The Adventures of Leo

By Tom Gilco

Dear readers,

This story is very personal to me. It starts with the tales of young Leo Bryant, which by the way is the name of my great-grandson, and includes many characters in his early years. Most of the facts in this story are related to my father, who was born on August 20, 1927, just as Leo was, whose father’s name was the name of my father and myself. Having read extensively on the subject of the United Mine Workers of America, of which I am a current member, having worked in the coal mines for fourteen years on various assignments, and being forced out by injuries, of which there are many in the coal mining industry, I believe I am qualified as a man who knows the facts of the mine wars.

Many of the historical facts in this story are true, for example, the Blair Mountain Massacre in which quite a few miners were killed or injured by the coal company thugs, including Sheriff Don Chafin whose sole responsibility was to keep the union out of Logan County, West Virginia.

I hope you read and enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thanks.

Tom Leo Gilco Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685260118

Book preview

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The Adventures of Leo

Tom Gilco

ISBN 978-1-68526-010-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68526-011-8 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 Tom Gilco

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

To my friend, Mike Roark, and his beautiful wife, Elva. I miss you, Mike.

Chapter 1

Funny thing was…

’Twas August 1927 when Leo was born in an isolated little camp called Slagle, in the coalfields of Southern West Virginia to a single young mother and a Greyhound bus driver named Tom Bryant from Northern West Virginia who made regular stops in the hills disgorging passengers and taking on new. This is how he met Victoria, a pretty young girl with a flirtatious smile who rode his bus regularly from small-town Logan County to another small-town Logan County.

Tom was a Seventh-Day Adventist from Fairmont, West Virginia, and soon educated Vicky in the basics of Adventism. She recognized it for the truth. It made sense to her, and she decided to become one of his faith. She had her doubts about his fidelity to his beliefs because he had a thing for pretty young girls. It wasn’t long ’til he turned his focus on Vicky, which suited her just fine. She was ready to get out of coal country and shake the dust from her shiny new pumps her newfound friend had bought her. Having been born and raised on a sidehill farm in neighboring Lincoln County, she had come to live in the relative poverty of coal country when her father, Claiborne Hager, grew tired of eking out a precarious living farming and decided to try his luck at mining. Poor is poor, and neither suited Vicky. So with an eye to leaving, she latched onto the Yankee bus driver with fervor.

But, when the Yankee learned she was with child, he quickly retreated north to his wife, leaving Vicky with a heart full of disappointment and a belly full of baby. But her bubbly personality soon kicked in, and she accepted the reality of her condition and settled in for the long haul. Little Leo soon became her joy and made each day seem exciting and helped her ignore the judgmental attitudes of her fellow poor folks. No one can ride a high horse like a poor person. Jump on that sucker and ride like the wind. Never mind the hurt left behind. Just focus on the superiority of being holier than thou. That’s the ticket!

Vicky decided to raise her child in the Adventist church, if she could find one. Her search was futile, but she had learned from her ex-lover how to contact someone higher up in the church. She decided to write in search of more information. She soon received material and began what was to become a lifelong effort to live as she should according to the Bible. The Adventist emphasized the Bible was the only Word of God and put nothing above it. They also sent writings from a lady named Ellen G. White, who wrote extensively about heaven and reportedly had visions from God. Some considered her a true prophet.

Watching her mother and father bear the shame of her fatherless child left Vicky with a permanent determination to live her life as normal as possible and, of course, observe the Sabbath on the seventh day instead of the first, like most folks in the coalfields did. Vicky found that God could and would become her source of strength and her father, though sorely disappointed, was her source of strength on earth and she found she desperately needed it at times. Claiborne Hager continued to support his beautiful daughter and soon became little Leo’s idol. They spent most of Claiborne’s free time together, and Leo’s character was molded gently into the man he was to become. Claiborne was born in Ranger, Lincoln County, in 1870 and was thirty-two when Vicky was born. Knowing the hard realities Leo faced, he firmly entrenched in his grandchild the harsh truths of life in a coal camp and the need to treat people as you would want to be treated. Be firm but always be fair. He also helped with Leo’s relationship with God and gave him an education on the Bible that Leo would use for the rest of his life.

Vicky had many discussions with her parents about their beliefs and how they came to believe as they did. After many such discussions and intensive Bible study, they were more than willing to support her faith.

Vicky’s strong will and determination turned Leo into a young firebrand who mostly ignored those who looked down on him as a bastard, something that carried a heavy burden in coal country. With a zest for living and a will to do what most would not, he soon found himself in hot spot after hot spot…and loving every minute of it.

