Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [78]
It’s the same way with charity. I would dig into my pocketbook and give away money all the time if they didn’t stop me. I’ve done it. Somebody tells me a story and I just say, “Here, take whatever I’ve got.” I know I can’t do that forever, so now they’ve worked it out where we give a certain amount to charities like United Way. Whenever some group talks to me, I tell ’em to see my manager. That sounds cold, but it’s the only way. And we give plenty. I know because we’ve helped build churches and given money to stop diseases, because I insist on it.
Doo keeps most of the letters away from me, but sometimes I get hold of one. We got a letter from a woman who said she had six kids and they were being evicted from their home and some had diseases. It was a real pitiful story. I was about to send ’em some money when Doo stopped me. Instead he called up the sheriff where that lady lives. The sheriff said that woman had six kids by six different men and that none of the kids had any diseases that he knew of. He also said they had a new car and a television on installments and that nobody was kicking them out. If it had been up to me, I’d have just sent the money.
I keep threatening to cut out all the extra appearances because I’m too tired. Pete Axthelm, who wrote such a nice story when I was on the cover of Newsweek magazine, remembers me saying, “No more benefits” until somebody reminded me that we had a benefit scheduled the following Monday.
“But that’s for kids,” I said. “That’s different.”
Which is true. How’re you gonna turn down some poor kids?
Sometimes you can’t help but get involved. At least I can’t. My manager, David Skepner, told my writer this story, and it’s true:
“Loretta had just returned to Nashville from a grueling six-week tour and, as usual, on her first day back, everybody within a hundred-mile radius was there to tell her their problems. She was scheduled to do a benefit performance that night and she could hardly keep her eyes open. She knew a number of the local ‘squirrels’ were trying to see her and she started to leave the bus to talk to them. We quietly tried to explain that she needed thirty minutes of rest rather than listening to everyone’s problems. She looked at me with tired eyes that seemed to hold compassion for the whole world and said: ‘Listen, when I die, I want God to put me in charge of all the people that nobody loves.’
“That is what makes Loretta Lynn, Loretta Lynn.”
Well, that’s mighty nice people feel that way about me. I did say it and I meant it. And they can even put it on my tombstone when I die.
Sometimes it seems, though, the more I try to do good the more problems I have. I got into more trouble than you can imagine over that coal-mine explosion at Hyden, Kentucky. There are still people down there that accuse me of lying, stealing, and cheating, when the truth is I put myself into the hospital because I just wore myself down with trying to make money to send their kids to college, to let ’em be somebody and stay away from the mines. But it didn’t work out too good.
Everybody’s told stories about me and Hyden, but I’ve never really told my side of it.
Hyden is a little town in Leslie County, Kentucky, about seventy-five miles from where I was born, but I never heard of it until December 30, 1970. Around noontime there was a terrific explosion at this mine on Hurricane Creek. That name caught my attention right away, because we live on Hurricane Creek down in Tennessee—but it’s a completely different creek.
This mine was what they call a drift mine—just like my Daddy used to work in—a tunnel straight back into the mountain. But it was one of those dog-holes, a cheap, nonunion mine, whereas Daddy always worked for big companies.
There were thirty-nine men working on the shift that day. One of them was just heading toward the outside when the explosion