A Letter to Old John

In a little yellow-brown company house at Beech Grove in Tennessee's coal-mining hills, Robert L. Parks sat down and wrote an indiscreet letter. It was addressed to John L. Lewis himself. Bob Parks didn't like the idea of the two-week mine strike that Lewis had called. And he didn't like the way Old John kept on drawing his fat salary ($50,000) and riding around Washington in his big car while the boys were out of work. Parks, a miner since he was 13, had a wife and three kids to feed.

He got an answer, but not from John L. Last week Parks told Justice Leon Elkins about it. The boys of Local 3164 at Beech Grove ordered him to make a public apology at a meeting in the schoolhouse. When Parks didn't show up, he charged later, Local President Robert Mink and Union Brother Alfred Nolan came to his house and beat him up. Mink and Nolan told the judge that the whole thing was "just a little union trouble," but the judge bound the two men over to the grand jury.

The 250 miners of Local 3164 refused to work alongside Brother Parks at the Southern Collieries Mine. So for three weeks Parks had stayed home, and was borrowing money for groceries. Reporters found him last week sprawled out disconsolately on his bed. "I can't afford to say anything," he told them. "I'm not against the union. I have to live here." The miners were sympathetic but sensible about the whole thing. They thought if he'd just apologize to the membership, everything would turn out all right. Said Dan Sams: "There's no miner here that would let him and his family go hungry." But, as Brother Audrey McCulley observed: "He's hotheaded--if he'd been in his right mind he wouldn't have written the letter in the first place."

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