Coal Scrip :

Rod, like the way you did the page, very nice presentation. The company store was a way of like in the first half of the 20th century in the U.S. My grandfather worked at a steel mill and said he would have quit in the 1920's if he could have paid off the company store.

Looks Good Rod....i travelled a LONG way to find them

Thanks Russ.
Phil, I hope I did them, and your trip, justice.

I think this sort of thing, can be heard in various lyrics
in songs of the time, Roy Orbison's "working for the man"
may be one.
A lot of the "American dream" was built on taking advantage
of the less fortunate.

Rod, No doubt about it..but I wonder if things were much different in West Virginia or in the Wales of How green was my valley...its amazing that the coal barons would have no feeling for the miners...my mother and her parents first stop in the States was the coal mining section a triangle of Pennsylvania Ohio and West Virginia..where my grandparents came from the men worked at tunneling...my Grandmother saw one too many mine accidents and got them out of there by hook or by crook...

Thanks Grandma...the thought of washing coal dust off every day does not really appeal to me !!

Agreed, at the beginning of the industrial age,
Britain, be it Cornwall or Wales, was apparently horrific,
Navvy work, horrible stuff, the Dickensian age.

Rod, the system was newcomers have to pay their dues...in the 1950's most of my school friends were D.P.s displaced persons..Polish, Northern Ireland,German and Italian..they got into the U.S. but had to do the lowest jobs of course..we have the old limestone caves from making cement and they grew mushrooms in them..so guess where a lot of the D.P women used to work ??

Interesting Phil.

I was sitting down today with some of
the old fellas in town, having a chin wag,
turns out the local builder, (Italian name)
is the son of (of course) an Italian who emmigrated here
in 1946.

He was originally here in town, in 1941 as a prisoner of war
working for the local farmers. We liked the Italians,
they worked hard, and were used to the conditions.
He was forced to return to Italy in 1945, but wanted to return
which he did when the farmers invited him back, and sponsored him.

The family are now local builders.

Rod, when I was in the Air Force I spent 20 months in Southern Italy...(party time) on a joint U.S.-Italian missle base...a lot of the young Italians who were getting discharged were going to Australia to work as mechanics or whatever..i hope they liked it there because in those days the trip was by boat...a long ride..It was funny some of the local bar owners spoke English with a British accent..when asked they said they spent 1940-45 as prisoners of war in England...better than being dead I would say !