More Mining Stories

[hardrockminer]

Looks like my original stories post was lost in the upgrade, so starting anew, but will not repeat any stories.

This story is about a couple I met in 1974, on the Trans Canada Highway (Hwy 17) between Wawa and White River.  They were from Germany, and their car had broken down on the side of the road.  Their names were Hugo and Juta (Judy) and they were on their way to Manitouwadge, where I worked.  Hugo was looking for a job at one of the local mines.  They spoke English, but with a strong German accent.  I asked them where they had come from and Hugo replied "Vee left VaVa this morning.  Ve vork at A and Dooble Vey in VaVa."  He went on to tell me that he was a machinist who had worked all his life for Krupp in West Germany and he wanted to find similar work in Canada.  I told him the mines were hiring mechanics and he had the kind of skills they were looking for.  I said I would take him to the mine where I worked and help him fill out an application.

The next day I picked him up and brought him to the main office to apply for a job.  I couldn't read or write English, so I said I would fill out the application for him.  The application asked for prior experience, and I put down that he had worked in Germany as a machinist at Krupp works.  I asked Hugo what he had done before and he replied that he was trained as a tail gunner in the Luftwaffe!  I told him we wouldn't put that on his resume!  We handed in his resume and he was hired to work in the machine shop.

Several weeks went by and I would visit Hugo and Judy in their apartment from time to time.  I was curious about life in Germany and asked them a lot of questions.  Hugo had a 35 mm slide hand viewer and pulled out some slides to show me some scenes of their former home.  I popped the first slide in and got the shock of my life.  It was a wedding scene, with everyone dressed in their underwear.  Hugo and Judy were in front of a preacher, with him in his tighty whiteys and her in a skimpy bra and panties.  I broke out laughing at how outrageous it seemed, and Hugo demanded to know what was so funny.  That's when I realized these people weren't the same as the people I had grown up with!  I told him it just seemed strange to get married like that and he replied that it was perfectly normal for them to dress like that, and that sometimes they didn't even dress when they went out with friends!  They had an entire box of slides, expecting me to check them out.  I wasn't sure what to do next, so I found an excuse to leave.  It was quite a shock for me.

Several weeks later I stopped by to see them again but they were nowhere to be found.  The next day I checked with the mine to find out what happened to them.  It turned out that they were working without a work visa and Canada Immigration caught up with them and deported them.  Since then, when I drive by VaVa I always stop at the A and Dooble Vey for a burger and fries and think about my friends from long ago.

[hardrockminer]

 Early in my career I worked at the Madawaska Mine, near Bancroft, Ontario.  It was a uranium mine that had closed in the early 1960's when the US government decided it had purchased enough material for their nuclear programs and stopped buying Canadian uranium.  The price plunged and mines became uneconomic and closed.  Fifteen years later new demand brought pricess back and mines like Madawaska reopened.   The company awarded a contract to JS Redpath to deepen the shaft several hundred feet and establish new mining areas in the lower part  of the mine.  I was an open raise miner who came to the project immediately after the shaft work was complete.  It was early June and the job was supposed to last about a month.  The work included new ore and waste pass raises to join up with the old systems.  It was a fairly short job so we stayed at a local motel owned by a young guy named Matt Ireland.

We worked two shifts.  My cross shift was Ron "Rockbolt" Sarginson and Richard Tessier.  My partner was Marc Leroux.  The four of us were responsible for excavating the new ore pass extension.  Ron's partner Richard was from Quebec.  He spoke very little English.  He was in his early 60's, which was impressive for a contract miner, never mind an open raise miner.  It's tough working in a hole angled upwards at 49 degrees where everything that goes in has to be carried by hand, sometimes up to 250 ft.  Richard was as tough as they come and must have been a hell of a miner in his prime.  He wasn't a large man at about 5 ft 9 in or thereabouts, weighing around 150 lbs.  But there was no fat on his frame.  He drove an impressively beautiful blue 1974 Cadillac El Dorado, and could be seen driving around the streets and backroads every evening after work.  

As mentioned earlier we stayed at a motel on the main highway, not far from the mine site.  Matt's staff made our meals and cleaned rooms.  We were bunked two to a room but Richard had no room mate that I can recall.  After supper one night, as usual, Richard went out for a drive.That  night at about 2 am we were awakened by police sirens and flashing red lights.  We all went outside to see what had caused the ruckus and saw the police knocking on Richard's door until he finally opened it.  After several minutes they led him to a police car in handcuffs.  

The next morning we discovered why he had been taken away.  Apparently in his drives around the countryside he would pick up young girls and expose himself to them.  It must have happened several times but on this particular night he was in the act of giving two girls the Quebec salute and they jumped out and called the police.   The following evening Richard returned to the motel and packed his bag and left.  That was the last we ever saw of him.

