Hewie Hicks, My Brother--1909-1968

Hewie Hicks and Family--Photo by the Hicks Family

I am about a week late relatively speaking in writing and posting this blog post since the anniversary of the death of my brother Hewie Hicks is June 20.  In other terms, I suppose I am about eight years late since I could have written it anytime since I began this blog in 2011. And in some other terms, I should have written something about him fifty years ago not long after he died. Hewie Hicks was the eldest child of my father, Ballard Hicks, and his first wife, Ora Wicker Hicks.  Hewie was born in 1909 and was killed in a coal mine accident in 1968, the year I graduated from high school.  He was approaching retirement age after raising all of his family to adulthood with the exception of his youngest son, Jeff Hicks.  I was a student at Alice Lloyd College when Hewie was killed and still remember being called by my mother, Mellie Hicks, and told that someone would be coming to pick me up to bring me home for the funeral proceedings.  The funeral was conducted by Hall Brothers Funeral Home in Martin, Kentucky, which generally handled all the funerals in our extended family at the time. 

Hewie Hicks and Ballard Hicks, Our Father--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Although we were more than forty years apart in age and Hewie had children older than me, we had a positive relationship as I did with my other two brothers who were just a bit younger than Hewie.  He often came to our house to visit and he had a positive relationship with my mother who was actually five years younger than he. They both loved to garden and raise flowers and often exchanged cuttings, clippings, root stock, and plants with each other.  Hewie Hicks, his life, and death are, in many ways, a typical story of a coal miner's life in Eastern Kentucky.  When he was killed, he was working in a small, privately owned punch mine in Floyd County.  He was 59 years old and near the end of his working career without union membership. Therefore he was forced to work where any small operator was willing to hire him and with more than thirty years experience older men like Hewie Hicks could always find a dangerous job for the last years of their mining lives. He was killed by a kettle bottom which one online mining glossary from the Hudson Institute of Mineralogy defines as "(a) smooth, rounded piece of rock, cylindrical in shape, which may drop out of the roof of a mine without warning, sometimes causing serious injuries to miners." You will sometimes see large kettle bottoms used as entrance markers for driveways in the Appalachian states.  They look like upside down mushrooms of one to many tons. Hewie's obituary in the Floyd County Times of June 27, 1968 states that "No other workers were in the part of the mine where the tragedy occurred."  This kind of situation with single miners working in isolated portions of a mine was common with small punch mines along with bad top, bad bottom, water, and gas.  The large companies almost never attempted to mine their holdings with these kinds of problems.  But they were always willing to lease those sites to ambitious small operators and either sell or lease the operators used equipment to work those situations.  That in a nutshell describes the situation where Hewie Hicks died.   In many ways, Hewie Hicks is just one more statistic in the world of coal mining in Appalachia.  He worked for thirty or forty years in the coal industry, devoted his life to working and raising a family, and upon his untimely death was just one more forgotten fatality by everyone involved except his immediate family.  There have been thousands of other sad statistics just like this in the coal business in Appalachia.  

Hewie Hicks--Photo by the Hicks Family

The obituary which I wrote for Hewie on Find A Grave contains the following brief personal account of one common link we had.  Hewie had graduated from the Hindman Settlement School and he and I had one teacher in common, the famous Appalachian Poet and Social Activist Don West. The first time I ever met Don West in about 1972 in Beckley, WV, at the Southern Appalachian Circuit of Antioch College he immediately remembered Hewie even though it had been many years since he had taught him. Don spoke fondly of Hewie, his intelligence, work ethic, and high potential.  I also always think of a major project Hewie had made in his high school woodworking class which my parents owned at the time of their deaths and which has since been lost, sold, or destroyed.  It was a three piece oak bedroom suite with a dresser, night stand, and chest of drawers which weighed a ton, was solid as rock, and had excellent craftsmanship.  I would love to own it today and I am certain it has been lost for all eternity. 

Curtis Hicks, Ballard Hicks, Hewie Hicks--Photo by the Hicks Family