Editorially speaking...
Coincidental to today’s promo for next week’s post on the PCC Mine disaster of February 1915, it was on the news that legendary country music star Loretta Lynn died, aged 90.
Loretta achieved fame as a Kentucky coal miner’s daughter, a title she used as her signature song during her decades-long career.
A Kentucky coal miner. —Wikipedia Commons
We were poor but we had love
That’s the one thing Daddy made sure of
He shovelled coal to make a poor man’s dollar
For all her fame and, logically, fortune, Loretta Lynn never forgot her ‘black’ roots. Coal Miner’s Daughter was also the title of her 1976 book which was made into an Oscar-nominated movie of the same name for which star Sissy Spacek won an Academy Award.
I just couldn’t resist acknowledging this phenomenally successful coal miner’s daughter in today’s editorial. She represented the hope for a better future for his children that every coal miner daily risked his life for.
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According to the news, our continuing dry summer weather has a downside: the fire hazard remains at extreme. Which makes the latest Headlines in History post, coincidentally or not, exceedingly timely.
It’s about “The Great Smoke Pall of Sept. 24-30, 1950,” when smoke from several forest fires in northern Alberta and northeastern British Columbia burned approximately four million acres—reputedly the largest recorded fire in North America.
Rising into the upper atmosphere, smoke from what was called the Chinchaga Fire, thought to have been human-caused in the Fort St. John area, blanketed portions of Canada as far east as Ontario and Ohio and the east coast of the United States.
Smoke so thick and black that it “turned the skies dark at midday, leaving some residents wondering if there had been a nuclear attack”.
You’ll need a subscription to read the dramatic story at www.newspapers.com but it, and the 1000s of newspaper content that comes with it, is worth it.
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I’ve just finished reading In the Shadow of the Red Brick Building, the story of Raymond Tony Charlie, a residential school survivor, in his case, Kuper (now Penelakut) Island.
Published by Askew Creek Publishing of Chemainus, Mr. Charlie’s story is one that needed to be told. If any Chronicles readers still harbour doubts as to the impact of residential schools, with their attendant physical and sexual abuse, had upon the 1000s and 1000s of Indigenous children who were forced to attend by government policy, this is an insightful introduction.
Mr. Charlie ultimately survived in every sense of the word, having overcome chronic depression that led him to the brink of suicide. Now in his late 70s, he’s a grandparent with a large, loving family and a successful artist.
He believes passionately that the real story of the residential schools must be told so that we Canadians can begin to truly understand the evils that our governments and our churches inflicted upon children and their families for more than a century.
The harm that was caused is incalculable and ongoing.