Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part series on unions and the Bonacci family. The first ran in the Utah section on Aug. 14, 2011

On April 1, 1922, reacting to severe wage cuts, inadequate housing and hazardous working conditions, Sunnyside coal miners joined a nationwide effort and went out on strike.

Evicted from their non-union company-owned town, the strikers moved in with relatives or temporary tents provided by the United Mine Workers of American (UMWA). They were subjected to constant surveillance. Searchlights and machine guns were planted in nearby knolls. And their demands for equity were compromised when strikebreakers — mostly farmers from Sanpete and Emery County — sought quick profits in mining.

In 1921, Italian immigrant Vito Bonacci was a "scraper" in Sunnyside's coke ovens. During the strike he volunteered with his relative and local labor organizer, Frank Bonacci, to help unionize Carbon County. Later, he'd catch the attention of and marry a Sunnyside girl named Filomena Fazzio.

From the 1890s to the 1920s, Utah's coalfields attracted numbers of Italian laborers looking for full-time or seasonal work. Rosario Fazzio migrated from the Calabrian region in southern Italy.

"My father would work for four years, go home to his family in Decollatura, and then return, each time leaving my mother pregnant," Filomena said in interviews archived at University of Utah's Marriott Library.

"After three children, my mother said, 'I can't live like this anymore. If you're going to [America] without us, don't come back.' My father said he loved her too much to leave her behind."

One of nine siblings, Filomena was born in 1910 in Sunnyside, where Rosario worked in the coke ovens. Wanting to raise his children away from the mining camps, he bought a farm, ran a dairy and found employment in the nearby Kenilworth mines.

At 7, Filomena was "an outside" child. She planted gardens and cultivated fields with her mother.

"I'd help cut down four-acre wheat fields with a sickle," she said. "Mother would make a knot with the wheat itself and then tie it to make the bundles of grain. She sewed, canned, delivered babies, and was good in everything she did."

Filomena recalls the 1922 strike. "Uncle Frank and his brother moved down to our place with their tents," she said. "At night in the hills, searchlights kept a-going. The company saw everything that was going on, who was here and who wasn't here. I'd go to bed with fear, wondering if they were going to come out and get us, my dad — or my uncles. They didn't, but after my uncles moved, my dad couldn't get any work."

The strike lasted seven months. The out-of-work and struggling family relied on $9.00 weekly union funds, fortunate to have their farm.

"We'd fill up our small duggy [wagon] with vegetables to peddle in Helper and Kenilworth," Filimena said. "We sold every bit of it, I guess, because we were kids."

When the strike ended, the coal companies restored wages but rejected unions. Carrying the surname "Bonacci," Vito went from one mine to the next but couldn't get hired. He worked on a "traveling gang" for the Union Pacific and gardened for a mine supervisor. Only when the farmers returned to the land did Vito return to the mines. He cleaned two-story wooden tipples and ran a stove track. For fifteen years — until he became a mechanic at Kenilworth — he worked winters and got laid off during summers.

In early 1940, Vito couldn't move his arms or legs.

"He was swollen, in pain, and in bed," Filomena said. "Doctors thought he'd never walk. It was hard. But for four months, I'd put his arms around my neck, get him up, and drag him back and forth, every day, trying to work his legs."

Then, one morning, the vocal union man stood up on his own and went to work.

"I thought Vito was smart aleck when I first met him," Filomena said. "But I'm not sorry I married him."

She was a 16-year-old bride, and they celebrated 72 years together before her death in 1998.

Eileen Hallet Stone is an oral historian who's always looking for another good story. She may be reached at ehswriter@aol.