[hardrockminer]

 Pickle Lake is a very small community, less than 1,000 people located about 200 miles north of the Trans Canada Highway, in the middle of Nowhere, Ontario.  In 1980 I travelled there on my motorcycle for the summer between my second and third years of engineering studies, to work for a contractor driving open raises at the UMEX Thierry underground mine.  It was a lucrative summer job.  I was able to earn $5k to $6k per month, which was more per month than most of my fellow students could earn for an entire summer. 

During my time there I met a woman who had come to town to be a teacher at the local grade school.  We enjoyed a few chats over several weeks, and one day she mentioned that she had received an invitation from one of her students to attend a Baptist revival meeting at the local church.  She said she felt pressure to attend but was reluctant to do so because she wasn't overly religious and most certainly wasn't a Baptist.  Now these Baptists were revivalists and this meeting was a revival meeting, to be led by a Southern US Baptist minister by the name of Reverend Jim Jessop.  Apparently he had heard about the good work the local church was doing while converting all the local Indians from Osnaburgh Reserve into good little Baptists.  I had never been to a revival meeting so I told the teacher I would be happy to accompany her if she felt that would be OK.  She agreed.

The day of the meeting came and we got dressed up in our finest clothes, which for me was a clean shirt and jeans, because you can't carry a large wardrobe on a motorcycle.  As it turned out, we were very well dressed compared to most of the visitors that evening. 

The meeting began with a hymn, followed by an introduction of Mr Jessop, who had travelled all the way from the Southern US to be with us.  Reverend Jessop took the podium and began a speech that lasted about an hour.  It was impressive...more impressive than those evangelists you see on TV.  He knew his bible and he knew how to work up a crowd.  In no time people were shouting amens.  After a few minutes there were parishners speaking in tongues.  One woman collapsed in the aisle grunting and moaning.  Live theatre at its finest!

It came time to wind things down and call for sinners to step to the front of the church to be absolved of their sins and accepted into the congregation.  Most of the Indians came forward, few others.  I took that as a sign that the rest of the attendees were already members.  With a blessing the new members of the congregation were asked to contribute to the church's finances and then sent back to their seats.  Then the reverend asked us all to bow our heads and pray.  He said "Anyone else who wants his sins washed away please come forward."  A few people did and they were blessed.  I began to realize that my teacher friend and I were probably the only people left who had not heeded the reverend's words.  Again he asked us all to bow our heads and pray, and then asked for anyone else who wished to come forward.  It seemed like the entire congregation knew that only my friend and I were left to come forward.  The reverend persisted and asked again.  With out heads bowed it was impossible for me to see her or for her to see me, but I was hoping beyond hope that she wasn't planning to step forward because then it would be only me left to resist.  But she was strong!  The reverend asked a fourth and then a fifth time, as if resistance was futile, but we resisted.  By now we understood the game and we were determined to sit on our hands and remain in our seats.  Finally the reverend gave up in resignation, saying that he and the congregation would pray for us sinners.  At that point the meeting was over and we left.

The next day I went into work and discovered that the guy who changed next to me was an elder in the church!  I thought I might be hearing regularly from him for the rest of the summer but he was good and never brought religion up in any of our meetings.  The teacher lady left town when school ended.  I don't know if she ever returned to Pickle Lake.  I did, the following summer to work, but I never saw her again.

[hardrockminer]

 Wally was a farmer, with land somewhere in Manitoba.  Farmers make good miners because they learn how to come up with alternate plans on the fly, a skill that Wally possessed in abundance.  So Wally was also a very good miner, albeit only part time due to his farm responsibilities in the spring and fall.  But it was summer, so Wally was mining.

We had a fairly small crew of underground miners, led by a superintendent named Rene Roy.  He was once a very good miner himself, and like most good miners from the 50's and 60's he became a supervisor when he could no longer take the pounding that mining imposes on one's body.

One night Wally showed up for a graveyard shift.  He was drunk so I refused to allow him to go to work.  But Wally was insistent that he was capable of working.  And I was insistent that he was not going underground while under the influence.  Incensed, he stormed out of the office, jumped in a parked truck and left.

I thought Wally had gone to the camp nearby.  But he had actually gone into the open pit, where he had a wonderful drunken time driving to avoid the haul trucks and loaders.  The pit foreman, who worked for the company eventually confronted Wally and told him to get the hell out of the pit, and Wally left.  Shortly after, the pit foreman came to me to tell me the story and to say he would file a report with his boss in the morning.

I had my own report to complete for my boss, Rene.  Just before I went off shift the company manager came to our office and asked to see Rene, who had not yet arrived.  A few moments later, when Rene appeared, the manager told him that Rene had to leave the property immediately because the night shift supervisor had caught him in the pit in a Masse & Gauthier half ton that night.  Rene was aghast!  He claimed to have been at home that night sleeping in his bed.  It turned out that Rene had left his hard hat in the truck taken by Wally for his pit tour.  The hat had Rene's name tag on the front and the pit supervisor had noticed the name.  As good a miner as he was, and as short as we were for good miners, Wally was quickly fired and sent back to his farm.

