theory or some passage he read in a history book or even a passage that he might have read from steven crane. he lived it. his father and his grandfather and his extended family in his community lived it. and that awareness, that understanding of danger in the workplace, that understanding of suffering that workers still face today in different contexts but certainly faced in a coal mine all those years ago, that's part of who he was. and to understand rich trumka and his contributions to american working men and women, you have to understand where he came from, those roots. so i'm thinking about that today because of the connection to my own region of pennsylvania, really the connection to my own family. i'm far removed from it. we had, i guess, four generations before me working the coal mines, but it kind of stopped when my grandfather worked there as a child and then was able to escape the mines. these were people who not only understood labor and suffering and contribution to their community, these were people who kept their promises. that's why we fought so hard just a couple of years

you're still going every day into that darkness, into that place of so many risks, what steven crane called a place of inscrutable darkness, a soundless place of tangible loneliness. that's how he described his first impression of a coal mine when crane was just in his 20's. later he described all the ways you could die in that coal mine, what he called the hundred perils of dying in a coal line. of course, this is in the context of the 1890's, but said, there is an insidious, silent enemy in the gas. if the huge fan wheel on top of the earth should stop for a brief period, there is certain death. if a man escapes the gas, the floods, the squeezes of falling rock, the scarce shooting through little -- the cars shooting through little tunnels, the hundreds perils that usually comes to him in minor's asthma that shakes and rakes him into the grave. he was talking to what they used to call minor's asthma in the old, old days. rich trumka understood that. his own family members had died from that same -- had that same cause of death. it wasn't some theory or some passage he read in a hist