"The Price of Coal" (23 March, Swansea)

From:  http://www.dis-ind-soc.org.uk/en/events.htm?id=1
Roadshow: The Price of Coal

Sat 23rd March 2013

National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

Disability history roadshow at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 23^rd March 2013 (10am–4pm).

Click here for the day's programme (PDF)

Click here for the flyer (PDF)

Did you or a member of your family work in the coal industry in south Wales? Did you face difficult working conditions or the constant threat of accident? Did you experience injury, illness or disease as a result of this work? If so, come along to the Disability History Roadshow at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea on Saturday 23 March 2013 between 10am and 4pm. The Roadshow will focus on the human costs of this most dangerous of industries and explore the consequences for the people of the mining communities of south Wales. It will include:

• talks by historians on the industry and working conditions;
• historic documentary films on disease and disability;
• photos, documents and archives;
• readings of poetry and historical sources;
• medical equipment;
• archivists on hand to discuss any historical documents relating to the coal industry that you might wish to bring along.

Come and find out more about how our fathers and grandfathers, working in the bowels of the earth, faced danger, disease and death in the course of their daily lives and paid the heavy price of coal.

Confirmed speakers and guests include: Rhodri Morgan, Hywel Francis MP, Steven Thompson (Aberystwyth University), Ben Curtis (Aberystwyth University), Anne Borsay (Swansea University), David Turner (Swansea University).

Louis "Big Louie" Moilanen (c1885-1913)

Louis Moilanen, portrait
image description:  photograph of a very
tall man in formal wear, holding a top hat,
posed next to a chair

Louis Moilanen
Let me see you smile. Do not spurn me. Looking for some one to love. Let’s get acquainted. Introduce me to yourself.

---The text on the business card of Louis Moilanen, while he was with the circus


Louis Moilanen was born in Finland, and came to America when he was four years old, with his parents.   They were a farming family in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The child soon became as tall as an average man, and then taller still.  By his teen years, special clothing and shoes had to be made for the boy.  He worked at the copper mines nearby, hauling timbers, until his size made that unmanageable--mines were built for smaller bodies.  As an adult who was at or above eight feet in height (as usual, reports vary), he joined the Ringling Brothers circus for three seasons.  Upon his father's death, Louis immediately returned to the family farm to help his mother.

Louis Moilanen worked as a bartender, and was elected justice of the peace for Hancock MI, which is some evidence of his community's respect for the young man.  He was just 27 when he died from tubercular meningitis, in 1913.  Of course, there had to be a specially-built coffin for Moilanen, and it took eight pallbearers to carry him to his rest. 

The 100th anniversary of Moilanen's death is coming up next year, and there are plans to put an 8'3" marker at his grave, to commemorate the centennial.