Al Beavis, Former Mayor of Walkerville
Al Beavis, photo by Nora Saks
Oral History Transcript of Al Beavis
Interviewer: Clark Grant
Interview Date: June 8th, 2018
Interview Location: Al’s home in Walkerville (1627 N Main)
Transcribed: May 7th, 2019 by Shawn McDermott
CLARK GRANT: Well, should we do a mic check? Want to say and spell your name?
AL BEAVIS: Now what do you want me to do?
GRANT: Just say and spell your name.
BEAVIS: Al B-E-A-V-I-S.
GRANT: Are you comfortable sitting like that?
BEAVIS: Yes, I am.
GRANT: Okay, you're not going to want to sit back?
BEAVIS: No, I might want to pull forward. Then I can hear you.
GRANT: The closer you are, the better for that. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me up to the house.
BEAVIS: Thanks for coming.
GRANT: I'm sorry it took me so long to get here.
BEAVIS: Well, thank God you got here. I'm getting old. I might not be around next year.
GRANT: So how old are you then?
BEAVIS: 87.
GRANT: Okay, so when were you born?
BEAVIS: Born 1931.
GRANT: Okay. And, so like I said, I want to come up to the house a couple of times. I want to come visit with you on subsequent occasions, but today, I wanted to talk about, you know, your ancestors, your grandparents, your parents, where you were born, what you did in your first 8 to 10 years of life, what school you went to, so, what did your grandparents do? What do you know about them?
BEAVIS: They were farmers. My grandmother, she was from Virginia. And my grandfather, he was from Virginia, too. And their parents were from back in the Old Country. I never got to know them real good. They passed away when, in like in 1948, '49. And when the Civil War came about, that's when they relocated from Virginia to Rapid City and Piedmont and Mitchell, South Dakota, where they started their homesteads. And that's where my mother was at and she met my dad, he came from Cornwall, in 1890. No, 18... Around the turn of the century. Between the 1800s and the 1900s. He was born in 1891. My mother was born the same year. They met and dad went to South Dakota to work in the mines and he started out in the Homestake down there. And he came over, thank God he missed it, he was supposed to come over on the Titanic. He missed that one and he caught the next ship. And that's the truth.
GRANT: Is it really?
BEAVIS: Yes, it is. That's the truth. That's it. When he got here, then he went to South Dakota and he started in the Homestake Mining over there. And Butte was, in 1964, Butte was really getting with it. Turn of the 1900s and he came here and we were all born in Butte and Walkerville. I think all of us, primarily, were born in Walkerville. We never got to go to the hospital. And I don't know if he even had a midwife.
They came to Butte. My mother says when she came across Harding Way (she told me this when I was very young), she said "When I look down at Butte, Montana from the height of Harding Way, all I wanted to do was turn around and come back to Virginia." She said it was nothing but smokestacks and Butte and everything was dirt and horses and buggies and stuff like that. But they settled in, and my sister Ruby, she was the oldest. She was born in Walkerville. My brother Reg, he was next to Ruby. Then there was Eileen, and then there was I. My brother Toby ended his life at, let's see, he was about 11 years old. Down at the Dream Theater in Walkerville, that's where we used to go to the show. And he was out in the road throwing snowballs at an intoxicated doctor run over him. At that time, my dad, I think that's about when he took up drinking. He just took Toby and put him on a train. The body. And he went back to Nemo, South Dakota. That's where they had the farm, then. And then he buried back there. And then we went back.
We went back in a 1929 Overland. My dad bought that brand new. And the first thing he did with that was take the [inaudible] top off of it. It was canvas and cellophane windows and that and he made a truck out of it. The reason for the truck was to haul wood, so you had something to burn, because that's what you burned at that time. And we went back to South Dakota and I was four. Then I turned five, back there, and school came in the fall. I wasn't old enough to go, but I went and tried to go. My cousin said, "He's only five." So, I didn't get to start school in South Dakota. And we came back in the winter. I was five then, and in Overland. There was three of us. There was Matt Shelby. That was my sister's husband. And there was Ruby, and there was mom. They got to ride in the front seat. It was a truck. We got to ride in the pickup. In the back. I never did forget that. I never did forget when we opened the door at 18 Toboggan, where I was born, and went in the house. It was a disaster. It was cold.
My dad didn't believe in inside plumbing. So, if you went to the bathroom, you went out to the outhouse. If you wanted to cook a chicken or something, then you cooked it on top of wood. For your hot water, you had a side arm on the old wood stove. You'd heat that up. That would be your bath on Friday, because you only got one a week.
It was quite a life. It was good. I enjoyed it. It was more like a neighborhood and a community at that time. Like, some woman, she left her number and I called her and she said, "Was that your mother that used to make that divinity?" And I said, "Yeah, that was mom." And then there was Miss [inaudible], she used to make taffy. And then Miss Bolton, she had 13 children. She used to bake bread every day. Mom would make donuts. When you're in grade school, you would come home for lunch. Or, if school was out, then you would enjoy some donuts. Or I'd go up Bolton's because she had homemade bread and she'd give me a thick slice of bread with real butter and then I'd put a lot of ketchup on it. That was it. It was really quite a neighborhood. It's a lot different then it is around the country today. Everybody knew everybody. If you needed a bowl of sugar, you went to your next door neighbor and got a bowl of sugar. And she'd come over to your house and get a bowl of something else.
It was during the Depression. I started school in the Blaine. This is the old, old Blaine. It was three stories at that time. I started the first grade there after I fought my way down to school. Like a pecking order. And I remember one time, my best friend, he became my best friend, but we got into a skirmish down there on the corner of Main and Toboggan. He was on top of me, but I was doing pretty good. I got on top of him. Then my dad told Walt Rogers, he was the sheriff of Walkerville. Walt went over to pull me off, and dad said "Leave them go, Walt." Now that was how it was in Walkerville when you were growing up.
Then, I went to the Blaine and in the first grade I can remember my teachers and everything. I never really enjoyed school. I didn't want to go to school. There are people like that, believe me, I know a lot of them. But anyway, I told mom, I said "Mom, I don't want to go to school." She said, "Well, you gotta go to school. You might as well just make up your mind you're going." I said, "Well, I'm not going." Anyway, I did.
I graduated from the eighth grade. Something happened that was pretty interesting there. I was going in on the second floor of the school, that's where the principal's office was at. Her name was Mrs. McDonald. I went and I had to run upstairs. I was in the sixth grade. The sixth, seventh, and eighth was on the third floor. So when I passed her office and I started running up them wooden steps -- you make a lot of noise when you have a set of loggers on -- and she come out of her office and she said "You know, Al, what you should do when you grow up?" I said, "No, Mrs. McDonald, I really don't have an idea yet." She said, "You ought to go into broadcasting." I said, "Why is that?" She said, "Because you never shut your mouth."
When I was in the second grade, that was prior to the Second World War, and they had a fund going on for paper. So I got the idea that I'd like to go get papers and stuff like that and bring them to school. They didn't excuse me because I collected so much paper. I collected enough from Josie and Danny at the candy store down by the old Civic Center, which you can see from your place. She give me all kinds of papers. She had tons of them. Her sister Josie run the boarding house. That's the old building where the so-called Civic Center that they're working on now. I'd go get all them papers. I had a slug of papers. Anyway, I got pretty good at collecting papers. Fun fact: I won the Blaine -- the flag -- that was the present you got if you won the papers. I turned around, I got a flag. Presented it to the school. That's when I was just in grade school.
[00:12:02]
Then I played football. We were playing Hawthorne. They were big kids. And I'm a runt anyway, but I'm playing left end, and we were playing for the championship. Mrs. McDonald was up in the viewing stand. She's watching all this going on. I run around that east/west end. Some kind of a play. One of them guys from the Hawthorne hit me in the belly. I went down. The next thing I know, I looked up, and here's Mrs. McDonald looking down at me. She says, "Al, are you alright?" That was my football career.
But you know, we didn't have stuff available like kids have today. You'd go out after school and you'd play marbles. I had a Steely. And so did other guys. You'd play marbles and then you'd go home and you'd eat dinner, if you had anything to eat. And then you would go outside and you'd play kick the can or hide and seek with the girls and the boys. You'd put your head up to a telephone pole and you'd count. "I see you," and then you run around trying to find them all. That's the games we used to play.
I got sick and tired of eating chicken. In fact, I don't like chicken anymore. I haven't for a long time. Because when it came Sunday, that was the meal of the day. That's when Mom would walk from Toboggan Street, over to Manza's Market, get a chicken with the head still on it and the feet still on it and the innards still in it. She'd bring that thing home and she'd open the wood stove, and she'd burn them pin feathers off of it. She cleaned it and cut the head off and save the gizzards and the heart for the gravy. You'd have chicken and dumplings. My dad was strict. You stay at the table until he told you to get up. Then, you'd listen to Jack Benny on the radio, and the Inner Sanctum Mystery, the squeaky [inaudible]. Stuff like that.
Go out and play a few games and enjoy yourself and then you'd come in and maybe have, if you're lucky, have an orange, if there was an orange around. I can remember my mother and I. She was a chamber maid. That's when my dad died. He died when I was 11. He died at the Bella Diamond, up where the monuments at. Anyway, we'd walk from Toboggan Street, down Main Street, and you know where Bob and Bruce's pawn shop is at, that's the old VFW, and prior to that, it was something else, but back in the '30s, it was known as the relief area. I'd go in there and sit on a pack of potatoes until Mom got the allotment. Then, we'd walk back up Main Street, but you're loaded this time. You're going uphill. There was never enough, anyway, but you made do with what you had.
She had eight kids. Reggie, he went in the Marines in 1942, right after Pearl Harbor. I don't know, it was a tough deal. I always wanted to be a miner. I don't know why. My dad was a miner, but I don't use that excuse. I think the excuse I used was that I didn't want to go to school. It wasn't that I was dumb.
I started early in life working. Like, when I was 12 years old, I worked at a pharmacy after school. One thing I did: I was a bellhop. That was down at the Acoma Hotel. That's where the Acoma Lounge or whatever it is now, on East Broadway. That was pretty neat. She gave me a uniform. It fit me, somewhat. It was an army uniform with the US buttons and that on it. It was a uniform. I'm only that tall. I was getting 28 bucks a month. When I had time to eat, I went down to where my sister worked at a donut shop. It was called the Rialto Donuts. She was down there, so I would get down there and have a couple of donuts and a glass of milk or something. I went in there one day and I said, "Ruby, did you know that Cy Holman got run over?" He was a great big heavy-set policeman. City police of Butte. She said "No." He used to come in there and eat, and he wouldn't pay for it. I said, "Ruby, he got run over." She said, "Well, did they back up to make sure they got him?"
