Kitching, Muriel the Mother Of The Museum and Jimmy Kitching and His Music

Kitching, Muriel: the Mother of the Museum and Jimmy Kitching: Playing His Music

Images and notes from Nancy and Victor Anderson with contributions from Bob Leathers

Muriel Kitching, third grade teacher at Hanna Elementary in 1961. (Hanna Basin Museum Collection)

House 11, Two Town, John H. and Harriet Ellen Crawford and children Albert (born 1907), Muriel (born 1908) and Edith (born 1910). (Hanna Basin Museum Collection)

The members of the Hanna Basin Historical Society refer to Muriel Kitching (1908-1999) as “the Mother of our museum.” She and husband Jim were present at the organizational meeting in 1983 and were life-long members. Muriel’s donations (a vast number of varied items, manuscripts, and photographs) form the nucleus of the museum’s collections. Gathering and telling stories of the coal camps of Carbon and Hanna, sharing artifacts with their human connections intact, Muriel was an historian of the best kind. In her eightieth year Muriel wrote an autobiographical piece from which the following information is taken:

A few months after the tragic explosion in which fifty-nine men lost their lives, on August 9,1908, I appeared at the home of John Henry and Harriet Ellen (Nicholson) Crawford sided by Dr. Arthur and midwife “Grandma” Reese. There but for the Grace of God, I would have been born fatherless as my father, by only a few seconds, escaped being killed by the second explosion that day, March 28. I was to grow up in a town saddened by the explosions of 1903 and 1908. Always there was a series of dread when the miners left for work that a husband, father or son might not return from a day’s work in the pits.

Muriel grew up in a family of three sisters and two brothers. Her mother, “a clever, ingenious, tiny Englishwoman,” wrote poems and articles, many written on butcher paper as she did her kitchen work. Her father, who had entered the British pits as a boy of nine, was respected “Judge Crawford,” Democrat, union man, sometimes mine boss, and justice of the peace. The Crawford children, like most others in Hanna, grew up with a variety of farm animals and spent time hiking the surrounding hills. During her school years, Muriel began a life-long involvement with Girl Scouts.

Muriel on the porch of Hanna House 30 in Two Town when she and Jim were courting. (Not Dated) (Hanna Basin Museum Collection)

After graduating from Hanna High School in 1926, Muriel moved to Rock Springs and worked as a clerk in the coal company office and also assisted Jessie McDiarmid, editor of the Union Pacific Employes’ Magazine. Feeling this work “too confining,” she earned her normal certificate from the University of Wyoming and accepted her first teaching position at the little coal camp of Winton. There she had 35 third and fourth graders and earned a salary of $125 a month while she boarded with any family willing to accommodate her.

Hanna Graduating Class of 1926. Muriel in the front row third from the left in front of the stone school. (Hanna Basin Museum Collection)

At Winton she met her future husband, “a miner and a banjo player with a merry smile.” Muriel Crawford and James Kitching were married in Hanna on March 31, 1935. The couple lived in Rock Springs for a year and then returned to Winton. “It was just like coming home and we were deeply grateful for all the help we were given when our daughter required hospitalization in Omaha.”

Muriel and Jimmy's wedding at Hanna House 30 in Two Town March 31, 1935. (Hanna Basin Museum Collection)

Called by the illness of Muriel’s mother, the young family moved to Hanna in 1940. Jimmy worked at a strip mine, and Muriel continued with Girl Scout activities and formed Hanna’s first Brownie troop, which daughter Peggy joined. Then came the big closedown in 1954 as the Union Pacific shifted to diesel fuel. By this time Peggy had entered the nursing program at the University. Muriel returned to teaching. Too soon, as she wrote, “tragedy struck.” Daughter Peggy, now a wife and mother, suffered renal failure. The next few years found Muriel teaching and Jimmy caring for Peggy, including taking her to dialysis sessions, often frequent and at times far distant. They moved constantly to accommodate her condition; Muriel began to feel like a “gypsy.” After Peggy died in 1971, Muriel and Jim, now retired, returned to their boarded up house in Hanna and raised granddaughter Rhonda.

They arrived to participate in the coal boom of the 1970s and shared their interests and talents with a new population. Muriel described her proudest achievements as writing articles on Carbon and Hanna history for the Hanna Herald, being applauded with a life membership in the PTA and with both the” Pioneer of the Year” award from the Jaycees and “Outstanding Contribution to the Historic Preservation of Carbon County” from the Carbon County Historical Society. She realized two long-time personal goals: the naming of the Hanna Community Hall to the National Registry of Historical Places (1983) and the hall’s transition to a museum (1990) and the dedication of the Miners’ Monument, which honors all those lost in the mines of Carbon and Hanna (1984).

Muriel and Jimmy Kitching at their 50th wedding anniversary party. (Hanna Basin Museum Collection)

Jim, banjo player, and Muriel, director and prompter, accompanied my husband Victor and me in over 100 statewide performances for the Wyoming Council for the Humanities’ Speakers’ Bureau. Our programs concerned women in coal camps, on homesteads, and in tie camps. With audiences from pre-schoolers to seniors, Jim strummed appropriate old tunes and sometimes sang. It was a final hurrah for Muriel and Jim. With Jim’s passing in 1993, Muriel spent her final years in a care facility in Saratoga. Her piece of the room was covered with books, notebooks (writing poetry was her late-found passion), assorted tools (pens, pencils, and crochet hooks), and balls of yarn. Visits from granddaughter Rhonda and her husband Mike and young Mike cheered Muriel. To the end her mind was active and her hands busy. Tom Mansfield, long-time activity director at the facility, declared, “Muriel was my favorite resident ever.”

Nancy Anderson
Director, Hanna Basin Museum

JIMMY KITCHING AND HIS BANJO (CARL BERGER OF THE HANNA HERALD IN 1980s, HANNA BASIN MUSEUM)

(Gert and Rob Milliken Collection from Gary Milliken)
The Wind

The wind, the wind, the naughty wind,
Does blow, the girl's skirts so high.
But God is just. He sends the dust
To blind the bad man's eye!!

Jim Kitching, Banjo Player

Muriel always said it was Jimmy’s music plus the sparkles in his eyes that attracted her. In her eighties, she sat nearby and gazed fondly at him as he plied his true calling, entertaining. As the keeper of the little black book containing his repertoire, Muriel would prompt him with titles of tunes and away he would go.

Born into a family of coal miners in the village of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, Jimmy labored four years in the British pits before immigrating at age seventeen. Yet, life-long, he remained a Yorkshireman, retaining, among other things, a special love for old mining songs and for the expletive, “Bloody.”

A few years after arriving at the coal camp of Winton, Wyoming, Jim responded to an ad offering a cheap banjo and sheet music from the New York Academy of Music. He once threw the banjo in the closet in frustration but persevered with his self-education and often said proudly, “ In two or three years, I was playing for entertainments.”

In 1935 Jim married Muriel Crawford from Hanna and the following year, daughter Peggy was born. Peggy was destined to share his love of and talent for music; in the fifties and sixties the duo, on piano and banjo, were popular at local dances and other events around Carbon County.

Jim strummed and sang at schools and senior centers, parties and picnics, bars and clubs; he brought memories to the old and joy to the young, even to the very young who would join him in a lively “Bingo Was His Name O. B-I-N-G-O!” Picking up his banjo, he would say to any audience, “How about a little tune?” (Nancy Anderson, Director, Hanna Basin Museum)