ABSTRACT
John Wesley (Jack) Conroy was born on December 5, 1899, to Irish parents in a tiny Missouri coal mining camp derisively called "Monkey Nest" by miners who toiled and sometimes died there. At age ten Conroy lost his father, killed in a mine explosion; a brother and two half-brothers also died in work-related accidents. Conroy grew up in a folk community that was soon to dissolve under competition from the new technology of oil and the dispersive social forces of industrialization that came late to northern Missouri. In dangerous coal pits, railroad shops, and construction jobs, on auto production lines, wherever, in short, men and women labor for their living, Conroy experienced firsthand how humor lightens the task and brightens people's lives under the dreary, hazardous conditions of industrial work. Shortly before the Moberly railroad strike in 1922, Conroy had gained the position of apprentice "car toad".
