Word: appalachia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sizemore is a coal miner who has practically no money and lives in a rented house in Appalachia, where the hallow he lives in is choked in a layer of "red dog" coal slag left by the strippers for "surface miners," as the industry calls them). He's been broke more than once, drives a '68 Ford after going three years without one and wheezes like a train when he walks around because he has second-stage black lung. He lives in a place where school teachers quote from the National Enquirer and where the deputy sheriff pistol-whipped...
...quintessential miner-mountaineer. Yet he is not freak show, either. How could this socialist grow out of these barren hills? It has something to do with being suddenly laid off for nine months during the fifties, having some time to think, and making a decision. The tragedy of Appalachia--which Vecsey seems to ignore--is that Dan Sizemore made the decision alone. "Nobody brainwashed him; nobody forced him into it. Certainly peer pressure had nothing to do with it." So up in his hollow Dan Sizemore read books, decided he was against the profit system, and prepared to keep...
Vecsey makes certain that he's not showing us an oddity in this "Story of a Coal Miner," and he tells how Sizemore deals with his fellow workers in a locker-room sort of way (Vecsey, who used to be a sportswriter until he went to cover Appalachia for The New York Times, gets into the camaraderie of the miners' bathhouse). But the powerful images are still the pistol whipping, and the time one of Dan Sizemore's neighbors shot the dog belonging to his retarded son (Blackie, as Vecsey tells us several times), and the silent looks when they...
...deeply wants the Sizemore to have a better life, for Dan Sizemore to respect his work. But does he want them to drive a Volvo too? He projects his own cultural alienation onto his subjects. Just as their outsider friends do, as though there's no viable culture in Appalachia. His style suffers for the same reason--the well written and thorough approach to the Sizemores only fails when Vecsey goes into the house and transcribers domestic babbling, the "universals" of home life. Or when he refers to people we already know as the "sensitive...
...needless universalizing of a local way of life happens because the writer is genuinely moved by people managing to stay human in such dehumanizing circumstances. The first day that Dan Sizemore drives Vecsey to the mine shaft where hundreds work, the reporter is amazed by the roads. Driving through Appalachia plays hell on a car, anyway--mud and garbage all over, trucks barreling around tortuous curves without guard rails, heaved-up pavement everywhere. But the drive from the Sizemore house to the Big Ridge mine is frightful, and ends on a dirt road so bombed out that any vehicle cuts...