CHEYENNE — More than 40 years after it was first recorded, a strip-mining protest song still rankles one of the nation’s largest coal mining companies.
Peabody Energy Corp., which operates major mines in Wyoming, asked a federal judge in Casper to strike lyrics of singer-songwriter John Prine’s 1971 song “Paradise” from a federal lawsuit filed by a pair of environmental activists who claim they were jailed for demonstrating at a company shareholders meeting.
The couple’s lawsuit opens by quoting lyrics of Prine’s song, including this verse:
“And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County. …
“Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
“Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away”
The activists, Thomas Asprey and Leslie Glustrom, both of Boulder, have sued Peabody as well as the Northern Wyoming Community College District and a college district police officer.
Asprey and Glustrom claim in the lawsuit filed this spring that Peabody had moved its 2013 shareholders’ meeting to the campus of Gillette College because of protests by mine workers at the company headquarters in St. Louis.
Members of the United Mine Workers of America were staging protests in St. Louis in 2013 over bankruptcy proceedings involving Patriot Coal.
Peabody had spun off Patriot Coal in 2007, and Patriot declared bankruptcy in 2012. The bankruptcy proceeding prompted complaints from miners that it was trying to shed pension and retiree health benefits owed to some miners who had worked for Peabody.
Darold Killmer, a Denver lawyer representing Asprey and Glustrom, said it’s unusual in a civil case to ask a judge to strike portions of a civil complaint.
“Anytime anybody criticizes Peabody, they get angry and they retaliate, and that’s what happened here,” Killmer said.
