— I visited with my dad, David Pack, this morning on Turkey Creek. We sat on the benches outside.

His first question to me was “Where are your articles? I haven’t seen one in awhile.” I had to admit to him that the well of memories and stories have run dry, unless he had an idea.

Looking down the holler sitting on top of his mountain he started telling me story after story. There were many stories and I learned more about my heritage as our time passed by.

Jump back, way back, kiss yourself twice. Before rock and roll, fancy cars, color television, bathrooms, central heat and air conditioning, plumbing, instant this and instant that, Game Boys, and cell phones. Long ago, when girls were never hit by boys and respect was the norm and not the exception.

A time when Momma secretly pampered the children, but made them mind, and Papa was the center of his family’s world.

He would get up at two in the morning so he could head out to work by three. His wife, committed to him for better or for worse until death do them part, would get up before him to fix his breakfast and lunch. Most of the time he would have bacon, eggs, biscuits, gravy and a cup of hot coffee, once in awhile he would have cereal.

She would fix him his lunch; a couple of biscuits with jelly that she made from her best cooking apples. Sometimes she would treat him to a special lunch, biscuits with apple butter.

At the bottom of his miner’s lunch bucket, she would pour black coffee. She poured it directly into the bottom of his metal lunch box. How careful do you think he had to walk to work and still be able to drink a cup of coffee with the “boys?”

He worked for the Gauley Mountain Mining Company out of Ansted. The strip mines were just over Gauley Mountain. A trip a mile or so long, up a tall mountain, through the creeks, on a footpath that he pounded out each and every day. This was a trip taken in the dark to work and back home again. He would use his carbide lamp to see. Carbide was very expensive, especially from the “company stow.”

Many of you know what the mountain terrain is like here. Imagine having to get up that early; it’s raining, or there is a 14-inch blanket of snow with snow still falling on the ground and you had to go to work. You couldn’t call in because you were sick, or the alarm clock didn’t wake you, or you had a doctor’s appointment, or any other lame excuse. The company only heard the reason for your absence from the other miners, sooner or later. Most of the time death played a part in your absence. There were no phones on the job site and none at home.

Work back then meant survival and paid $20 a day for a 14-hour day. That bought flour, sugar, coffee, a pair of shoes for each of the kids, clothing, yarn to knit and mend, fuel oil for the lamps, gas, tools, and perhaps a pretty Sunday dress for Momma. After all, the dress she was wearing was thread-bare, tattered and had been mended many times.

The items he bought had to be paid in scrip, money stamped into a little piece of brass with “Gauley Mountain Mining Company.” The scrip could only be used at that company’s store. In the store was just about anything a man and his family would need plus more. The prices were high and the pay was low. That was how mine owners kept a hold on the men. The song goes “I owe my soul to the company store.” Indeed they did!

Never making enough money for necessities, they had to put what was left of the bill on their credit line, a line that never ended. Always indebted, they managed to make do with what they had.

Still every morning he gets to the job site, pours the coffee out of his lunch pail into a cup, or jar, joins his buddies around a campfire and talks about the war, how well his mule was doing, the work ahead and perhaps some politics. The horn would blow and the long work day started.

That miner was my grandfather, Bill Pack.

(Pack may be contacted at rickypack@peoplepc.com. Letters to the editor regarding his column may be e-mailed to ckeenan@register-herald.com.)