Blood on the Coal, page 5
Canada’s worst-ever coal mine disaster, which happened in 1914 at Hillcrest, Alberta, claimed the lives of 189 miners. However, that body count pales in comparison to North America’s deadliest underground accident: a December 1907 explosion at a coal mine at Monongah, West Virginia, killed more than 360 men. And not to be macabre, but it’s worth noting that the world’s worst coal mine disaster occurred in 1942 at a mine in Liaoning, the northeast coastal province of Japanese-occupied China. Almost 1,550 miners died in the Benxihu mine, which was being run by the Japanese military. The safety of the prisoners of war and other slave labourers who were doing the digging was of no concern; the scale of the disaster reflected that grim reality.
Springhill’s history up to 1958 included those two mining disasters that devastated the town and claimed 164 lives. The youngest of the victims was twelve-year-old Joseph Dupre, who was killed in the 1891 explosion. Incredibly, several boys as young as eight survived the blast and their exposure to lethal levels of firedamp. The other Springhill disaster—the one the aforementioned Henry Dykens survived on November 1, 1956—resulted in thirty-nine deaths.
Harold Brine was painfully aware of the history of accidents and deaths in the Springhill mines, but like most of his workmates, he simply accepted the risks and shelved them in a back corner of his mind. As the miners liked to say, “The money was clean, even if at the end of a shift your face wasn’t.” It had been this way since Day One of commercial mining at Springhill.
IN 1958, THE AVERAGE Canadian blue-collar worker earned about $4,000 per year. The cost of living was relatively low at that time, especially in Nova Scotia and Canada’s other Maritime provinces. It was possible for a typical family there to make do on a single income if the work was steady and the pay adequate. As a result, more than seventy percent of the men who worked at the DOSCO mine built and owned their own homes. Many of them also owned a car. Harold Brine certainly did. He’d bought, restored, and repainted a vehicle that had been damaged in an accident. His rebuilt maroon-coloured 1950 Meteor was a gleaming dream machine. The car, one of the earliest Ford models to have an automatic transmission, also had leather seats. And an AM radio. Whitewall tires. Tube lights on the fenders and lots of chrome. The whole nine yards. Small wonder it drew admiring stares from males and females alike.
Brine’s spiffy wheels were a familiar sight on local streets, and so was he; Springhill wasn’t a big place. Everybody knew just about everybody in this small town. People here married young. Most teenage girls took it for granted that when they came of age, they’d marry a miner, have babies, and (hopefully) live happily ever after. If Brine hadn’t already worn a wedding band on his finger, the young single women in town would have regarded him as a prime catch. After all, he had a steady job, and he was good looking. There was no question about that.
Harold Brine behind the wheel of his souped-up 1950 Meteor. (Courtesy of Harold Brine)
Brine was average height and tipped the scales at about 175 pounds. He was built as solidly as a coiled spring; strong muscles were one of the few positive fringe benefits for the men who worked in a coal mine. Brine also was blessed with a winning personality and the kind of manly good looks that set feminine hearts aflutter. There was a touch of the Cary Grant twinkle in Brine’s steely blue eyes. He surveyed the world from beneath dark eyebrows and a full, thick thatch of dark, wavy hair. Inexplicably, Brine didn’t have the sideburns that were pretty much de rigueur for teen and twenty-something males at that time. Despite this, he combed back his locks in the same kind of ducktail coif that male heartthrobs James Dean and Elvis had made all the rage.
When the weather was warm and he wasn’t working, Brine could often be seen motoring up and down Main Street. Seated behind the wheel of his shiny car, he well could have been a prototype for the American Graffiti hot-rodders who (in that 1973 film) were depicted as cruising the streets of cities from coast to coast across North America in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Brine’s left elbow would jut out the open driver’s door window, smoke trailing from the ever-present Player’s cigarette that dangled from the corner of his lips. “I enjoyed myself. A lot of other guys cruised around town too. One of the boys had an old Model T Ford with a ragtop; others drove motorcycles. We all had a good time,” said Brine.9
However, on October 23, 1958, he had no more time to cruise up and down Main Street than he did to work on his house. In order to be ready for the start of his shift at 3:00 p.m., Harold Brine made it his habit to be at the pithead a half hour before the mine whistle sounded. And so it was that at about 2:15 p.m., he hopped into his car with wife and daughter perched on the front bench seat beside him; at that time, there was no such thing as seat belts or baby seats.
