Watched a PBS documentary last night (Sept. 3, 2019) on the Mine Workers Union battle in Southern West Virginia at the turn of the last century, after World War I. Many pipe smoking miners were pictured, and no mine operators or owners that I spotted. Many different shapes of pipes, from big-bowled bent to snappy straight Dublins. How miners navigated with a pipe, how they put them out and emptied ash without wasting tobacco, wasn't discussed. The flammable gasses, methane etc., probably prohibited smoking much underground, but they definitely lit up the pipes once in the daylight. Neither cigars nor cigarettes appeared in this scenario. Among the striking characters depicted was Mother Jones, an Irish immigrant union activists who, in her sixties, waded into the most volatile and potentially violent situations, and even tried to bluff miners out of getting into a violent battle, really at the level of war, with hired guards and various mercenaries of the mine owners. We're talking machine gun nests. The worst was averted, but barely, and with many deaths and casualties.