Life in a coal camp could be tiring. No entertainment. No place to go for diversion from the tediousness of the drab existence most poor people in coal camps lived. Get up before light, fill the dinner bucket, and off to work in the mines—work that was hard, dirty, and not at all rewarding. The few meager dollars grudgingly paid by the coal operators merely made it possible for their slaves to exist. Work hard for ten or twelve hours and go home in the dark to a miserly dinner. Sometimes it was possible to take a bath in a washtub; sometimes it wasn’t. If the miner felt like carrying water in buckets from the community well, he bathed. If he was too tired, which was most of the time, he didn’t bathe. When Leo could, he carried water for his grandfather to bathe. Most likely the miner returned to work in the same dirt-encrusted clothes and dirt-creased face he came home in.

Leo’s personality was developed and cultivated by his equally spirited mother, Vicky (Victoria) Hagar. She was an unwed mother in a time when such a condition was a social evil, a time when such a woman was shunned, put down, and kept behind closed doors as much as possible. The shame would often destroy a family who was ostracized to the point that some would leave the small community they were being persecuted in and move to another such community where their scandalous past soon caught up with them, and the cycle continued. And now that she was a Sabbath worshipper, the ostracizing became worse. To be different in the coal camps was met with suspicion and added to her burden. Scandal could not be outrun in the coal camps.

Vicky managed to shield little Leo from this for most of his formative years. She concocted a story of her husband who came from Macedonia, worked in the mines, and fathered her child and died at the hands of the local authorities when he was picked up for vagrancy and jailed. He was then given poison, without his knowledge, of course, and allowed to go home to die, which he did. Over a lifetime of deceit, Vicky kept the details of this fictional affair a closely guarded secret. The name of Leo’s father was never discussed nor any details that a future generation could latch onto. He was a deep dark secret.

Leo grew to love getting into mischief and took every opportunity to do so. He was the unordained leader of the coal camp kids, from making a raid on the local grocery for cardboard boxes to slide down the numerous slate dumps in the area to leading a midnight raid on a local, supposedly secret, moonshine still. The boys would confiscate, or so they called it, a quart or so and proceed to get drunker than a miner on a Saturday night trying to escape the reality of the coal camp. Most of the owners of the stills didn’t really protest. They had been young hellions at one time in their lives also. But then there was Old Jake, whose moonshine was reputed to be the best in the mountains. Old Jake would raise more hell than a mule in a tin barn. He set booby traps to catch the little thieves, but Leo knew all the tricks by the time he was ten years old and often rigged them to backfire on Jake. But Leo had a good heart and never set one to hurt Jake, just so it would make him aware that he was aware of his tricks. By the time Leo was twelve, it had become a game between Old Jake and him. Jake could often be seen drifting thru the camp with a puzzled look on his wrinkled face muttering to himself about little thieving brats. Most folks were not surprised to hear Leo’s name mentioned a time or two. Leo was a hell-raiser, but most of the miners and their families looked upon him either with pity at his status in the camps or with humor. Leo was nothing if he wasn’t entertaining. Leo loved attention, good or bad, and the fact that he was a bastard child and prominent in the rascal division of the kids let him garner more than his share.

The local sheriff made an occasional appearance in the camps to let the miners know where he stood. And he stood with the operators who usually owned the local law like they owned the miner, from the cradle to the grave. Most lawmen were thugs for the operators and did their bidding in all things. To let the miners know that he was the supreme ruler, he could often be seen leading little Leo thru the camp with a firm grip on an ear, lifting Leo up onto his toes to ease the pain of the sheriff’s insistent grasp. Either in good humor and a spontaneous laugh or with dark looks and muttered threats, the one thing people loved about Leo was his spontaneity. That and the fact that he was basically a good kid and was a child who would stop what he was doing, no matter how much fun he was having, and help someone who needed it. Carry water for Mrs. Johanson from Switzerland or carry in heavy coal buckets for Mrs. Garbowsky from Poland, even helping Mr. Johnson, the local coal operator, when his old Lincoln Town Car got stuck in the mud.

Leo’s propensity for getting into and out of troubling situations would let him take on a leading role when the miners, tired of being less than slaves, rebelled against the operators and tried organizing and demanding better conditions. The greed of the operators was the primary reason they used any means possible, even murder, to keep the miners enslaved. In the early years of the twentieth century, the operators fought with all their resources to maintain firm control on the lives of the miners. Most of the men and their families lived in houses provided by the company and paid rent, of course—houses that were stifling hot in summer and freezing cold in the bitter mountain winters, primarily because they were built as cheaply as possible with no insulation and only fireplaces to heat the house. The way to stay warm most often was to make regular trips to the fireplaces in the house, one by one. The activity kept them warm. But it made for ingenuity in finding new ways to keep the fire overnight, avoiding having to jump out of bed, hastily building a fire as quickly as possible, and getting back under the quilts before your place got cold. One way this jumping into the cold was avoided was by building a good source of fuel, getting the fire a firm grip on the wood or coal, and then putting ashes over the entire fire. This usually made the fire simmer until morning where a few sticks of wood would restart it. When the