For much of his life, Bill Petchnick was a mechanic at local coal mines. In this 1977 photo, Petchnick is at the controls of a Koehring 405 dragline crane outfitted with a shovel bucket used to extract coal at a surface mine on Franklin Hill. His former employer, Palmer Coking Coal Company, was mining the famous McKay coal seam to supply fuel to state institutions, primarily the Washington Correction Center near Shelton and the Monroe Reformatory. Energy prices rose after the Arab oil embargo a few years earlier. Many energy planners were looking towards coal to help offset inflating fuel costs.
Ladislav William Petchnick was born in 1910 in Krain, Washington, to parents who emigrated from Slovenia, then part of the Austrian empire. Like many immigrants, Matija ‘Matt’ Podpecnik and Matilda Falla settled among their own kind in an area north of Enumclaw that was populated by Slovenians. Matt Malnertich and Joseph Paschich families established the first homesteads in Krain in 1881.
As a boy, Bill Petchnick worked on his family farm, but at age 16, he found employment at a small coal mine near Krain for about 10 years. He married Vivian Burnett, an Enumclaw girl, in 1936. The family moved to Black Diamond shortly after their union. There Bill went to work for the town’s biggest employer, Pacific Coast Coal Co. The marriage produced five girls, Judy, Althea, Arleane, Adrienne, and Audrey, plus two boys, Allen and Billy Jr. Petchnick learned mechanical skills in the Tacoma shipyards as an arc welder in the late 1930s. By 1940, he was back to coal mining at Strain Coal Company’s operation at Ginder Lake and Franklin. There followed two years when Petchnick operated a bulldozer for a logging company, then he headed to Alaska for work at a lime quarry, and briefly back to logging and lumber, before returning to Strain Coal Company’s Newcastle mine in 1949.
With all the skills he learned over the years, in late 1951, Bill Petchnick joined Palmer Coking Coal as a full-time mechanic. Palmer was operating both underground and surface mines, so Petchnick shuttled from job to job, fixing what needed to be fixed. With his many trades and skills, he could quickly fill in on a bulldozer, crane, or hoist. Petchnick proved himself a valuable man to have on the payroll.
Petchnick was blustery with a hearty laugh and never afraid to share his opinion. He could also be a taskmaster and, like many mechanics that are spread too thin; he was often cranky. His broad smile, as seen in this photo, was hard to forget. After 23 years with Palmer, Petchnick retired in late 1972. Yet, he continued to hang around the company’s operations, helping out here and there. He served on the Black Diamond City Council from 1970-73 and again from 1977-83, and was also a member and past Master of the Diamond Lodge #83 of the Masons. His wife, Vivian, passed away in March 1983 at age 64. Bill Petchnick survived Vivian by four years before his death in May 1987 at age 76.
