Howard Berkes
speaker
259 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 9 Aug
Howard Berkes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And his father, who's also named Gary and also was a coal miner, he told me this.
One of the shocking experiences we had right away was meeting coal miners who did not fit that description.
They were far younger when they were diagnosed and they got far sicker more quickly.
This included a miner named Mark McCowan.
He was only 40 years old when he was diagnosed.
We went to his house in Southwest Virginia.
And he held up an x-ray of his lungs in the light of his living room window.
You go from being normal to where all of a sudden one day you try to do something you used to do and you can't do it.
And you're just heaving to catch your breath.
And you say, this is crazy.
It can't be this bad.
And then you realize a couple months down the road that it can be.
And you realize a year down the road after that that you ain't seen nothing yet.
Mark was 47 years old when we interviewed him.
He'd been living with the disease for seven years, and it was getting worse and worse.
So one of the things that he described is something we heard over and over and over again while interviewing dozens of coal miners with black lung disease.
They talk about the simplest things that they can no longer do, like just being with their grandchildren.
I say, little buddy, I've got to put you down for a few minutes.
And he's learned to run a little bit.
He'll say, run, Papa, run.
Showing 21–40 of 259 · page 2 of 13
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