Episode 20 - Virginia Salazar

Five generations of the Salazar family, Virginia holding her great-great grandchild

Welcome to Mining City Reflections. In this third part of our series, we shift to the oral histories of women currently living in Butte. I’m your host Marian Jensen.

In January, 1983 the Anaconda Mining Company that produced the bulk of the world’s copper in the 20th century announced operations would cease. From June of 1980 through June of 1983, nearly 3000 workers would lose their jobs. The women in this series of podcasts lived through that day which brought the once glorious mining city almost to its knees. We’ll learn how they survived and flourished.

In this episode we’ll hear from Virginia “Gin” Salazar, whose oral history was taken by Community Radio station manager, Clark Grant, in 2018 in her home on West Granite Street.

Gin’s story is quintessentially Butte - the daughter of a miner who married a miner and lived through the turbulent last decades of the Anaconda Mining Company. She provides an intimate portrait of the roller coaster life in a mining community. Recounting her story with the good humor and patient attention to detail one might come to expect from the mother of fifteen children, Gin faced down challenges that might have defeated lesser women.

“After sundown is when you’re supposed to cut, now this is probably an old wives tale, that’s when you’re supposed to cut the rattlers off of a rattle snake. You don’t take them until after sundown.”

Born in Yakima, Washington in 1933, Gin’s early years were spent in the fruit orchards of her grandparents. Her parents had met there and had two children.

“And I can remember, in the fall mom and dad both worked in packing houses. Y’know packing the fruit. My brother and I would go with them and other peoples children would be there too and they had a little play area for us outside the packing houses and we made a lot of different friends. I mean to us it was great.”

The hard times of the Depression led her parents to move to Montana in 1939 where her father found work at the Boaz gold mine in Norris, about 40 miles from Butte. Her father, a mechanic and hoist engineer, was a diamond driller in the mine itself. He even drove the truck that transported the gold bars to the train station.

Living far off the beaten path, Gin's mother became equally skilled but in different ways.

“She could make anything, she made all my clothes, all my brothers shirts. Oh gosh she could sew, she could hardly wait for the Montgomery Ward catalogue to come and she’d start… because we would get to Bozeman in good weather and she would always get a lot of materials but she used to order a lot from Montgomery Ward catalogue; material and stuff that she’d make things out of. She made everything. My sister turned out to be just as good a seamstress as my mother and one time there was a fella who asked, “How many tons of steel wool would I have to get for you to crochet a stove?”

Gin and her brother went to school in Norris then in Harrison, Montana through long winters when she rode a memorable school bus.

“Oh our school bus was something else, it was probably one of the first city buses with tires. Y’know Butte used to have the tracks and this was probably one of the first busses with tires that Butte ever got. In the winter time, we all had blankets… those winters were terrific especially up at that mine. There was an unbelievable amount of snow, there were tunnels from peoples houses to others and even up in the mine yard when we started going to school in Harrison there was always some kids in the winter time that wanted to come home with us on weekends because we had a skating rink and our skating rink was the tailings pond from the mine.”

Gin was clearly no shrinking violet. Her father would even take her down into the mine, a secret they kept from her mother.

“It wasn’t real deep, it went down five hundred feet, straight down. Then another 800 feet and had a lot of tunnels that spread out all over. Probably a lot of people wouldn’t like the smell of it but I did. It smelled… y’know you have all those metals that have been cut into and everything. One time when I was down there with my dad and I had on the hat with the light on it, the battery strapped around me. And I happened to look and there was a lot of wire gold, and it’s really gold, wires of it in the rock, and I shined the light on it and he said, “Yep, that’s wire gold.”

After World War II and the mine had played out, the family moved to nearby Pony, Montana, where she roamed all around, adventurous as ever. Come across a rattle snake? No worries. Gin could take care of it.

“So we were walking on this trail up behind our house and we didn’t get too far, it was in August, I could hear a rattlesnake. We were on what what at one time was probably a road but was now just a trail and there was a little bank up. I looked and I told Bonnie that I think it’s probably a rattlesnake, I think that’s rattlers…

“What? Let’s leave!”