I can remember all that stuff. I remember we'd go to the show. There was four show houses in Butte and one in Walkerville. We'd go to the show and one guy would pay to get in and he would go into the show house and he'd go up to the exit and open the door and the rest of them would pile in there and hope they didn't get caught. When that Dream Theater was open, that was pretty neat.
GRANT: Where was that?
BEAVIS: That was right down at, let's see, Toboggan, on the corner, not on the corner of Toboggan, it was a little bit to the right of that and then on the west side. Would you know where Powers lives?
GRANT: No.
BEAVIS: There's only a couple of houses down there. You can't miss it.
GRANT: Okay.
BEAVIS: You can't miss it. But it's gone now. It was a big building. They had a projector in there, one of those old time ones. It used to come on with Bugs Bunny eating a rabbit and saying "That's all, folks!" Porky Pig. Stuff like that.
Anyway, one time I went to that show on Wednesday, and I never forgot it. "Mom, give me a dime." Nickel a show and a nickel for a bag of popcorn. We went in there, and what was playing? The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The bell-ringer. I don't know, I'm just small. Scared the heck out of me. So then I used to hang out with the kids in Centerville because I used to go to the Blaine. Well, I used to walk down there after dinner. I'd go down and play with the game. I'd go home and it would be dark. Well, you know where the bell tower is for the St. Lawrence church? I had to get on the other side of the street. I wasn't walking by that bell tower because I thought the old hunchback was in there, going to ring that bell. That's the truth. I never forgot that.
Then, an interesting thing did happen. It was on a Sunday. I was getting ready to go to the matinee, with Lone Ranger and Tonto. High ho, silver, and away. I'm getting ready to go to the show, and here comes Finkle Dunn down the street, down Toboggan. He said, "Hey, you want to buy a pup?" I said, "Finkle, I ain't got no money. I only got a dime." He said, "That's all I wanted was a dime." I said "Well, I'd have to go ask my mother if we can have a pup or not." So, I went in and asked Mom and Mom said "Yeah, you can buy it. But just remember, you're not going to the show today." I liked the dog. I had him for a long time. I think was about 8 when I bought that dog off of Finkle.
Off the record, I went into my mother, and I showed her that dog. He's about that long. I said, "Mom, I got the dog. Here he is." I showed it to her. She was from Virginia. A rebel. I said, "Mom, what should I call him?" She says, "Call him a nigger. He's black." So, what the hell? I called him Nigger. When I went out to call my dog, I said "Here, Nigger, here, Nigger, here, Nigger, here Nigger." That's what you're supposed to do. You wouldn't do that today.
When I got twelve years old, like I said, I was working. I wasn't making a lot of money. That had to be when I was about fourteen or something like that. I went to work for Hansen's Packing Company. You remember Hansen's Packing? We were canning horse meat and gravy. I think part of it went to the horse meat factory up on Park Street. These people ate horses. I never ate any horses, I don't think. I probably had, but I don't remember it. That's what I did. I was up there packaging that stuff. We'd send it to Korea, across the pond. Hard work, you know?
[00:22:55]
Especially when they shook hides. I'm about that tall, and you're working with guys that are as tall as you, you know, and you get into them railroad cars and they got a railroad car full of hides that are wrapped up. All the horses and cows they killed. Well, this is it, we're going to shake hides today. And that's what you did. There was six guys on a hide, two on the back, two on the front, and two on the middle. You take that hide and you salt it down and they'd rewrap it. That wore me out. Anyway, I got overtime that time. I had $35, anyway, for that pay period. So what did I do? I went out and bought myself a horse.
Now I'm living down on 18 Toboggan Street and I got a horse. Mean. Just a mean Roman nose horse. I got it off of a guy, name was Goodman. He lived out by Buxton. That horse had run away. And he run off from where I lived on Toboggan and he run all the way to... and I'd have to go out and get him and walk back with him. I'd get off him, he'd throw me off. No [inaudible] that the rodeo crowd that they thought they were, they're going to ride that horse. They threw all them off too. But it run away, back to Goodman's, and I went out to Goodman's and she said "Well, we got rid of that horse." I said, "I paid $35 for that horse from that guy." "Oh, did you buy it?" So I'd been taken. It wasn't my horse. I got another one, after that. I was a little older then.
GRANT: In South Dakota, what did your grandparents farm? What was that like?
BEAVIS: Most of it was corn. You know, I can't really remember a lot about South Dakota. I can remember specific things about Dolly Byington. She was an Indian. There was Indians in Piedmont. That was right out of Rapid City. North of Rapid City. We stayed there for, I really can't say how long, but I remember some things from back there. What my grandfather did when he was back there. He had some hogs and this is in the old days. So they brought that hog into the barn, they hung him up with his back feet. I'm watching him, and I don't know how they killed him, if they stuck him or if they cut his throat or what, but they dumped in 55 gallons of hot water and drug him out there. When he come out, he didn't have a hair on him. He was pure white. Then they butchered it. You'd never tasted bacon like that. We had bacon the next morning and it was [inaudible]. Bacon the next morning, and it was thick sliced, and it was bacon, no fat hardly on it, it was lean. Then my mother and my grandmother, they were churning butter. I watched them do that. Then I watched them make lye soap. That's what you washed with. If you didn't have lye soap, you didn't wash. That wouldn't have bothered me, no. Like that time I tried to get into school and was turned down. Then I had relations in Hill City, South Dakota. I had relations in Mitchell, South Dakota. They just migrated all over the place. I had a great uncle that was a colonel in the Civil War. I should have got closer to Mom and got into all this stuff at the time. She had a spinning wheel. She'd talk about that stuff, spinning yarn. Pretty interesting.
GRANT: When you say your mom was a "rebel," can you elaborate on that?
BEAVIS: Well, she was born in Virginia. That's rebel country. Confederate. You know, I never did really get close to Mom on that, but they must have had something like a plantation. They had slaves, I know that, because they took one of them and hung him up from a well and was gonna drop him down it. So, they were in that era when slavery was going good. I really can't remember a heck of a lot about that. I went back there in 1946. In fact, I hitchhiked back there. I stayed with them in Rapid City. They'd moved in. They were old, then. I moved in with them. Stayed there for a few months, then I got tired. I said, "I'm going to go back to Butte, back to Walkerville." He said, "Well, what are you going to do?" I said, "I'm gonna go mine, underground." He said, "My God, Albert. Don't you know that you'll be underground long enough after you're dead?" He tried to make that a point. We still got people buried back there in Nemo, but as far as it goes with the Confederacy, you know, I never really got into that. It was tough times and we weren't interested in that stuff. We were trying to look and see where the next meal was coming from. And it did come, because Matt Shelby, my brother-in-law, gave me a .22. I was still in grade school.
The Badger Mine over the hill, it was going full blast. I used to go over there, and when the men went down the mine, and the timekeeper went inside, then the rabbits were running around. Brown ones, pretty ones with pink eyes. I'd bring a rabbit or two home. That would be the meals. If you didn't have that rabbit, sometimes, there wouldn't be a meal. I helped out a little bit.
GRANT: You said your dad was mining in South Dakota? Is that what you said?
BEAVIS: Yeah, he was at Homestake.
GRANT: And so what is that mine?
BEAVIS: Homestake. Homestake Mining. Gold. What is it? Homestake Gold Mining Company.
GRANT: It's gold?
BEAVIS: Yeah.
GRANT: Is it underground, or?
BEAVIS: Yes, it is. Lot deeper than Butte.
GRANT: Oh.
BEAVIS: Before they shut down, he was a guy that got run out of there by Poker Jane.
GRANT: Really?
BEAVIS: I think that was her name. Yeah. No. She didn't. She run him out of the saloon. That was it. What the hell was her name? Anyway. He got run out of South Dakota and he come to Butte. The way I heard it, anyways, they took some carbide and mixed some water with it at a lake, and it became an explosive, and that's how they caught fish. Unbeknown to them, there was a game warden around there, so. That's what [inaudible] does. There used to be an old joke about carbide. He'll give you a can of carbide and all the water you can drink. I wouldn't went back to South Dakota if it wouldn't been for Toby getting killed down at the Dream. We wouldn't have gone back there.
GRANT: And how old were you when that happened?
BEAVIS: I was four. I can remember that because we were down on Toboggan Street, and it must have been just before he got killed. Because I can remember riding on his back. You know how you ride on your brothers? He was down on all fours and I was on his back, and he was riding me around the kitchen. I fell off. Mom scolded Toby. It wasn't very long after that that Toby got killed because Mom went crazy. She just couldn't take it. And that's why we ended up in South Dakota for a while. But Dad was going to go back there to do some ranching. A foreman. No way. He headed back for Butte. We come back in the Overland. That would have been in 1936, because in '37, I started school.
GRANT: What makes you say that your dad strict?
BEAVIS: My dad was strict. He was from the old country. He wore a white shirt every day of his life. And suit pants. He was well-dressed, for a miner. But he was from the old country and he had one of them Cousin Jack hats, you know, that you wore down on the street. I was down there with Mom. We went down to Butte one time. The men always walked in front of the women. The women walked in back. They're getting over that today. The man is starting to walk in the back. But anyway, he tipped his hat. "Good evening." He was strict. But he was a good guy. He was fair. In fact, he bought me a BB gun one time. I thought that was pretty damn good. I got a BB gun. I went out and they used to have these old arc lights that had the big round lights in them, and hung from a pole, and I'd take that BB gun out there and shoot that light out. He told me, "Al, if you go out there and shoot another one of them lights out, I'm going to break that BB gun over the rock. It's going to be gone."
So, the power company came out and put another light in, and I went out that night, and shot it out. That was the end of the BB gun.
GRANT: He did break it?
BEAVIS: He did break it. [Inaudible] was a friend of mine, he had one of them flyers, a sled that you get behind and push it and steer it like this. He was coming down Toboggan, and I was out on the porch, and ride past me on that sled and I had my BB gun. He's bent over, you know? Hey, temptation. So I let go with the pellets. And he let go. We used to have a wooden toboggan, and that's what we used to come down Toboggan Street on it, because there wasn't even car. You'd go climb to the top and [inaudible] and some big guy'd be steering it, you know, and ten or twelve of us would be behind him, and we'd ride all the way down the Main Street, and then we'd push it back up to the top of Toboggan. None of this plastic stuff.
