2 tons of coal.. and what do you get?

Sometimes the smallest pieces of history have a way of finding their way back to the people who were part of them.

Earlier this weekend, I posted what seemed like a fairly ordinary piece of Coal Region history .. an old Blaschak Coal Company weighmaster’s certificate from February 1988.

It documented a delivery of two tons of coal to my parents’ home..

I originally posted it because I thought people might get a kick out of seeing something like this from nearly four decades ago. The slip shows the amount of coal, the weight of the truck and, of course, what two tons of coal cost back then. By today’s standards, the price certainly looks cheap, although when you consider inflation and what people were earning in 1988, I’m sure it didn’t necessarily feel quite as cheap to the person paying the bill.

But I certainly didn’t expect to hear from the grandson of the man who delivered it.

Not long after posting the photograph, I received a message from Robert Fetterman.
“Hi, I really like the coal ticket you posted from 1988. That was my grandfather Bob Fetterman that delivered it.”
And suddenly this old piece of paper became something much more interesting.

Think about that for a moment…

On a cold February day in 1988, Bob Fetterman pulled up to my parents’ home and delivered the coal they needed to heat their house. A receipt was handed over, somebody saved it, and eventually it ended up among the old papers I’ve accumulated and preserved over the years.

Thirty-eight years later, I put a photograph of that receipt on the Internet.
And Bob Fetterman’s grandson saw it.

Robert sent me a photograph of himself and his father standing with his grandfather’s last coal truck and he was kind enough to give permission for me to post it.

He explained that his grandfather delivered coal from Blaschak’s in Mahanoy City right up until the day he died … and, remarkably, he was actually out delivering coal when he passed away.

The Fetterman family’s connection to the coal business didn’t end there.

Robert told me there are now three generations of the family involved, living in the Wilburton area near Aristes. The family continues hauling coal throughout the region today, including Mahanoy City, Ashland, Frackville, Mount Carmel, Shenandoah and Ringtown.

Coal is obviously a huge part of the history of this region, but when we talk about “coal history,” our minds usually go toward the mines, breakers, collieries and enormous events that shaped Northeastern Pennsylvania.
But history isn’t always something enormous or filled with soot..

Sometimes history is a truck pulling into a driveway or a man making his deliveries on a freezing February day.

And sometimes it’s nothing more than an old piece of paper that somebody decided not to throw away.
This is why I keep sharing this stuff.

You can post hundreds or thousands of things over the years, and you never quite know who is going to see them.
An old photograph might contain someone’s grandfather.

A newspaper clipping might answer a question somebody has had about their family for years.
A forgotten business advertisement might bring back a memory.

And speaking of newspapers, in order to really set the scene of February 4, 1988, we went back to check the weather to see what it was really like that day during the delivery.. It appeared that after a snow event, cold was coming… coal was necessary!

The piece of paper itself isn’t necessarily valuable. Most people probably would have thrown it away decades ago. But once you attach the people to it, suddenly it tells a story.

For my parents, it was simply the record of two tons of coal that helped keep their house warm during the winter of 1988.
For Robert Fetterman, it was evidence of another day’s work by his grandfather.

And for me, almost four decades later, it became a reminder of just how connected all of our stories around here really are.
Robert, thank you for reaching out, for sharing the photograph of your family, and for allowing me to share the story.
And I’ll definitely be looking through the old papers a little more carefully now.
If I find any more of these old coal slips, I’ll be sure to post them.

You never know who might be on the other end of a little piece of history.