Hermit Trainer - Truax Traer Coal Mine.

Hermit (my grandfather) had this picture taken for a Coal Mining Magazine because he held a coal loading record of over 35 tons by hand in a day. 

I can only begin to imagine the how demanding and difficult this sort of work was.

Working in the coal mines was brutal work- the tunnels didn't always allow standing fully upright, the days were long, and the work could be dangerous.  Hermit was once trapped deep underground for three days.  

A book was written about the hazards and rewards of coal mining for "the company" in West Virginia throughout the 1940s and 1950s, it is called October Sky.  It was written by a man whose father spent his entire life in the coal mines in West Virginia.  It's a great book.  The movie completely sucks- they missed the entire point of the book.  But interestingly enough, the author went into the Air Force in the late 50s, saying "In my day you either followed your father into the mine, or you joined the military."  Kind of like my own father, who joined the Air Force at about the same time.

This picture was probably taken sometime after the invention of what was called the "continuous miner" - a steam driven noisy contraption that would loosen up the coal so that it could be extracted (by hand) onto small rail carts.  Note the large battery pack on the waist- it powered the lamp on the helmet.  

I imagine that it was probably very dark in the mines- most of the light shown here is probably  from the photographer's flash.  And of course that Grandpa has probably been tossing coal for hours on end.  He spent a lifetime in the mines and like most miners he eventually contracted Black Lung, a disease that results from prolonged exposure to coal dust.