Bringing local history alive

Play depicts the lives of women in the mining days, By Mark J. Yablonsky FRANKLIN — Call it history in HD. Sometimes lectures aren’t enough; sometimes, you need history presented in a way that better depicts it to everyone, and that is where Jeanne Austin and her husband Peter Nadolny come in. “We Live by the Whistle,” a one-woman program in which Austin portrays the wives and daughters of this area’s long-gone mining era, was postponed Sunday, due to last week’s major snowstorm. But disappointed though many were at the postponement, the Nadolny-Austin team is hopeful they’ll present the play soon. “It’s being rescheduled; we just don’t know when it will be,” said Nadolny, the writer of the play, Monday. “We’re hoping for March 21.” Nadolny, a retired quality assurance consultant for the medical products industry, wrote the play following nearly a year of extensive research. His wife is the sole actress, taking on the roles of various women: a miner’s wife of the 1920s and 1930s, a miner’s daughter of the 1940s, a miner’s wife from the 1960s. The production involves various music clips contemporary to each era, as well as a recording of an actual mining whistle, courtesy of local historian John Sowden IV. The whistle was unmistakably effective in ending the shifts of some miners while announcing the call to start the shifts of others. Extensive research Nadolny wrote the play with support of a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. His research was conducted in three parts. He began by studying histories at the stacks in Rutgers, where among the many items he read was Carrie Papa’s classic “A Mile Deep and Black as Pitch,” a book that tells much of the story behind the Franklin-Ogdensburg mining era. That era began in the latter nineteenth century and concluded in March 1986, when the Ogdensburg mines closed. The legendary Franklin mines were closed on Sept. 30, 1954. After that, Nadolny said, “I went to the Sterling Hill magazine and saw all of their items about the picnics and the parties from that era.” Next, he went to primary sources. “I got a list of people from that era who are still alive and I talked to them. So that kind of fills it out, I guess.” Nadolny also credited Wasco Hadowanetz, an Ogdensburg historian, with assistance in getting names and arranging for interviews. How did he tell the stories of the typical miners’ wives? “Every woman’s life was different,” said Austin, an Augusta resident who is a professional actress. She has performed locally, regionally and nationally, ranging from the Tri-State Actor’s Theater in Sussex to the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival. In the “We Live By the Whistle,” she said, the play “cover(s) the miner’s wife and the mining superintendent’s wife, which was quite different. There’s no generalization,” Austin added. “As the miner says to his wife, ‘the two most important things are your partner and the lamp.’ Their lives were dictated by the sound of the mine whistle.”