Biography
Michael Michalen was a miner imprisoned at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania for activity in the 1921 miners' strike. The Daily Worker of August 10, 1933, page 3, names Anthony Crillo, Michael Michalen and Michael Pehulic as serving long sentences and reports that three ILD relief money orders addressed to them had been returned the previous week. It says they had received such relief until August 1932, when Warden J. W. Claudy began refusing it, and announces a campaign to restore their access. The report provides no exact arrest, sentence or release day, individual term, formal charge, or basis to infer uninterrupted imprisonment beginning in 1921.
The December 1932 prisoner directory printed in the January 1933 Labor Defender lists Mike Michalen at Bellefonte after a 1931 strike prosecution for conspiracy and malicious mischief and reports a two-year imposed term. A later Daily Worker article of August 10, 1933 names Michael Michalen with Anthony Crillo and Michael Pehulic at Bellefonte but literally dates the miners’ strike to 1921 and calls their terms long sentences. The differing printed strike years are retained as a source disagreement; no separate case, custody endpoint or actual completed term is inferred.
Labor Defender, January 1933, printed page 235. Daily Worker, August 10, 1933, page 3.
