Paul E. Patton - Coal Industry Career

Coal Industry Career

After graduation, Patton worked as a day laborer for his father-in-law. In 1961, he moved to Virgie and founded a coal company with his brother-in-law. In 1972, he purchased Chapperal Coal Company and became extremely wealthy during the coal boom that resulted from the 1973 oil crisis. He became a leader in the coal industry, serving on the board of directors of the Kentucky Coal Association, chairing the Board of the National Independent Coal Operators Association, and becoming a member of the Kentucky Deep Mine Safety Commission. He denounced the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 as "right in its diagnosis of the problem, but wrong in prescription for the cure". By 1976, he had become president of the National Independent Coal Operators Association. He railed against a federal regulation that would prohibit strip mining on slopes of greater than 20 degrees, which would have effectively ended that method of mining in the Eastern Mountain Coal Fields, and lamented the economic disadvantage imposed on Kentucky coal miners by the state's coal severance tax.

Patton was regarded as more moderate than most coal operators in his relationship to labor unions. Most of his mine workers were not unionized, and those who were generally belonged to the Southern Labor Union rather than the more confrontational United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Members of the UMWA local at Shelby Gap maintained that Patton was arrested for clipping a striking miner on a picket line with his pickup truck in the late 1970s. Local law enforcement officials claim no recollection of the incident, and there is no record of an arrest warrant against Patton or an actual arrest.

On October 18, 1976, Patton filed for divorce from Carol Cooley, saying only that their marriage was irretrievably broken. The divorce was final on February 25, 1977. Later that year, Patton married Judi Jane Conway of Pikeville, a secretary at his Kentucky Elkhorn mine. In 1973, Conway had divorced her first husband, Bill Harvey Johnson, with whom she had two children.