Cloud By Day: A Story of Coal and Coke and People - Hardcover

Sheppard, Muriel Earley And Melega, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0961392207 ISBN 13: 9780961392208

Publisher: Heritage, 1975

Synopsis

Pennsylvania's famed Coke Region, which fuels the great steel mills of the Pittsburgh district, is a country of extremes: ugly by day with its blackened tipples and slate dumps, beautiful by night when the flare of the coke ovens works magic with sooty buildings; a place of great wealth and great poverty, with too much violence and far too many people. This is the Region in today's headlines. These are the people who stand, willingly or unwillingly, back of John L. Lewis and the sick industry--the people whose "work-stoppages" affect each individual in the United States. Today a clearer understanding of the way the miner works and lives is imperative, and the Centralia Mine disaster has underlined the further necessity of understanding the hazards of the miner's job.

Cloud By Day, written from the author's personal knowledge of the district, is a picture of the fabulous and violent past of the Region and of its uncertain present. In tracing its history Mrs. Shepard shows the changes in methods of production and in the racial character of the population; she pictures early mob violence, the activities of coal and iron police, and the conditions which led to union organization in the section. The story of the Region is a story of its people: J. V. Thompson, coal baron of the early 1900's who built an eleven-story skyscraper; Steve Kupka, the personification of the miner who leaves his house in the patch long before daybreak with his big round dinner bucket; women watching the main shaft of Mather Mine for days and nights while rescue teams risk their lives to find the husbands and sons caught somewhere in the raging inferno below; men who built their homes themselves under the Penncraft Cooperative Housing Project; Greek Catholic pilgrims at Mount St. Macrina; immigrants taking out citizenship papers; engineers, strike leaders and strikebreakers, and old King Coal himself--John L. Lewis.

About this edition

• Publisher: Heritage
• Publication date: 1975
• ISBN 10: 0961392207
• ISBN 13: 9780961392208
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1