GRANT: Where did your dad work here in Butte?
BEAVIS: Underground.
GRANT: At various mines?
BEAVIS: Yeah. So many mines, like the Mountain Con, the Lexington, The Belmont, the Badger, the Stewart, Anselmo, most of them were more or less compacted together. Then you had outlaying mines like the Orphan Girl and Orphan Boy and that. He usually spent most of his time in this vicinity. You're close to home, you know, you'd walk. When I started in the mines, that's what I did. I walked. Everybody walked. Better than fighting at a parking place. If the car made it in the first place. He give me that car. What was I, eight, nine? He said, "When I'm gone, Al, you can have that Overland." We had a gas station in Walkerville, then.
GRANT: And where was that?
BEAVIS: You know Manza's Groceries? It was directly south of that in the middle of that roadway. You see, that isn't Main Street. It was right there and had one of those round things, and you could look up at it and it filled, gravity-fed, and you'd fill your gas tank that way. We had a hamburger [inaudible] and we had seven saloons. I made it to all of them, too. I got thrown out of them. Not old enough, you know. I don't know, that gets me to about twelve.
GRANT: And what was your dad's name?
[00:36:51]
BEAVIS: Stewart Seaford Beavis. The opposite of Butthead. You'd never forget it. That's what I'd tell, if I order something, go on the internet, they say "What's your name?" and I say, "It's the opposite of Butthead, you won't forget it." That's a laugh, you know. In fact, my daughter-in-law, she was from Maryland, and she went back east when Butthead became popular, and approached the producer of that, and read him off. She asked him, "Why did you ever call him Beavis anyway?" We had relations back there but there wasn't very many Beavis. Dad's brother was located back there somewhere. He said, "Because I knew this Beavis and he was really a card." That's how we come about Beavis.
GRANT: And you said you were four or five when Toby died.
BEAVIS: Toby died when I was four.
GRANT: That changed both your parents. Your dad started drinking then.
BEAVIS: Heavy.
GRANT: How did your mom change?
BEAVIS: She just changed. She wasn't happy and jovial anymore. In fact, she took the clothes that he got killed in and put them in a steamer trunk. And it was still there when she turned 94. And Dad died in 1942. That's when I was 11.
GRANT: How did he die?
BEAVIS: He died over at the Bella Diamond. I don't know if he had a heart attack or something. He had my dog, Nigger, with him. The dog came home. He didn't. He told me one thing. He must have known something was going to happen that night because mom had a good friend, Sarah Woodthorpe, and Dad was working graveyard. So Mom had cooked a big dinner. She put a big ham and homemade biscuits and cocoa and real butter and potatoes and whatever went with it. Dad come home from all over the street, and he sat down to eat, and I had a cup of cocoa and a biscuit with some ham on it. I never forget that stuff. So then I went in and he said, "You better get to bed." He tells you to go to bed, you went to bed. He never beat us or nothing. Just stern. You knew he wanted you to do this, and now. So you went in and put your pajamas on and you went to bed. Then, he came in the bedroom and I was laying there and he said, "Well, I'm heading out to work." I said, "Well, bye, Dad." He said, "Al, it ain't goodbye. It's just so long." I never did forget that. The next morning, when I looked out the kitchen window, east, toward the Bella Diamond, the dog came down but he never. You don't forget stuff like that. It stays with you. You learning anything?
GRANT: Absolutely.
BEAVIS: You'll write a book. You should. No. Nah.
[00:40:24]
GRANT: So, 1942. Was that the same year, you said, that one of your brothers joined the Marines?
BEAVIS: Yeah, Reg.
GRANT: Same year your dad died?
BEAVIS: Yeah.
GRANT: And so, where did he end up going?
BEAVIS: Well, he was in four major battles. They give you a little star, up here. He was in four major battles. He was in Guadalcanal. He was in Iwo Jima. That's where the end came to the third Marine Corps, was in Iwo Jima. He was in that battle. Guadalcanal, and a couple of others, I don't know what they were. Heat of the war, because he went in right after Pearl Harbor. He went into boot camp and they sent a picture of him home in his platoon, and he earned his boot camp eye was [inaudible.] I always wanted that picture. I don't know what the heck happened to that. He did the four years. When he came back, he ended up in China, when the Communism was [inaudible] in China. That must have been '45 or right after the war, I guess. But he ended up over there, and they wanted him to re-up, and he said, "If you leave me in China, I'll re-up." They said, "No." They didn't, so he came back and he went down to Parris Island where there was training camp, and he was buck sergeant and he was training the Marines. He did that, he got out, and he came home. Probably wishes he didn't because there was a woman from Flushing, Long Island chasing him around. He didn't want to get married, but he did. That shows you them women. They don't walk behind you.
GRANT: Did you ever talk about the war with him?
BEAVIS: Wouldn't talk.
GRANT: Wouldn't talk about it.
BEAVIS: No. He seen some awful stuff, though. He was in the mortars. He was in that. He was -- that beach, I don't know, three or four times, he was in an invasion. But I can't remember the other two. Guatemala. Or, not -- that's where I was at. Guadalcanal. I can't remember the other two. Four stars, he had. We had one hanging in the doorway. Blue, red, white, and blue with a gold star on it, showing that you had somebody from your family in the Second World War.
GRANT: Did you ever watch news reels at the Dream Theater?
BEAVIS: All the time.
GRANT: Okay. Were you worried about him?
BEAVIS: Warner Brothers. That lion that barked. [Roars.] Then he come running and they tell you the news. Intermission. That's when you went and got your popcorn or you came home, if you's at a matinee. You could run home and get a roast beef sandwich. I did lots of that. Then run back.
GRANT: Yeah. Were you ever worried about him?
BEAVIS: All the time. Mom was really worried about him. He did help Mom out when he went in. He send an allotment home. I think it was whatever he could send. Mom, when Dad died, she was on social security. That helped out. They give you all of ten dollars a month.
GRANT: When he returned home, did he mine, or?
BEAVIS: Reg? He didn't mine. He didn't want to be a miner like his stupid brother. He worked on top. He was a topman. All the time. He was active in the union. He went through all the chairs in the union. He was the last person laid off at ARCO, for the Butte Miners Union. He was the oldest one on there, when he got laid off. He was a janitor, then. There wasn't anybody else around to represent. He told me, he came off of that cage and he said "Al, you better not be doing that contract mining. You got to get out of there and get a day's pay job." I didn't pay no attention to him. I was doing my own thing.
GRANT: And your other siblings, you said there's eight of you?
BEAVIS: Yeah. There was Ruby, Reggie, Eileen, Toby, me, Frank, my brother, and Bonnie. That's seven. And she lost one in childbirth. They have big families around here. McEwans had 17. Lito up here, he was trying to beat McEwan. He never caught up. Fred wouldn't put away with that. He'd nave another one. There's some big families.
GRANT: Should we take a break?
BEAVIS: Don't bother me.
GRANT: Okay, yeah.
BEAVIS: We'll get you a cup of coffee.
GRANT: Okay, sounds good.
BEAVIS: Come on. Sugar and cream?
GRANT: Sure, if you don't mind. Yeah, why not.
BEAVIS: Why not.
[Here, some small talk while Al makes coffee.]
[00:48:04]
GRANT: We were talking, before our break, about your siblings. I kind of wanted to go down each one. Could we talk about each sibling? Maybe starting with Frank, who is still alive? Your brother who lives here, too?
BEAVIS: Yeah.
GRANT: Okay, so he is younger than you?
BEAVIS: Yeah, he's 84.
GRANT: And, when you guys were growing up, did he go to the same schools, grew up in Walkerville?
BEAVIS: Yeah. He graduated from the Blaine, too. He went to Butte High. Then he went to work in the mines. He went to work at the Diamond Driller. In fact, last year I just bought four bricks at the monument. I bought one for my dad, one for my older brother, one for myself, and one for Frank. And then I put on two of them, on mine and my dad's, I put "Contract Miner." I could put a hell of a lot of stuff on there. You know, management and everything, but that's what I liked. So I put down "Contract Miner" on us and on Reg, I put "President of the Miner's Union, Number One, Solidarity Forever." On Frank, I put "Diamond Drill." So we're all up there, on a brick.
GRANT: When we first started talking, you mentioned how the neighborhood used to be more cohesive.
BEAVIS: Yeah. Community, you know?
GRANT: Can you describe more of that?
BEAVIS: The neighborhood. Everybody knew everybody. A lot of people would help you out. Especially, when I was younger, and that was during the Second World War, and Jimmy Shea was mayor and Ralph Hawking was the sheriff of Walkerville. I'm walking down on Dunn Street, going the other direction than the house, and Jimmy Shea pulled over and says "Where are you going? You know the curfew just rang." I said, "I'm going home." He said, "You'd better, or you're going to jail." The jail is still down the city [inaudible.] Did you ever see it? It looks like it's out of the 1800s and Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. It's got a little hole you look out. It scared the death out of me, being that young. I headed home.
GRANT: What other families are up here that were close with your family?
BEAVIS: At that time, years back, we're talking about, there were some Marquieros. Robert, we got in a tough down there at the corner of Toboggan and Main, going to school. His brother Tommy was kind of ornery, but he was also more or less like on the [inaudible]. He liked classical music, played the piano, classical stuff. But he also went on to become the first doctor that did a kidney transplant. He was ornery enough to do it. He was. He did it, and people are still alive that he transplanted, you know, Marino. Marinos, they lived in Walkerville. The house is gone now. Tommy invited him up to Spokane, I think, and he fixed his kidney up for him. Took it out.
GRANT: Speaking of doctors, the doctor who was driving the car that killed your brother. What became of him?
BEAVIS: You know, I don't know. I'm only four years old. I didn't really get my memory until I turned five.
GRANT: You don't remember him going to jail?
BEAVIS: No, no. He may have.
GRANT: You said earlier there were seven bars in Walkerville?
BEAVIS: Yes, there were seven bars, and about the same number of grocery stores.
GRANT: Right. What were some of the other bars?
