Eighteen year-old Hungarian immigrant Martin Himler arrived in America on May 7, 1907, with $0.09 in his pocket and two goals in his mind. One of Mr. Himler's goals was to make a living, and his first job was working as a coal miner in the Thacker Coal Mines at Thacker, West Virginia. Mr. Himler also worked as a coal miner in Iselin, Pennsylvania, and Gary, West Virginia, and later, his entrepreneurial spirit led him to become a peddler in the coal mining towns of West Virginia and Virginia. While waiting for his Holden, West Virginia, customers on a Winter day in 1913,

Mr. Himler wrote the first issue of a weekly newspaper that he conceived as a source of information for immigrant Hungarian miners, a newspaper written, according to Mr. Himler, "for miners by miners". Mr. Himler named his weekly newspaper the Magyar Banyaszlap (Hungarian Miners' Journal), and filled the newspaper with articles and advertisements about mining, a Hungarian-English dictionary, and information about American citizenship. Magyar Banyaszlap soon had 60,000 followers, was published in both Hungarian and English, and was self-supporting within five months.

Mr. Himler was a prosperous newspaper publisher by 1917, and he and two of his Hungarian coal mining friends, Joseph Harkel and Louis Hajnal, along with four additional Hungarian miners, opened a coal mine at Ajax, West Virginia, but the men were then on the lookout for a larger, more profitable mine. On June 24, 1919, Martin Himler and the Himler Coal Company signed a fifty-year lease with Buck Creek Coal Company for 2,000 acres of coal property located in Martin County, Kentucky. The Himler Coal Company then constructed a $450,000.00 railroad bridge across the Tug River to carry coal from the new Hungarian town of Himlerville, Kentucky, to the state of West Virginia. The railroad bridge gave the Himler Coal Company access to 20,000 more acres of coal land, and the first Himlerville coal traveled across the new railroad bridge in June, 1921. The Himler Coal Company and Himlerville immediately received international attention because the Himler Coal Company was structured on an innovative co-operative business model, developed by Mr. Himler, that allowed the Hungarian immigrant miners to be shareholders and thus owners of Himler Coal Company. The average stock holder invested $300.00 and only stockholders could live at Himlerville. The ravaging flood waters of Buck Creek washed away much of Himlerville in the flood of June 28, 1928. As Mr. Himler stated, "I took this flood to be a notice served by God Himself that Himlerville was wiped out."









The second goal in Mr. Himler's mind was to serve the America that he loved so well, and Mr. Himler fulfilled this goal when he became Colonel Martin Himler, Office of Strategic Services (now Central Intelligence Agency), of the United States of America. America and the world waited as Mr .Himler interrogated the Nazi criminals whom Mr. Himler referred to as "the cringing beasts before me". Following World War II, Mr. Himler continued his career as a journalist and published The Miners' Journal, and other newspapers from his offices in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan. He continued to publish The Miners' Journal and to serve as a contributing writer for several newspapers when he retired to Los Angeles, California, in 1957. Pancreatic and liver cancer resulted in Mr. Himler's death  on July 8, 1961. Mr. Himler's love for America and the freedoms that America offered to immigrants was expressed emphatically by Mr. Himler: "America was everything; America was an impossible dream"