IN HONOR OF...

When my children were small I went with them to buy them a parakeet. Nathan’s bird was  green and Andrea’s was yellow. During my childhood my mother and her sister always had a parakeet in their homes. They said this reminded them of their father who had died in a coal mining accident when they were small.

Coal miners always had canaries or other small birds in the mines. They enjoyed the song of the bird. Also, the birds were so sensitive to the quality of the air that if there was any gas in the mine the bird died quickly. This gave the miners the warning they needed in order to escape before there was an explosion.

I don’t know how my grandfather Jacobsen died. My grandmother never talked about him. When I was a teenager my grandpa Rich (who also was a coal miner) talked to me about my mother's father. He said I needed to know about the sacrifice Grandpa Arno made by working in the mines. My grandfather also took me to the Schofield mine and showed me a plaque where the worst coal mine accident in the history of the United Stakes occurred. I didn’t understand the significance at that time. It has been many years for me to understand what it meant to a community to have a coal miner die in the mines.