BEAVIS: There was the Hilltop. Right down where Manza's, that's the Friendly Tavern. It was called something different at that time. And then down from that was The American House. Across the street from that was Patroney's, and down farther, there was the Hitchin' Post, and then there was The Bulls, that was Shawnberg's, that's about seven, I think. And then there was Maudini's. That was during the bootleg, and that was down west of where I lived on Toboggan Street. And she used to make bootleg. A lot of the guys used to come off of work and they'd go down Maudini's and have a beer. She'd drink it out the barrel. Well, she got the barrel empty one time, and the guys looked in the barrel. What's in there? A dead cat. And that's the truth. That shut Maudini down for a little while. They went over the Hilltop, I guess.
My dad, he was from England, and they invented the pasty. The lunch bucket underground, at that time, was round like this here. There's two compartments in it where you could put your lunch and where you could put your drink. I don't know, let's see, I must have been about ten years old. I could go in the bar but I couldn't get served. I could get a bottle of beer to take home to my dad to take to work that night. So I'd go over and get his beer.
[00:54:46]
GRANT: And the grocery stores? I've only ever heard of Manza's.
BEAVIS: Oh no, there was this rock building that's on the corner? That was the mercantile, and that's where you could go in and try just about anything you wanted. Across the street from there was a 7-Eleven. Down a little bit farther there was Manza's. Oh, wait a minute, you gotta go back. There was Danny's, too. Danny's was across from the Hilltop Bar. So there was one, two, three there. And then you go down a little farther and there was two on Daly. One of them was -- I don't know if they were Serbian or what, something like that -- they had special stuff in there. Two women owned it. On the other side of town, down at the bottom, by where you go up to Dewey's point, there was, on the south side there, the house is still there, there was a little candy store. They served groceries and non-perishable stuff. But why would you want to walk way down there when you live up here. You go to Manza's. Frankie Manza was a great guy. He packed a lot of people during the Depression. Lost a lot of money.
GRANT: Oh.
BEAVIS: Never got paid back.
GRANT: Would he sell on credit?
BEAVIS: That's one mistake he made.
GRANT: Really.
BEAVIS: Yeah, but he was just that way. But they came from the old country, the dad and Angie Manza. She was the mother. There used to be a potbellied stove in the store and us kids, during the winter, we'd go down there and hang around the stove and talk to Angie, until the bus came. Then we'd go out and hook the bus. Take a free ride on the back. Then, I can remember the caretaker of the Mouton Reservoir out there, he used to come into town with a sleigh, pulled by horses. And he'd pick up his groceries and head back out. Wouldn't hook him. He's too slow with horses.
GRANT: How distinct were Butte and Walkerville? Were they really separate cities entirely?
BEAVIS: You take Butte, now. They were incorporated in 1890. 1889, pardon me. You know, I can't find out what happened. Walkerville was incorporated in 1890. A year apart. You know, I can't get the information. Gibson come out, one time, and he had a little bit of information that a bunch of women, the people that walk in the back, they were going to call it "The Rainbeau." The reason for that was because of the rainbow vein in the Alice Pit, here. But I can't find out why they incorporated. It was probably named because of the Walker brothers out of Salt Lake and that. Why it because incorporated, there must have been a feud going on between the Copper Kings or something. Either Butte wanted to pull away from the Hill or the Hill wanted to pull away from Butte. I'd say the Hill wanted to pull away from Butte.
GRANT: And so, as a kid from Walkerville, would you catch hell if you went to Butte? How different were the two towns?
BEAVIS: You know, there really wasn't that much difference. A thing I used to say: the kids in Centerville, they had stronger arms, because we threw rocks downhill and they had to throw them back up. There's a lot of that stuff. Everybody was a community. It was a neighborhood. It was strong. There was only certain people that they'd even allow to come in. Like the blacks? I can remember a little bit about guys talking about the Granite Mountain Mine Fire. I can visually see that stuff happening anyway. When we go through mining, I'll explain that stuff to you. In fact, there was some people that lost a man. The Mitchell's. They lost their father to the fire. Russel Rintilla, up here, he lives in that little house with the big equipment packed around it. I don't know if it was his uncle. He's on the stone up there. He was lost in the fire. That's pretty interesting. Underground mine fire.
GRANT: It is. Did you, as a kid, take trips to Butte? Did you shop at the department stores, or anything like that?
BEAVIS: Well, I used to go down with my mother, because she was a chambermaid. Richard Gibson, he had a piece in the paper not so long ago about the Butte Hotel. That was a big hotel. I can remember that thing. It was big. Mom was a chambermaid there. I go down, they had a big barroom in it. It was like the old time, turn-of-the-1900's. I walked in there one day and I was going to see mom. I went over by the bar. Here's this guy sitting at the bar. I'm just a kid, six, eight years old? I'm looking at that guy. He's sitting at that bar and he's got a shot glass in front of him here, full of whiskey. You'd think it was glued to the bar. He couldn't get it to his mouth. He couldn't get that glass up there. I don't know if he ever did.
GRANT: And you remember that? That image?
BEAVIS: I remember all that stuff. I can visually see that Butte Hotel. I was in it.
GRANT: Where was it?
BEAVIS: You know where Montana Power Building is at? Across the street from that parking lot? You know, there's bars all over. There's two hundred and something bars in Butte. Those bars. There's Cliffords, and all kinds of different bars. They were pretty well packed. There was a lot of people working. I can remember a lot of them.
GRANT: Would you ever walk down there by yourself, as a kid? Go past Centerville?
BEAVIS: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it wasn't like that. You might get in a fight, but, when you did get in a fight, you'd fight and it was over. You'd forget about it. Go about your business and fight somebody else, maybe next week, or something. I remember one time, I was going to school and this Leslie Jones, he was a big kid. I was in fifth of sixth grade. He used to put a head on me once in a while. He's big. When I was going home. So I told Mom, I said, "That Leslie is picking on me, all the time." She said, "I'll tell you what to do. You look around. If you find a big stick, you take that stick and go after him. If you find a rock, get that rock." So I was thinking about it one day. I went down to school and was coming out, and I had a rock right in my fist. I saved it. Les is coming out. He says, "Hey Beavis," like that. I said, "Yeah, Les, what?" He said "Come here." Bully. I went over to him, looking at him like that. He said "What have you got in your hand?" I said, "I ain't got nothing in my hand." He reached over to take my hand, and I let that go and that rock in my fist, and boom, right in his eye and blacked his eye. He's holding his eye like that, and I'm beating it for home. My oldest sister and Ethel Cuisick, they were in the Blaine at the time, they were in the seventh or eighth grade, and I was in about the fourth or something, I don't know, when I got Les. I said, "I can't go back to school, he'll really beat me this time." Eileen and Ethel said, "We'll walk you to school." And they did. And Les never bothered me again. Then it was over, you know. At night, that was over. It was a new dawn. I was either going to have a black eye or someone was going to have one.
[01:04:28]
They called them the "good old days."
GRANT: Is that how you think of it?
BEAVIS: Yeah. Yeah, it's better than it was today.
GRANT: Really.
BEAVIS: Yeah. Kids had to get out and let's say, grow up and become adults. Be responsible for your actions. If you look at the kids today, all kids are good. Not some are better than others. Just the way that they're made. Some got the good clay, some didn't, did they? I don't know. But it was different. You were in need. There were a lot of people on relief. I can remember one time, Red Cuisick, he became a counselor at Butte High. Beans [Inaudible] became the principal. Beans told his wife, "Them guys used to go to the Hilltop and drink." That's when we went to the service. He said, "I never drank." He was the biggest. I told him that at the Walkerville Centerville Days over at the Mountain Con last year. I said, "You told her that, Beans, eh?"
He used to raid gardens. I was a little guy and Reggie was about that tall and Ray Sullivan and the rest of them, well they pushed me over the top of the fence. I'd have to go in and get the carrots and hand it to them. They'd bring me back over the fence. Then we'd go. Halloween, we weren't really destructive. Everybody had an outdoor toilet. We'd dump a few of them over. We never would have tore anything apart. Well, nobody had anything anywhere to tear apart.
GRANT: Was that hard on your parents, being on relief?
BEAVIS: Was it hard?
GRANT: Did they feel bad about accepting it? Do you know what I mean? Was there any pride involved?
BEAVIS: Yeah. There was. You know. Some guys were still working in the mines, like Bernie [inaudible]. Most of the guys were out. If they got a job, it might be for a day or two. But a pair of Levi's only cost a couple of bucks. Three dollars. I don't know. It was just good. People got to know one another. You trusted them. You could trust them.
GRANT: You don't feel that you can, today? Trust your neighbors?
BEAVIS: What neighbors? I don't even know half of them anymore. I thought when I grew up in Walkerville, by the time I grew up, I'd know everyone in town. Now, I don't know anybody. They're all dead or... But you know, when you're going through adolescence, you want to be an adult. "When I get 18 years old, or 17... Wait until I get to be 21..." Then you wonder why the hell you ever wished to be 21, when you're 87.
You look at a guy when you were 40 years old. I was telling my brother the other day, I said "What do you think when you're looking at a guy that was your age, Frank? 84? And you were only 40."
And that's how they look at us today, probably. But Frank's still working. He works for the Forest Service.
GRANT: Really?
BEAVIS: Well, he can. He's my young brother.
GRANT: I'm just curious for my own reasons. The church building, when you were a kid, do you have memories of going there?
BEAVIS: Oh, yeah.
GRANT: Can you share some of those?
BEAVIS: Well, it was Sunday. It was 11:00 in the morning or something. We were young. They had a like a chaperone to take the young kids down into the basement. They had games down there that you would play. The adults would be up in the upper part. Then when you got older, you would naturally go to church. My mother was a Southern Methodist. That was the Methodist church. But I wasn't. When my grandson, Charlie, down at the Trinity -- no, the one in Centerville, the Mount Bethel. I'm 50. They were getting baptized, so I got baptized. Then, I was a Methodist. Then I turned around and I got married when I was in the service in 1951. I got married in the Lutheran church. Then, Bob O'Bill, he was a Catholic involved with The Lady of the Rockies. See, I called it "The Lady of the Rockies," I didn't call it "Our Lady." He said, "You want to go to a Cursillo?" He said, "Well, that's a retreat. It's when a bunch of guys get together and go to in there and sleep for two or three days. You have different sections where you go and talk about different things." Anyway, I'm a Methodist. So, I take that retreat. So, lo and behold, I'm given the talk on Our Lady. I'm a Methodist, and that's Catholic. I did the talk. It turned out alright.
