If the Purdue executives thought that people like Sue Ella and Sister Beth could be bought, they had not done their homework. Both had stood on the picket lines with strikers and their families for nine life-and-death months in 1989, when the Pittston Coal Company wanted such huge union-contract concessions as reduced pay-in to retired miners’ health insurance and wage cuts. Sister Beth had literally lain on the ground, to block the coal trucks, while Sue Ella stood next to the striking miners with her six-month-old baby in a carrier.