11/25/2025
🎙️ Can't catch Mountain Talks live on the air weekly? No worries! You can now listen to episodes on both SoundCloud and YouTube!
On this Mountain Talk: he may be retiring, but he’s still fired up — we start our show with a feisty, fiery speech from longtime UMWA President Cecil Roberts, who stepped into that role back in 1995, and just retired last month, after 30 years. In this talk, which he gave recently at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, Roberts, a WV native, reflects on the long and rich history of coal union organizing in Appalachia—including how his own great-grandparents were evicted from their Fayette County home, by a coal company, because they’d been suspected of supporting the union—and why he thinks, given the state of the country and the economy, the union is as important now as it’s ever been.
Up next: November is National Diabetes Awareness Month, and, sadly, eastern Kentucky has higher rates of type 2 diabetes than both the state and national averages. But even if it runs in your family, diabetes CAN be managed, or even prevented in the first place. And for the second half of our show, as part of our ongoing series Prevent Diabetes EKY, we sit down with Alita Vogel, director of the Letcher County Public Library, to hear about both her challenges and her successes in her diabetes journey— including how she cut her A1C level plum in half.
đź”— Listen to this episode on YouTube here: https://loom.ly/tPztY3M or on SoundCloud here: https://loom.ly/dsfLM5E