GRANT: Back in the day, when you'd go into the church, how was it laid out?
BEAVIS: Well, right up stairs when you walk in the double doors, there, that's where they handed out the literature for the mass or the church. You walk into that, and on both side, there was pews. And then in the far west end, that's where the pulpit was at. Don't ask me the preacher's name, I don't know who he was.
GRANT: Well, I guess my final question for today, in terms of your upbringing, is about -- You know, the more I learn about Butte and Walkerville and the things I learn about that are gone, like that church, like all the markets, all the bars up here. Every time I learn about a place that I'll never be able to visit, it brings me sadness.
BEAVIS: Yes, it does.
GRANT: So, over the course of your life, the changes you've observed in Walkerville, does it make it sad? Is there any redeeming factor?
BEAVIS: Oh, yeah. I'm part of Walkerville. I'm born here. I'm the oldest living person that's been born here. There's nobody else around. They're all gone. Wilene Mullaney, she's older than me but she was born down at St. James.
GRANT: All the way in Butte.
BEAVIS: Yeah, and she brags about it. Anyway. Yeah, it's tragic, some of the things that you go through. Like I was telling you, Dad comes into the bed, and say's "It ain't goodbye, it's so long." You know, drinking. Oh, he drank. He was a good man. He could have gone to work for [inaudible] but the bottle got him. He was 51 years old when he died. The doctor told me, he said -- they called him "Shorty," -- he said, "Shorty, you'll live to be 100 if you quit drinking." Well. Who wants to live to be 100? You think about that. Different things. Things that's happened in the family. Split up. Dad ornery, but he never hit nobody, just ornery. In fact, see how old was I, then? Well, I was in grade school anyway. But Walkerville used to have a firemen's picnic. They used to have it out at the Lowlands. My dad was quite a rock worker, building rock walls and fancy stuff like that around the house down there. He built this cold storage unit, sunk into the ground, and a little door on it. You didn't have no refrigerator. You had the iceman bring you a big pack of ice. We went to that picnic and he got drunk. Damn good and drunk. When got home, the next day, he was laying on the couch, sobering up. I'm not very old, because he died when I was 11, so I had to be young. I said, "How do you feel?" I went out in that outside storage. And when I was out in the lowlands at the picnic, I got a quart of beer. And I brought that home and put it in that cold storage. When I see he was so sick, I went out and got that beer and brought it to him. And here's a kid, eight, nine years old, bartending, whatever you want to call it. But you felt sorry for him. I guess.
GRANT: And he drank it?
BEAVIS: You bet. Wouldn't you, if you had a hangover?
[01:16:06]
GRANT: Do you remember, did he have a favorite drink?
BEAVIS: Whiskey.
GRANT: Just neat? No ice or anything? Neat whiskey, straight?
BEAVIS: Straight. Straight as you can get it out of the bottle. Unless you went to Maudini's. Yeah, and he'd work, but he'd take his whole check. He'd pass it over the bar and then Mom wouldn't have any money. I can remember when she saved up the nickels and dimes that she could get and hid it. He found it. He knew the secret of the hiding places. He'd take it and spend it. A lot of guys did that then. I don't know. I don't know if I would have or not. I got too damn sick when I was drinking. I drank wine one time when I was sixteen, running with Jimmy Arnoldi, he was an Italian.
His dad used to make that [inaudible] red. Then he'd put it in his dirt basement down the house. He lived on First Street, down there. Jimmy'd go in the house and he'd get a gallon of that. Then he'd reach under the mattress and that's where the dad's bank was at, and he'd take twenty dollars or whatever, one bill. Then we'd go to town. I had a girl down there on Dewey Boulevard. I drank that wine. I went over her house. I was singing under her window. I'm sick. But I wasn't too bad then, so I went and caught the bus. The bus come across Dewey and I got on the bus and it's heading for Walkerville and Mrs. Cuisick is sitting in front of me, two seats in front. I'm sitting back there and I'm getting sick. [Inaudible.] I missed Mrs. Cuisick but if I was two seats ahead, I would have got her. I got home and my mother, I'll tell you, I was so damn sick for a week, I think, from that stuff. It tore me apart. I wasn't as tough as I thought I was. [Inaudible] red. But I can remember singing under the girl's window and she didn't come out.
GRANT: Oh, really?
BEAVIS: In fact, she wrote me, years later. Years later. We were adults and I was married and had five kids. She said, "How are you doing, Al?" She was probably a decrepit old lady, like I was an old man. All kinds of stories.
GRANT: That's a good one. Do you remember what you were singing?
BEAVIS: No. Something that she liked, I guess. Maybe it was "Home on the Range." I don't know.
GRANT: When you were a teenager, where would you go to meet girls? Like, how would you meet her, living all the way down there?
BEAVIS: How did I meet her? That was Shirley. Probably at Columbia Gardens.
GRANT: Okay.
BEAVIS: Or at Kick the Can, maybe. You know, you met a lot of girls playing Kick the Can and Hide and Seek.
GRANT: Really?
BEAVIS: Yeah, that was quite an adventure.
GRANT: Because you'd have to go down to their neighborhood?
BEAVIS: For Hide and Seek?
GRANT: Yeah, or to meet them, you know.
BEAVIS: Yeah. But you and your girlfriend, you might hide out in Hide and Seek. "Olly olly oxen free." That was it. You'd run for the telephone pole. I can't remember some of the games. Post Office. You'd go to a birthday party or something and play Post Office and drop the pin in the bottle. Somebody'd give you a balloon but you had to blow it up.
GRANT: What was Post Office?
BEAVIS: Well. Who was the post mistress, in the closet? I can't really remember, but it was just a game. A fun game.
GRANT: And the Gardens, did you go there a lot?
BEAVIS: Yeah. Every Thursday was free Gardens. A bus would take you up there and dump you off and then it would bring you back.
GRANT: Was it closed in the winter?
BEAVIS: Yeah.
GRANT: Just closed.
BEAVIS: Yeah. Because that's how it was. Games. They had them big hot houses up there for [inaudible] used to take care of fires and stuff like that. In fact, I was one responsible for taking the Gardens out.
GRANT: What do you mean?
BEAVIS: I was in management at the time, when went over there to mine.
GRANT: Yeah.
BEAVIS: Wasn't my idea. It was Hannifin's idea, you know.
GRANT: Who is Hannifin?
BEAVIS: He was the General Manager of the Anaconda Company at that time. There was a lot of them.
GRANT: Who started the fire?
BEAVIS: I don't know. Beech lived out there. I know it wasn't him. That fire. The pavilion, when I was in the eighth grade. You had a prom. I was in the Blaine. Lois Pathousen. She was shorter than me. We were going to make a couple. Well, I didn't know how to dance, so I had to go on Park Street and go to Bishop's School of Dancing to learn the Two-Step. So I learned to Two-Step. I took Lois the prom. It was pretty good.
GRANT: Can you describe the pavilion?
BEAVIS: Well, yeah. It was huge. Big dance hall that had some major bands come in there. Tom Dorsey. Lawrence Welk, he never showed up. He's still in North Dakota. It was a big outfit. It was a big place. It had a big rotunda on it and all kinds of different stuff and it wasn't too far from the main part of the Gardens with the rollercoaster and the hobby horses and the airplanes and all them. Right in that specific area. It was pretty neat. Got a lot of grass and a lot of flowers. Tons of flowers. Tons and tons of flowers. Because they had people from the mines out there working, taking care of all that stuff. But I went in there when they were mining it, getting it ready to mine, and the pavilion was a mess then. The roof is all leaking and the floors were partially gone and this and that. I was up there and I had to go up there, I wanted to look for something, one evening, before the shift change. So, I went up there, parked the pickup, and went into the lower area of it. The door was half open. Kind of dark in there. You hear the water drip. Drip. Drip. I had a funny feeling. I got into that door and I turned around and here's a guy behind me.
Well, you know how that went. Anyway, he had a metal detector with him. He was looking for money. I told him, "You get out! Get out! Get out! Get out of here!" I went that way, and he got the heck out.
Yeah, it was quite a place. You had a lot going on. Baseball was a big thing up there. A lot of people used to congregate up there. Families. They had a big place for picnics up in the back and [inaudible] I don't know how many people would get up there, just from different neighborhoods, and just have a heck of a time.
GRANT: Was it the open air trolley? Was it the trolley car you took out there?
BEAVIS: No, no. You mean that brought you back to town?
GRANT: Yeah. On Thursdays, I thought it was a trolley line that went.
BEAVIS: That's before I was up there.
GRANT: Okay, yeah.
BEAVIS: Yeah, we had a bus with four rubber tires on it.
GRANT: Okay. Alright. That makes sense.
BEAVIS: It took you up there, didn't charge you nothing, then brought you back. It was a big day for the kids. They didn't have any of these smart phones. There was a lot of differences. Technology today. Industrial Revolution.
GRANT: Well, all that mining made it possible.
[01:26:54]
BEAVIS: Yeah.
GRANT: You said you like to read. Have you ever read that Richard K. O'Malley book Mile High, Mile Deep?
BEAVIS: I've read that. Because I was a mile high and a mile deep. I went down to the bottom of the Con, which is 5,300 feet. Not -- what's a mile? 5,276 or something?
GRANT: That book, he describes growing up in Butte in the '20s. But it doesn't sound that different from you growing up in the '30s and '40s.
BEAVIS: So, it's similar to what I'm talking about?
GRANT: It is. Getting in fights. The Gardens.
BEAVIS: Yeah. There's a lot of other things. You can't remember all of it. It starts coming back to you when you start talking about it and discussing things and as you start discussing it, it will highlight, and you'd pick up on it.
GRANT: After WWII, when you were becoming a teenager, was food less scarce around the house?
BEAVIS: Well, it wasn't a bumper crop, that's for sure. You mean after the war, '46, '47. Let's see, I was getting a little bit old then, I started in the mines in '47.
GRANT: Oh, really?
BEAVIS: So. That's going to be interesting, talking about that. When we go underground. You're going to really get a kick out of that, because there's some real stories there.
GRANT: Well, I'd like to come back and do that.
BEAVIS: I want you to come back. I want to finish it. I wanna bring you back to 1980. And I want to bring you forward to today. Now that's one man's opinion.
GRANT: Sure.
