Homer is the son of 3 generations of miners in West Virginia. Raised with two sisters, a brother and a grandmother in a home built by his grandfather and uncles, he took to books instead of manual labor.
Because mining was all they’d known, his parents didn’t always think taking to books was a good way to go and they thought he should probably follow in the footsteps of the men folk in his family, for security, for the future. He didn’t.
Homer was a quiet boy and had grown into a reserved young man. To the bystander, it appeared he was the outsider to his family. He’d done well in school but his parents and grandparents wanted him to drop out of school at age 16 to become a miner. He went against the expected path and stayed in school and made repairs of machinery for money he was saving for college.
He never knew that attending college was his parent’s greatest wish for him, they didn’t know it could be possible. They’d been saving for years a few cents here, a dollar there. While they didn’t really know how to express their happiness and pride to Homer directly, they were immensely proud.
Homer did attend college. Even at age 17 he worked tirelessly with the small high school (67 graduates that year) to learn what he would need to do to attend. He was his town’s greatest student. By way of the school counselor people from the town of miners often pitched in their pennies to help support him through the years, him never knowing how his needs were continually met.
He finished college as an engineer with the highest grades in the school. The professors never knew what fueled him to study so hard. They didn’t know why engineering meant so much to him and in particular why the mining industry held such a hold on him.
They didn’t know that throughout his life he’d watched his family bury 6 relatives, among them a grandfather and 2 uncles and countless neighbors due to unsafe conditions below the ground in the dark. He never wanted another family to suffer the losses his family had suffered. He’d always believed that those missing members of his family impacted his life, his siblings, cousins and community in immeasurable ways. Those losses would fuel his desire to change mining safety – which he did for many years – saving a community of people from the pain of a coal miner’s death.
Written by Julia Roberts, Kidneys and Eyes
