Walter Haile, the grandson of a slave, has stored up countless stories over the past nine decades, and now he’s ready to pass them on. When Haile was a child, his family didn’t have extra money for a diary, so his mother recorded the important events of their lives — such as days when bad storms tore through Heath Springs, S.C. — in “an old Negro history book,” he said. Haile recalls one entry from 1919 especially well. That was the year he turned 7 and started working in his sharecropper father’s cotton field. Thanks to his mother’s notes, Haile remembers that he picked 113 pounds of cotton in one day, a feat he’s still proud of. He said most grown men could pick 350 pounds in one day. The history book is lost now, and many of the memories are gone forever. Haile, with some help from retired school teacher and local author Phylis Pietrusza, is passing on the memories of his first 91 years to his family. His biography , “From Cotton Fields to Coal Fields,” contains snapshots and stories by and about Haile as he grew up, moved to Westmoreland County and, after many struggles, became a successful foreman in a coal mine. Sitting in the living room of his home at Old Hanna’s Town, Haile retells his life story, starting in a segregated schoolhouse where he and the other students used leftover supplies from the next-door school for whites. “I never saw a new book in South Carolina,” he said. When Haile was 11, his family moved north to Crabtree, where children went to integrated schools with better supplies. During the Great Depression, Haile attended Greensburg High School during the day and then worked in a coal mine until midnight. He remembers black families and white families helping each other through the hard times. “If my mother had soup, if she had beans, if she had chili, everybody got some,” Haile said. He graduated from high school in 1933 and went to work full time, laboring in the mines for $2.72 a day. In 1944, Haile took a three-day class for certification as a mine foreman. He didn’t miss a single question on the exam, beating every one of his college-educated peers. “You can’t beat on-the-job training,” Haile said. “If you were in a classroom, you couldn’t imagine what it was like down in the mine.” He had experience and met all the qualifications, but the color of his skin apparently kept him from being hired as a foreman. Haile’s biography continues, telling how he left the mines and went to work on the Steele family farm and helped to raise their Black Angus cattle. He stopped working on the farm during the 1960s, then worked as a security guard and briefly as a school bus driver. Later, Haile decided to return to the coal mines to earn more money. In 1971, Consolidated Coal Co. took one look at the certification he had earned 27 years earlier and gave him a job as a foreman. During his seven years with the company, Haile said he had the highest production of any foreman. When he retired, the company gave him credit for 10 years of service — and the pension to go with it. Through a contract he signed with the Steele family a half-century ago, Haile still lives in the same house on the site, which has since been converted to Historic Hanna’s Town, a re-created historical site. He helps to take care of the grounds. Although his biography ends on Nov. 9, 2003, as he celebrates his 91st birthday with his family, Haile is still going strong. “From Cotton Fields to Coal Fields” soon will be available from major online booksellers and at Aspinwall Bookshop in Aspinwall, Allegheny County.

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