BEAVIS: I've studied it so much. I'm a mining engineer, I'm a geologist, I'm a metallurgist, I'm a jack of all trades. I'm a carpenter. I'm a plumber. You name it. Because you did it all, underground. I was thinking about it the other day. People get claustrophobic underground, and I did once, in a cave-in. But when you think about it, and you get on that cage, your first day in the mine, and he rings you two, one. And that means come down one deck. There's four decks there that load men. So he loads you one. You can look out on the sheets. That'd be the elevation of the surface, there. You can just about peek out. You can see the daylight. Then, he rings you one, two, one, and he loads you down another deck. Then, you can still see a little bit. But when you get [inaudible] at the top deck, that's four times, then you're in the dark. Well, then he rings two, one, and two. Clear. And away you go. 4,500 feet, straight down, vertically, in a cage that will hold seven people, and the guides are made of wood, and so's the shaft. It's going to boom, boom, boom, and you're bouncing all over because of goddamn wood ain't -- you know, wood wears out. Lots of times, I'd get on the bottom deck before they had the solid deck on the bottom, and you could look down, and you could see the station lights. Boom. Boom. Boom. Every hundred feet. Going down. But then you'd get off at 4,500 feet, so what? You're 4,500 feet underground. Does that tell you anything? That's what we got to get into, that stuff. Then we'll get into some of the working places. We'll get into fire. I was in fires. We'll get into caves. I was caved in three times. Went to the hospital once. I know there ain't nobody living, wasn't anybody living when I was in the mines that knew the mining that I knew. How to mine in a [inaudible] that was completely caved and sand-filled. And how you do that, how do you mine that [inaudible]. I loved it. I just loved it. It was part of me. I was meant to be there. I wasn't like the regular miner. I went down to make a living, but I had to know what's happening. What goes on here. Why do we do this and why do we do that? That's probably why I ended up in top management. Never finished high school. I ain't going back to that goddamn school.
[01:32:43]
I told her I wasn't going.
GRANT: Your mom.
BEAVIS: We'll get into when I got my first rustling card. To go underground. How many times I had to go back to the rustling card office to get it because I looked like I was about twelve years old. I did. I only weighed about 115 pounds. I had to weigh 120 to get in the Service. Damned near didn't make it. I wish I wouldn't have. That's what I told Mom. "You still got them mine boots?"
GRANT: Well, good, and then we also have to cover your political career, so to say.
BEAVIS: Oh yeah, I did quite a bit there. I went to different schools. I went to like Queens University and presented a paper at the Tenth Canadian [Inaudible] Symposium on drilling and blasting techniques in the Berkeley Pit. So I learned.
GRANT: I'd love to talk, too, about your involvement with the Lady of the Rockies.
BEAVIS: That's a book.
GRANT: That's a whole other deal.
BEAVIS: If I was you, I'd make it another deal, because you could write a book. People wanted me to write a book about it. Some of the stuff you'll wonder about that happened. Like, people will try to turn it into a miracle. When I was executive director of the Lady of the Rockies and we had the church, St. Mary's Church on Main Street. Well, these women that were in the gift shop, they were religious. Some, fanatics. So they'd come out and they'd say "I think I seen something up on that mountain. I think it's a miracle."
I was putting a newsletter out, quarterly, and I even wrote it. Got it published and that. I got tired of hearing that. So, I put in the paper there, "A Miracle." I said, "For those who don't know what a miracle is, that's like when you take a seed and put it in the ground and it comes out a radish." That changed a little bit.
GRANT: Well, good, then we'll have some other meetings here.
BEAVIS: Yeah, if I was you, I'd look at that as a separate deal. Because there's so many things to bring forward on that that's never been written. Nobody knows about. How things transpired, you know. Okay the statue goes up. 4:07 P.M. on December the 20th, 1985. Hey, that's just fine and all, good. It's standing up there, there's seven pieces of it, it's welded here and spot welded around it. But, what happens when you got to make sure it's secure up there? Velocity of winds. Wear and tear from sand and abrasive materials. You had to put a fence up there. John Shea, he was an ironworker. The bus would bring up the visitors. This little old lady is standing out there in front of the statue, looking up at it, and John's standing watching her, because there's no fence there. And she says, "Well, I can't get the whole picture in." He said, "Lady, if you step back another foot, you'll be shaking hands with her."
GRANT: Wow. Thank you for your time today.
BEAVIS: Are you through?
GRANT: Yeah. This has been great.
BEAVIS: God Almighty! It's twenty after eight!
GRANT: I know! That's good, isn't it? It flies. But I figure it will be good to do, like I say, a couple of sessions. Otherwise, it can be fatiguing for you.
BEAVIS: It don't bother me.
GRANT: Okay.
BEAVIS: It'll be fatiguing when I get a little older. I sleep. I've got oxygen at night. I've got that CPAP. My sleep last month, on an average, was 4.3 hours per night.
GRANT: Wow.
BEAVIS: My sleep from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, was 3.1. That's not much sleep. You see my eyes. I don't know if it's the cat or if it's just me. The cat, she hits you on the chest, she wants out that door. I sleep in the bed in that front room there. I don't sleep up the stairs in the main bedroom. So, I go to bed, he'll come at the bed at about ten o'clock. He's done his patrol of his area. He'll come in and go in the bathroom, jump up on the vanity, and I have to turn the water on so he can get a drink. Jesus. That's the truth. Then he gets down the sink. Once he gets through, then I can wash up, put my pajamas on, then I'll go to bed. He don't know if he was ready to go to bed. He might stay on the vanity for a little bit. But he jumps off and he comes in and then he jumps up in the chair there on the blanket and he stays there until I wake up in the morning. He's a good cat.
GRANT: Seems like it. Good companion.
BEAVIS: Yes, he is.
GRANT: Will tomorrow at the same time work for you?
BEAVIS: What's tomorrow?
GRANT: Saturday.
BEAVIS: I'd like to do it. I don't know why not. I go to the market in the morning.
GRANT: Yeah. I'll be there.
BEAVIS: I'll see you down there then. Your partner, what's his name, that was there with you?
GRANT: At the market? A guy named John Conlan.
BEAVIS: Conlan. They're from Butte?
GRANT: No. They're from Conlan.
BEAVIS: Yeah, I'll see you down there, anyway. I'd like to see that CTECH and get them going again. Environmental.
GRANT: I know a guy that's on their board, the vice president. A good guy named Dave Hutchins.
BEAVIS: Hutchins? The radio station, do you sell ads?
GRANT: We don't sell ads. No commercials.
BEAVIS: Well, how do you survive?
GRANT: Donations.
BEAVIS: Donations?
GRANT: Yeah. We're nonprofit.
BEAVIS: 501c3.
GRANT: Yeah. We do grants. The on-air fundraiser once a year.
BEAVIS: The incorporation papers for the Lady of the Rockies to make it a 501c3, I wrote them.
GRANT: Okay, yeah.
BEAVIS: I try to get an attorney do it. I even wrote for Judge Purcell, I even give him a recommendation to become a district judge. Jesus.
GRANT: Yeah. The paperwork. Yeah, if you're around tomorrow evening, I would come the same time.
BEAVIS: Yeah. Let's see. Well, I'll talk to you tomorrow at the market. I'll be down there for sure. But figure we'll do it anyway.
[01:40:54]
[More discussion of setting up a time.]
[END OF RECORDING]
*******************************************************************************
Transcript of the second interview:
Oral History Transcript of Al Beavis (Mining)
Interviewer: Clark Grant
Interview Date: November 25th, 2019
Location: Beavis Residence in Walkerville
Transcribed: October 2020-2021 by Jane Duffy
[00:00:01]
Al Beavis: I went to one of their meetings. Ed Randall was there and I got walked into the Court House and whose there walking toward that meeting and I didn’t know where the meeting was but Dave Palmer. And I didn’t know where the meeting was so I said “Dave, where the hell’s the meeting for the dogs down at the shelter?” He never looked at me, never said nothing because we don’t get along.
Clark Grant: Ok. (Laughs)
Al: So, I went there and got into the meeting and what I wanted to find out was a friend of mine over on the west side Bill Sill’s wife Laurel, she’s a lover of animals and works at the shelter on Sunday and Monday. (Do you want me to pull the blind? – Pulls blind closed. Thank you.) So they were interested in what was going on with the donations given by somebody in Helena, I can’t remember his name, but it was administered by Andersons. Anyways I went to that meeting and sat down; it was no meeting. there was no Board there, I don’t know what it was and I told them. But finely when the meeting was almost over, one of them looked at me and he said “You have something? Do you want to talk about something?” And I said, yeah, I have a few things that I wanted to talk about.
Clark: They shouldn’t have asked you.
Al: They shouldn’t have asked me is right! Because I want to find out about it, and I said you know you have $106,000 donation from people in Helena and I said that it was supposed to be specifically used for the animals and not go to the shelter or anything else, just to the animals. Pens and washers and dryers and anything that they need down at that shelter. I’m interested in that and I said it has been about two years now and I’d like to know what is going on. And that Ed Randall wouldn’t get up and say anything, but that John Moodry got up and said “Well, Al, we didn’t want to spend that money until we get the new shelter. Then we are going to buy the stuff to put in the shelter; move kennels and like that.” And is said that it was a good idea. But it has been two years now and I said where is the shelter; what’s happening with it? And the girl from Silver Bow said that Silver Bow was going to donate the land and we were going to use that for the shelter. I said fine, where’s the land at? And she said that “they hadn’t given it to us yet”
[00:02:55]
And I said well, where is it at? I said you haven’t got the land and you can’t build the shelter. And I said have you got the money to build the shelter. Have you budgeted for that? She said “Well, no. We are going to have a fundraiser.” I said, you are going to have a fundraiser? I said that you need $500,000 to build the shelter.
Clark: Woah, that much?
Al: I said that was a lot of money to raise for a fund. Have you started the fund yet? “Oh, no they said” “Well not yet!” Well, anyway, I kept going with that shit and you know they are getting burnt.
Clark: Yeah, they didn’t like that!
Al: So pretty soon they want to call the meeting to a close. So they said this and that and I got up and said well, you cut me short, but just remember one thing. When I walk out this door, this is only round one.
Clark: Round one…..oh no!
