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SPEAKER_02: And I remember laying in that little trailer and the roof was actually so close to me that the bib of my hard hat would almost hit the roof.
SPEAKER_08: When they got down to the bottom, Ronnie's boss handed him a wrench and told him to open a nearby water line. But someone had forgotten to cut the water off.
SPEAKER_02: Like water just started spraying me. It just sprayed all in my face and all over me. I was soaking wet and it like I just like fell up against the real, you know, the wall of coal. And I thought to myself, what have I done?
SPEAKER_05: As a new miner in a dangerous industry, Ronnie had to go through an intensive orientation process before this first trip underground. That's producer Irena Zhorov.
SPEAKER_08: Ronnie is actually my partner's father.
SPEAKER_05: He lives in northern Alabama and on a recent visit as the family cooked dinner, Ronnie and I went out to his workshop where he likes to sit and smoke with only the dogs and cicadas for company. There's somewhere else you want to do it here or somewhere? I don't care.
SPEAKER_02: We can just go back there.
SPEAKER_05: He told me about how he sat through 40 hours of training and safety classes before going down into the mines. At the end, he was issued a hard hat that identified him as a rookie. The hard hat was yellow. It was like you stood out from here to the road, you know. It was terrible. It was terrible.
SPEAKER_02: Was it terrible because you'd get like crap from the other men?
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, yeah. Everybody knew you were a rookie, you know, and just, you know, practical jokes. Just nothing serious. In addition to this terrible yellow hard hat, the safety man at his mine also gave him a sticker.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was this sticker right here.
SPEAKER_05: It's a red rhombus about two by two inches with a reflective white center. ABC, and he says always be careful. But ABC was a company named Alabama Byproducts Corporation.
SPEAKER_05: Ronnie got a few of these stickers back then. He put one in a box and one on his brand new yellow hat. This was just the beginning of Ronnie's sticker collecting. After 34 years as a miner, he now has several photo albums filled with thousands of stickers.
SPEAKER_08: Some are inside jokes. Some commemorate big events at work.
SPEAKER_05: Lots of other coal miners across the country have collections just like Ronnie's. Miners use these stickers for safety and for communication and as a kind of currency down in the mines. It was just what coal miners did, you know. Kids collect baseball cards in the coal mines.
SPEAKER_02: You know, that's all you had really to collect, you know, was coal mining stickers.
SPEAKER_03: One of the darkest of all working environments, underground mines.
SPEAKER_08: Since the beginning of underground mining, one of the biggest dangers in the workplace has been the darkness.
SPEAKER_03: Coal miners of today would shudder at the thought of using some of the early methods of coal mine illumination. Well into the era of industrial society, miners were still using open flames as their only source of light.
SPEAKER_08: The darkness makes accidents more likely. And even though technology has improved to make mines brighter and safer, it's still an issue. The culture of mining, to a certain degree, has been shaped by the level of risk involved. Work cultures have very strong cultures, especially ones that face danger like mining, firefighting, police work, the military, deep sea fishing, etc.
SPEAKER_05: This is Elaine Cullen. She's an occupational ethnographer and she spent a lot of time with miners. Like actually down in the mines with them. Mining has a very strong culture. I think the reason is because people who work underground are well aware of the fact that every day you go in, you don't know if you're coming out.
SPEAKER_04: The first time Cullen went down into a mine, she was told that she had to have something reflective on her hard hat.
SPEAKER_05: There's a lot of heavy machinery moving around, from buses to the shears, roof bolters, and other tools used to extract coal. People get hit, they get run over, they get crushed by mobile equipment.
SPEAKER_05: And so reflective material increases the visibility of the people underground.
SPEAKER_04: We put strips of reflective tape on the back of our hard hats, but then it became pretty obvious that other people had other things on their hard hats, and these were stickers.
SPEAKER_05: The stickers had originally been little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s, when mining safety laws started requiring reflective materials underground, miners used those stickers to stay visible to each other. But as time passed, the stickers evolved. They became more personal and started to tell miners stories. And the mine companies themselves started printing stickers for their workers.