I just wanted to look a little closer. So she was on the trail, I got up on the little embankment and I said that it couldn’t see me because they’re supposed to be blind in the months of August. Now I don’t know if that was an old wives tale or what. Anyway, can’t see me. I said, “Bonnie, see that rock?”

She said, “This boulder?”

“Pick it up and bring it to me.”

“No! No!”

Anyway she picked it up and she came around and I hung on to it and she said, “What are you doing?”

And I said, “He’s coiling… and I’m gonna drop it on his head.”

And I did. I dropped it, but I dropped it just right and I chopped his head right off.”

Gin made her way to Butte after high school after a summer of working at a coffee shop in West Yellowstone. Even in 1951 life around a national park attracted a lot of visitors.

“The day after I graduated my aunt and my cousin and I took a trip to west Yellowstone, and I packed some close just in case there was a job up there or something. I got a job in a coffee shop and that’s where I was for the summer. Five dollars a day. Oh my hours, boy they were horrendous. I would have a two hour break in the afternoon and there were just two of us waitress’ that worked and this coffee shop had seventeen stools and it was the busiest spot in town. It’s where all the smoke jumpers ate and they had a lot of telephone operators so it’s where all of them ate. I mean it was just a busy place, but I’d have to go early in the morning, I’d have to be there before six. Then I would get off from two until four. I had to go back at four and we closed at eight. I got a room in a house, there were three upstairs rooms that the people rented for ninety dollars a month. I would have never been able to afford it but tips of course, tips were good.”

Gin never had trouble finding work and Butte was no different. She came to visit her friend, Bonnie of rattlesnake fame, in Butte and got a job at St. James Hospital working in the miners’ ward.

“I go down to St. James and yeah, yeah they needed nurses aides alright. My gosh, the mines were going full blast, there must have been at least four miners wards. One of them had ten beds in it, these were big, and there was one that had eight and I know two had six. There were miners in other rooms too but those were some that uh… Well mostly broken bones and then the older miners with consumption and at the time they didn’t have rest homes so they lived at the hospital. And my pay was the same; five dollars a day, but I could have breakfast when I got there and I could have lunch. So I got a room at the Fox Hotel, gosh I think I was paying maybe thirty dollars a month.”

Working on the miners’ ward, Gin saw hardship firsthand. Many of the miners had no family or were immigrants. In the days before the advent of rest homes, If they were permanently injured, or had consumption, they lived out their last days at the hospital.

“I used to feel so bad for the old ones, and you knew they were going to be there until they died. So many of them were foreigners y’know? There were a lot of them that had come from the old country, they’d always tell you stories about the old country. They could remember their childhood there y’know?”

While the work environment was difficult at times, Gin brought home her share of good stories. One in particular concerned a co-worker .

“I worked with one gal, her last name was Beaver. Everybody called her Beaver. She and I were working together and there was one order, we had to have this guy go on the bedpan, the doctor needed a warm stool. So, we were the culprits to take this warm stool to the lab. So there we were, the bedpan all covered, and then a heating pad underneath the bedpan. We get on the elevator… the elevator gets stuck. Do you think we take that heating pad off the bedpan? No. To us it seemed like an hour and it was probably five minutes that we were stuck. But we walked into the lab and there were three people sitting there at a table eating lunch. Beaver said, “We’re delivering your warm stool.” And they all looked at us and said, “Not mine!”

Along with memorable work experiences, the miners’ ward was also the place where Gin would meet her future husband, a war hero.

“Went to work at St. James and that’s where I met Max. He was a patient, he had a broken leg. Oh it was a bad one, his knee was completely ruined. And that’s the one he kept breaking in later years.”

Max Salazar, a decorated Navy veteran, and Gin married in 1952 and would have 15 children — 6 boys and 9 girls.

“Mike, Tony, Tracy, Tim, Terry, Pam, Peggy, Patty, Mark, Steve, Cari, Jenny, Kelly, Max and Jackie.”

In the 1950’s the lack of reliable birth control made for harrowing experiences for new brides. Gin had a tendency toward abbreviated pregnancies, and nine of their children were premature. At one point, she had 4 children in 18 months.

“The doctor’s used to say, “You are the most fertile woman we have ever seen.” And I said, “Do something about it!”

“Well we can’t, you are in a Catholic town.”

Despite his lingering knee injury, Max Salazar continued to work in the mines for a time.

