Fire Damp, page 3

Since I teach drama, it seemed logical to tell the story of Coalhurst's mining heritage through a play produced at the high school. In 1997 1 worked with a very special group of high school students on the spring drama production, and I knew they could form the core of this project of a lifetime. I felt ill-equipped for the job ahead since I had never written even so much as a short story. But I had a vision. I wanted to capture the essence of the town that had existed here-before the war and 30 years before man landed on the moon. I wanted to appeal to the old, who remembered the past, and to the young, who needed to know their history.

I began that summer. I contacted old-timers who had grown up in Coalhurst in the thirties, and our principal, Wayne Tate, arranged for a student and the use of the school video camera to record interviews. Jerrad Kubik and I visited people in their homes and taped their remarkably clear and vivid recollections-people like Johnny Walker, who, as a boy, had careened down the smoking "Dump, then over a hundred feet high, curled up inside the discarded tire of a Model T They soon forgot about the camera as they were transported back to the Southern Alberta of the Dirty Thirties. Netti Fabbi (nee Locatelli) relived her days of baseball glory as a star player on the Red Aces (the team name was slightly altered by the local boys when teasing the girls). Johnny Boychuk, a worker in the Galt No. 8 Mine, told what life was like for a miner, and his wife, Oral, recalled the daily worry of being a miner's wife. These people welcomed our project with warmth and generosity--so grateful that someone was taking an interest. Through Johnny Walker I was welcomed into the Coalhurst Historical Society, a group of Coalhurst natives who had lovingly collected family histories, documentation, and photographs into a local history book which became my primary reference. A Coalhurst resident, Katie Nestoruk, who had been a member of the school board in the thirties had kept the notes and minutes and had donated them to the school. The mildewed pages showed the harsh and real effect of boom and bust economies. Through the Lethbridge Public Library and their transfer service I was able to access books and documents including a Coalhurst newspaper from the late twenties, which gave weekly accounts of the meetings of ladies' clubs where "dainty sandwiches were served." A school librarian, Madeline Brown, had carefully preserved the original newspaper clippings from 1935. Penny Stone and Kevin Maclean at the Sir Alexander Galt Museum provided local documentation, such as mine-accident reports, and access to their collections where we could photograph artifacts (miners' lamps, hats, tools, etc.) for reproduction. I spent two days at the Provincial Archives in Edmonton reading the surviving 750 pages of the official transcript of the try into the disaster. It contained the voices of the miners themselves, and, with a court clerk's precision, it recorded the speech patterns of the Ukrainian, Italian, and Scots miners.

Local personal history, although essential, wasn't enough. I had to understand the context of the time-what they talked about at the supper table. I read about the politics, both national and international, world events, the Tabour movement, coal mining, chemistry, geology, immigration, Music, dance, clothing, fads and fashions, the Great Depression, the economy, architecture, literature.

Firedamp: How the Creation of a Play about a Disaster Rekindled Community in Coalhurst