Originally published Saturday, December 14, 1996

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

BLACK DIAMOND -- Coal might have been Black Diamond's mother lode back in the old days, but beer, wine and bootleg booze were its mother's milk.

Emil Rossi knows, because he worked at just about every job and at ground level down to almost 6,000 feet in the old No. 11 mine before it closed.

And because his mother was a bootlegger.

Pushing 90 years and with no reason to push the truth, Emil's clear eyes twinkle as he says, "There's no reason to lie . . . everyone from around here will know the truth." His mother, Ermalina Agari, made bootleg booze that sold for $2 a pint. She made beer and wine, too, Emil said.

"But so did Big John, and Santi, and the Fontanas and Big Mary and many, many others not so big as them. And (a former law enforcement official) then, he owned a couple (stills) and had some guys running them," Emil adds with a big outstretched hand for emphasis.

"The Italians, we made it from what was left over after making wine. Some of the others used plums. That's why you still see all those plum trees growing wild around Crane Corner and other places around here. They'd take the grapes or plums, after making wine, and add sugar and let it ferment again, then put it in a still fired by a coal oil lamp."

Like he said, lots of folks did it. A nicely crafted bootlegger's still is on display at the Black Diamond Museum in town. It was donated by a local family.

Sitting across the kitchen table from Emil, 85-year-old Carl Steiert, who grew up in the same part of town, nods his head in agreement. "Bootlegging was the number two industry in this town," he says. "Some weekend days, there were traffic jams on the Maple Valley Highway from all the Seattle people coming out to buy bootleg."

Emil's wife, Harriet, nods her head and smiles in affirmation as she goes about rolling pie dough on the kitchen counter. "Oh, you've got them started now!" she warns. "You're going to hear it all. But he's right . . . might just as well tell it like it was."

All the old-timers here recall how it was when their families knew that state or federal agents were about to make alcohol raids. Except for places like Black Diamond. The lawman in question "would show up, down at the local pool hall, and play a game or two of pool. That would be a sign for everyone to high-tail it out into the woods and move their stills and their stashes," Carl says.

"That's when everyone watched everyone else, and some guys would try to steal the booze when they saw it being moved and hidden again," Emil says. "And (the lawman) owned one of the biggest stills, over by Ravensdale, a 1,000-gallon still run by some other guys.

"He got money . . . the other, smaller guys paid him for -- what do you call it? -- protection! And he always advised them that they should leave a little something for the agents to find, and someone would have to pay a fine."

The risk of getting nailed in a bootlegging raid was no big thing back in those days when men risked their lives in the mines for $2.75 a 10-hour day, six days a week. You didn't raise a family on that, so in addition to bootlegging, Emil's mother also expected her children to help raise vegetables and pigs.

His first project, after arriving from Italy in 1919 as a 12-year-old, was cleaning out an outhouse behind their rented home in an area then called Lower Dago Town. Italian immigrants were on a social scale about even with imported black strike-breakers, Emil explains. So, Lower Dago Town was about as low as you could get in Black Diamond, even if it wasn't far removed from Upper Dago Town up the hill.

And nothing brought it home as poignantly as that outhouse job: "Not moving it -- digging it out!" he says. "I wheelbarrowed the stuff down to a low area and in the spring, we cleaned it up and planted potatoes. They were good potatoes!"

He also slopped the pigs. "That's how I got the name 'Ash Can,'" Emil says. "I got sent over to the big hotel, or boarding house, where everyone sat around a table with a hole in the middle where they scraped their garbage into an ash can. I had to haul that ash can back to our pigs."

Because he couldn't speak English and the schools made no special accommodations for foreign-speaking students, Emil dropped out after a couple of years, just as the mine was struck by the United Mine Workers union. He found a $2.98-a-day job as a "dogger," securing raw logs on a moving track at the Covington Creek Lumber mill.

And about the time the strike petered out in '23, Emil parlayed his lumber mill experience into a job setting timbers in the coal mine. By the time Emil and the coal mines got out of the business in 1945, he had done it all, seen it all. And the only mine injury he'd suffered was some broken ribs, from a timber collapse. It could have been worse.

"You could hear the coal crumbling as you worked," Emil says. Which was all right, as long as you didn't hear a "bump." In 1922, there was a mine "bump" that could be heard and felt in the pool hall in town, Emil says. "All they said was that the roof and the walls came in on them (mine workers), and they just sealed the Number 9 level -- North, with the men still in there." There were other "bumps" and other fatalities. And there were mine fires and underground floods.

Emil remembers another day, while working the 12-North shaft, "there was a helluva noise and a guy came running, saying a man was pinned by fallen rock. They had to cut off his leg right there in the mine, and we put him in a coal car. He sang all the way up to the surface, but the minute we got him up in the light, he died."

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.