As the Brines set off, driving northeast along Mountain Road, the afternoon breeze blowing in the open windows of the big Meteor was gloriously warm and summery. However, this late in the season the last leaves that still clung to the trees—stands of sugar maples, yellow birches, scrubby poplars, and staghorn sumac—along both sides of the two-lane blacktop were splashed with nature’s autumn palette of colours. The reds, golds, and browns of the autumnal foliage stood in stark contrast to the cloudless blue sky above. It was a glorious day to be alive.
After a ten-minute drive, the Brines arrived in Springhill. At the foot of Main Street, Harold Brine turned his car to the left, passing through the iconic U-shaped archway that marked the entrance to the dirt road that led up to the lamp cabin building and the DOSCO mine. It was coming up to 2:30 p.m., and the dusty, gravelled employees’ parking lot was already chock full of vehicles. Most were arriving; a few were leaving. The three o’clock shift change was just starting. The first of the men who’d worked the morning shift at the mine would soon be emerging from the depths, while Brine and the other men in the crews on the afternoon shift were checking in, getting ready to go below.
After giving Joan a quick peck on the cheek, Harold Brine hugged and kissed his daughter—“Bye bye, Daddy!” cried Bonnie—before he grabbed his lunch box, slid out of the driver’s seat, and exited the car. Brine stood watching and waving a perfunctory goodbye as his wife wheeled the Meteor out of the parking lot.
“See you at eleven,” Joan Brine called out through the open driver’s window of the car. “Love you!”
Chapter 4
Destined to Be Miner #872
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1958
2:20 P.M.
ON A WARM, SUNLIT DAY SUCH AS THIS ONE, THE THOUGHTS of many Springhillers often turned to the sport of baseball. Raymond “Tommie” Tabor was among them. Whatever he was doing, he’d sometimes stop and think what a splendid day it would be for a ball game. Today, as he did whenever he drove down Main Street on his way to work at the DOSCO mine, Tabor passed the Springhill ball field.
If you’d been in the car with him on this day, Tabor might well have pointed out the ballpark. Not that it was easily missed. The diamond was located at the bottom of the Main Street hill. It was there on the north side of the street, nestled on the infield of the town’s horse racing track. Home plate was a long fly ball distance east of the decorative archway that marked the entrance to the DOSCO mine property.
It was no accident that the ball field occupied such a prominent location in Springhill. The town was baseball crazy. The local men’s baseball team, the Fencebusters, and their exploits were—and are—the stuff of local sporting legend. In the twenty-four years from 1921 to 1945, the team made it to the provincial finals sixteen times, winning eight provincial championships. In the days before every home had a radio or television set, whenever the Fencebusters played a big game on the road, people followed the action via telegrams that a reporter wired back to Springhill after each inning of play. Large crowds would gather to read these reports, which were posted in the window of the telegraph office at the Springhill railway station.
Many of the players who suited up for the Fencebusters were miners living out their diamond dreams. As many as three thousand people—almost half the town’s population at that time—sometimes packed the bleachers on a Saturday afternoon to watch them play. As a boy, Tommie Tabor was often there among the throng, cheering on the home side. Then, in his teenage years, he played for the town’s junior men’s team. Tabor was a gifted athlete, a “take charge” guy who was blessed with a strong, accurate throwing arm. He’d been the catcher on the 1937 Springhill Red Sox team that thrilled all of Cumberland County by winning the junior men’s championship of the Maritimes. He’d graduated to play with the Iron Dukes intermediate team and then with the Fencebusters.
As you may have guessed, the Springhill Red Sox name was a nod to the major league’s Boston Red Sox, which had a large following locally. Fans tuned their radio dials to AM 850, Boston station WHDH, to hear broadcasts of the Sox games. If you’d walked around the residential streets of town on a lazy summer evening, chances are you’d have heard the radio broadcast of a game drifting out through the open windows. When the Red Sox were playing in the afternoons, miners working the 3:00 to 11:00 p.m. shift at the mine would gather outside the nursing station to listen to the radio broadcast of the game until it was time to go below. As often as not, you’d have found Tabor among the men who were there listening. He lived and loved baseball.