SPEAKER_05: They went from simple ads to signaling an identity. These are sort of, they're symbols. Symbols of the mining industry and that you're part of it. That you're a miner.
SPEAKER_05: After a year in the Alabama mine, Ronnie swapped out his yellow hard hat for a black one, which meant he was no longer a rookie. With that came more stickers. The stickers always came in twos. One went on his hard hat, which he actually brought out to show me. So where's your six inches of reflective tape?
SPEAKER_02: I probably covered all mine up with stickers. You can see all the Alabama stickers on it, you know.
SPEAKER_05: The other sticker he saved for his growing collection. A miner showed Ronnie how to keep the stickers organized, so each week he'd sit down and put the new stickers in an album. What's this one? That's the Grim Reaper, it looks like, don't it? It says UMWA. That's a union sticker. I'm sure it's got something to do with black lung.
SPEAKER_08: Managers and the safety man at his mine gave him stickers with the mine name on them, and his union gave him stickers with union messages on them. One of his favorite stickers has the state of Alabama outlined in red, and inside it says Alabama coal miner. That's kind of a pride thing there, you know, Alabama coal miner.
SPEAKER_08: As he gained more experience, he got stickers commemorating his accomplishments. He worked at a company early on that counted the amount of coal mined by the number of cars filled during a shift.
SPEAKER_05: Something like 100 cars was OK, but Ronnie has a sticker that says his team mined 150 cars in one shift. And then these stickers says 150 car club with a little playboy bunny on there.
SPEAKER_02: He also has one commemorating 225 cars in a shift, which is a big deal.
SPEAKER_08: You have a big run, then the next night you're outside and all the guys that didn't have such a good run or whatever, and your boss is going around giving you these stickers.
SPEAKER_02: It was just kind of an incentive thing.
SPEAKER_08: In the 1960s and 70s, a number of major mine safety laws were passed in the U.S. Elaine Cullen started working at a new agency that was responsible for studying and enforcing safety in the mines. For years, she researched mining culture. In the 2000s, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal agency, hired her to develop a safety training program for coal miners. By that time, she knew who she was dealing with, so she knew she might be facing some skepticism from the miners she was trying to reach. I don't look like a miner. I'm a woman, and most of them are not.
SPEAKER_04: So getting them to work with me, especially when I was a representative of the federal government, and they are a little eerie to work with the government.
SPEAKER_05: But Elaine had seen that the miners were really into these stickers. And she figured she could use them to gain their trust and to convey messages about safety.
SPEAKER_08: But she knew just putting work safe on a sticker wouldn't cut it. She needed something to grab the miner's attention.
SPEAKER_04: We were working out in eastern Kentucky.
SPEAKER_08: It was a mining community with deep cultural ties to coal, and she started to notice something. She'd be walking along with the safety guy.
SPEAKER_04: And as we would approach another miner, he would squeal like a pig. I finally asked him, I said, Jesse, what's going on here? Why are they doing that? And he said, oh, they're just saying they know I'm a coal hog. And I said, what is a coal hog? And he said, a coal hog is hungry for coal, greedy for coal, can't ever get enough. Meaning that you're a good miner. So Elaine took the idea and designed a sticker with a big muscular pig with a hard hat on, and it says, coal hogs work safe.
SPEAKER_04: So what we were doing is putting those two ideas together that you can be a coal hog, but you can also work safely.
SPEAKER_08: The miners loved it. Oh, gosh, I think we printed three thousand to begin with. And I have one little packet left that I'm kind of keeping as a keepsake.
SPEAKER_05: Some of Cullen's other designs were duds. Her team made one with a dead canary. Canaries were once used to check for bad air in a mine, but that was a long time ago and the younger miners didn't get it. Other stickers catering to the raunchy humor in the mines didn't pass muster with her bosses in the federal government.
SPEAKER_08: For example, they designed one sticker to remind miners to check for gas in the mines. So what the this one was at the back end of a donkey and had the donkey kind of looking back at you and it said, don't be an ass.
