Emerging: January 24, 1959
by Catherine Young
from Anamesa Journal 2014


Emerging, January 24, 1959 is composed from news reports on that date and is centered on the Knox Mine Disaster. This event precipitated the collapse of anthracite coal mining in eastern Pennsylvania, creating a huge shift in our coal-based economy.

Emerging
January 24, 1959

Emerge. To uncover; become known. To come out of obscurity. To appear from behind something. To rise from or out of anything that surrounds or covers. To come out of a condition – especially a difficult one. To come forth from that in which anything has been enveloped.

*
Concealed
Corner Brook, Newfoundland

In a paper mill town, a nineteen-year-old girl gives birth during the night, in the bathroom of her workplace, the boarding house, then lapses into a coma. When she regains consciousness, the baby is dead.
The girl panics. She finds a shoebox. She lifts the lifeless body of her baby, places it in the shoebox, and ties the box with twine. The box bulges oddly. Anyone seeing it would be curious about the contents, so she places the box in a paper shopping bag with twisted paper handles, the kind used at Christmas time. The girl brings the box to the trash.

It is the discarded shoebox discovered at the dump that leads that the police to the door of a female retail clerk whose residence is located near the boarding house. After canvassing two hundred residences in that area, the RCMP center on this one. They enter and search the clerk’s house. Under her bed, they find a suitcase that serves as a coffin; inside, the body of a second infant. The RCMP press the woman with questions. She denies any knowledge of an infant in a shoebox, but she is sent to a doctor to be examined. Perhaps she has had twins. But no, the shoebox baby is not hers.
The investigators trace the shoebox to a local shoe store, and then to a man in Port au Port whose specialty shoes mark him as the one who discarded the shoebox in the boarding house bathroom. Back at the boarding house, all the female members of the staff are medically examined to discover who had recently given birth. The nineteen-year-old girl is found, and admits the baby is hers.

The women are prosecuted for concealment of birth and negligence to obtain reasonable medical assistance in childbirth. The Corner Brook Incident is written up in the RCMP Quarterly. The Corner Brook women are never called mothers. Almost unbelievable, the police say as they wrap up the investigation.

Concealment of birth is not uncommon, the investigators admit, though the discovery of two infanticides emerging in the same block is a strange coincidence.


*
Revealed
Stockport, United Kingdom

Tucked away among the brick facades of Stockport, elderly people live alone in houses and small apartments without anyone to care for them. These people over eighty years of age have seen the Victorian era through the Edwardian. Many of have been the backbone of Stockport's hatting and milling industries. They have witnessed two world wars in their country and the economic depression sandwiched in between; have huddled in basements through bombings; lived through rationing and meager meals. And now, because they have lost relatives to war, or simply have outlived them, these Stockport residents have no one to nurse them when they are in need. They have remained hidden like the old aunt in the attic in Jane Eyre.

The very elderly continue to live on meager portions, as if war food rationing had not ended six years ago. Because they have no one to prepare meals for them, they may only be able to prepare one warm meal a day. If these elderly people cannot cook, their only warmth may come from a cup of tea.

Thanks to a social research team at Manchester University, this is about to change. Through newspaper advertising, wireless, and house to house visits, the elderly are learning about welfare services. Their doors open to social workers and students with clipboards in hand, ready to listen and give help. The old people who were tucked away are now emerging as supported members of their community.


*
Unveiled
Scranton, Pennsylvania

On this bitterly cold January day, Teresa Martin stands at the back of St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church looking at her bare hands, which hold the white missal and the white orchids. Her triple-tiered veil of illusion casts a filmy light over her visage, a light much lovelier than the haze veiling the mountains from the nearby burning coal dumps. Each move, each breath, rustles the crinolines and flared skirt of her silk taffeta wedding gown, a dress reminiscent of Grace Kelly's.

Breakfast was held at the Koch-Conley American Legion Hall, and the day will finish there with the reception. Teresa's uncle, Father Martin, will perform the ceremony, even though his community in the neighboring valley awaits news of coal miners feared lost to a watery grave. Father Martin has brought an apostolic blessing from Pope John XXIII, who, in one day’s time, will announce his intent for Vatican II, and his desire for an ecumenical church.

Brassy chords resound from the alcove organ. Teresa looks up. She appears as a princess in her gown adorned in seed pearls. Blue silk bridesmaids float ahead of her down the aisle as her journey begins. The strident opening notes of Mendelssohn's Wedding March ring out. After a pause, Teresa's father takes her arm. In measured steps, Teresa moves toward the golden lights of the altar, where her groom, George Lally, waits. But just before reaching him, she turns to the statue of the Virgin Mary. The Vigin's loving arms extend toward the bride, and Teresa places her orchids within them. After genuflecting, Teresa walks to the kneeler to join her groom. A few steps taken, a few vows made, and she will turn away from girlhood. She will accept the gold ring, and tonight Teresa will shed her gown, a cocoon from which she will emerge a woman.


