Like young workers in the South, Stanny Mattcvitcz entered the Pennsylvania coal mines at a young age. There, he loaded coal cars, heaping up the hard anthracite that a growing U.S. economy prized. Stanny's work was hard. “In de morning awful easy,” he recalled, “but in de night awful hard.” By age twelve, Stanny had attended the local Polish school a total of three years. He found the drudgery of the classroom little better than the toil of the coal face. “Me no like school,” he confided, “radder play baseball and chase de cows.” Though he wished for an airy, playful childhood, Stanny's overbearing father dashed his hopes. Although Pennsylvania law prohibited boys of his age from working in the mines, his father dragged him there nonetheless. “Me been going on twelve and me go to the mines to help mine fadder,” he revealed. “He take me in every day when de work been goin' on.” Resisting the elder Mattcvitcz's unreasonable demands was not a possibility. “Wen de fadder say, ‘Get up and put on yer mine clothes,’ me got to get up or he lick me,” the boy disclosed. Stanny had paid dearly for his father's lawbreaking, ending up with a crushed leg that doctors told him would “take a long time to get good.”