Decision Time in Oceana

If any coal-mining town seemed ripe for violence, it was Oceana, W. Va., a scraggly strip of forlorn-looking buildings lining a potholed main street and set between two brown mountains in the Appalachian foothills. Once a brawling town that sprouted no fewer than 37 bars during a mining and railroad boom in the early 1940s, Oceana (pop. 1,580) is one of the few communities in which the miners voted to accept the latest proposed contract and go back to work. Although they are members of U.M.W. District 17, one of the union's most militant, they voted contrary to their brothers on the other side of the mountains and endorsed the contract, 409 votes to 214.

TIME Correspondent Robert Wurmstedt visited Oceana last'week, expecting to find a torn community in which neighbor was set against neighbor over the strike issue. Instead, he ran into a spirit of miner camaraderie that may be typical of rank-and-file reaction throughout Appalachia. The town is divided on whether the contract was the best deal at that moment, but it is united in its detestation for Taft-Hartley and its respect for a union picket line. Oceana's miners expect to find roving pickets from other parts of the district along the road to the Eastern Associated Coal Corp. mine in nearby Kopperston--and unless police keep the pickets clear of the mine at all times, they will not work. If there is violence, the Oceana miners say, it will come from outsiders; they will not turn against each other.

Why such relative calm? For one thing, Oceana's rough reputation has always been a bit overblown. The bars are gone now, and the town's businesses consist mainly of a coal company store, a bank, two coin laundries, an AMC-Jeep dealership, Wanda's Beauty Shop, Roberts Motel and a Montgomery Ward catalogue office. "We have no bars, no parking meters and no coloreds," says Frank Laxton Jr., a used-car dealer and Oceana's mayor.

Then, too, no one in Oceana thought the contract was really a good one. The majority who voted to accept it did so mainly on complicated tactical grounds. They feared that failure to accept could lead to the breakdown of their union, the end of nationwide bargaining and thus the loss of their hard-won retirement benefits. The local has 300 retirees, who have not received a pension check since January because the old retirement fund is broke; the contract would have set up a new fund. "We felt that a contract would give some guaranteed protection to the retirees for at least three years," said Emil Martin, president of the local. "We wanted to buy them three more years."

Oceana's miners would go back to work if the Government seized the mines, but not under Taft-Hartley. At Connie Cook's Ashland Oil station, outside town, where striking miners sip coffee around an old space heater, William ("Fats") Stafford, 52, expressed a prevailing view. "I love this country and I had two sons serve in Viet Nam," he said. "I abide by the laws of this country, but not Taft-Hartley. That's slave labor, and there's no penalties in it against the companies."

Possibly a fourth of the local's miners would go back to work if no pickets appeared and if they were guaranteed some protection. But they are certain that "stranger" pickets, who cannot be readily identified and thus prosecuted, will show up and that protection cannot be provided. "Local people won't picket here," predicted Leonard Stewart, 31, who would like to go back to work. "People won't fight the people they live with." Toward the expected "strangers," however, the miners feel fear. "

"I'll go to work, but if pickets are there, I'll go home," said Claude Profitt, 47. Said Ken Hager: "I drive a long ways every day before daylight. How is the National Guard gonna protect a miner on these West Virginia roads?"

So even in Oceana, a relatively conservative union town, compliance with Taft-Hartley is not likely, and violence from outsiders is feared. But there is no sense of outrage or personal enmity. Said Mary Bailey, wife of a miner whose family has dipped deeply into its savings to keep food on the table: "I sure would like the men to go back to work, but you don't always get what you want in this world."

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