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For all this, Spradlin draws a salary of $40,000. His home is bright and comfortable. But the price he pays is never forgotten. "If a man works in the mines until retirement -- if he lives -- it's going to knock a certain percentage off of his life, health-wise. You're making good money, but you're getting bad health doing it." Yet he counts himself among the lucky ones. He still has a job.
After a decade in which thousands of mining jobs disappeared, many Logan County workers face a bitter choice: stay put and live hand-to-mouth, or migrate. Among the thousands who have left is 60-year-old Eugene Jones, who was laid off in September 1990. Like many of his generation, Jones never went past the sixth grade. "I can write my name and my address and stuff like that, but I cannot spell hardly anything," he says. He now lives in Virginia and has been searching for work around the region for eight months. Recently he drove his pickup truck five hours to Tennessee to try for a job on a road crew. At the construction office he was asked to fill out an application form, but it was beyond his ability. So he took the form and retraced his five-hour drive back to his wife Wanda Lou, who filled out the application for him and mailed it in. The stress is wearing on him and on his marriage. "Sometimes I feel like raising a gun and shooting my brains out," says Jones. "I feel like I ain't much, like I'm down on the bottom and I can't get up."
No matter how grim the prospect for mining jobs, many of Logan County's young men still believe there will be a mining career for them. The Ralph R. / Willis Vocational Training Center is one of the county's best hopes for teaching its young that there is more to the world than coal. But the most popular courses in the school are those on mining. One is taught by David Thompson, 33, who went into the mines at 18. "The only thing I could see was dollar signs," he recalls. For the next eight years, the 6-ft. 3-in. miner worked in spaces little more than 3 ft. high. "I was on my knees eight hours a day -- crawling, bending, twisting," says Thompson. By age 27, his knees couldn't take it anymore. Since then he has had six operations on his knees and all the cartilage removed.
Nonetheless, Thompson and the school train some 600 young people a year in the basics of mining. "If a person chooses to do so, who am I to tell him no?" asks Thompson. He has considered what he would do if he lost his teaching position. "I would have to go back into the coal mines -- if I could find a job," he says. And what of his 10-year-old son Justin? "I realize that's not what I want my son to do," he says.
The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration insists that the mines are safer now than ever before. In fact, catastrophic cave-ins are largely a thing of the past. The number of miners killed each year is between 60 and 70, about half the annual toll of a decade ago. But MSHA statistics also suggest that serious injuries -- those that result in some loss of work -- may be on the rise. After dipping to an annual average of 9,500 injuries during the mid- 1980s, they increased to an average of more than 12,000 a year over the past four years, despite a shrinking work force. The MSHA attributes the higher tally to better reporting procedures rather than an increase in injuries.