“They made good money, miners wages were good. The only problem with that was that they would go on strike about every three years because the company wouldn’t give them raises y’know? So they’d go on strike and boy we lived through a lot of strikes. Then finally Max went to work for the state, but the state was really low pay. Of course he did become an officer in the Miners Union after one of his leg breaks. He went to the Union and he was the financial secretary. But then the mines were closing one at a time cause they were gonna have the pit. Anyway he wen to work for the state as the state mine inspector.”

The life of a contract miner was fraught with peril, and was difficult to stare down day after day even for a ‘war hero.’

“The Belmont was his favorite, and he was the first hispanic that they ever had as a boss. Before the dBelmont closed he was one of the bosses. They’re were a lot of accidents I’ll say that, and his partner, and they were friends of ours; the Woody’s, they we’re at work one night and a slab came down and got his partner. He was a mess then, he could never go back then. They were contract miners then, they were really making good money. But he couldn’t go back in that same part, he tried it a couple different days but it didn’t work.”

One of the most dangerous occupations in America, mining accidents devastated many families. Gin felt that pain, if only second hand.

“God all I could think of was, oh my God his wife. They had… they just had four kids, well just… Yeah two girls and two boys. They lived at 3006 Dixon. We went to see her a lot. Her kids were grown enough so they were all in school and so she went ahead and went to work herself.”

The Salazars had financed the purchase of a house on the GI bill in the 50's, and Gin ran a tidy ship, largely revolving around securing and preparing enough food.

“I know my son in law Dan up in Alaska, he’s always saying, “How did you raise all those kids?” And I said, “Sometimes I don’t even want to think about it now that it’s all over with, but I’d get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other and start in.” Maybe I would get into the bathtub at midnight. The only time I could ever take a bath was when everyone was in bed. Oh gosh.. and then getting them off to school. Of course they all went to McKinley, walking distance right to McKinley School along with all the other kids in the neighborhood. They’d come home for lunch and I always had a good lunch, with a dessert. They’d come home from school there was always a good snack, I never made so many cookies and brownies and I had recipes for so many things. Oh my gosh. And we used to buy eggs from and older couple whose children had chickens out in Whitehall, and this older couple would come in with eggs and I can’t even remember how many eggs we’d get at a time. We always had a lot of eggs. We always got flour and sugar and potatoes and pinto beans, everything like that in big bags. I baked a lot of bread and when frozen dough came out oh God that was like heaven. When cake mixes came out!”

The neighborhood store took some pressure off.

“It was such a wonderful little store, the big sale was penny candy. It was great, when we came the Martello’s had the store, he worked in the assay office for the Anaconda Company I think and his wife ran the store. They had one daughter and they were godparent’s to our daughter Peggy. And then Carolyn Campbell had a little store up on Main Street, and this one was bigger so she bought this one. She carried everything, it was a good business. She had a cat and she’d come over and get me to watch the store if she had to take a run someplace. And that cat would come and sit in the front window and as soon as she would hear Carolyn come that cat would say, it kinda howled, Caaarrrooolllyynnnn. Everyone used to laugh about Carolyn’s talking cat, that’s the only thing anybody ever heard.”

Despite an unfailingly positive attitude, Gin recalled the uncertainty of the long strikes and how she and Max had to think ahead to get through.

“The union, they couldn’t be paid either but they would get unemployment. That’s when he decided he would go and work for the state because that strike had started in July and it was January when he went to work for the state. I know whenever the three years would come we would always get a loan from a place that was called commercial credit. We would get a loan so that we could get through. We always managed. One thing, and this nurse Joan Shannon, she used to say, “One good thing that the strikes did for the town of Butte, at least all of the kids that were in school would get shots and vaccinations free.” They would have, sometimes they would have big clinics and people could take their kids. I can remember one time, it must have been for the polio shots or something, and they had it down at the Civic Center instead of doctor’s having tons and tons of people going to their office they just set up at the Civic Center. This was a union town at the time, it was definitely a union town and all unions helped out other unions all the time.”

Having outlived her husband by more than 20 years, and three of her sons, Virginia Salazar still lives at her same address after more than 60 years. Her attitude hasn’t changed.

“They all came out… on the up side.”