Overlooked No More: Elizabeth Hayes, Coal Town Doctor Who Fought for Miners

The miners, members of the United Mine Employees, despatched a telegram to President Harry S. Truman asking for assist, and a federal choose, Man Ok. Bard, was assigned to research Shawmut’s funds. At a listening to, Hayes and the miners testified in regards to the horrid sanitation situations, Biederman wrote, with Hayes’s testimony clearly transferring the choose. She spoke of delivering a child after she had fallen right into a ditch and sewage had splattered her garments. Public well being professionals had urged ladies to have their infants in hospitals, “utilizing every thing that science has taught us about child care,” Hayes stated, but, she added, “now we have to combine our formulation with sewage and diluted urine.”

Decide Bard appointed two new executives to run Shawmut, ousting Dickson and his prime aide. The brand new executives rehired Hayes and agreed to repair the sewage issues and pave the roads. Declaring victory, the miners ended their five-month strike.

Hayes grew to become so celebrated that Woody Guthrie wrote a tune, “The Dying Physician,” about her and her father. The lyrics go, partially, “My daddy instructed me to battle to treatment illness / However I can’t treatment illness with sewage throughout.”

Hayes determined to depart her job in 1947, and the miners and their households threw an enormous farewell picnic. She married Charles Williamson and labored as a civilian physician on the Cherry Level Marine Air Base in North Carolina. Whereas her husband was serving in Korea, she moved to Brockway, Pa., and helped run a medical apply there. After her marriage to Williamson resulted in divorce, she married LeRoy Voris, an agricultural researcher, in 1957. They lived in Washington and in the end retired to Pine Knoll Shores, N.C.

Hayes died of a stroke on June 26, 1984, in New Bern, N.C. She was 72.

Throughout the 1945 strike, when “Dr. Betty” was a nationwide sensation, The Philadelphia Document wrote, “The prescription of Dr. Hayes — ‘Get good and mad — and begin preventing’ — reminds us that many, many extra Individuals have to comply with her instance.”