SPEAKER_04: Check for gas and kind of have this little cloud coming out.
SPEAKER_08: Gas can be really dangerous underground, and donkeys were once used to carry coal out of the mines. Oh, boy, the the folks in Washington didn't like that one. But the miners loved it.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: Unless Elaine visited your mine, it'd be hard to get one of these stickers. A lot of the stickers were specialized or localized, depending on what organization or company designed them. That's part of what made collecting them fun. I have over twenty six thousand different stickers in my collection.
SPEAKER_09: And I've kind of come to believe that you either are a collector or you're not. And if you're not a collector, you just don't get it. And if you are a collector, you just really can't help yourself.
SPEAKER_05: This is Lenny Hanner.
SPEAKER_09: And I'm a coal miner from southern Illinois. Lenny has worked in coal mines for 40 years.
SPEAKER_05: He's a major sticker collector. At the height of his collecting in the 1980s, he'd exchange stickers with other collectors across the country and go to sticker swaps almost every weekend. Those are meetups where miners exchange pieces. Lenny says unique stickers were like currency in the mines, a way to buy or sell favors and help.
SPEAKER_08: For instance, say you're a trucker and you've rolled up to the mines with a big load of supplies. You ask some of the miners to help you unload. The first thing they wanted to know is, do you have any stickers?
SPEAKER_09: Without stickers, the miners wouldn't exactly rush to help.
SPEAKER_08: So they all learned that they had stickers in that truck when they arrived and that's, they tend to get unloaded a whole lot faster that way.
SPEAKER_08: Lenny still works for a mining company, but above ground these days. He lives in an old mining town in a house that was once owned by a mining company. And he's got a full room devoted to mining memorabilia.
SPEAKER_09: I'm married to the, you know, the most understanding woman in the world.
SPEAKER_08: He keeps his stickers in 27 albums organized by type of sticker. The ones printed by mining companies, the ones equipment manufacturers gave out, the ones focused on safety and union issues. Some of them are especially sentimental.
SPEAKER_09: I have a sticker that I got from a friend of mine and he recently passed away. And I have just a couple stickers in my collection that really make me think of him when I see them. The sticker albums function just like photo albums, reminding miners of their milestones and stories.
SPEAKER_09: They are just little pieces of our history, of our past little mementos. I guess maybe like a postcard if you travel that you might pick up a postcard that that reminds you of something from the past. We can just see our past mining history there on the pages of the album.
SPEAKER_08: Of course, just like with photos, some of the darker memories don't end up in the album.
SPEAKER_05: In 2011, after more than 30 years in the mines, my partner's dad Ronnie had an accident. We were living a thousand miles away and paced around in my living room as news trickled in. We eventually learned that his hand got pulled into a machine and it took a finger. Down in Alabama, he was rushed to a hospital. He was told to call his wife, Deborah. At first, he didn't want to call. What happened in the mine stayed in the mine.
SPEAKER_08: But the nurse insisted and Deborah happened to be nearby. I remember Deborah looking at me when she came in the room and said,
SPEAKER_02: Ronnie, Johnson, how'd you get so dirty? You know, like, I mean, I'd been getting that way for years. And I guess she had never saw me. I had on my rubber boots and my face was all black and my hand was all wrapped up in a bandage. He'd never really shared much about his life in the mine with his family.
SPEAKER_05: I guess they had never saw me like that. I didn't tell them what I went through.
SPEAKER_08: The sticker albums stacked up in his cozy house only tell their stories to those who know how to read them.
SPEAKER_05: Ronnie says before he lost his finger, he'd gone 31 years without spending a night in the hospital. He'd never ridden in an ambulance and never had an accident in the mine that made him lose work hours. I caught up for all those 31 years in one night, you know.
SPEAKER_08: Ronnie never got a sticker for that.
SPEAKER_08: So what do you do with a mine that's no longer productive? Lots of things, it turns out. Kurt Kohlstedt tells us about his favorite examples of adaptive reuse after this. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time with annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial. You're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility and their life insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to Lincoln Financial dot com slash get started now to learn how to plan, protect and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc., a broker dealer.