Al: So I got up the next morning and I thought God damn it, this has burnt me because I didn’t get any satisfaction out of them. So when they told me those funds, the funds were there in an interest bearing account? “Oh, yea they are” they said. So well, this was a Tuesday that I went to the meeting, so on Wednesday I got up and I thought I’m going down to the courthouse. So, I went down the courthouse and I went up to the second floor and I went in and talked to my friends in the treasury and then at the clerk and then I went over to the budget department. “Yes, could we help you?” Yes, I said, I want to look into the budget for the shelter. What I specifically want to look into is the $106,000 donation. “Well, we can check that for you.” And you know I done budgets. I was doing an $800 M budget for the pit, so I understand budgets. And I said what I want to do is look into the budget for just that and look into the line items that that are contained in the budget for the shelter. She brought out a piece of paper that had the donation on it, it said $106,000. Well, I thought you know - I said this is all fine, I said where’s the money at? You can put anything on paper. So, she said “Well.” I said you know open it up I want to see the line items and I want to see what you do with the budget for this shelter. Well, they don’t have one! So then I said well, I said it is in an interest bearing account somewhere. They told me that last night at the meeting and she said, “It is”. I said where is it at and she said “Well we take all that stuff and compile it and put it in the general fund.
Clark: Ok?
Al: You know what? I’m not saying what there. I said I don’t understand that. She said “Yea, that’s the way we work the Silver Bow budget.” We put them all in this ….
Clark: One account!
Al: So now, you’ve got all the god damn department who I guess are responsible for their departments for their departments have to say hey, … they all I guess when budget time comes… I got on that party line one day …. Usually, when I was doing a budget, I had five or six department heads underneath me. They would submit a budget to me and then we would have a planning on it and you know we would discuss the line items like capital items or labor or fringe benefits, whatever. It was all this just to see what the department was doing. Well, when she told me it all went into the general fund, I just shook my god damn head and I said I was used to budgeting. I said I was budgeting the price of a pound of copper. You know that is what I was looking at it $2.53 today. And you know you have to look at that because that is where everything comes out of, not a god damn general fund.
Clark: Everything’s in one pot.
Al: You’ve got to take a look at that Clark, and you take a look at the Butte Silver Bow and the budget. They can do whatever they want, they are not responsible for anything. You know, we need more money, we’ll go to the taxpayer and maybe we will get a grant and stuff like that. Well anyway, I got that one sheet of paper, and I went home. I got up Thursday morning and I still wasn’t satisfied. I’m not a traveler, you know, and I don’t feel like it. So, I put on my coat and went down to the budget office again.
Clark: And they are like here he comes!
Al: I went down there three times. And I let them know I was down there, and I went to the Clerk of the Court and the Treasury and I let them know what I was doing because I know quite a few people down there and pass it around. And then by the third meeting, I was so God damned disgusted I wasn’t getting what I wanted.
[00:08:57]
I knew what they were doing. But I got so damned disgusted that I didn’t know what they were trying to do because they didn’t know what they were doing. But maybe I was wrong, and you don’t need to have supplemental sheets and all that for a budget so you see what you got. You know what you are working against. Anyway, that day I went into Palmer’s office. And I said is Dave in and she said “yes he is. Would you like to see him?” and I said yes. And she said, “what’s your name?” and I said Al Beavis. He wouldn’t see me. And she went in, and he has got a big office and I’ve been in there before for a conference and such. And she walked in there and came out in no time at all and she says he’s in a conference now.
Clark: Oh, he’s not available.
Al: Now, anyway about a week later (you probably read it in the paper) Palmer, he was addressing the issue for the shelter, and they were looking to relocate it down in Parkland Avenue, Parkland View, I don’t know at that time.
Grant: Were they trying to relocate it in the Pole Plant site?
Al: That was their second one. Well, anyway they were looking to put on Parkway or something like that, with plenty of land for the animals to walk around, a nice place to build a shelter, just to let people know that he was interested in the shelter. Which he wasn’t. He wouldn’t have brought anything up if I hadn’t gone down there and got them going with. Anyway, that bypassed, and it just lately came out about the pole plant, and you know that’s a horrible mess. And it has been a mess for….I was down there, I knew the owner. Turk Oles, he owned the Pole Plant, and he was assistant foreman for the Belmont Mine, I worked for him. So, I knew all about the pole plant.
And I talked to people that were … one guy that was overseeing it for Butte Silver Bow – this is off the record and quite a few years ago - Well, his daughter was out over the garage over there, wanting to work the lathe, she’d done lathe’s and things like that, he was one of the chiefs down there and he said “I told them people”, he told me so it’s like second hand information like the impeachment. And he said “when I went through there the first time, now you gotta go back there and clean it up.” So, they left you up there just like they did with everyone.
Grant: Waste in place.
Al: So, what is Palmer trying to do? You know DEQ, they’re doing the work on the Pole Plant down there and they are watching it closely, so they see that all the contaminants and everything are cleaned up. And then they want to transfer it over to ARCO who wants to get out of it and get Butte Silver Bow responsible for it like a Consent Decree. Anyway, that would take it off his back. What he did in the meantime, before that come up, he got hold of the people in Helena that were administrators for the $106,000 and asked them if he could use that money as startup money for a shelter that is going to go down to the Pole Plant now. And it never will. Anyway, he got hold of them and asked them if it would be alright. And according to him they gave him to use that as seed money to start. Ok, now, he could do that if he could get that, it would be transferred over and be a help with the Consent Decree to get that out of ARCO’s hair, put it in Butte Silver Bow’s hair and you’d give it to the dog catcher. And that’s where I told this Julie (?) when I wrote her a note on email. I said well that’s what they are trying to do because they are not going to get any industrial business or nothing, they just not go. But if you can give it, I said they are trying to give it to the dogs.
[00:13:48]
Anyway, you know that them or him going over to those people and telling them that they needed the seed money, they can take that $106,000 and use it as seed money … that gives him cover if he has spilt (?) it.
Grant: Pause, Ooooh
Al: That’s what I’m mad at. But I don’t want to be involved. I’m too old and too f…ken tried to argue with them anymore. But that it just gets you mad that they’re out there. But you know Fritz Daly, I know Fritz real well we email back and forth.
Grant: I see your emails.
Al: Well, what it is, I’ve been against the creek. Well, not against the creek but against the location. And wet (?) comes out and then Elizabeth Erickson comes out and she comes out and draws a bunch of lines and bypasses this and goes this way and that way and I told Fritz, I told him I like to have a job like that where I get paid $50,000 just for drawing a line on a piece of paper. I never even read her article. I looked at the picture and that was enough for me. But that you know, and you get, I don’t know if you know him. Do you know Evan Barrett?
Grant: Oh yeah.
Al: And do you know Rick -
Grant: Foote?
Al: No. What’s his name, the other guy he was in the Small Business Administration. He use to own the shoe store down there, Norman’s.
Grant: Mick Ringsack?
Al: Ringsack, that’s him.
Grant: I’ve met him.
Al: I know him. But they come out with articles supporting it. I better quit talking, we’re not getting anything done.
Grant: No, that’s ok.
Al: You know and I’ll tell you why I’m against it. I’m against it from the first meeting. And I told Fritz, and you might have gotten it in the email, well I don’t know if you did or not. I told Fritz that the first meeting that was held behind the Civic Center; Ron Davis was the main speaker for it and there was a lot of people out there. And I said that after the meeting was over, I said I got hold of you and we had quite a discussion down there. And I said if you will remember I was against it, I was the only one down there against it. Now they’re still for it and I’m still against it.
Grant: Yeah.
Al: The reason I’m against it is, ah, it’s not a creek. And you know I can go back a long way just between you and I, I can go back a long ways and they are always talking about Yankee Doodle. There’s no water in Yankee Doodle; there was never enough water hardly to reach what they call Silver Bow Creek, the headwaters of the creek. It’s about dried up in the summer and the only water that was in it, they use to call it, old lady Ortonicer, she used to have a pig farm back there, I remember it, I was there. I’m saying you know, and she had enough water there to take care of the hogs. Well, the main water source for … you want to know where the water came from for the Yankee Doodle? I know where it came from, it was a good running stream at one time.
Grant: Well, Elk Park?
Al: No. I came from the underground. The 55 hundred gallons per minute? The High Ore Mine was the pumping station for the underground water. And all the water was collected on the 38 hundred. I’ve been through it. I drove a drift off of the damn thing called the Twilight Zone it was so hot. This will help you.
Grant: [Laughs] That’s cool.
Al: The water run under the track. The drift was seven by nine or whatever and there was a regular creek running under it. Well, when that water hit where it was going to be pumped to the surface it was called, it was a High Ore Mine, and we mucked it out on the last push back. But when the water came out the High Ore, it hit the surface and run over the god damn hill over there, down north of Meaderville, into what we called the copper tanks and I use to go out there and watch these old wore out miners taking the skim off of the old iron and old rails and that was the copper that was deposited on, you know, the iron. And they’d take that and clean it off and the water would run down behind Meaderville into Silver Bow Creek. Now it did that since 19 what? Or 18 maybe, or the early 1900.
Grant: Now, is this what they want to restore?
Al: This is the water that makes Silver Bow Creek - because there wasn’t any water. You’re the only one I’ve ever told this to.
[00:19:11]
Grant: Well, then maybe…
Al: I just wanted to get it off my bib.
Grant: It will break some people’s heart you know.
Al: Now, you’ll remember it. Anyway, it run from the High Ore and when it got to the surface and went down the side of the hill into what they called the copper tanks, and they were more or less open and the guys had brooms and shovels and they’d scrape the copper deposits from the copper sulphate, the acid, and it would go down and they’d collect that, and the water had to go somewhere. It couldn’t go to the tailings pond because there was no ph. There’s nothing there, there was still people living there and the water would flow down and into the headwaters of Silver Bow Creek.
Grant: And there wasn’t probably a fish in it.
Al: They had to make names for it. It was drown trout because it was sewer.
Grant: It was shit creek.
Al: It was shit creek, that was what they called it.
Grant: Me and my friend Daniel made a joke of it. Rather that Restore Our Creek, we said we should reshit the creek.
Al: Anyway, that’s only part of the story. Then when I was, I was more or less head of the pit that MR’s in now. I started it from the first shovel full …. but before that the Gardens were there. The water for the gardens, you remember that big water tank that they had down by the Belmont? That was the water tank for the gardens. But anyway, there was a creek up there up in the back and what we did was get the cat skinners up there (dozer operators) and we cut that water that was running down through the gardens off the east ridge like that and we cut that water around the perimeter where the pit was going to be. So that the water that was coming down there and instead of going straight down stream to First Street (that was the name of the street) and being collected and going down then at that time, if you go back a few years, and the water at that time flowed down into Silver Bow Creek. You can still see some of the remnants down at the guard station; see dome of the creek there. Ok, then, what happened.
