‘The tough’ ingrained

By Bill Archer
Bluefield Daily Telegraph

March 22, 2008 08:56 pm

— BLUEFIELD — He wanted to be a doctor so he could help people and save lives, but his family just didn’t have enough money to afford eight years of schooling. Instead, Eustace Frederick became a coal mining engineer and still found a way to help people and save lives.
“I got a call one morning at 2 a.m., back when I was vice president of Consol’s Southern Appalachian Region,” Frederick recalled during a story-laced interview last week in the den of his Bluefield home. “I never get any calls at night that are good. There was a roof fall at our Maitland Mine and there was a coal miner who was covered under seven or eight feet of coal.
“We had been working to get canopies on all of our continuous miners,” Frederick said. “That was a difficult process too, but we continued to work for their use. Some coal miners were concerned about how the canopies reduced their range of movement, but you just couldn’t argue about the increased safety that a canopy gave a coal miner.
“The rescue team down at Maitland dug for eight to nine hours to get the coal miner out, and when he came out, there was not one scratch on him ... Not one,” Frederick said. “He walked up to me and said: ‘You don’t have to convince me any more about the canopies.’ The canopy saved his life. I thanked the Lord. Word spreads fast in the coal mines, and we never had any problems getting coal miners to accept canopies after that.”
Frederick spent 40 years of his life with Consol helping people and saving lives. He gained a reputation of being a tough boss, but also earned the respect and admiration of the people who worked for him as well as the respect and admiration of the people he worked for. Frederick’s position was similar to the post James Elwood Jones held from about 1910 until the early 1930s. Jones, the son of another pioneering coal baron, Jenkin Jones, oversaw the operations of 25 Pocahontas Fuel Company coal mines from his mansion in Switchback.
But unlike Jones, Frederick’s birthright was that of a coal miner’s son. He was the son of Russian immigrant parents who lived in a four-room shack in Delta Hollow. The Frederick home stood literally in the shadow of the Jones Mansion near the power plant in Switchback. Jones was vice president and superintendent of Pocahontas Fuel when he died Nov. 25, 1932 while playing cards at his home.
Frederick’s father, Eustace Fedoruk, (later Americanized to Frederick) of Grodno, Russia on the Polish border, came to the United States at age 18. He got a job working on a moving van in New York City in the first decade of the 20th Century. When the moving van work played out, he was lured into the southern West Virginia coalfields where work was plentiful. The elder Mr. Frederick met his wife, Annie, also a Russian immigrant whose family had settled in Upland. The two were married and started raising a family in their small, Delta Hollow home. The Fredericks had three sons and also kept a boarder in their modest home as well.
“Both of my parents only had a third-grade education, but they were big on education,” Frederick said. “The first thing I can remember was them telling me I was going to college.” Delta Hollow was segregated three ways, with whites of American heritage in one part of town, blacks in another section and foreigners in yet another section. While he loved to play as a child, he still recoils from the thought of an acrimonious slang term applied to foreign-born miners and their children. He spelled the four-letter term, then asked for it not to be used in this article.
“Our life was hard,” Frederick said. “We had no TV, and we never locked our doors because we didn’t have anything worth stealing. We had a radio where I listened to ‘Amos & Andy’ and ‘Jack Benny,’ but that was about all. We played cards — pinochle and rummy — and we had some hard-fought games. There were three pictures in our house — Jesus Christ, John L. Lewis and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I thought I had a good life. The only thing I didn’t like was our outdoor john.”
Frederick was born in 1930, and his father passed away in the early 1960s. Although he was married at the time and he and his late wife, Frances Q. “Frankie” Frederick (Mendora), were living in Green Valley, he spent some time staying in the Delta Hollow home with his mother.
“I was in my early 30s at the time and mine superintendent at the Itmann Mine,” Frederick said. “The first cold morning I spent there, when I woke up, I thought I was in Alaska. I’ve always been the first one to the mine — always — so I got up pretty early, but my mother was already up making breakfast. The kitchen was the only warm place in the house. I was only gone from home for a few years, but the tough had already gone out of me.”
Most people who know Frederick would doubt that the tough is gone. He went to Switchback grade school and graduated from Elkhorn High School in 1948. During his time at Elkhorn, he played football all four years and led the team to a county championship as a fullback in the old single-wing offense during his senior year in 1947. “Jack Owens was my coach,” Frederick said. “He was an excellent defensive coach.
