Another female financier came to the miners' aid. Josephine Roche, the daughter of John J. Roche, the anti-labor president of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMFC) which owned many of the mines in the Lafayette area, used some shares of the company she had inherited from her father after his death in 1927, bought a controlling interest in the company, and immediately began the most labor-friendly mine operation in the United States. She became a top assistant to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. Back in Lafayette, life became much better for the coal miners with the more labor-friendly management of the RMFC.