An earlier story mentioned Bob Lewis, the top-side general foreman for Henryetta’s Blackstone mine. (Ned Wilson was the general underground foremen.) I first met Bob Lewis when the Taylor family, owners of Ben Hur Coal Company which in turn owned Blackstone, had a strip mine near Arma, Kansas, 20 miles north of Pittsburg, Kansas. My family lived in Pittsburg from late October 1935, when I was just five, until May 1938 while my father was the accountant for that operation.
Bob Lewis was also a foreman there, and had been the topside Blackstone foreman in Henryetta before the Kansas operations started. His son, Doc, was a welder in his 20s then, and had also worked at Henryetta's Blackstone before working at the Kansas operation. While in Kansas, Bob and his family lived in Arcadia, and then Frontenac, two small towns north of Pittsburg that were closer to the Arma mine.kansas strip mine
The Kansas strip mine and my father's office were in two separate rural areas about a mile apart, and my father often took me with him when he went to work on Saturdays. He worked in a small office building out in the country.
The land near his office was all cleared, but there were no other buildings near it except for a supply house, and the scale house where trucks brought coal to dump into an underground pit to be taken up by a conveyer to where it could then be unloaded into railroad cars that came there on a short railroad switch line – I think the railroad was the Pittsburg Midway, but it could have some other railroad.
There were several abandoned strip pits near my father’s office and while I was just six and seven, I ran around on the top of abandoned strip pits full of water, explored a small overgrown country cemetery, crossed a creek back and forth by stepping on rocks, chased rabbits (I really thought I might catch one), and watched trucks full of coal come from the big strip pit to be weighed on some scales and dump their coal into the underground pit so it could be loaded in railroad cars. It was like being in my special wonderland.
As top foreman, Bob Lewis had duties at the big strip pit where the large strip shovel dug coal, at the scale house, at the nearby supply house and in operation of the machinery that loaded the rail cars. And on top of that, he sort of watched over me when he was in that area, I guess to try to rescue me if I fell into the water in one of the abandoned pits full of water. A few times, he took me up into the cabin of the very large strip shovel at the working pit, and that was like being another wonderland.
My father sometimes took a shotgun to work and brought home a rabbit or two, but not on days I was with him. A few times, he brought home a dead rattlesnake to show my sisters (Betty, older and now deceased, and Dora younger she now lives in Poteau) and me.
Years later when I lived in Kansas City in the late half of the 70s, I sometimes drove south to Henryetta and noticed the old abandoned pit that was active in the 30s right beside the highway. A few times, I turned off to the place where my father’s abandoned office still stood to check out the little creek, see the old more-overgrown cemetery, and remember the fun of those long ago boyhood days.
When the leased land in Kansas was fully mined, the Taylors reopened Blackstone in Henryetta and we moved back.
blackstoneActually, there had been at least three Blackstone mines at Henryetta in the 20s and early 30s, but there was just one after 1938. Bob and his family moved back, too, and Bob was very special to my sisters and me, like an uncle or even better. He even insisted that we call him “Bob” instead of “Mr. Lewis.” I had known him in Kansas and now my two sisters got to know him and all three of us got to see him fairly often.
The Blackstone tipple (the building where coal was sorted the coal by size and grade. and then loaded into railroad cars) was over a siding of the Frisco Railroad partway up a hill about two miles northeast of Henryetta.
The mine entrance was about a mile northeast of the tipple. As a kid, there were a few times when Bob took me out to the tipple and let me use a fantastic levered mechanism to move railroad coal cars a few feet on a siding that went under the tipple. By spending time at the tipple, I began to learn a lot about all the coordination of moving railroad cars, filling them from end to end, letting full cars go down a slight grade to where other full cars were waiting for Frisco to come and take them, getting new empty cars in place under the tipple, unloading the coal into the tipple from the 4 ton mine cars that hauled the coal from the mine, changing the huge steel screens the coal was shaken across to sort it by size.
It was all interesting and I could still explain a lot of it, but won’t because the purpose of this story, which is to tell about my mine hero, Bob Lewis, who was in charge of all the tipple and other above ground operations
When people think of coal mining, their thoughts usually run to all the inside conditions, the darkness, the low ceiling that had to be braced with timbers to keep the mine roof from falling in, the drilling and dynamiting of coal off the face of the coal vein, the loading of the coal into small four ton coal cars by men on their knees using shovels - and the coordination of those activities. In Blackstone, most of the timbers were 34” long, but they were longer in places where the electric mine trolley ran to take timbers, supplies, and workers in, and coal and workers out. But the topside work at the tipple also required a lot of work and coordination to change the large steel screens to sort the coal by size and grade and manage all the rail cars to be loaded. Bob was the man in charge of all that plus many things not mentioned here.tipple action
In the early 40s, one of Bob’s arms was tragically yanked off at the shoulder when he reached into some tipple machinery to make an adjustment. After telling the tipple crew to call an ambulance, Bob grabbed the veins/arteries at his shoulder and walked down the hill to wait for the ambulance beside highway 75. When the ambulance arrived, they could barely get him to turn loose of the veins/arteries.
Bob continued as the one-armed top foreman after his arm healed, and my sisters and I saw him often. One of his responsibilities at the tipple was to collect round markers from each four ton car of coal coming from mine. (The railroad coal cars held about forty tons.)
The markers identified the specific face or area in the mine from which the coal in that particular four ton car had been taken. Though their use, my father could average out the load from all cars in a month and compute the royalties due to the owner of the specific land directly above each face. Bob usually took them to my father’s office, in Henryetta’s Morgan Building, but also sometimes came to our house to tell my father the number of markers for the day from each face or some related information (like the need to order some specific supplies for the supply house) to our father fairly often, and we kids enjoyed those visits.
Regarding the computation of the weight of coal for computation of he the land owner royalties, the Frisco weighed each car, subtracted their empty weights, and advised my father of the total weight of coal – in tons - taken from the mine each day.
In the mid to late 50s, after I had left Henryetta and was living in Tulsa, Bob was using a pickup truck to drag some equipment to the mine by going up a narrow road that led from the highway, crossed the Frisco and then led to the mine entrance. He was using a long chain from the truck to drag the equipment. When he had crossed the tracks but the equipment hadn’t, a train came through, hit the chain, and whipped Bob's truck into the side of the engine. Bob was killed. I was devastated when I learned of it, as were my parents and my sisters, and everyone who knew Bob.
When my father died in Henryetta at 95 in 1994, Bob's long-retired son, Doc, the Blackstone welder in both Henryetta and Kansas who was living near Lake Eufaula by then, was an honorary pallbearer.
ssigenthalerAnd now for a related item. Long-time Henryetta resident, Geraldine (Geri) Siegenthaler, who lived to be about 90 years old by the time she died, I think in 2013, was Bob Lewis’s daughter. When I was in grade school in Henryetta, the Sigenthaler family owned a Henryetta based bottling company that made a soda called Double Cola. Every time we got our grade cards, we could have a bottle of Double Cola if we had an “A” on any subject ( I think just one bottle for the whole card, but maybe one for each “A”). I recall that to get the Double Cola, we had to go to Lahey’s (which later became Lavendusky’s) grocery, at the northeast corner of Fourth and Gentry, but there could have been other locations, too. Naturally, they put a mark on the card to show we had received our bottle so we couldn’t keep going back.
Being several years older than me, Geraldine didn't know me as a little kid in either Kansas or Henryetta, but that doesn't matter. Geri Siegenthaler was Bob Lewis's daughter, and is remembered by those who knew her with as many fond memories as I have for her father.