[hardrockminer]

 In the early 1970's I was working in Northern Manitoba for Masse Gauthier, a mining contractor at the Ruttan Mine near Leaf Rapids.  Leaf, as we called it was a new town built to house and service mine employees.  All of the town services were under one roof....schools, shops, recreation facilities, everything.  The mine was about 17 km from town over a hilly gravel road.  A taxi took me out to the mine camp, driving wildly over the road, using both the left and right side at will.  I asked him at one point as we went over a hill how he knew no one was coming in the opposite direction.  He replied, "I can't see any dust cloud, which means no one is coming."  To which I replied "What if it's a moose in the middle of the road?"  The driver thought for a second and slowed down considerably.

I stayed in camp at the mine, and was cross shifting a guy by the name of Chris Proud.  We were shift bosses at the time, which for a contractor basically meant that you did anything you were asked to do to support the miners.  Chris was an incredible cross shift, always trying to set me up for a good shift.  I quickly began to return the favour, and we became fast friends.  We worked 7 days a week for months on end.  At that time the mine was open pit, but the contractor that employed us was doing underground development in preparation for when the open pit ran out of ore.

Chris had a friend named Rocky Madsen.  As a side note, Rocky was son of the Madsen who discovered the Madsen Red Lake Gold Mine and formed a company by the same name.  Rocky had inherited  wealth and could have done anything he wanted as a profession, but he chose to be a helicopter pilot, and his job was to provide support to geoscientists who were doing soil surveys throughout N Manitoba in support of the huge hydro projects that were just beginning back then.

One Saturday Rocky was in the vicinity of the mine, so he decided to visit his friend Chris.  He landed near the bunkhouse with his helicopter and Chris and I went out to greet him.  We all decided to fly to town for a beer, so off we went.  We landed near the facility I mentioned above and went looking for a licensed facility, but we were out of luck.  All we could find was off sales, so we bought some beer and headed back to the mine.

On the way back Rocky was following the road and saw a huge cloud of dust up ahead.  We caught up to the source...a car that was going very fast towards the mine.  Rocky decided to play a joke on the driver, so he swooped down to tree level and began to chase the car.  Then he activated a loudspeaker outside the chopper and said into his mike..."You in the yellow car....you're speeding.....pull over!"  The car slowed to a stop and pulled onto a side road.  Meanwhile, Rocky roared with laughter and continued on to the mine.

Rocky eventually left the helicopter business and moved into a safer line of work.  He formed a company that to this day sells Rocky Madsen's Fish Crisp, found in most grocery stores.

[hardrockminer]

 There is an attitude that develops in resource based towns.  The influence of a large industry like a mine or a mill on townsfolk manifests itself over time as "The world owes me a living."  It's most noticeable in towns with a long history, say more than two generations.  It was noticeable in several locations where I worked, including Marathon.  The town was originally built around a pulp mill in the 1940's.  Jobs at the mill were passed on from father to son.  Everyone became accustomed to the benefits that a large employer in a small town brings...the paid for rec center, the paid for slow pitch league, hockey rink, baseball diamonds, curling teams etc.  Of course employers HAVE to do it in a small town in order to keep their employees happy, but eventually everyone comes to EXPECT it.  Benny was one of those people.

We were the new guys on the block so to speak.  Our mine was new, but our people lived in the pulp town and we drew from the town for some of our employees.  Benny applied for a job and was accepted.  He was a local boy who grew up in town and had no ambition to leave as many young people did.  He was barely out of high school and built like the proverbial brick S#*thouse, thanks to a serious weightlifting program. 

Some people don't see the mine's view that attendance at work as scheduled as a commitment that should be honoured under all but the most exceptional reasons.  Benny would miss the odd shift, usually when there was a weight lifting competition going on somewhere.  Some of Benny's co-workers became aware of this coincidence.  After about a year of employment Benny went off on short term disability for a back problem, which meant he was paid full salary by the mine for up to six months, and at that point he would go on long term disability.  It was rumoured that he was still lifting, and in fact was preparing for a major competition in a nearby city.  The event came and went, and Benny was still off work.  One day a co-worker came in to the mine with a photo of Benny, sore back and all, holding the winning lift in his division above his head.  Under it Benny had scrawled "Thanks to all my fellow lifters.  I never would have won without your support.!

That was the evidence we needed.  Benny was called in to work and relieved of any obligation to return.  And for me...a young mine superintendent who was learning the ropes....I learned to be very discrimination when hiring locals from a long term pulp town.