Nashville, to the Decca offices to find out if she has any new songs out, so he can-keep his requests up to date.
Steve has been down to see the Opry three times to date; some friends got some money together and sent him down for the first time in 1968. "Oh boy, " he says, his face lighting up, "they have themselves a time down there, they sure do!" Last summer, on his third visit, he was going to get to see Jeanie Pruett for the first time, but his bus got caught in traffic and he arrived just a little too late to see her perform. "I sure hated to do that, " he says now.
fsco and Jackie are on now, doing a fine job on "Mother Left Me Her Bible to Guide Me to Heaven, " and the old radioman is rooting through a large pile of his "sacred" records --it being time for the final quarter hour of the Country Jamboree, the Country Hymn Program. The routine varies only once a year, for the Easter show on Good Friday when the "sacred" portion of the show runs a full half hour; "I look forward to that one all year. "
He ran into an embarrassing situation recently when he put a new record called "Help Me Make It
Through the Night" on during the final segment, figuring that it was surely a hymn.   "Oh boy, I had to take that one off right in the middle, " he chuckles. "That wasn't no hymn. "
Tonight he decides on Dolly Parten's "Daddy Was an Oldtime Preacherman, " Skeeter Davis's "Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock and Roll" (which he dedicates to me) and a fine rendition of the old Spiritual "Amazing Grace" by "Miss Judy Collins, a little lady fast comin'up in the country music field. "
"Well, that's all we have time for tonight, folks.   If the good Lord's willin', we'll be back with you again tomorrow night 'long about six o'clock, Eastern Standard Time. This is Cowboy Steve Taylor saying kneel at your bedside and say just one little prayer before saying good night.   Join us again tomorrow afternoon at the same time.   Until then, this is Cowboy Steve Taylor saying thank you and good night and stay happy, everyone."
With that the old radioman quickly begins to put away his records and turn off his equipment; he wants to catch a ride back across town because the city buses don't run at night any-
more and cab fare is a dear expense.
As I wait for him to finish up I sift through a few loose thoughts and decide:
that the title of "Cowboy" is not something assumed, but something conferred, like the "Country" in Country Charlie Pride;
and that the Cowboy Steve Taylor Show has something to impart--something very basic--to my own show and to a lot of other folks' shows, especially when those shows start ballooning around full of self-importance, certain in the knowledge that they are the most significant and most tormented of shows.
Tomorrow I'll come back down and park on Jefferson Street, near Fourth, set the tuner a little to the 900-side of 1000 and try to weed out the whistles and buzzes and whines that cling to the WSEV signal like so many strands of a parasitic vine.   If the day is right and the buses haven't gotten held up in traffic, maybe I'll be able to hear the voice of Cowboy Steve Taylor, sounding like it's being filtered through a bullhorn and several pillows, like it's coming from a very faraway place, saying, ". . .and remember, tell 'em Cowboy Steve Taylor told you to come in. "
Massacre
continued from page nine
the Congressmen most re sponsible for the bill assumed that their instructions would be followed.
It was an unsafe assumption, as they were soon to dis cover.
The director of the Bureau of Mines, John O'Leary, a Johnson appointee who had been in office only four weeks when the Farmington disaster happened, seemed to be the first man to hold the job who understood that the Bureau was supposed to be a regulatory agency and not just the Washington office of the coal industry. There was hope that he could make the new law work -- and O'Leary, for his part, seemed to believe that the administration would support him; in January 1970 he told reporters that "there is every indication that the administration will forcefully enforce this law.   There is no effort of any kind to hold back. " So saying, he settled down to draft the complex new safety regulations required by the law -- regulations due to go into effect at the end of March.
But like many other people, O'Leary may not have fully appreciated the extent to which the Interior Department had become the captive of men who saw its function in life largely as a support for major industries -- principally the oil industry.
Like all Democratic appointees, O'Leary had submitted a pro forma resignation on January 20, 1969, as the government changed hands.   The resignation had never been acknowledged.   Throughout 1969, there had been rumors that he would be fired as soon as the new bill became law.   But in January and February of 1970 there was no sound of an axe falling from the White House. On February 28 O'Leary was working in his office, drafting safety regulations scheduled to go into effect the following month, when a messenger arrived from the White House with a letter accepting his resignation.   He was given 24 hours to clear out.
Those who remained at the Bureau began to demonstrate the kind of foot-shuffling approach to mine safety that Congress had so recently tried to legislate out of existence.   March was the month when the new inspection schedule was supposed to go into effect (four full inspections of every U.S. mine per year), and when the Bureau
was supposed to publish a penalty schedule coordinated with the different types of violations that inspectors might impose.   There were countless indications that the Bureau would miss its legal deadlines; it had already done so in the areas of dust-control and other regulations, and there was maximum confusion among the Bureau's inspectors.   O'Leary had been bringing them together in cram courses on the new law when he was fired; the cram courses were cancelled, and the inspectors waited for instructions that didn't come.
They may have been prepared to inspect every-j^mine four times a year, but the Bureau was not going to authorize them to do so.   Late in March, Wheeler devised a system of "Partial But Representative" inspections (PBR), under which, as he described it, "we would inspect enough, but only enough, of a mine to be representative of the entire mine insofar as health and safety are concerned. " What that meant was anyone's guess; within two weeks after the PBR system went into effect (directly contradicting the Congressional mandate), one man was killed and three others injured in an explosion at a Pennsylvania mine that had been PBR'd two days previously.    Wheeler and other Bureau officials claimed that the agency had not nearly enough inspectors to meet the requirements of Congress.
I^ate in March, angered at the inability of Interior and the Bureau to meet the time schedules passed by Congress, Reps. Hechler, Dent, and O'Hara (Democrat, of Michigan) joined a tough UMW reformer named John Mendez and went to court to try to force compliance with the law.   The suit became bogged down in details (nine months later, when a federal judge got around to ruling on it, he concluded that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue, and denied the suit) and the health-and-safety situation continued to deteriorate.   While the Bureau went into its second month without a director, Interior undersecretary Russell put into effect an arbitrary penalty schedule which flatly ignored the law (which required that penalties be worked out case-by-case, using several criteria) and was declared effective as soon as it was
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