little air movement except for a slight breeze from fans that ventilated the mine. We didn’t have to worry about rain, as it was dry except for a stream of underground water that accumulated in a ditch next to the hanging wall. It flowed to a sump and was pumped outside. The mine tunnels were supported by a three-piece timber set, consisting of two uprights supporting a cross beam log all tied together by an overhead roof of rugged boards, called lagging. It was a comfortable working environment, save for the fact everything you touched was black.
At 7 pm, work stopped for our dinner break. I moseyed down to the hoist room where a pot-bellied coal stove kept the tin shack warm. On rare occasions, the miners came up from below to warm themselves and join us. But most nights it was just me and the hoist man, either Roy Darby, Bill McLoughry, my cousin, Bob Morris, or sometimes Frank Manowski. Pee Wee, the dirty black mine dog hung out in the hoist room.
George Savicke, right eats his lunch while Tony Basselli toasts his sandwich on the pot-bellied coal stove in the hoist room. That night the two miners came out from below for their dinner break. November 1974.
Dinner break was a time to relax, chat, and eat the meal Mom prepared 12 hours earlier. Sometimes she packed homemade soup in a thermos, but more often a meat and cheese sandwich, which I toasted atop the hot stove. I was talkative and conversations with the old coal miners took curious turns. Almost to a man, they told me to get an education and stay out of the mines.
Following our half-hour pause, it was back to work until 11 pm when our shift ended. Then I dragged my tired body, covered with sweat and coal dust, down to the wash house where we showered on concrete floors, under three side-by-side spigots. It was like traveling back to a shoddy version of a junior high locker room. The hot showers felt good, as did donning clean clothes you’d changed from eight hours earlier.
Pee Wee, the hoist room mine dog carrying a miner’s lunch box ,then seeking attention and perhaps a snack from the miners. Photo by Barry Kombol, April 1974.
Each night, your work clothes were hung from hooks on a wire basket, with gloves and hard hat placed inside. A chain and pulley hauled the gear to the eve of the wash house where heat naturally accumulated. If your clothes were wet, they’d be warm and toasty by the following day. Each Friday, I brought my dirty garments home for Mom to wash.
I was in my car by 11:20 pm for the 20-minute drive back to Enumclaw. I brushed my teeth and plopped into the same bed I’d slept in since sixth grade. Falling to sleep each night was the easiest part of my day. Six hours later, it started all over again – up for breakfast, in my car, and driving to the U.W.
On weekends, I’d sleep till 11 or noon. I had no life outside of school and work. All my friends were away so largely I kept to myself. Some Saturday nights, I walked to the Chalet Theater to see a movie. But mostly I studied, typed papers, and prepared to face Monday.
After two college quarters and more than seven months of this routine, I was burned out. Fortunately, the underground coal mine was preparing to shut down. My night-shift job on the picking table phased out shortly after the start of the spring quarter. I completed my senior year living in Enumclaw but no longer working at the mine.
When the Rogers #3 mine finally closed, a retirement party was held featuring a cake with all Palmer personnel, who were part of the last underground coal mine in Washington State written in the frosting. 1975.
In addition to my regular Econ classes, I took a one-credit P.E. in tennis and a two-credit course on nutrition. But my favorite class spring quarter was a three-credit course entitled the Living Theater. We studied drama, went to plays, and wrote reviews of those we saw. It was my favorite college class and fittingly my last.
During those days of school and nights of work, my dreams were filled with fears – of papers not completed and exams I didn’t understand. Remarkably, I scored all A’s, and only one B that year. Slowly my life recovered as I took pride in a fat bank account. It’s easy saving money when living at home with no time to spend it.
For more than a year prior, I’d suffered an emotionally embarrassing case of facial acne. I felt ugly. But nothing Dr. Homer Harris, a noted dermatologist prescribed seemed to work. I stopped getting haircuts and grew my hair out. To hide my pimpled face, I quit shaving. Perhaps it was the release from stress or maybe shaving irritated my skin. But the acne lessened and within a few months disappeared. I began to feel human again.
I graduated that June, with a B.A. in Economics. I was tired of college. My attachment to fraternity brothers dwindled and I abandoned the academic scene. I had no interest in attending commencement. My sister graduated from high school that same year, so the folks wanted to throw a party for the both of us. I declined their offer and also pointedly skipped graduation ceremonies. My diploma arrived in the mail four months later.
Four years of study and 195 college credits produced this Bachelor of Arts in Economics, mailed to me several months later, as I had no interest in attending graduation ceremonies.
A few relatives and two high school teachers sent congratulatory cards. My Grandma Kombol, a school teacher for 44 years gave me Webster’s Third International, a 13-pound dictionary I still cherish. I loafed all summer. I bought a motorcycle in August and moved to Lincoln City that fall. There I collected unemployment checks, read books, and walked on the beach.
Working at a coal mine my senior year of college was an experience I’ll never forget. It was a lonely existence within a beehive of perpetual motion. My life was a rolling slog in squirrel-cage. That choice shaped my life, unlike anything before or since. Perhaps the Stoic philosopher, Seneca said it best, “Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”
The mine and the old miners are now all gone. All that remains of Rogers #3 is the weather-beaten washhouse. Still to these memories I remain eternally grateful – the miners with whom I worked, the hours spent driving to and fro, the classes attended, and college papers written. Textbook pages studied, the picking table, cement-floor showers, and the sense of freedom that spring when released from the whirlwind into a world of plays and theater.
Of those days long-ago, this memory I shall never forget – dinnertime in the hoist room, standing beside a hot coal stove, and tasting the melted cheese on the sandwich Mom lovingly packed for me.
I kept my hard hat and lunch bucket, photographing them recently atop a pile of stoker coal.
* * *
After loafing all summer, bumming that fall in Lincoln City and cashing unemployment checks, seven months later, I came back to work for Palmer. My uncle Charlie Falk took this photo of me in January 1976, where I was working in Enumclaw helping PCC relocate the Stergeon cement bins to Black Diamond for use at the coal mine wash plant there.
