The Breaker Boys (Tommy "Mule" Symons of Primrose and Stu "Shaftdigger" Richards of Orwigsburg) perform at the Mountaineer Hose Company in Minersville. PHOTO BY JACQUELINE DORMER
Originally published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on March 13, 2022.
MINERSVILLE — At the Mountaineer Hose Company Thursday night, spectators sipped Guers iced tea as they heard Tommy “Mule” Symons and Stu “Shaftdigger” Richards tell the story of Ratty McQuaid, winner of the great Fourth of July rat-killing contest in Wadesville, New Castle Twp.
“Ratty killed one ton of rat in a 24-hour period,” Richards said. “But nobody said what they got for a reward.”
Symons showed his (plastic) mine rat, who, like the canary, sensed danger in the mines. He praised the mules that hauled the coal, calling them “The most intelligent of God’s creatures… put in the mine” — second to himself, of course.
There were more stories in store. Symons, 70, of Primrose, and Richards, 73, of Orwigsburg, are the Breaker Boys. Donning the uniforms and dialects of old-time anthracite miners, the duo sang folk songs penned by the miners of generations past.
Thursday’s performance, sponsored by the Minersville Area Historical Society, was entitled “Once a Man, Twice a Boy.” A miner began his life separating coal as a boy. When he grew up, he toiled in the mine until he was too old to work, at which point he separated coal once more. Once a man, twice a boy.
The Breaker Boys’ act is more similar to Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello than Sean Connery and Richard Harris in “The Molly Maguires.” Their act was full of puns, malapropisms and insult humor punctuated by bouts of harmonica playing and songs about the ambitions and hardships of miners.
The duo called each other “bucko” and “lad.” They spit at the mention of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal Co. and its president, Franklin B. Gowen. Symons played an Irish miner, and Richards played a Welshman — “Welchman” in Symons’ dialect.
They even dedicated a song to me — a song about a newspaperman who gets in a bar fight with miners in Lost Creek. Lost Creek was a place “where women had their rights, where the whiskey flows like water and there are always brawls and fights.”
When singing about the “ruffians,” the newspaperman met in Lost Creek, Symons gestured to the folks assembled in the fire hall.
“Stay outta Lost Creek,” Richards told me.
I was flattered.
Symons read a poem about Stosh, an old Eastern European miner. Stosh had blue specks of coal embedded in his skin — “a coal miner’s tattoo.” When he was a boy, Symons and his friends would tease Stosh and call him names, before they realized why he had those blue scars. Stosh died of black lung, but in Symons’ words, “He survived the mine. He won.”
“To this day I still think about Stosh,” Symons said, “and I feel sorry for what we did. God bless ya, Stosh.”
Two of the songs they sang were written by Minersville natives. John “Captain Jack” Crawford, was a Civil War veteran who learned how to read and write in the hospital. His exploits with General Custer gave him the nickname “the poet scout.”
When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877, Crawford woke up to banner headlines on the front page of his newspaper. Meanwhile, only one column could be spared for a gold miner killed during his work. “Only a miner,” the paper wrote. Crawford wrote the song “Only a Miner” in memory of this anonymous miner, whose story was the same as countless others.
There was also William E. Keating, a miner and World War I veteran who wrote a 40-verse mining epic entitled “Down, Down, Down.” Keating performed “Down, Down, Down” in as many bar rooms as he could, but couldn’t get through 15 verses without cries of “Time!” — Keating and the audience’s cue to get another drink.
As Symons began to sing the miners’ tale, someone shouted, “Time!”
Comments