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SPEAKER_08: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. We were attracted to the coal miner stickers because it was this cool way that design and the culture of mining intersected. And it brought to mind another interesting juxtaposition of design and abandoned mines that Kohlstedt wrote about on the website. So I asked him to come in the studio and talk about it. I think a lot of people tend to have this idea that mines are these, you know, rickety, dangerous places to go.
SPEAKER_10: You know, with rotting timber frames holding up sections of tunnel that could collapse on you at any moment. The reality is a lot of mines are much bigger than that and much more stable than that. And really have promising futures doing much different things than they were designed for. What's a good example? So one example would be there's this really cool mine in Romania that was actually first mined for salt nearly a thousand years ago. And it's been used on an office assault mine ever since. So it's really deep and it's really complex. And recently they decided we're going to turn this into an attraction. So they made it a museum. They made it kind of a theme park. You go down there and like boat around on this water and the pictures are just sort of mesmerizing. They've really lit this place up so you can go down and really get a sense of the geology but also just have this kind of fun experience underground. Cool. Are there any in the U.S.?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. In Kansas there's a data center. It's a little less exciting but a little more functional on a sort of day to day basis that essentially uses the natural even temperatures and the protection of this mine space. This old limestone mine space to house its servers. And you can imagine if you're just trying to keep these servers running during any kind of weather the perfect place is just to tuck them on the ground.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I mean that makes a ton of sense to me.
SPEAKER_10: And there's also a research facility that is doing experiments on dark matter far underground in South Dakota in an old gold mine. It's about a mile deep. And it turns out that there's a lot of particles that sort of just float through space and bombard our atmosphere on a pretty regular basis. And getting below the surface they can get away from a lot of that noise and have a lot more of a kind of clean experiment. Yeah totally. Well that makes a ton of sense.
SPEAKER_08: Well that's so cool. And you know if they decide to destroy the universe at least they're a mile underground. Yeah I mean yeah right. The hope is that they'd only just destroy their lab in a mountain or something.
SPEAKER_10: Well there you go.
SPEAKER_08: So what's your favorite example?
SPEAKER_10: So my favorite is probably the Louisville mega cavern which is this huge huge underground space in Louisville Kentucky. If you buy the argument that it's now a building it's the largest building in Kentucky at about 4 million square feet. And basically this mine opened in the 1930s. They dug out limestone for decades. They really carved this thing out. In the 1960s they actually talked about using it as a fallout shelter in case the Cuban Missile Crisis went the wrong way. And they were planning to pack like tens of thousands of people in there. And then eventually it sort of fell into disuse and some investors came along and said hey we could do something with this. And they did. Basically they bought this thing and they started putting businesses in there. They started using it for storage because it's sort of temperature stable. It's a good place for storage. And then they did something kind of weird and they started adding all these kind of theme park elements to it. So you can go take tram tours of the underground. You can go take zipline tours. There's a ropes course. At the heart of it all one of the biggest functions is this huge huge 300,000 plus square foot bike park.
SPEAKER_08: And it's like a BMX bike park with hills and jumps and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_10: And they build those out of all the fill that was already carved out and sort of laying around from the miners. So all they have to do is just kind of pick up the dirt here, shovel it over there, and they can make entirely new courses. Oh that's so cool. And we have some pictures of these on our website.
SPEAKER_08: Oh yeah we've got a bunch of pictures and some video of this on the website.
SPEAKER_10: Awesome. Well thanks so much. That's so cool.
SPEAKER_08: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Irina Jurov with Delaney Hall. Tech Production and Mix by Shree Fusef. Music by Sean Real. Our Senior Editor is Katie Mingle. Kurt Kohlstedt is the Digital Director. The rest of the staff is Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taryn Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of Radio-Topia and 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find 99% Invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But our beautiful home on the internet with more design stories than we could ever tell you inside this podcast is our website 99pi.org.
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