Life had thrown Tommie a called third strike that curtailed his own playing days. Even if he’d seen it coming, there probably was nothing he could have done to change the pitch’s trajectory.
There are those who believe and insist it’s fate that dictates the life paths we follow. Maybe they’re right, or maybe they’re not. Who can say for sure? Regardless, it looked as though kismet had decreed that Tommie Tabor would earn his living as a coal miner. He’d been born into a Springhill coal mining family, and it seemed he was fated to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Tommie’s dad, Percy (“Pa”) Tabor, was twenty-four in 1895, the year he began working underground at the only job he’d ever know. Fittingly, when Percy married in 1902, his seventeen-year-old bride, Myrtle Johnson, also hailed from a coal mining family. By the time Percy retired in 1947, he’d laboured in the pits for fifty-two years and had left his flesh-and-blood legacy there.
Among Myrtle and Percy Tabor’s ten kids were seven sons. Raymond Tabor, who entered the world on February 29, 1920—as a leap year baby—was the couple’s seventh child. It was his older sister Margaret who dubbed him “Tommie.” He liked the nickname, which was matey and suited him. He was a people person. He made friends easily and was never shy about getting involved in the community.
All seven Tabor brothers toiled in the mines at one time or another. For three of them, mining was fated—there’s that word again—to be their life’s work. In the autumn of 1958, Tommie was thirty-eight, and he’d already been a miner for almost half his life. That being so, he knew all too well the dangers of underground work. It would have been impossible for him not to. Accidents in the DOSCO mine had claimed two of his siblings. Tommie Tabor’s older brother Fred died in a 1938 rock fall; he was thirty-one when a boulder suddenly dropped from the roof of the No. 2 mine and struck him on the head. A younger brother, Donald, fell victim to carbon monoxide poisoning in the 1956 disaster that shattered the No. 4 mine.
Most coal miners seldom, if ever, voiced their vocational fears. Oh, sure, they sometimes joked about them, or they’d raise safety concerns in the weekly meetings held each Saturday at the union hall, but that was about it. There was no point in dwelling on any of this stuff. The wife of a miner who died in a mining accident put it succinctly and well when she said, “We never talked about the risk. It was just something that we lived with.”1
That was Tommie Tabor’s attitude. And so, while he never talked much about the deaths of his two brothers, there can be no doubt that he felt their loss deeply. Sometimes late at night, when he and his wife, Ruth, lay in bed talking about the latest goings-on at the mine—accidents, close calls, or deaths that had happened—Tabor would begin to shake. Ruth understood why. She was a McManaman, a well-known Springhill mining family; three of her brothers worked alongside her husband at the DOSCO mine. By 1958, after almost two decades of marriage, Ruth Tabor well knew how her Tommie felt about working in the No. 2 mine. She also knew that if there’d been a good option, he’d much rather have earned his living another way.
Tabor had been just seventeen when he’d joined his father and brothers on the payroll at the DOSCO mine in 1937. It was pretty much a given that he’d do so. He was already a veteran miner when he and Ruth McManaman got married in November 1941. The newlyweds moved in next door to his parents in the vacant half of the coal company house at 86 Herrett Road. Ruth Tabor and baby daughter Glenda remained there, close to her in-laws, when Tommie went away during WWII, serving for three years and fighting overseas as a member of the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. On a per capita basis, Springhill had the highest enlistment rates of any town in Canada. Even though the staff at the local recruiting office posted a sign that said, “If you are a Springhill Miner you are needed in the mines, not in the army,” more than 1,250 local men and women signed up. Almost seven hundred of them served overseas, and fifty-four of them were killed.2
When he wasn’t wearing a baseball uniform, Raymond “Tommie” Tabor wore a different kind of uniform—that of a soldier. He served three years in the Canadian Army during WWII. (Courtesy of Valarie Alderson)
FOLLOWING HIS RETURN home from Europe in early 1945, Tommie Tabor resumed his life in Springhill pretty much where he’d left off. Like the million other Canadian men and women who’d been in uniform during the war, Tabor wanted nothing more than to settle down, raise a family, and enjoy the peace and prosperity for which he’d fought. His workaday routine in Springhill fit him as comfortably as his old catcher’s mitt. If Tabor’s life was remarkable in any way, it’s that it was so typical of the life of the many Springhill miners who’d volunteered to do their bit for King and country
Although he went back to work as a miner in the No. 2 mine, it was Tabor’s family life that was his focal point. Tommie and Ruth were devoted parents. In addition to daughter Glenda, the couple had three more children. In 1946, Ruth gave birth to a son they named Gary. Three years later, daughter Valarie came along, and then in 1953, daughter Susan—“Suzie Bubblegum” her dad called her.
