SITKO, LEO (Oct. 2, 1904 -- July 1, 1974)Miner, Socialist, and veteran. Leo Sitko, 66 inches tall and ordinary looking, was the Socialist candidate for the U.S. House of Representatuves in Pennsylvania's 13th District He was an unemployed mine worker who lived in a small house with his parents and seven siblings and an outhouse in Exchange (Atlas post office), an unincorporated place across the creek from Mount Carmel, where I lived when I was 18 years and couldn't vote. His stump was generally the back end of a truck on Fourth Street, just off Oak Street, in Mount Carmel, when shoppers were at their peak. He attracted an audience from the shoppers in the business section. Without a microphone, lights, and entertainment, he and other speakers were as dull as the unswept street. In the general election, November 6, 1934, Sitko garnered 1,368 votes compared to the Democratic candidate, James H. Gildea, who won with 54,309 votes.
For the first time I became acquainted with Sitko after my father, who was drunk, interrupted one of the political rallies. My father was taken to sober up in the borough jail, four blocks away, and I found him in the cellar of the Borough Hall the following day and obtained his release. He faced no charges.
Despite this incident, I developed a friendship with Leo Sitko, as I did with other Polish miners, whether they were single or married, active, blacklisted, or unemployed miners. His father, Anthony Sitko, who came from Poland in 1880, probably to avoid military service under the Russian czar, found work at Richards Colliery on the road between Exchange and Natalie. Over the years, because one could hear many foreign languages in the coal mine and Richards patch, the colliery was a melting pot beyond comprehension. Unfortunately, no author has found out how much coal was taken out of the mine, how many immigrants were employed, lives lost, and the impact on the life of the coal belt.
After graduation from high school, Leo Sitko followed in the footsteps of his father and older brothers and went to work at Richards Colliery. The family provided fresh blood not only to the Richards Colliery but also to the nearby village of Exchange. Before coal was discovered in them thar hills, it was stategically located on a turnpike between Reading and Sunbury and was one of the stations where drivers of stage coaches changed their horses, hence Exchange. When Anthony Sitko was too old to work all day in the bowels of the earth, he began to peddle dry goods door to door and passed away in the 1920s.
The local of the United Mine Workers of American at Richards Colliery was the apple of Leo Sitko's eye. He climbed up the ranks until he was elected president of the miners' local union. Then, in 1921, when A. J. Muste, an ex-Dutch minister, was head of Brookwood Labor College, a residential college in Katonah, New York, Leo Sitko was one of the union officers he recruited in the labor movement. It received financial support from the American Federation of Labor and its affiliates. Sitko began reading radical literature and became a Socialist. Another student, Bill Falkowski, who came from Shenandoah, joined a party more revolutionary in character.
Sitko was blacklisted and couldn't find a job in the coal industry when he returned to his old diggings. Richards Colliery, however, was on its last legs. When Susquehabnna Coal Company closed it, Richards patch and surrounding mine wastes, known as culm banks, disappeared so fast that when I went looking for them Richards Colliery was gone. Coal bootleggers followed and opened holes into the top layers of coal in order to make a living. Leo Sitko and his brothers were coal bootleggers and built a makeshift breaker on the edge of Exchange. One imagines that he showed his independent coal operation to Muste and graduates of Brookwood Labor College when they held a reunion in his backyard. We are left to imagine that the outhouse in the rear of the Sitko homestead was a funny merry-go-round. No wonder the house without indoor plumbing was valued at $1200 in 1930.
Whatever Sitko read in his classes at Brookwood Labor College about overthrowing the government was swept out of the way when Hitler and the Emperor of Japan started the Second World War. On April 28, 1942, Leo Sitko joined the U. S. Air Force and served his country like a proud American. Little is known of his life after he returned to the coal country after the war. He died at Danville, literally across the Susquehanna River from the ruins of Rickarde Colliery, and was buried in M. O. C. (Mother of Consolation), a Polish cemetery, on the crest of Locust Mountain overlooking Mount Carmel. Exchange, and other mining towns. He was a pure Pole and, despite the Socialist interlude, he is remembered for the hard times in Mount Carmel.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2011) --- [email protected]