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to be prepared for anything. I was only about fifteen years old when there was a big mine explosion and I had to help carry up the dead. I knew it could happen, but that kind of thing makes you a better man. You have to learn to take what comes the way it comes. You have to learn to a tand by your guns and to stand by what's proper and right. You have to learn to stand up for your rights. There's always somebody who will take them away from you.”

He reminisced on and on about the quarrels they'd had with the employer, how they'd sent a committee, how his father was on the committee, how his father was turned away and the employers wouldn't deal with them, how his father had taken part in the formation of a union, how they'd met in a little back room with nothing but a kerosene lamp - a little back room in somebody's house with nothing but a little oil cloth tablecloth - how these four men sat around the table. They were grown up men. His father told him about it when he came with the lantern to light his father home after the meeting. His mother sent him with a lantern because it was an awful dark and rainy night. His father told him they had decided to form a union.

“‘What is a union?' I had to ask,” said John Mitchell. “My father told me what a union was. They had them in Scotland in the old country. You had to have a union here.