Even as he was working full time and engaged in a busy family life, Tabor somehow found—or made—time to involve himself in the community. He volunteered with the Knights of Columbus, played some baseball with the Fencebusters, served as president of the local women’s softball league, and coached both a women’s team and his son Gary’s Little League ball team. Small wonder the Tabors’ company house on Herrett Road was perpetually buzzing. There were always four kids and their playmates running around, of course. Then too, with the DOSCO mine being close by, Tommie’s pals were always dropping by before or after work, and just a few doors down the street was “the Liars Bench,” a neighbourhood gathering spot for miners young and old alike who were tellers of tall tales. Pa Tabor had gathered scrap lumber and helped build and set up the rough-hewn bench that became—and still is—a Springhill landmark.3
A steady stream of visitors came to the door on both sides of the Tabor duplex. On Tommie and Ruth Tabor’s side, the kitchen was a prime draw. Ruth, like her husband, was quiet by nature, but she loved to cook. The pies she baked spoke on her behalf with the eloquence of a great orator. “Butterscotch, lemon, coconut . . . I try to have something different every day,” she once told American author Melissa Fay Greene.4
In 1942, when Pa Tabor and his chums built a bench adjacent to the Tabor family’s home on Herrett Road, pranking teenagers painted the seat and dubbed it “the Liars Bench.” The name stuck and the Liars Bench became a Springhill landmark. (Nova Scotia Archives)
Visitors also called next door, at the home of the elder Tabors, Myrtle and Percy. “A lot of men used to come to talk with my grandfather about what was going on in the mine,” Valarie (Tabor) Alderson remembered. “Grandfather had a little shack [in the yard] where he and the men would go to play cards, smoke, and have a few drinks. Mum Tabor wouldn’t let them do any of that in the house.”5
Each July, when the DOSCO mine shut down for the annual two weeks of holidays, Tommie Tabor always made it a point to take Ruth and the kids on a road trip. They’d pack up the family’s 1954 Ford and head for the seashore. Some of their happiest memories were made on the drives they took around Nova Scotia and over to Prince Edward Island. One of the most cherished photos in the Tabor family album is of Tommie and his two younger girls, taken in the summer of 1958 in the passenger lounge of the Northumberland Strait ferry. For Tabor, life was always all about family. That was why when Ruth’s aging parents began having health issues and could no longer look after themselves, Tommie, Ruth, and the four kids moved in with the McManamans in their house on Pleasant Street. This was a real change for the Tabors. They became “hillers.”
This photo of Tommie Tabor and his daughters Susan (on her dad’s lap) and Valarie on the ferry to PEI is a cherished family keepsake. (Courtesy of Valarie Alderson)
Most of the residents along Herrett Road, on the flat land to the west of the town that was a hop, skip, and jump away from the mine, were miners and their families. Pleasant Street, a half-mile to the east on the hilltop, had a different focus. Not all the male family breadwinners here were miners. The neighbourhood was known as “French Hill” since so many families with French surnames lived there. Not that any of this mattered much to the Tabors. After their move, the only real differences in their lives were that the kids now went to a different school and not as many familiar faces dropped by unannounced for a cup of tea or to sample Ruth’s pies. For her husband, the biggest difference was that while he could walk to work in five minutes when he and his family lived on Herrett Road, he now drove most days. That’s how, on this balmy autumn afternoon, he came to be passing the Springhill baseball field. He’d snatched up his lunch box and identification tag, given Ruth a peck on the cheek, and ruffled Suzie Bubblegum’s hair as he breezed out the door; the other three kids were still at school until four o’clock.
