TRANSCRIPT:

Well, each of us who worked in that mine was different from one another in lots of different ways. But some of my differences were more striking.

I was living in the city and I was in one of the few people, maybe the only one who lived in Pittsburgh and drove all the way down to the mine every day to work. I was a socialist people all knew that about me and I had no trouble once I had been working long enough to establish that I was there, actually, to do the work, and that didn’t take very long.

I had Black people – I was in a family that included Black and white people. My family all lived in California. The most horrifying thing really to most of my coworkers who were horrified by anything was that I was a Jew. The women in the locker room– my close friends in the locker room told me after I’d been there for a while, “you know, Kipp, when we were in the shower,” because we had that time, we had a gang shower, everybody showered together, you know, and I’m very short, so this was an easy thing for these people to do. “You know, Kipp, when you were first here, you might not have noticed, but in the shower, the women were all looking to see where the horns were in your head.” Because this is Washington County, very few Jews, that people know are Jewish, maybe closeted Jews, I don’t know, that people had encountered. I was the only Jew that anybody– that many of them had known that close up. And you’re pretty close up in your relationships in the mines. All the women, and because we all talked– we needed each other, we were family in that locker room and all the women knew of each other’s personal lives and who, if anybody, that people were living with. The women all knew pretty early on because I told them that I was living with my female partner. To them, the way I told it, quietly, didn’t seem to be shocking. That’s the way you talked about things like that.