When this photo was taken in the late 1940s, Shirly Ruppert (standing on left) was foreman for a crew of workers building floor racks for refrigerated railroad cars at Pacific Car & Foundry’s Renton plant. At the time, Ruppert, his wife Emma (Butorac), and their growing family that eventually reached 11 children were living at the home of Shirly’s mother in Renton. The family would soon call Black Diamond, where the family had previously lived on and off, their final home.
Twenty years earlier, Shirly Ruppert was a boy in Roslyn living with four siblings and his father and mother, Philip and Nellie (Weddle). In the late-1920s, Roslyn was Washington state’s largest coal-producing field with over a million tons regularly produced by a workforce of more than 1,300 men. Most of the region’s output fueled the coal-fired locomotives of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The majority of that coal was produced by Northwest Improvement Co., a division of the railroad.
While Shirly Ruppert had been a good student who passed his 8th grade exams and was admitted to Roslyn High School, sometime between his sophomore and junior years, the young man went off track. He started drinking and hanging with bad actors, as his life just came apart. That fall, Shirly announced to his parents that he didn’t want to go back to school. His father, Phillip Ruppert wasn’t happy about the turn of events but privately told his wife, Nellie of his cure – Shirly would start working at a coal mine.
A few weeks later, Shirly landed a job at NWI’s Number 5 mine located midway between Roslyn and Cle Elum. Though he was underage – you had to be 18 to work underground – Shirly appeared before the Justice of the Peace and swore under oath he was 18. The ruse was suggested to him by the coal company. Shirly would be partnered with his dad. But first he joined the union, the United Mine Workers of America.
Early one Monday morning, Shirly strode into the miners’ wash house and changed into a heavy set of work clothes, then donned a canvas cap outfitted with a leather bill that fastened his headlamp in place. Shirly’s daily job was shoveling tons of coal into rail cars deep underground. As contract miners, the Ruppert father-son team were paid by the ton. As each coal car was loaded and ready to haul, Shirly placed one of their brass chips, a small square token with a hole upon which was stamped each miner’s payroll identification number. When payday came, Shirly was rewarded with two dollars. But, a routine of work, eat, and sleep left him so perennially tired that he had little interest in blowing his wages around town or at the show hall.
When not shoveling, Shirly packed heavy posts from a stack of props up the steep, crooked manways with little room to maneuver, so he dragged and wrestled up the slope with a timber dog. It was back-breaking work. Packing timber was just another of the many jobs that fell to contract laborers like Philip and Shirly, who termed any work that wasn’t producing coal as dead work.
The prop pile was home to families of rats, “big, grey, ugly beasts, and every miner’s friend.” For miners believed that rats could anticipate danger and would scatter if a cave-in or explosion were imminent. To see rats busying themselves around the prop pile was reassuring.
After nearly a year of working at a coal mine, Phillip Ruppert asked his son, Shirly, if he was ready to go back to school. In his chronicle of that year spent underground, Shirly wrote, “The choice was easy. I had seen enough of mining to know it wasn’t for me. So, back to school I went, and gladly.” In school he picked up right where he’d left off, and realized in that first year back, he’d probably matured ten. Still, that year taught Shirly another important life lesson – an appreciation of what his father did every day to keep bread on the family table.
Back at Roslyn High, Shirly was asked to join the journalism class and was soon made literary editor of the school paper and later editor of the school annual, Klailax. But due to that lost year and needing two more credits, Ruppert, at age 20, was unable to graduate with his Class of 1929. That August, the Ruppert family moved to Black Diamond where Shirly completed his high school studies the following spring.
This photo of Shirly Ruppert at Paccar comes courtesy of his oldest son, John Ruppert. Photo enhancements were undertaken by Doug “Boomer” Burnham and Oliver Kombol. This story would not have been possible without three life essays written by Shirly Ruppert: “Dad’s Story,” “The Best of My Life,” and “A Coal Miner’s Son.”
In the 1929 Roslyn Klailax yearbook, Shirley published a brief story titled, “A Day’s Work,” plus his poem, “The Miner” which includes this four-line stanza: “Deep beneath the little town; Each day he works; Undisturbed, though always around; Death lurks.” Shirly Edward Ruppert passed away in Black Diamond in 2003 at age 94.