*
Rising
Port Griffith, Pennsylvania

Joe Stella, local police chief and anthracite mine surveyor, stands on the banks of the Susquehanna River while emergency construction workers run rails to the river's edge, preparing to drop railcars into the whirlpool in the flooding river. The men with floodlights, rails, and bulldozers do not speak the horror of trying to fill this hole. No one expected miners to punch a hole in the riverbed by accident. No mine owner admits to forcing miners to take away too much coal and bedrock.

Two days earlier, Joe was beneath that hole, standing in the River Slope tunnel of the Knox Mine, looking at maps moments before the waters crashed in. He kept the miners calm. He asked them to turn off their headlamps and wait for him while he and another miner raced to find passage through the Marcy Vein. It had already filled up with water. Looking for a sign, they found one: chalk markings on a rotted doorframe that read, To Eagle Shaft. They felt air pushing upward into the shaft; they shouted for the men to follow them. Beneath the river, anthracite miners in coveralls, flannel shirts, and boots slogged in chest-deep icy water. They followed the air being forced out as the water rose. They crawled over debris; clawed through cave-ins. They saw a light coming towards them ––a light no one could later explain. Joe and the men kept shouting until a search party hauled them out. Then Joe went back into the mine to rescue others.

Fifty-six men were in the Knox mine at River Slope when the Susquehanna River broke through and smashed the workings. Thanks to Joe's fast action, only twelve miners remain unaccounted for.

Now as Joe stands above the steel-gray Susquehanna watching the whirlpool, a hole as wide as a two-story tower, men with rails, bulldozers, and floodlights try to fill that hole. Hopper cars drop and disappear into the swirling icy waters as if they had never existed; as if no iron had been mined, melted, shaped and riveted into their structure. The railcars plunge into the whirlpool along with hay, bailed excelsior, utility poles, railroad ties, and the largest rocks available. There is no sucking sound as they vanish.
For three days Pennsylvania Congressman Daniel J Flood uses television, radio, and newspapers to demonstrate his concern and reassure everyone that twelve missing miners will be found and that a flooding river is a catastrophe no one could predict.
Joe doesn’t say anything as he watches. But when it comes his turn he will tell how, only two weeks earlier, he warned officials that they had mined ten feet beyond the permitted point beneath the river.

Joe Stella does not tell reporters what it sounds like in a coalmine under a January river when the waters rise; when men wearing miner’s hats begin to cry, yell, and bargain with God, not knowing if they will ever emerge alive.


*
Laughter Escapes
London, United Kingdom

Two nurses dressed in white from their perky caps to their crêpe shoes accompany two doctors flanking the iron lung in which Peter Wood lies. But for his head, Peter has been encased in the contraption for the past ten months, since he was afflicted with polio. Breath by breath, the device removes pressure on his diaphragm so he can inhale, then restores pressure for him to expel air. Outside the iron lung, beyond Peter’s feet, a circulating rod turns and pumps bellows. Machinery reminiscent of a windmill, but which draws breath instead of water.

Many hope the new Sabin oral polio vaccine will finally wipe out polio, but the vaccine is not yet widely available. For Peter, the vaccine comes too late. Most patients stay in the iron lung for only two to three weeks. The doctors believe it is time for Peter to leave behind his comfortable womb. Thirteen-year-old Peter needs to begin breathing on his own. The doctors and nurses will trick him into it--with comedy. They take Peter to the London Coliseum, to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, starring Yanna.
As Peter is wheeled into the theater on his back, he takes in the view of the newly-renovated dome and the striking black-and-white circles surrounding it. He also takes in the odors of the crowd: damp wools scented with naphthalene, musky perfumes, hair crème, and cigarettes--so very different from the hospital's ever-present odor of wintergreen alcohol.

The overture begins; Peter turns his head to the side. "The Prince is giving a ball! The Prince is giving a ball!" the cast sings as they parade around the stage. Peter smiles. The town crier onstage operatically begins his list of preposterous names: "His Royal highness, Christopher Rupert, Vindermier Vlandamier, Carl Alexander, François Reginald, Lancelot Herman…"

" Herman?!!" the cast questions, incredulous.

"Herman," the town crier sings decisively, with exaggerated seriousness, "…is having a ball."
Peter laughs. The nurse beside him springs into action and turns off the iron lung. She watches through the side port window as Peter breathes on his own for twenty minutes.

The next time Peter laughs, he breathes for forty minutes on his own.
Peter won't break out of his iron cocoon tonight, but he is breathing on his own. Laughing and breathing.