The coal baron who wouldn't sell out

I first met E.B. "Ted" Leisenring in 1997, when he was already past 70 and recently retired as chairman of the Westmoreland Coal Company. Ted represented the fifth generation of a dynasty that had mined coal not only in eastern and western Pennsylvania but also in the hills of southwestern Virginia and, finally, in the surface mines of Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. In the course of two centuries the Leisenrings had tangled personally with, and outlasted, such legendary predators as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, John L. Lewis and W.A. "Tony" Boyle.

When I met him, Ted had been trying for years to interest some business historian in delving into the 900 boxes of family and company papers— dating back to 1835— that he had donated to the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Delaware.

I quickly concluded that the coal industry was one of America's great untold stories and that Ted and his family would make an ideal centerpiece for such a book (In the Kingdom of Coal, published by Routledge in 2003). But Ted also struck me right off as someone I could work with. He possessed a curious mind and a pleasantly manageable ego, as well as a bachelor's degree in English from Yale and an interest in words and language that he had never put to practical use.

But as I came to know Ted in the ensuing years, I discerned something else beneath his stoic and self-deprecating corporate executive's exterior: the heart of a romantic.

Refusing to sell out

Ted had entered the coal business less for fortune or duty than for the sheer masculine adventure of it; and at a critical point when the future of his company was at stake, Ted had followed his heart rather than his head, rejecting a hefty offer to sell Westmoreland to Standard Oil of Indiana rather than betray the legacy of his ancestors.

Although Ted's company and his family's legacy lay seemingly on the brink of extinction when I first met him, Ted was eager to explore the history of coal and his family's role in it— not for self-aggrandizement or self-justification, but simply as a way, in his 70s, to extend the adventure.

That adventure began at the age of 15 when Ted entered a mine for the first time and was permanently smitten by the sight of the miners with their soot-covered faces, their hard hats and their cap lamps. When he graduated from Yale in 1950, Ted shocked his family by announcing his intention to work underground in the company's mines in southwest Virginia and even to join the United Mine Workers union, the bane of management.

"'Who's your daddy?'

Ted first worked as a hand-loader, shoveling coal by hand after it was drilled and exploded with a charge of black powder. At a second mine he worked on his knees, wearing rubber kneepads, eight hours a day in a space no more than four feet high, shoveling coal around his side and loading it onto conveyor belts.

One day during his 30-minute lunch break, young Ted found himself sitting next to a toothless old miner (old by miners' standards— he was in his 60s) named Pap Lee. As they opened their lunch buckets and ate their soot-covered sandwiches, Pap said to Ted, "Kid, isn't your daddy some kind of a big rabbit in this coal company? Isn't he the daddy rabbit? What's his title?"

When Ted told him, the miner shook his head. "Chairman of the board, and he sent you down here to do this? Your Daddy must sure hate the shit out of you."

Only a man with a romantic turn of mind would have volunteered for work like that. But you have to be a romantic to last in the coal business as long as Ted did.

Despised and unappreciated

This is a business that few people appreciate, that many people despise and that most people would rather not think about at all. But it's also a business that generates most of America's electricity. None of us could live without it.

To be a coal operator like Ted meant manning the front lines of a titanic human struggle to extract coal from the ground and bring it to a relentlessly capricious and ungrateful market, through a seemingly endless cycle of booms and busts, labor strikes, mine disasters, floods and wild swings in government policy.

Most coal barons, confronted with the thankless task of providing an ample supply of a commodity that most people take for granted, routinely sell out after a generation or so— at the top of the market, if they're lucky— and retire to some place like Fifth Avenue or Palm Beach, where they'll never have to think about coal again.

Ted alone stayed with it for nearly half a century, and he crossed the finish line this month, at the age of 85, with not only his company intact, but also his principles and his sense of humor as well. In the whole history of the coal industry, only one chief executive lasted longer than Ted. That was Ted's adversary and also his idol, the great labor leader John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers union.

Meeting the great John L.

Ted first met Lewis in 1954, when Westmoreland's newest and potentially most profitable Virginia mine, named Glennbrook, was constantly being disrupted by two thugs who ran the local union. When these guys weren't calling unauthorized "wildcat" strikes, they were beating up mine supervisors in the dressing room for performing tasks that should have been done by union men.

To Ted's elders in management, these union tactics were just another cost of doing business. But Ted was only 28 and in high-dudgeon mode. When he vented his frustrations to Ralph Knode, Westmoreland's president, Knode replied, to Ted's surprise, "Let's go to Washington and talk to John L. Lewis."

So about a week later Ted and Knode and another Westmoreland executive found themselves walking into the huge office of John L. Lewis. At this point Lewis was 74 and a mythical American figure, famous for his dramatic oratorical style and far more powerful than any individual coal operator. He'd been president of the UMW since before Ted was born.

Fatherly advice

The four men wound up spending an hour and a quarter together, and despite Ted's unabated righteous indignation over the perceived atrocities at Glennbrook, Lewis took a liking to him. When the meeting broke up and they were leaving the room, Lewis fell in with Ted and draped a fatherly arm around his shoulder.

"Now, young man," Lewis said, "I can see that you are emotionally disturbed by this situation. I can understand that, because you worked in the mine and you knew the foremen who were beaten. But I'm telling you, if you are fortunate to live to my age, I think that you will look back upon this episode as though it were a mosquito trying to bite the ass of an elephant."

At the end of the day, these two men from different generations, different backgrounds and different sides of the bargaining table respected and appreciated each other as coal men because they knew almost nobody else did. They shared one other common characteristic: the steadfast ability to endure, over many decades, whatever lumps life handed them.

A few years ago— by which time Ted was older than John L. Lewis had been at that first meeting— I asked Ted how he felt now about that episode at the Glennbrook mine in '54. "It was like a mosquito trying to bite the ass of an elephant," he replied.♦


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