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That was the only way the men could get together, have a decent kind of a wage and steady work.”

He reminisced about these long periods when there wasn't any work, when there was too much coal above ground, the orders fell off and so there wasn't any work for months. That was a great period of suffering. That's when the miners almost went to pieces. They didn't have anything else to do, no other income and so forth.

That was a wonderful ride around that part of New York in the afternoon of that great day. We came back. That was that. That was one of the occasions when I became an intimate friend of John Mitchell's and became acquainted with him.

John Mitchell died in the early autumn of 1919.

Mitchell had been increasingly ill. He'd be away for a day or two days, not well, subsequent terrible headaches and that kind of thing. Until two or three weeks before his death none of us had been aware of the fact that it was more than a minor illness. I should say about two weeks before his death the word came in that he was seriously ill at his home. Even so his death was unexpected. He was seriously ill, but everyone was very surprised when he died so quickly. To this day I don't know what he died of. His heart failed, it was a coronary, or he had a stroke. His illness had been probably sort of a generalized illness.