Preserving the Past for the Future

Hello, my name is Jay Luke. I am a writer from a town called Olyphant in northeast PA. I know the usual setup for authors is to talk about stories that inspired their fiction writing. Mine is a bit different as my writing covers historical context and is nonfiction.

During my childhood, the town I lived in as well as the surrounding towns were built up by the famed anthracite coal mining industry and its massive boom in our area over the past two centuries. Northeastern PA was a megapower in the anthracite world from its humble beginnings in the late 1700s to its eventual rise as America’s favorite choice in home heating. If you lived in my town you couldn’t escape it. It was integral in our lives.

It can be argued that coal powered us through the Industrial Revolution by fueling steamships and locomotives. When coal mania hit the area it was a sensation, both economically and socially.

Eventually, over ten million tons of coal were dug out of the earth as mine production took off as a thriving business. It seemed the demand was endless. Coal became something that was used in nearly every household at one time, and due to the large amounts, it was also exported to other countries.

As far as jobs go, the mining industry lifted up the economy when it was very vulnerable and gave many Americans job security. Like all things, eventually the business was threatened by competitors in the form of alternative fueling operations, and was notorious for driving employees to near slavery-like conditions until somewhere in the early 1960s, when the industry closed its doors for good.

One day many years back, a friend and I discussed what subject matter we would be shooting for our photography class, and immediately I thought we could take pictures of the remaining buildings and sites from the mining days.

What we didn’t realize then was that the more time passed the more relics and ghosts of the past would slowly disappear one by one. At first a bit of the landscape would change, then a building would be razed, and on it went until barely anything from the past survived. It seemed to us that by the time we purchased film for our cameras the physical remains had vanished.

I recall very fondly wondering if children younger than us would ever know the history of the area as all of its memories were slowly dying. All we have left are street names and a handful of living miners whom I consider to be living national treasures. From that day on I had the goal in my mind of collecting as much information as I could about the town of Olyphant and it turned out to be the greatest history lesson of my life.

In writing about history you have to really be prepared to spend plenty of time on research. I spent countless hours in libraries going over things with a fine toothed comb for errors. My advice to all writers, whether it be in fiction or nonfiction, is know your material. I have learned through my fact-checking that just because something is written in a book or etched onto a monument you cannot always believe it to be true. I was very surprised at how many mistakes I uncovered in previous publications, and I urge everyone to look a little deeper into things and not just take things at face value.

Through my journey I met some amazing people, spoke to the few living miners, did a lot of Indiana Jones-like traveling and learned boatloads of interesting facts about Olyphant. In a way, what drove me on-ward was thinking that if someone didn’t try to keep the memories of the coal miners alive they would die with my generation. We’re the last ones who have grandfathers or family members that can tell us things rather than depending on written records which could be filled with errors.

I often wonder if not for that photography assignment if things would have ever turned out as they did, but because of that moment I now have a book written some years later. Ideas and inspiration can strike you in the strangest of times and places. It’s our job to either take the cue and run with them or ignore them.

After many book signings, I realized the moment a small group of grade school children approached me and asked me some questions for a project they were doing at their school that I had accomplished my very goal. In my efforts of preserving the memories of the past I knew that there would be knowledge that would spread into the future, and for that I am very grateful.

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Jay Luke is a musician and artist from Throop, Pa. A graduate from Marywood University, Jay is very active in all things art, whether it be through painting, performing with his band, or through his day job as a graphic designer. As a project engineer of the Olyphant Coal Miner Memorial Association, he has delved deeply into the origins of the area and the forgotten histories of the towns around him. Passionate about not letting future generations forget their local origins, he took on this project to reconnect readers to the past. As writer and poet Wendell Berry once said, “The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”
taken from http://www.tribute-books.com/authors.html

I can be found on Facebook @ http://www.facebook.com/JayLukePage
on Twitter @ http://www.twitter.com/jay-luke
on Myspace @ http://www.myspace.com/jayluke

Where to buy my book:
http://www.amazon.com/When-Coal-Was-Queen-Pennsylvania/dp/0982256523/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267492846&sr=8-1
if you’d like a signed copy just send me an email at messmusic@aol.com and I’ll be happy to send one out.

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