“We were the smallest of the six white high schools in McDowell County,” Frederick said. “We lost to War, but we beat Welch, Gary, Northfork and Iaeger and finished that season 5-1. I got a scholarship offer from Marshall University, and The Citadel wanted me to go there, but one of my brothers was at Virginia Tech, and said they wanted me to come there.”
Frederick said that the Citadel and Marshall didn’t have a mine engineering program so he ruled both of those schools out. Still, he was reluctant to attend Virginia Tech because he was afraid his grades wouldn’t be good enough and he didn’t want to embarrass his brother or the family. He decided to forego college for a while and join the Army.
“Dad had just come home from work,” he said. “That was before they had bath houses at the mines. He had to lay down and rest an hour-and a-half before he could get cleaned up and have supper. When he was resting, I told my mom what I decided to do. She cried and not just that night. She cried for two or three weeks. That tugged at me. I finally broke down and told her: ‘I’ll give it a try.’ She stopped crying then.”
Still, Frederick was concerned about how he would be received in Blacksburg, Va. Football players were required to report for training before the start of the fall term. Frederick caught a bus in Switchback to Bluefield, then traveled from Bluefield to Blacksburg with his clothes neatly packed in a cardboard suitcase. Upon his arrival, he walked to the Tech fieldhouse.
“Here I am wearing ordinary clothes and here come the other boys with their parents dropping them off in Cadillacs, Fords and Lincolns,” he said. “Nobody else came on the bus and nobody else walked from the bus station to the football field.
“One of my coaches — Paul Sizemore — could see it was discomforting to me,” Frederick said. “He told me it didn’t matter how I got there, ‘You’re equal when you get out there on that practice field.’ I put on that uniform and I was the same as everyone else there.” Frederick played fullback during his first three years, scored touchdowns against North Carolina State and Maryland and blocked a field goal against Marshall in a 63-7 loss the Hokies suffered in 1950 in the final game of an 0-10 season played at Mitchell Stadium in Bluefield.
Frank Moseley took over as head coach of the Hokies in Frederick’s senior year, and moved him from the backfield to an offensive line position as guard. The Hokies improved to 2-8 during their first season under Moseley, but Frederick also earned his claim to fame was that he was the only student who played football and graduated in 1952 after only having been in school for four years.
Frederick’s career with Consol was successful and diverse. After pioneering the ATRS systems in the early 1970s, he worked to combine those systems with roof bolting to increase safety for underground coal miners. Frederick supervised experimentation with roof bolt systems to provide even more stable top support. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he turned his attentions to the Buchanan County, Va., coalfields, and worked to develop a system to vent the coalbed methane off the gaseous Pocahontas No. 3 coal seam, and in the process, helped lay the foundation for Consol’s highly successful gas production component.
He retired from Consol in 1992 after 40 years of service, but it didn’t take long for Frederick to be called into public service. “I liked to play duplicate bridge, and I was about to leave the house for the game when the telephone rang. It was about 12:10 p.m.,” Frederick said. “It was Paige Wooldridge (former Norfolk Southern Pocahontas Division resident vice president). He said that (former State Delegate) Bill Carper had resigned from office, and he wanted to know if I would be interested in serving.
“Frankie was traveling in Israel at the time and if you’ve ever played duplicate bridge, you know that those ladies don’t like to be kept waiting for any time,” he said. “I asked him how long I had to decide, and he said the Democratic Party had until 3 p.m. to submit the names. I told him to go ahead and put me in there. If he would have called 30 seconds later, I would have been out the door and none of this would have happened.
“Gov. Gaston Caperton called me and said we have more paper on you than we have on the other names that were submitted to me,” Frederick said. “The only thing he asked me was that if I served that one year, would I run again for office the following year, I served that one year of Carper’s unexpired term and I’ve run successfully for the seat seven times.”
Frederick has been suffering a respiratory ailment during the past two sessions and is on oxygen therapy. “I just didn’t have the physical ability to do it any more,” he said.
Frederick remains active in his church, St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Church in Bluefield, and although Frankie passed away on Feb. 28, 1998, their two children Charlotte “Carrie” Frederick Frost and her husband, Matthew of Charlottesville, Va., and Eustace “Stacy” Frederick III of Bluefield are always close by and his good friend, Shirley Ofsa, helps as well.
He has made contact with some of his Russian cousins, but they cautioned him against visiting. “One of my cousins said it was a little too dangerous,” he said. “It may have been a hard life growing up in Delta Hollow, but I thought it was good. I owe all of my success to the man above. That’s how I put it. It’s as simple as that.”
– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

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