A Lit Fuse: Damian Dressick’s 40 Patchtown and the Windber, PA, Coal Mine Strike of 1922 by Bonnie Proudfoot
A Lit Fuse: Damian Dressick’s 40 Patchtown and the Windber, PA, Coal Mine Strike of 1922
by Bonnie Proudfoot
In the Acknowledgements to his debut novel 40 Patchtown (2020, Bottom Dog Press), author Damian Dressick thanks his Grandfather, Alex Valentine Dressick, for stories he told about a coal mine strike in Southwestern, PA, in 1922, and he thanks his Grandmother, Margaret Swincinski, for conversations about farm life on the outskirts of the coal camps. That is likely why 40 Patchtown is a novel told in a voice so authentic that readers will feel like they have lived beside the teenage narrator, Chester (Chet) Pistakowski (a young “trapper boy” in the coalmines) in 40 Patchtown, one of a series of linked mining camps in Somerset County, outside of Windber, PA.
Told in the first person, through the point of view of fourteen-year-old Chet, 40 Patchtown begins a couple of months after the start of a miner walkout that eventually costs Chet’s family their home and most of their possessions and keeps Chet scrambling to help his mother and siblings survive. The book is an engaging coming-of-age story as well as a glimpse into the lives of Central and Eastern European immigrants who sought work in the coal camps of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Southwestern Pennsylvania. In addition to listening to family stories, Dressick extensively researched the Windber, PA, coal mine strike where miners, with union backing, began an organized protest against the Berwind-White Coal Company.
In much the same way that Harper Lee offers Americans a window into southern society in the 1930’s in Jim Crow Alabama through the eyes of Scout Finch, Dressick allows readers to view the aspirations and the ensuing frustrations of the families of striking miners, workers who have sacrificed comfort and security by going on strike for months, holding out for a union contract. Chet tells us about a union meeting, the strikers gather to hear union organizers try to rally the men on the lines. “Ya men wanna get honest weight for yer coal?” asks the organizer. The miners answer back, “Damn right, we want honest weight.” But as Chet observes, the strike has continued without any sign of concession from the Berwinds, “I seen this lots of times before, but a good many of the miners from 40 ain’t shouting back. Some are just standing over at the edge of the crowd, looking scared.”
Like Scout Finch, Chet is the kind of narrator who readers immediately trust, in part because his innate innocence and honesty seems to make him incapable of guile. Along with Chet, readers gradually come to realize the predicament the strikers have found themselves in. After a few months, as in Matewan and other mine strikes of that era, the striking miners who tried to wait out the strike and gain public support are evicted from their company-owned homes, and families of strikers wind up living in union-provided canvas tents.
The company advertises for more labor, deceiving scabs by claiming new mines are opening that need workers. The striking miners picket scab trains, raising the ire of the mine owners, who hire Pinkerton guards to protect scabs and intimidate the strikers. The armed Pinkertons, who operate like a private militia, are compared by Chet and other Polish miners to the brutal Cossack soldiers, who served the Russian Czars. Yet, despite his fury at the Pinkertons, Chet also expresses his concerns about the union leadership, whose broad smiles, slicked back hair, and costly attire are a vivid contrast to the worn clothing of the striking miners. “I’m looking at [the miner’s] clothes,” says Chet, comparing the clean shirts and neckties of union bosses with the clothes of the striking miners, “and they’re looking like they ain’t held together with nothing but coal dust.”
Like Scout, Chet has much to learn about the way power is wielded; unfortunately, in 40 Patchtown, there is no Atticus Finch to point the way. Chet’s father is killed in a mine accident, and his older brother’s way of solving problems brings added misfortune to the family. As a temporary way to feed his family, Chet hires on as a farm laborer, but soon another worker accuses Chet of stealing food and gets him fired. Luckily Chet’s survival instincts and his insights about who to trust grow as the novel progresses. Bit by bit, he gains awareness about the way any actions taken without enough prior calculation might have unforeseen consequences that impact others. “It’s like tossing a rock into the Paint Creek swimming hole,” he thinks. “Even if you turn away and don’t watch, the ripples is still there.“
Like a lit fuse that slowly smolders until it hits a blasting cap, Dressick skillfully manipulates the dramatic tension in the novel, from the first chapter where a scab worker is killed, to the retribution taken by the Pinkertons and Berwind thugs, and to the violence that ignites after more scabs arrive. Tension rises in the camps, and with the advent of winter, the strikers’ situation goes from bad to worse. After eight months, as the strikers try to hold fast despite increasingly hostile strong-arm tactics and despite receiving less support from the union whose funds and strategic tactics dwindle, life becomes more dire and more volatile for Chet, for his girlfriend and for both families.
