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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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and he was an engineer. He held some kind of an engineering certificate. Whether it was a degree or not, I don't know, but he held an engineer's certificate. That was shown to me once at the Lewis's house as a treasure. He had come out. I've forgotten how he got to Iowa, but there were coal mines there, and he drifted out there. He had been a good miner with good wages--well, good wages of the moment. But he thought, coming out of a Welsh background and a British background, that there should be a union, and he attempted to form a union. He did form a union and they made some demands. In one way or another, he became a marked man with the coal operators, who just put him on the black list. “Don't employ him.”

That was what Lewis meant when he said, “George L. Baer never asked what means are used to dispose of a man who opposes him.” Those means had been used to dispose of Lewis's father, to push him out and push him out. I think he had had a mining post in some better area, an area of better coal, before he got out to Iowa.

Anyhow, Lewis grew up as a boy with this picture of his father driven out of the coal mining industry, or attempted to be driven out into the less productive or less well paid areas of it. He himself went to work in the mines, I think, when he was eleven, a very young boy. It was then permitted. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, he was being pushed out





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