Old King Coal

On a warm Friday afternoon in West Frankfort, Illinois, there’s an avalanche in front of city hall.

Actually, it’s The Avalanche, a carnival ride. A dozen or more rides are jammed onto a stretch of Poplar Street and its adjacent parking lots. The area’s transformed, for a few days, into a midway filled with colored lights, music and the smell of funnel cake. This weekend marks the Old King Coal Festival, a tradition dating back 75 years for this small town.

The festival got its name because Southern Illinois produces so much coal, boosters call it the Saudi Arabia of coal. No kidding. The coal industry has shaped whole towns in Illinois, and defined their history — towns like West Frankfort. Of course, coal has been pulled right into the middle of the climate change fight. So West Frankfort and its heritage have been dragged in too.

Recently, some people from around West Frankfort decided they were going to pull together an army of sorts, to take up their part in that fight. At first, it was just a virtual army, on Facebook. The organizers have come to the Old King Coal Festival to see if those troops might show up in real life.

They’re holding a rally here Saturday. And I’ve come to see what happens when they do.

And yet, the bond between West Frankfort and coal mining still runs deep. In addition to Jamie Harmon, there are people here like Jack McReynolds. He’s 80 years old, has lived here for almost all of them, and worked 40 of them underground. His stories about this place are about coal mining. And his coal-mining stories are horror stories, war stories.

In 1951, when McReynolds was fifteen, an explosion underground killed more than a hundred guys. That was Christmas Eve. “There was no Christmas that year,” he recalls. Families pulled wreaths off the doors, put the gifts away.

Another story is from 1922, before McReynolds was born, when a local operator tried running a mine with non-union labor and heavy security — which the union men got past. “They went inside this non-union mine, took all the workers out,” McReynolds says, “and executed them.”

McReynolds’ grandpa took his daughters out to see the bodies. “And my mother said he pointed and said, ‘Girls, there’s the vermin that tried to take the food off your table.’ My mother never forgot that.”

And right there, McReynolds lets out a little chuckle — the chuckle of a proud, old warrior.

The chuckle comes back, double, when he tells about the time he saw combat himself — when he traveled to Virginia in the ‘80s, to fight strikebreakers. He says guys threw Molotov cocktails into coal trucks and derailed trains.

Asked about what he did, McReynolds pauses. Smiles. And says only: “Different things.” And chuckles. People like him fought for these jobs, died for them, did different things for them.

For people like him, coal mining defines the place they’re from and the people who live there. Coal mining is the story they tell themselves about who they are.

And it’s out of that relationship that a fledgling grassroots pro-coal movement recently sprouted. A movement that felt, maybe, like something new. New enough for me to travel to West Frankfort to see it firsthand.

It started like this: In February, when Diaz and about a hundred other people got laid off, a guy named Bob Sandidge was mulling things over, at home, with his wife Kelly, a coal-miner’s daughter. “She’s the one that said, ‘Hey, we need to do something. Let’s launch a Facebook page.”

They did — called it the “Coal Miner’s Movement, ” although the page itself was the whole movement at that point — and the message was “Stop the war on coal.”

From one perspective, the big war — the war on coal-mining jobs — was already over, and technology had won it a long time ago, taking away almost all the jobs. But with every proposed regulation, and every layoff, almost everybody who’s still connected to this industry feels like their way of life — their identity, their integrity — is under assault. So, the message: Stop the war on coal.

Bob and Kelly Sandidge launched their Facebook group on a Saturday, “And MAN, it exploded,” Bob recalls. “Man, oh man.” By Monday morning, they had 13,000 Facebook likes —and a DC lobbying consultant on the phone, offering to volunteer his time.

For weeks the momentum built — 20,000 likes, 25,000, 28,000.

To Bob and Kelly Sandidge, to the lobbyist —to me— it felt like maybe, just maybe, they were suddenly mounting an army, a groundswell of people ready to take on a fight in the name of their way of life.

Then the Old King Coal festival organizers came calling, inviting Bob and Kelly to lead a rally at the festival, offering a 90-minute slot on the festival stage. It seemed like a chance to turn that online groundswell into a crowd, a crowd capable of pushing back.

So, they went for it. And I went to see them.

Friday night, at the festival, I hung out at the booth they’d set up across from the Lions Club lemonade stand, to sign people up for the Coal Miner’s Movement. I watched Bob Sandidge work some prospective recruits. “Membership’s free,” he tells them. All it takes is a name and an email address, pretty much. You’ll get a newsletter. And a free sticker. The sticker, he’s found, really helps overcome people’s reluctance.

Slowly, he works toward his goal, signing up maybe a dozen people an hour. He sells a few hats, a few T-shirts, gets some encouragement. While he chats up a potential recruit, I see a kid, maybe 10 years old, come up and offer him a silent fist bump.

Saturday’s the festival’s big day — Bob and Kelly’s rally day —and I watch as they ride in a parade at 1 p.m. behind Princess Flame on the back of a convertible. (Also: Teen Princess Flame, Pre-Teen Princess Flame, and various princess runners-up, each on the back of her own convertible.)

Then, back at the fairgrounds, it’s 3 o’clock — time for the rally. The stage sits at one end of the festival grounds, facing a parking lot for the local Moose Lodge. On one side of it, an alley of booths like the Sandidges’ leads to the midway with its rides and games and treats.

This was it: Having seen the response the Coal Miner’s Movement got on Facebook, I’d come to West Frankfort with a vision of a big crowd, spilling out from the stage. Former miners, laid-off miners, families of miners, kids, the likes of Jack McReynolds and Dave Diaz.

But at go time, Bob and Kelly find themselves unsure of exactly what to do. Because nobody’s there. Nobody. The stage faces a completely empty parking lot.

“We need to round up more people,” Kelly says.

“How do you do that?” Bob asks her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Not a lot of people here.”

“Not a lot of people,” he agrees.

They don’t rush off to the Ferris Wheel or the funnel-cake stand to round people up — it’s not exactly clear how well that would work. Instead, they hang out by their booth, getting antsy, trying to keep their cool.

This goes on for like a half an hour. Bob keeps saying things like, “I’m gonna give it a few more minutes,” and asking the festival organizers if they have advice. They don’t.

Finally, the Sandidges and a friend of theirs have an idea: Turn the speakers away from the parking lot and aim them so the sound travels down the row of booths. Stand on that end of the stage and just talk to the few people who are milling around there.

They do it.

A few minutes later, Sandidge starts his speech by saying he wants to acknowledge elected officials who have come. He says he’ll call out their offices and ask them to pipe up for applause.

“So, if there’s anyone here from the U.S. Senate, we’d like to hear that.”

Silence. He continues. “Anybody from the U.S. House of Representatives?”

Nobody. “How about the Illinois State Senate?”

A hand goes up. Gary Forby, perhaps coal’s number-one advocate in Springfield. “Mr. Forby’s here!”

But no local officials are here — no mayors, no nothing. Sandidge soldiers on through the rest of his speech—it’s maybe five minutes.

Afterwards, he gets himself a big cone of soft-serve ice cream as a reward. Frankly, he deserves it. By the time he got up on that stage, I’d seen that he’d already acknowledged defeat. Getting up on stage anyway, going through with that speech, that took…something. A willingness to endure pain.

So when I ask how he thinks it all went, of course he puts a brave face on things. “It’s good,” he says, licking his ice cream. “Um, it’s always disappointing, and it can be frustrating not to have as big a turnout as you want.” Back to his ice cream.