Dressick takes the reader into an aspect of political and social history that still resonates for much of the Appalachian region. 40 Patchtown does not oversimplify or romanticize labor or inter-cultural allegiances, and it calls attention to the tensions that workers faced from within ranks as well as from the union leaders and the mine owners. The shifting power dynamics of labor relations are still being written, one hundred years after the events of this novel. As a native of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Dressick fully evokes the place and the culture of Eastern European immigrants who came to the northern Appalachians, and looked to coal mining as a way to provide for their families. As with other workers, they were caught up in the labor movement of the 1920’s. 40 Patchtown reminds us that history is the story of people as much as it is a clash of ideology and power.
40 Patchtown is an important look at a time and place. Dressick keeps it spare and tense yet full of empathy for those whose lives were on the line. In the Afterword we read that the author spent months living in a wood frame “company house” in the coal patch town of Mine 37 while he was working on 40 Patchtown, he saved the manuscript from a fire when that house was burning, and he went on to revise the manuscript for the novel in a home in Windber, PA, that belonged to his maternal grandmother. It is likely that Dressick was born to tell this story.
Bonnie Proudfoot lives outside of Athens, Ohio. She has an MA in English from West Virginia University, and another MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She has had fiction and poetry published in the Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Quarter After Eight, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Sheila-Na-Gig, Northern Appalachia Review, and other journals. Her short story “Old Spirits” placed first in the 2020 Sand Hills Journal Short fiction competition. Goshen Road, her debut novel, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020; it was selected by the Women’s National Book Association as one of their Great Group Reads for 2020. The novel was selected for the Longlist for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for a Debut Novel.
Like Scout, Chet has much to learn about the way power is wielded; unfortunately, in 40 Patchtown, there is no Atticus Finch to point the way. Chet’s father is killed in a mine accident, and his older brother’s way of solving problems brings added misfortune to the family. As a temporary way to feed his family, Chet hires on as a farm laborer, but soon another worker accuses Chet of stealing food and gets him fired. Luckily Chet’s survival instincts and his insights about who to trust grow as the novel progresses. Bit by bit, he gains awareness about the way any actions taken without enough prior calculation might have unforeseen consequences that impact others. “It’s like tossing a rock into the Paint Creek swimming hole,” he thinks. “Even if you turn away and don’t watch, the ripples is still there.“
Like a lit fuse that slowly smolders until it hits a blasting cap, Dressick skillfully manipulates the dramatic tension in the novel, from the first chapter where a scab worker is killed, to the retribution taken by the Pinkertons and Berwind thugs, and to the violence that ignites after more scabs arrive. Tension rises in the camps, and with the advent of winter, the strikers’ situation goes from bad to worse. After eight months, as the strikers try to hold fast despite increasingly hostile strong-arm tactics and despite receiving less support from the union whose funds and strategic tactics dwindle, life becomes more dire and more volatile for Chet, for his girlfriend and for both families.
Dressick takes the reader into an aspect of political and social history that still resonates for much of the Appalachian region. 40 Patchtown does not oversimplify or romanticize labor or inter-cultural allegiances, and it calls attention to the tensions that workers faced from within ranks as well as from the union leaders and the mine owners. The shifting power dynamics of labor relations are still being written, one hundred years after the events of this novel. As a native of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Dressick fully evokes the place and the culture of Eastern European immigrants who came to the northern Appalachians, and looked to coal mining as a way to provide for their families. As with other workers, they were caught up in the labor movement of the 1920’s. 40 Patchtown reminds us that history is the story of people as much as it is a clash of ideology and power.
40 Patchtown is an important look at a time and place. Dressick keeps it spare and tense yet full of empathy for those whose lives were on the line. In the Afterword we read that the author spent months living in a wood frame “company house” in the coal patch town of Mine 37 while he was working on 40 Patchtown, he saved the manuscript from a fire when that house was burning, and he went on to revise the manuscript for the novel in a home in Windber, PA, that belonged to his maternal grandmother. It is likely that Dressick was born to tell this story.
Bonnie Proudfoot lives outside of Athens, Ohio. She has an MA in English from West Virginia University, and another MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She has had fiction and poetry published in the Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Quarter After Eight, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Sheila-Na-Gig, Northern Appalachia Review, and other journals. Her short story “Old Spirits” placed first in the 2020 Sand Hills Journal Short fiction competition. Goshen Road, her debut novel, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020; it was selected by the Women’s National Book Association as one of their Great Group Reads for 2020. The novel was selected for the Longlist for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for a Debut Novel.
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