As a young girl, Linda O’Nelio Knoll knew something was missing in her education.
Despite being regaled by the heroics of her ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Southeast Kansas during the 1920s, nary a word could she find about either them or the industry in her eighth-grade history books.
“Perhaps because Southeast Kansas was so vastly different from the rest of the state, its stories may not have been so carefully preserved,” Knoll surmised Tuesday evening before an enthralled audience at the Iola Public Library where she shared her story, “Army of Amazons: Women’s fight for labor rights in Kansas cornfields,” as a Humanities Kansas speaker.
For Knoll, the research is as much personal as professional.
A descendant of Slovene and Italian immigrants, Knoll soon began to realize the value of their stories.
“A good deal of my early education came from the stories my grandmothers would tell me about their journeys from the Old World to the New in the early 1900s and their impressions of the intense and dynamic period of the time, including the mining camps and their horrendous working conditions.
“Both my grandmothers lived well into their 90s, so they had a lot of history to share and as a young girl I looked forward to their stories,” she said.
As a teenager, Knoll found it disconcerting that Kansas history books made no mention of the region’s ethnic roots, the “Little Balkans,” or its contentious times.
“I started looking for some of this history that I was hearing. There was nothing.”
It was only when Knoll came across a book of poems, “Goats House,” written by Gene DeGruson, the son of an SEK coal miner, that her grandmothers’ stories were not only validated, but opened a new world for Knoll.
Knoll recalled reading DeGruson’s poem “Alien Women,” to her elderly grandmother. The poem depicts a 17-year-old woman protesting the working conditions of the coal mines of that era.
“She does not remember they were called an Army of Amazons,” the poem reads. Only that she was hungry.
At the poem’s conclusion, Knoll recalls her Italian grandmother saying matter-of-factly, “Well, Linda, I was in that march.”
Knoll counts that singular interaction “as my first indication of all the rich treasures buried right here in our backyard.”
And ever since, it’s been her quest to dig.
