PINEVILLE

   Many years ago when I was in retail management, I was a district manager for the southeastern part of the U.S. One of my functions was to close unproductive stores. One such store was located in a small coal mining town in southwest Kentucky alone the Appalachian trail region. The population was only about 1,200 people and most could chart their linage back four or five generations to this town.

   Two of the coal mines had shut down and most everybody was living on the cuff. A small mall had opened in a town about 35 miles away and the remaining town folk were buying their needs there and thus my little 48 year old department store had seen it’s final days. When I closed a store it usually took about three weeks of doing transfers, asset liquidations, terminations and a mountain of paperwork. I also had to resolve any tax issues with the local government, which in this case was the mayor and his four councilmen who were all family. I stayed at the “Colonel Boone” hotel and endured the meatloaf at the small town café every night. There were no movie theaters and the only bar was in Hazard, 45 miles away.

   Living in this small mountain community was like a time warp into another place and decade. Everybody knew each other and who was doing who and how often. Half the kids didn’t finish high school and every boy’s future was ordained by the family tradition of becoming a coal miner at 17. There were several other coal jobs like “coal pickers” and “shovel sharpers” for those 14 to 16, but getting into the mines for the big money, you had to wait until 17. Sad to say, times were now against those old traditions.

   Every day you heard terms like “back in da holler,” or “his daddy’s a shineman”, or “the black lung got em, bless his heart.” Another thing you often heard was nonstop slander of “them Washington fellas”. To that very day, the older locals would talk about the day “them Washington fellas” sent army buses into town in 1943 and rounded up all the men between 18 and 35 in the hollers that were not working the mines. In the town square, under military guard, they got processed and then all the men folk were loaded on the buses and sent to war. The resentment, even after all those decades, was still as strong then as it was the day it happened in 1943. What kept this fervor alive was the fact that half these men never returned home.

   My store was on Main street, (yes, Main street). Down two blocks from me was the towns funeral parlor, (yes, parlor). My store shared a common delivery alley in the back with the funeral parlor and furniture store. Each morning I drove through that alley to get to a side street where I parked my car. Okay…..here it comes……some mornings there would be a corpse, wrapped in an old stitched quilt or blanket and left laying on the small loading dock of the funeral parlor.

   Come to find out, it was a common practice for many of the “clans” that lived up in the more isolated hollers to bring their dead to town at night in a borrowed pick-up and leave the deceased on the loading dock with a scratched note giving the name, date of birth, maybe a SS#, what happened and when they died. Also there would be some money. The mortician told me once, that the body of an old man was left one night with a leather bag containing a hundred silver dollars. Makes you think.  Children and babies were never left. The clans figured they never really had a life so a death certificate was not important, so they were given a “quilt” burial. As soon as they died they were wrapped in one of grandma’s quilts, put in a hole and covered up. Gives you a sense of sad loneliness but it had been their custom for generations.

   The undertaker would do the embalming and then take the paperwork over to an old retired doctor who signed off on the death certificate and then the undertaker would put it all in an envelope and along with the body he would place everything in a cardboard casket and that night he would place it back on the loading dock and by morning it was gone. This was the Appalachian way.