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Fifty years later, the murder of the Yablonskis still resonates

7 min read
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Associated Press

Joseph Yablonski, candidate for president of the United Mine Workers of America, at a news conference, May 29, 1969, in Washington, D.C.

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Observer-Reporter

A portion of coverage of the Yablonski slayings from the Observer-Reporter’s Jan. 6, 1970, edition

CLARKSVILLE – The clock was rapidly ticking down on what had been a tumultuous, violent decade.

Joseph “Jock” Yablonski was in his bed at the fieldstone farmhouse he lived in on the edge of Clarksville in the small hours of Dec. 31, 1969. Before retiring for the night, the fiery coal miner and union reform advocate had ventured to Vestaburg to attend a visitation at a funeral home for the mother of a friend. As he was going about routine tasks in the quiet days between Christmas and New Year’s, Yablonski didn’t know that his home was under surveillance by three small-time, beer-chugging hoodlums who had been hired to kill him.

Paul Gilly, Claude Vealey and Aubran Martin crept into Yablonski’s home sometime about 1 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, and made their way upstairs. The only sound in the house was Yablonski’s heavy snoring.

First they found Yablonski’s 25-year-old daughter, Charlotte. They shot her twice in the head. Then, they went to the bedroom where Yablonski and his wife, Margaret, slept. Jolted awake, Yablonski reached for an unloaded shotgun he kept by his bed, as his wife screamed, but it was too late. The intruders fired on the couple. Additional shots were fired at Yablonski after he crumbled to the floor to make sure he was dead.

The bodies went undiscovered for six days. By the time Yablonski’s son, Kenneth, found them on Jan. 5, 1970, untouched copies of The Pittsburgh Press and the Brownsville Telegraph were strewn on the back porch steps and mail had accumulated in the mailbox.

The killing of Yablonski has been described as the last political assassination of the 1960s over the last 50 years. Indeed, at the funeral for the Yablonskis at Immaculate Conception Church in Washington on Jan. 9, 1970, Monsignor Charles Owen Rice, who was known for his forceful advocacy of labor issues, compared Yablonski to fallen martyrs of the decade like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the months leading up to his death, Yablonski had spearheaded a campaign to reform the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and rid it of corruption, running a vigorous campaign to unseat incumbent president Tony Boyle. Yablonski was defeated by Boyle on Dec. 9, 1969, by a 2-to-1 margin in balloting that some believed was tainted by fraud.

Roman Pucinski, a Chicago-area congressman, remarked after the slayings that Yablonski “had lots of enemies. He was a hard-hitting guy.”

At first, union officials said they doubted that Yablonski’s murder had anything to do with the election. But Gilly, Vealey and Martin, apparently not being the most savvy of hitmen, left an abundance of fingerprints in the house and were quickly captured. They all confessed to the killings, and revealed that they had been hired by Albert Pass, a member of the United Mine Workers’ executive council, to do the job. Pass in turn had been commanded by Boyle to find willing assassins and was given $20,000 from embezzled union funds for the task. Boyle was arrested on first-degree murder charges in 1973, and convicted the following year. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1977, Boyle was tried again, but the result was the same. He died of a stroke while serving his sentence in 1985.

The murder of Yablonski, his wife and daughter still stands a half-century later as one of the most notorious crimes committed in Washington County. It has been the subject of multiple books, and was dramatized in a 1986 HBO film. Revulsion at the brutality of the slayings also helped bring to fruition many of the reforms Yablonski had been championing.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1910, Yablonski was a veteran of the mines who moved up through the ranks to become president of UMW District 5 in Southern Pennsylvania. His father died in a mining accident – a piece of slate fell on him, and he developed a massive infection and died of sepsis. According to Joseph “Chip” Yablonski, Yabolonski’s last surviving child, Yablonski’s mother fought the mining company “to the wall” to receive workmen’s compensation benefits.

“That motivated my dad,” the younger Yablonski explained on the phone from his home in Bethesda, Md., last week.

By the mid-1960s, Yablonski was disgusted by the union’s inaction on black lung disease as it became clear that it was impairing the health of miners the union was supposed to be standing up for. Moreover, Boyle was perceived as being too close to mining companies and living high off the hog, sporting expensive suits and driving pricey Cadillacs. Boyle was, by almost any measure, a bully and an autocrat, ruling over the UMWA with an iron fist and brooking no dissent. He removed Yablonski from the presidency of District 5 in 1965.

“The corruption of Tony Boyle was significant,” according to Jason Kozlowski, an associate professor with the Institute for Labor Studies and Research at West Virginia University. “He had closer ties to the mining companies than the people he was representing.”

Some UMWA members were reluctant to believe the union leadership could have had anything to do with the Yablonski murders. John Yannosik, a Clarksville-area miner who had bumperstickers promoting Boyle’s candidacy on his car, told the Observer-Reporter after the bodies were discovered, “I can’t see the union resorting to anything like this, but I might be wrong as hell. Sure, it’s a terrible thing, but what did anybody have to gain, especially in the union, for something like this? I thought we were going into the peaceful seventies and putting aside the radical sixties.”

Nonetheless, on Jan. 6, 1970, 20,000 miners walked off the job in West Virginia as a tribute to Yablonski and a denunciation of Boyle. Within weeks, the caucus Miners for Democracy was formed, with the Yablonski brothers among the main organizers. In 1972, the results of the 1969 UMWA election were overturned, and Arnold Miller, a miner from West Virginia who was afflicted with black lung disease, became president.

Chip Yablonski has little doubt that if his father had lived, he would have eventually ascended to the UMWA presidency.

“I don’t think there’s any question about that,” he said.

The push to democratize the United Mine Workers of America came fast on the heels of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the rise of the New Left and “expanding the notion of rights within society and challenging authority,” Kozlowski said. The murder of the Yablonskis may have put corruption in organized labor in the spotlight, but, more significantly in Kozlowski’s estimation, were the reforms that followed. Other unions, such as the United Steelworkers, made similar efforts to democratize, using the United Mine Workers as an example.

Despite the passage of a half-century and the decline of the coal industry – membership in the UMWA isn’t even half of what it was in Yablonski’s time – interest in his life and his tragic end remains. A new book on his life and death is due to be published in the spring, according to the younger Yablonski, and visitors still stop at the house in Clarksville where he lived and died.

Chip Yablonski believes his father would be dismayed by the state organized labor is in today.

“He would be disappointed where it stands,” he said. “But I think he also would have recognized that much of the industry has fallen on hard times.”

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