Biography
Mike Matty was a coal miner from Brownsville, Pennsylvania, jailed at the Allegheny County Workhouse at Blawnox -- rendered in contemporary sources as "Blaw Knox" -- for National Miners Union activity during the 1928 soft-coal strike and his conflict with the John L. Lewis leadership of the United Mine Workers.
He was demonstrably in custody by October 1928 and was still imprisoned in January 1929. He was released on April 29, 1929, after what the contemporary defence publication called several months' imprisonment.
NO ADMISSION DATE IS RECORDED. October 1928 is the point at which custody is first attested, not the date he entered, so entering it would understate the term and present an attestation as an admission. His actual time served is therefore not calculated. The exact arrest, admission and sentencing dates, the formal charge and statute, the length of the sentence, his vital dates and any photograph are all unresolved.
Writing in the December 13, 1928 Daily Worker, National Miners Union secretary-treasurer Pat Toohey names Mike and George Matty, Steve Crevda, Frank Sonosky and John Midi as rank-and-file members sent to the workhouse. The article collectively gives terms of four, six and eight months, without assigning a particular term to a particular man. No individual sentence length, admission day or actual duration is inferred for Matty from that group statement.
