Elizabeth Hayes

Elizabeth Hayes (7 May 1912 – 26 June 1984), known as Dr. Betty Hayes, was an American physician who drew widespread attention in 1945 for protesting the unsanitary conditions in Force, Pennsylvania, a company-owned coal town where sewage was contaminating the drinking water.

Fearing a typhoid outbreak, Hayes, the company doctor, asked her employer, Shawmut Mining Co., to clean up the town and provide another source of water.

When Shawmut refused, Hayes quit her job, and 350 miners struck for nearly five months in support of her.

Hayes became an overnight media sensation.

Dubbing her "Dr. Betty", reporters and editorial writers described her as a "miners' Joan of Arc."

Reluctantly famous, she compared her sudden celebrity to that of Canada's Dionne quintuplets.

Virtually all news coverage was sympathetic to the doctor and the strikers, who lived in Force and two other north-central Pennsylvania communities, Byrnedale and Hollywood.

Their demands for safe water and clean streets struck a chord with Americans hoping for a bright postwar future.

In the end, investigative reporting into the coal company's finances led to the replacement of its top executives with court-appointed managers.

The strike ended as the new management agreed to all of the miners' conditions and rehired Hayes, who was hailed as a "fighter" who "wouldn't wait for an epidemic."

The youngest of eight siblings, Hayes was born in Conifer, Pennsylvania, to Anna Hivick Hayes, a housewife, and Dr. Leo Z. Hayes, who preceded his daughter as the physician employed by Shawmut Mining Co. The company transferred Leo to Force when Betty was a young child, and she attended school in neighboring Weedville, where most of her classmates came from mining families and many would become miners themselves.

Like her classmates, Betty lived in company-owned housing, although the "big doc's house" in Force, where Leo worked and raised his family, had running water, piped in from a spring.

Most miners' homes lacked indoor plumbing.

Families used outdoor privies, situated close to hand-pumped wells that were their only source of water for drinking, washing and other domestic purposes.

Hayes completed her secondary-school education at the Villa Maria Academy in Erie, Pennsylvania, before entering Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State University) as a pre-med student.

After three years at Penn State, she was admitted to Temple University School of Medicine, where two of her siblings were also enrolled at the time and two others taught courses.

Hayes was the sixth of the Hayes siblings to study medicine, and the fifth to earn a medical degree (a brother, Francis, died in a car accident in his last year of medical school.) Betty graduated from Temple with honors in 1936 and began an internship at Nesbitt Memorial Hospital in Kingston, Pennsylvania.

Following a brief return to Force, where she assisted her father, Hayes established her own medical office in Kingston and worked as a general practitioner for four years.

After the US entered World War II, she obtained a position in the state tuberculosis clinic at Kirby Health Center in Wilkes-Barre, PA, replacing a male physician who had entered military service.

Despite her medical degree and years of practice, she was given the modest title of "assistant clinician."

After a few months she resigned to volunteer as a physician and tuberculosis researcher at the Grenfell Medical Mission in Newfoundland, Canada, which served remote fishing communities.

Two months after Hayes arrived in Newfoundland, she was summoned back to Force.

Her father, Leo, had died suddenly from a brain abscess.

The people of Force and neighboring coal towns mourned his loss.

As a rule, mining families distrusted company doctors, who were known to order sick or injured miners back to work prematurely.

Leo, however, had advocated for his patients and their families throughout his four-decade career.

Serving on the school board, he had fought to improve and expand the Weedville school.

He had also spearheaded the campaign to build a highway that lessened the coal towns' isolation from the outside world.

He had achieved such goals over the objections of Shawmut Mining Company, which owned all the property in the area and did not want taxes raised.

Even as he lay dying in December 1942, Leo worried about his patients.

Wartime had created a severe shortage of civilian physicians, particularly in rural areas.

Caring for miners, their families, and local residents, Leo was the only physician within a twenty-five mile radius with four thousand inhabitants.

In a scene later memorialized by Woody Guthrie in his song, "The Dying Doctor" or "The Company Town Doctor", Leo asked his children to assure him that one of them would continue to take care of the miners.

The job fell to Betty.

Shawmut Mining opposed her candidacy for the job, promoting its own candidate instead.

But Hayes was supported by leaders of the two United Mine Workers of America locals that represented the Shawmut miners.

At a union meeting, the miners voted for her unanimously, and she began work in early 1943.

Hayes found conditions in Force "intolerable."

Water pumped from the wells smelled rank, and visitors often left the area with stomach ailments.

After heavy rains, sewage flowed through the yards and into the unpaved streets where children played.