R. M. F.

In 1927, the year slight, greying Josephine Roche became heir to the minority interest of her late conservative father, John J. Roche, in the Rocky Mountain Fuel Co., blood was spilled on another page of the grim history of Colorado's mine wars. To Vassar-educated Miss Roche, who had spent 19 years as a social worker, that was bitter: six diggers had been killed in a strike riot within sight of the gaunt tipple of Rocky Mountain Fuel's Columbine mine.

Long an outspoken opponent of the nonunion policy of the Colorado coal field, she got ready to fight it. Within a few months she bought the interest of Denver Capitalist Horace Bennett and gained control of $10,000,000 R. M. F. Then to Josephine Roche's office was summoned Rocky Mountain Fuel's general counsel, the late progressive U. S. Senator Edward Prentiss Costigan. To Senator Costigan went leaders of Colorado's struggling mine unions. Late in the summer of 1928 they signed a famed document: the first mine union contract in Colorado's history. Its far-seeing purpose: "To establish industrial justice, substitute reason for violence, integrity and good faith for dishonest practices, and a union of effort for the chaos of present economic warfare."

It worked. Colorado union men bought R. M. F. coal, as a contribution to the high wages and good working conditions that Josephine Roche's workers enjoyed. R. M. F. diggers were R. M. F. salesmen, and once, when the company was threatened by a price war by nonunion mines, went without pay for 2 1/2 months to lend $80,000 to the management.

But while R. M. F. did better than others because of its union policy, the whole Colorado coal industry grew sick. The year that Miss Roche took over, a pipeline which had snaked its way from the natural gas fields of the Texas Panhandle went into operation. Owned jointly by Standard Oil of New Jersey, Sinclair Oil and Colorado Public Service Co., it knocked the spots off the coal business. In 1929, 9,934,000 tons of coal were mined in Colorado. By last year production had fallen to 5,722,899.

Meanwhile, under the pressure of the New Deal and public opinion, the entire Colorado coal field had been unionized. Paradoxically, it hurt Rocky Mountain Fuel. Union men who once had demanded R. M. F. coal, were now willing to buy from any union mine. R. M. F. sales leveled off, ran a deficit year after year.

For a few years Josephine Roche and other officers lent money to the company to pay interest on its $3,971,000 bonded debt. Some five years ago Miss Roche stepped out of the presidency to become Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Treasury, turned over the job of running the company to able J. Paul Peabody. Last year, after his death, she returned to the job, later asked bondholders to take interest cuts in their R. M. F. 5s. They refused.

Last week, unable to effect a compromise that would keep R. M. F. out of ruinous reorganization, she stepped out. Old Vice President John R. Lawson, onetime president of Colorado's Federation of Labor, resigned and took three months' pay. Into Rocky Mountain Fuel's offices in Denver moved William Taylor, president of Cleveland's Coal Mine Management Co. His aim: to reorganize R. M. F.. put it back on a paying basis. Colorado mine union leaders talked to Reorganizer Taylor, said they were satisfied no change in labor policies was intended.

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