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Wednesday, November 06, 2002

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

It's not a real mine rescue capsule. But it plays one on TV.

And yesterday -- done with its key role in the coming television flick on the Quecreek Mine rescue -- the capsule avoided the props retirement home and arrived to live out its days at a coal museum just outside Johnstown.

"We think we'll have it up and on display pretty soon," Chris Barkley, director of the Windber Coal Heritage Center, said after the capsule arrived, crated-up.

It might be the biggest link between Hollywood and Windber since Johnny Weissmuller left this town of 4,400 and wound up swinging tree-to-tree on the big screen as Tarzan.

ABC-Disney, which finished filming last month and plans to air the movie over the Thanksgiving holidays, packed the capsule off to Windber because the coal museum is hungry for artifacts from the Quecreek rescue. And, well, the brutal truth in Tinseltown is that there just isn't much work for bright yellow, nine-foot-high steel mesh cylinders.

But there still are roles in Windber. "It can be used as a prop," said David Kahley, president of The Progress Fund, the museum's nonprofit owner.

"We want to use it as a demonstrator, for people to get into," Barkley said.

The Windber museum is angling to get the original capsule, too -- the one federal mine rescuers had built a quarter-century ago but never threw into action until Quecreek.

But the original is still a star, doing guest shots at mine safety conferences as the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration basks in the afterglow of the July rescue. For now, MSHA hasn't promised that capsule to anyone and won't until it has a replacement model.

So, the Windber museum has what amounts to the stunt double.

ABC-Disney borrowed the original in September, when its crews and actors descended on Somerset to film scenes depicting the Quecreek Nine being pulled from the earth.

But because the original had a fervid schedule of appearances to keep, the producers needed an understudy.

Enter Al Weimer, metal fabricator, star maker.

Weimer Blacksmith and Welding, the Somerset County shop he co-owns, makes its trade in ornamental railings, truck bed repairs and the like. But it was recruited in September to go size up the original and, inside of five days, fashion a twin.

"It was a privilege," Weimer said yesterday.

For the record, the duplicate is 24 inches in girth, instead of the original 22 inches, big enough to allow a camera inside. For purists, it's missing adornments such as brass rings built onto the original to keep it from raising sparks in explosive mine environments.

"It's pretty close," Weimer said. "... but it's not near as heavy."

The Windber museum might uncrate the capsule as soon as today. And when it does, Barkley figures, he might find that ABC-Disney threw in a few extras.

"We're hoping for a script ... a signed one. We think they might have put in some of the miners caps ... and cap lights," he said. "And there might be a ... rock hammer in there."