Karen Tintori - Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster

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Trapped is everything that such a book ought to be, and much more: A gripping narrative, powerful in its language and extraordinarily well-constructed. A portrait of elemental human strengths and frailties. A reminder of the terrible price paid by immigrants to establish themselves in America. Karen Tintoris account of the Cherry Mine Disaster is a classic of its kind.

Frank Viviano, author of Blood Washes Blood and Dispatches from the Pacific Century

The authors writing skills are evident; she crafts a very accessible and gripping account of a human tragedy that elicited both the best and worst from those involved. Highly recommended.

Library Journal

Tintoris graphic account of this tragedy is a sad but gripping story

Booklist

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New York, NY 10020

SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2002 by Karen A. Katz Revocable Trust

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 978-0-7434-2195-9

0-7434-2195-7 (Pbk)

First Atria Books trade paperback edition September 2003

Cover design by Tom McKeveny

Photograph of miners courtesy of Lester Corsini

Photograph of mine courtesy of Jack Rooney

Author photograph by Larry Belland/P.P.A

is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or

Front cover: Cherry miners, left to right: Attilio Corsini, Adam Galletti, Bobby Corsini; seated: Louis Galletti

For my family, especially Lawrence, Mitchel and Steven and for miners, and their families

A little fire is quickly trodden out,

Which, being sufferd, rivers cannot quench.

William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth, Act IV, Scene VIII

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.

Seneca, De Providentia, 5,9

And after the fire, a still small voice.

I Kings, 19

I n the crisp postdawn hours of Saturday, November 13,1909, four hundred and eighty Illinois coal miners dropped down into a mine touted to be the safest in the country. By midday more than half of them were living their worst nightmare, trapped in an inferno raging nearly four hundred feet below ground. Cut off from exit routes, these men and boys battled for their lives, driven back by smoke, ferocious heat, walls of flames and the deadly invisible gas miners call the black damp.

By nightfall the mine was sealed, buryingdead and alivemore than half of the miners. No one could have guessed it would be March and beyond before rescuers could retrieve and bury most of those still trapped below.

Death touched nearly every home in Cherry, Illinois. Hundreds of women were widowed. Nearly five hundred children were orphaned. Just weeks before Thanksgiving they were plunged into despair and destitution, with no food or fuel in homes suddenly robbed of men.

Cherrys tragedy was a national one that dominated headlines for weeks. In a time before radio and television, newspapers devoted page after page to detail the continuing relief and rescue efforts and the investigation that ensued. Foreign governments dispatched their consuls to Cherry to look after their bereaved nationals, troops arrived to maintain order and Americans everywhere reached deep to answer appeals from the Red Cross and The Chicago Daily Tribune.

The catastrophe stands as the worst coal mine fire in U.S. history and the countrys third-worst coal mine disaster. Only the December 6, 1907, Monongah, West Virginia, explosion which claimed 362 at Monongah Numbers and 8 and the October 22, 1913, Dawson, New Mexico, explosion at Stag Canon Number 2, where 263 died, surpass it for loss of life.

It was a tragedy that precipitated sweeping changes in child labor practices and in the coal industry, and was the catalyst for the first workers compensation laws enacted in the United States.

It was also a tragedy that never should have happened.

Considered to be the largest coal shaft in the U.S., Cherry was the epitome of modernity and safety both in construction and equipment. Completed in 1905, it was one of the only mines in the country outfitted throughout with electricity. Built of steel, concrete, brick and stone, and with a tipple its engineer rated the safest in the world, the St. Paul Mine was declared fireproofa designation that would be the first of the ironies to haunt Cherry just four years later.

* * *

I never knew my Grandpa Tintori, but I grew up in Detroit in his home, a two-flat house heated by radiators that were steamed by coal. I can still hear the slush of those sooty lumps sliding down the chute at the side of our house into the coal cellar, hear the scrape of the shovel as my dad heaped another load onto the fire in the coal furnace.

Grandma Tintori, my dads widowed mother, lived in the upper flat. On Sunday mornings, shed invite me up for tea and whole wheat toast and stories about her hard life as the child of a coalminer who died in his forties of black lung disease. My parents, my sister, JoLynne, my brother, John, and I lived downstairs.

In January 1948, with her pregnancy just a hunch, my mother, Joanne, had stood beside her father-in-laws hospital bed and told him she was carrying his first grandchild. I wont live to see the baby? he told her. He died the next day. I have always felt a strong connection to this grandfather thanks to the gift of my mothers announcement. What Ive learned of him has come from photographs, a couple of legal documents and far too few family stories.

John Tintori was born in Fanano, Italy, and in his early twenties came to join relatives in Illinois to mine coal. He became a citizen, shipped out to France with the U.S. Army in World War I, came back to earn his miners license, then worked in mines throughout Illinois until he and other relatives succumbed to the lure of the assembly line. He packed up his young wife, Catherine, and my father, Raymond, and headed for the auto plants in Detroit.

Aside from the bittersweet story that he knew about me before he died, what burns in my mind most vividly about him is the sentence I remember first hearing when I was about seven, a pronouncement Grandma Tintori gave to me throughout my childhood like a recurring gift.