Bill Pancoast’s Road to Matewan

Labor History Today

I could not put this away. Once I saw what happened here: the orange Tug River from the strip mines…the strip mining, the desecration, the poverty. I owed it to the world to tell what happened.
William Trent Pancoast has worked as a construction laborer, gas station attendant, railroad section hand and brakeman, factory laborer, commercial laundry foreman, and machinist. He’s been an English teacher and a journeyman die-maker.
In 1986 The Wall Street Journal dubbed Pancoast a "Blue collar writer" and that’s just fine with him, as he told the Journal, "The reason I write about work is that that's just about damn near all I've ever done."
His working-class-flavored short stories and essays have appeared in many Midwestern and international magazines and newspapers.
Pancoast's novel Crashing was published in 1983. In 1986, his United Auto Worker's union history was published. Pancoast spent the next twenty years as the editor of a monthly union newspaper-the Union Forum-while continuing to publish his fiction, essays, and editorials not only in the Union Forum but also in the UAW's 1.2 million circulation Solidarity magazine.
A revised version of his novel The Road to Matewan has just been published and yesterday Bill Pancoast drove down from his home in Ohio to give a reading and talk at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum so I figured the least I could do was make the 7-hour drive down – my own 300-mile Road to Matewan – to record it for you.
By the way, as you’ll hear, the train still runs through town right across from the museum.
On this week’s Labor History in Two: the year was 1965; that was the day acclaimed photojournalist Dorothea Lange died.

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Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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