When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.
My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.
A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations... four or maybe five generations.
I grew up in Oregon, where as a teenager I worked with my grandfather Axel on his i shing boat at the mouth of the Columbia River.
Well, I'll tell you, one of things I'm proud of is for someone from Southern California, who didn't grow up around coal mines, I learned a lot that tragic day we lost twenty-nine miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine.
We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.
I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada in a tiny town called Searchlight. My dad was a hard rock miner. My mom took in wash. I grew up around people of strong values - even if they rarely talked about them.
I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.
I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.
My father and brothers were coal miners.