This is a true story. My hometown is a small town in the midwestern part of the United States. In essence, the Midwest is replete with these small towns, and if one were to not look at them personally, they would appear to be carbon copies of each other. There is a mainstreet, brick buildings, shops, stores, even the remnants of a paved brick street. During my childhood, I remember the time when most of the streets were of the same paving brick. I can even remember when there were no stoplights in town.

The town was originally established in the early 1800's on an open prairie, by settlers who were basically farmers. At some time in the 19th century, coal was discovered there, and within a short time, what was once a farmers prairie became a boom town. Many came to seek their fortune. Even today, there is a neighborhood on the West end of town that was established by Italian immigrants, and the ethnic flavor is still strong. In the early 1900's, the population of the town was in excess of 10,000. Ironically, when I was in high school, several decades after the boom had gone bust, the town only had 9,474 people. This tells about how things had gone.

During the height of the boom, there were about 17 small, independent coal mines within earshot of the downtown area. Good times and prosperity seemed to be endless. However, things are certain to change, and so it went. One by one, the mines closed, either by mining out the coal, inevitable change during World War II, or for other reasons. The last of these small coal mines terminated with an abrupt explosion on January 10, 1962. It was called the Blue Blaze.

Among the many perils faced by coal miners is the deadly methane gas. This gas exists naturally, as a by-product of the fermentation of the coal strata. Pockets of the gas are often encountered, and in current times the coal mining machinery has a "sniffer" which detects the presence of methane. In olden times, a canary was used. Indeed, one of my grandfathers was a mine inspector, and used a canary in a cage to test for methane. If the canary died, methane gas was present. The birds are much more sensitive to it than are humans. Typically when methane is discovered in a mine tunnel, it is blocked or sealed off, mapped, and a safe distance is established.

On that particular night in January, there were 11 men who descended the shaft of the coalmine. Certainly, all expected to re-surface. However, none of these men would ever see daylight again. The machinery and methods of 1962 were not as sophisticated as they are today. There was a blocked tunnel in the Blue Blaze which contained methane. The extreme cold temperature of minus 10 degrees added to the danger of the existing methane, and tended to compress the gas into an even more dangerous condition. Everyone knew where the walled methane was. However due to some oversight, or other still unknown failure, the gas was released from the walled tunnel. By some unknown means, the gas found an open flame or spark. Within a single split second, one sure and certain explosion completely incinerated every man, and destroyed all the machinery within the bowels of that hole.

My family was together that night, and we recounted it years later. I can still remember how the lights went out, which was not an unknown incident in those times. However, that night, they went out, and they stayed out; for most of the night. My grandfather had been a coal miner since he was 12 years old. He knew. He told us something terrible had happened at the mines. That was all he said.

Some of those men were young family men. Some were older men who were close to retirement. I even remember the widows of some of them. I'm sure that not a single one of them knew what was in store for them at the beginning of that shift. There was one man who survived. He didn't survive the blast, he survived because he was ill from the cold, and having overworked previously; he missed the work shift. I looked him up years later, we even went out to the old site.

I have often wondered, what is the moral of this story? What if today is my last?