Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires: Chapter Three

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CHAPTER THREE (1987)
On the evening of the day that he met Maggie Mulhearn, Archie told us during dinner of the unusual engagement.
"Who are the Molly Maguires?" Katy asked the question that was also in my mind. Given that Pop later confessed to me how he had indulged that afternoon in a celebratory pig out and snooze, in retrospect I'm surprised at how much he knew about John Kehoe and the so-called Molly Maguires when he responded to our collective curiosity.
"There are two kinds of coal in Pennsylvania," he began, swallowing a bit noisily the piece of pork chop he had been chewing. "There's soft coal. Bituminous. That's the most common and it's mined out around Pittsburgh. The second kind is anthracite, or... Ned?" He looked my way. The mashed potatoes on their way to my mouth stopped in mid air. The gravy dribbled from them back down onto my plate. This had always been one of Pop's favorite pedagogic ploys, as far back as I can recall.
"Uh... hard coal?" I ventured, hoping that logic ruled in the realm of coal mining.
"Very good, Ned," said my Father, showing no apparent pride that I had managed to guess the obvious. "Hard coal. Yes. Not so common, and today not very significant. But in the second half of the 19th century big money was being made in hard coal. By railroads such as the Reading, and by the people who owned and ran them. Naturally," he continued, "like almost everyone else on the planet at that time, the hard coal miners were exploited."
"What does that mean... exploited?" Katy questioned him.
"It means used... taken advantage of," Mom chimed in, this brief interruption in his disquisition affording the Old Man opportunity enough to shovel in a big fork-full of mashed spuds and wash them down with a big gulp of the white wine he was having with his dinner.
"Right," resumed Archie, delicately wiping some gravy from his fleshy, pink lower lip. "The miners in eastern Pennsylvania, where the hard coal was mined --- they were mostly Irish, by the way --- were required to work very long hours for very little pay. The work was exceptionally dangerous, even for a time when thousands of railroad and industrial workers were killed and injured every year."
"So who are the Molly Maguires?" Katy impatiently persisted, as she always did when Dad got into his professorial posture.
"The Molly Maguires," he went on, betraying only a very tiny bit of annoyance at this second, and apparently unwanted, interruption (his plate was clean, his wine glass empty now), "were Irish miners who rebelled against mine and railroad companies and took matters into their own hands.
"It was a secret society, the Molly Maguires, and its members shot mine owners and operators, blew up railroads and mines, and generally tried to make life as miserable for the capitalists as they made it for the miners and their families. But it was a no win situation."
"What do you mean?" asked Katy.
"I know," I said, stealing Archie's thunder. "They were all caught and hanged."
"How do you know that?" Archie inquired, a little disappointed that I had gotten to reveal the climax to his story.
"Because," I said with some satisfaction, "I just remembered that I saw the movie on the late show one night."
"Oh, yeah," the Old Man reflected, caressing the right side of his bulbous nose with a pensive forefinger. "I remember the film. Do you recall it, Karen?"
Mom had gotten up and begun clearing the dinner dishes as a prelude to dessert. "Not really," she replied. "I know we saw it years ago. But I can't say it left too much of an impression."
Mom was a Philly girl. The rest of Pennsylvania was an unknown wilderness to her, except for a couple of favorite Pocono resorts, which were the "known wilderness" in her mind. The history of the hard coal region was of no moment to her.
"Sean Connery and Richard Harris, wasn't it, Ned?" Pop turned back to me, Mom in his view having nothing useful to contribute.
"Sean Connery for sure," I responded. Connery was still a big star in the 1980s and on into the nineties. "I'm not sure who any of the other guys in it were."
"Well, we ought to rent it," Archie reasoned. In the next instant he was pushing himself ponderously back from the table.
"Don't you want dessert?" Mom sounded a bit startled, and where Archie and dessert were concerned, rightly so.
"I'm going over to Movies Unlimited to see if I can get that flick," he declared. "I'll have my dessert with the movie."
And so, a half hour later our family of four was gathered round the electronic hearth in the basement family room, watching a film released in 1970 by Paramount Pictures. The movie is called "The Molly Maguires," staring, yes, Sean Connery, Richard Harris, and a soap opera rage of that era named Samantha Eggar. Directed by Martin Ritt, a film maker with a reputation for making "message films," the movie captures the legend well enough:
The action opens with Richard Harris, playing the Pinkerton detective James McParlan, arriving at Shenandoah in central-eastern Pennsylvania, where he's been dispatched by Alan Pinkerton, who's been put on the payroll of the Reading Railroad to infiltrate and expose the Mollies. Under the alias of Jamie McKenna, McParlan takes a job down in the mines, meanwhile spreading around the local pub crowd the largess he attributes to "passing the queer" (fencing counterfeit money). The upshot is that Connery a/k/a Black Jack Kehoe, a fellow miner, initiates McParlan into his little band of desperadoes, a tight-knit band of terrorists within the ranks of the benevolent Irish social club, the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
Katy wasn't much interested in this hoary yarn of labor exploitation and unrest. After gobbling a slab of Mom's chocolate cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, she went to her room upstairs in search of more rewarding pursuits. The movie offered enough action to keep me interested, as the little band of Irish terrorists tore up the Reading's tracks with their black powder charges and ambushed offensive mine bosses in their victims' stables and outhouses. Mom stayed on to the end, too, though she insisted that one light stay lit --- Archie likes the room dark as a theater when he watches a video --- and she read some company documents she'd brought home in her briefcase, only occasionally casting a fleeting glance at the action on the screen.
But the Old Man was entranced. As the legendary tale lumbered inexorably to its tragic conclusion --- McParlan's betrayal of his comrades and his secret oath, their trial and execution, his rejection by Samantha Eggar (whose loyalty lay with her mine patch community), McParlan's departure from the coal fields with his pockets filled with money but his heart just as heavy with unrequited love --- Pop pumped down three big slabs of Mom's extra-moist devil's food cake (but no ice cream), sluiced down with about half a dozen cups of coffee. In fairness to my Dad, I note here that his concession to a healthier lifestyle that evening, as almost always, was decaf coffee sweetened artificially. This concession, pushed and policed by my mother, assuaged any twinge of guilt he might otherwise have felt about the three desserts.
Then, with Sean Connery and his comrades duly hanged by the neck until dead, and the chocolate cake (or what was left of it) duly sealed in saran wrap, Mom and I headed upstairs to our respective bedrooms and, gratefully, to our beds.
But not Pop. He adjourned to the sunroom at the back of the house, where he gobbled up the book he had begun before dozing off in his office that afternoon. One thing I always had to admit about the Old Man: if he could gorge himself on cake, he likewise could gorge himself on knowledge. He told me once that, when he started into law school, an attorney-friend of his father had given him a foam rubber cushion as a gift. "You'll need this more than you'll need your brains," he had told Archie, who added that he used that cushion hard during his three years of legal education. And when I started into law school five years ago, Archie wrapped that beat-up cushion, with its foam rubber showing through the torn material at the corners, and gave it to me.
I did all right in law school but I never developed Pop's power of uninterrupted concentration. Though I was upstairs asleep, still only a high school student, in my mind's eye I can see him pawing over the battered paperback book, that in the months ahead became his constant companion, sometimes in his briefcase, often in his suit coat pocket. I can see the dim lamplight illuminating the side of his jowly face, and his ever-sweaty hands clutching the book.
Archie had read nearly the whole book by the time morning rolled around and Mom gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead --- something I did see first hand --- before tiptoeing out to the garage and heading for her job at REF Group.