Fathers knew best about mines

WASHINGTON — My friend Ken Ball and I have a something very special in common: Separately and continents apart, our fathers kept us out of deep mines.

My father was a mechanic who worked in mine maintenance, mostly gold mines known as hard-rock mines, all over southern central Africa. Ken is the scion of a long line of coal miners in Pennsylvania.

Whenever there is a mine disaster, like the tragedy this week at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, Ken and I think of our fathers and thank them.

I dropped out of high school. Soon, I got a job in journalism, but journalism, then as now, can be a fickle business and the pay lousy.

After 18 glorious months of cub reporting, I found myself in Zambia getting by in construction work because my gig as a very junior foreign correspondent had gone south.

I was offered a job at fabulous money as a trainee miner in the Zambian copper mines. They paid what was called the "copper bonus" and it had, from the mine owners' point of view, gotten out of hand.

The defense buildup in the United States had pushed the price of copper beyond all expectations. Copper capitalism was all the rage.

I was already spending the money in my head, bonding in that machismo way that miners have. The typewriter would be traded for a jack hammer. I'd be a man's man with a pocket full of "copper bonus" money to prove it.

I wrote my father and told him that job insecurity and money woes would soon be over, I was "going down the mines."

My father had a faltering grip on spelling and grammar, but that didn't mean that he couldn't express himself elegantly. I believe that writing, like musicality, is innate.

If hard-mining is about the judicious use of dynamite, my father's response letter was as explosive.

Its gist was: I've never stopped you in your folly, especially in leaving school. But for God's sake, don't go down a mine. Those places aren't for human beings. I've been forced to work on them most of my life, and I can tell you that mines are no places for human beings. Please don't do it.

Just about the same time, in the late 1950s, in faraway Pennsylvania, Ken Ball was getting about the same advice from his father. Ken finished his schooling and went on to a distinguished career in science and engineering. I went back to the newspaper trade.