Well, we controlled that water and we were going to dig that up, it was going to be test line of the pit when we got in that far. Well, when Washington comes to town in 1986, he started in the pit and it shut down for a little bit and the mining. What they did they went in and dug that creek out. Now, that’s clean water. It’s a pretty good head. And I remember going to the Gardens when I was a kid, we’d take a bus to the gardens and go through a foot bridge. So that water is lost forever. What it does now, is it runs into the bottom of the pit that they are mining, and it is pumped into the Berkley Pit.
Grant: Oh, wow.
Al: And it’s just the same, it’s just as high in acid as they call the Parrot Tailings. And I have concern about the Parrot Tailings. We’ve lost that water, now we don’t have a source for water. You probably read that article that I put in the paper about using fresh water running into their pipeline. It’s not what you put in the pipe but what comes out the other end. It’s like you say something, not what goes in but what comes out. But anyway, that’s just part of the story they’re going to shut down eventually.
Grant: MR?
Al: And it ain’t going to be very long. They’ve got thing that will shut them down or they will shut themselves down. But there is a hell of a future for Butte. And I know about it because I worked on it in the 60’s. Where are the headwaters? Where are you going to get the water?
Grant: Silver Lake.
Al: You don’t do that!
Grant: No. It doesn’t make any sense.
Al: You know if you’ve been to a third world country you know. And like that girl who is trying to raise money for Uganda, or whatever the hell it is. I’ve been there. I haven’t been there, but I’ve been where you had to put the community well and the people come with buckets to get the water and take it to their house in Guatemala. But you don’t do that.
Grant: It would be a waste, wouldn’t it?
Al: Oh, God yes. But that’s what I put in the paper. I said you’re telling me that you’re going to take water that’s 40 miles away, put it in a pipeline, pump it into Butte, Montana, down at Montana Street, and dump it into a contaminated creek?
Grant: Yeah, why?
Al: Send it down the Clark Fork. I said, hey, that’s got to be three to seven million gallons of water a day?
Grant: It’s a waste.
Al: But that’s a cover up. Then I questioned them a lot of times with MR. I remember very well; I’ve got a damn good memory for shit like that. I could remember that I posted it half a dozen times on Fritz’s email. And I said you know, when Washington come in, the county commissioners were up on the bank on that damn treatment pond that they’ve got up there. Thompson, Mort Thompson said, and I noted it, that when this water goes down the creek it will be as clean or cleaner than the Federal or state standards call for. I said what’s going on. Make ‘em stand by their word.
Grant: They gave them the waiver.
Al: Them damn commissioners turned it on just a few weeks age, two weeks ago, and said hey, you take it. We’ll give you Butte Silver Bows’ water. We’re allotted just so much up there.
Grant: They do anything that Jon Sesso tells them.
Al: Who?
Grant: Anything that Jon Sesso tells them to do it and they do it.
[00:26:01]
Al: That’s why I put his name in it too.
Grant: They call him John Says So.
Al: I did get a pretty good email from a guy on the committee, the Council of Commissioners on the last one that I voted on.
Grant: Oh, who was it?
Al: Ah, Strizic? Mike Strizic. His dad worked for me in the pit.
Grant: Really
Al: Yeah. I didn’t know that he was his dad until I asked him if he was related to Krush Strizic. Yeah, I think it was Krush Strizic.
Grant: Yeah, I’m trying to think. Don’t know. In my mind what Elizabeth Erickson was saying
Al: And what he was saying, I’m thinking too that I want what’s good for my kids and the community not if they’re doing the shit they are doing. You really can’t blame the commission cause they don’t know”
Grant: They’re ill informed.
Al: Yeah, they’re ill informed. And you take like you said Sesso, and a few of the hob knobs that are hob knobbing around. And he said another thing, he said that the committee for the Super Fund that is in it for Sesso’s part of it, he got a 50% salary from Silver Bow. Anyway, they come in and tell us if we don’t accept this deal, we’re going to get a worse deal. He’s not in there for that. He’s in there to represent the people, he works for the people. Anyway, you can go on and on.
Grant: Let me show you a picture real quick, I’ll hand you this. I have to show you on my phone.
Al: And I also wrote one time. I said you know the Superfund came to Butte, Montana is the one of the worse things that ever happened. And it is; what have they done? Guess I’ll keep quiet.
Grant: Heh, heh
Al: I’m so much trouble.
Grant: You’re called the troublemaker.
Al: That’s what I’m called.
Grant: I like to visit with you. Anyway, so here’s the roof on the church with all of the sheeting and our brick work.
Al: Wow, wow.
Grant: All the brick above the roof is what we did. And all these concrete caps that I poured are up there too and all that roofing material. There’s all the sheeting, and there’s another view looking west.
Al: Now what is this?
Grant: Plywood.
Al: Plywood, did you cover it?
Grant: It will be covered with a membrane.
Al: You haven’t put anything on it. Is it just raw plywood?
Grant: We tarped it for the winter and we put this rubber material on there called TPO. Let me show you this here real quick too. One second.
Al: It’s great.
Grant: Yeah, that
Al: And you guys have to be commended for that and I’ve lived here for a long, long time and I’ve never seen nothing like that.
Grant: Alright
Al: Anyway, I can’t remember anything like that happening in Silver Bow County.
Grant: Ha, like fixing a building?
Al: (Phone rings) Probably a telemarketer. Yeah, re-elect the President!
Grant: Oh, well. So here’s the basement, I wanted to show you this.
Al: I’ve been in that basement when that guy lived over there. In that basement is where we used to go when we went to church. Where the kids hung out.
Grant: Look at it now. So, there’s like a 12 ton pile of rubble and dirt here. This thing is like 6 feet tall and 25 feet long, this pile. And there we got the conveyor belt set up.
Al: Where did you get the conveyor belt?
Grant: We bought is off this guy in Whitehall. And Rodney put a motor on it and he got it running. Let’s see if I can play it.
Al: (Sound of machine running) Wow! And it’s running good.
Grant: Yeah, it’s a ¾ horse electric, so he’s down there shoveling. So, we got the whole thing cleared out. I’ll show you one more picture than we
Al: What are you going to do when you compile all this information? What are you going to do with it?
Grant: I’ll make a little book, a coffee table book or something. We’ll have some pictures on the wall. But anyway, there’s the basement now.
Al: Wow, it comes out, don’t it? Keep going. Every shovel you take out of there.
[00:31:16]
Grant: That’s right.
Al: Just like in the underground. When you start mucking around, pretty soon it’s gone. You’re ready to timber, you’re ready to do something.
Grant: Well, let’s talk about that Al. So, first again thanks for letting me come up and giving me the time here.
Al: Well, I’m glad you came up. Get some of this out I guess. It’s what’s you want.
Grant: This thing is best if you are right up on it.
Al: If you’re what?
Grant: If you’re right up on it. On top of it
Al: Ok.
Grant: If at any point you want to stop, just let me know.
Al: I’ll go with just what you want to talk about. You say it.
Grant: Ok. I’m going to put these on. Ok, this looks good over here. So, where we left off last time I was up here, we talked about your childhood, and we left off at where you were just getting ready to start working the mines. And so that is where I wanted to pick up and maybe we could start with your first day working in the mines.
Al: Well, that’s kind of interesting, the first day. You know, my first day goes back to when I first got my “rustling card”. That was on Granite Street at the time. What happened at that time was that I had to prove I was 18 years old. Now, that’s another story. That’s when I headed down the card office and John O’Brien was the guy that I met down there that was behind the counter and issue the cards. And he said to me “How old are you?” And I told him I was either 16 or 17. And he said “you’re not old enough to go to work in the underground and I thought well I was old enough and I had done a lot of stuff before I’d go underground. But anyway, I went down there about two weeks later, and I had a big coat on and a man’s hat on. I went in and I met the man again and John said, “weren’t you in last week?” Well, I said (lower voice), no I’ve never been in here before. And he said, “what do you want”. And I said I want to get a rustling card; I want to go to work. And he said “well, how old are you?”, and I said I’m 18. He said, “do you have any proof of your age?” I said yes, I do.
I’ve got a baptism certificate, of which I wasn’t baptized. In which I forged with ink eradicator on which my buddy gave me one. And so, I showed it to him and I think he knew I was lying, but he said “ok, are you sure you’re 18 years old”. And so, he said “we’ll set you up with a rustling card” and so he did and to go through a physical and training for the underground and anyway, I went up to the Mountain Con when I got that card and there was about 100 men rustlin. So, I got in the line and to make it short, I rustled 18 days and finely, Wise Use the foreman and Vic O’Leary who was the assistant foreman said, “we’ll put you to work”. And I said that great. And I was supposed to start the day shift the next day. I went home, told Mom, went to bed that night really feeling good because I was going down the Mountain Con the next days. So anyway, I got up and Mom cooked breakfast, bacon and eggs and potatoes and I put on my coat an grabbed my diggers. That was stuff that I needed to go underground, the clothing. Went over into the dry, that’s another story. A hundred or two hundred men changing at the same time, and anyway I went in and I changed my clothes and I went out to what they called the line-up room, that’s where all the supervisors were at to give you your daily chore; what you were going to be doing underground.
So, I met Joe Bazer, he was a boss from Deer Lodge, and I never forgot him. But anyway, he told me that to go down to the 4200 and he said on the station down there and I’ll meet you there an tell you what I want you to do. Well, I went out and like everyone else jumped into the cage, seven met to a cage, twenty-eight total for the four cages. So, when it got to the 4200 level I got off and waited at the station for John to come down. Well, John come down and he said “alright, grab that pick and shovel and follow me, we’re going in the drift here.” So I grab my pick and my shovel and I followed John into the drift and he said, he got me in there about, I don’t know but a long ways. And he said “I want you to dig a hitch across this drift here underneath the tracks and get clean up the sides real good and he said “we’re going to build a door here, a ventilation door” and I said that’s fine and I took my pick and shovel and I dug and I dug and I shoveled and shoveled and quitting time came and I, four o’clock, and I got my shovel and pick and hid it and went out to the station with the rest of the guys about two hundred of them and I jumped on the cage and I went to the surface and reported off and took a shower with two or three hundred other guys.
[00:36:48]
Went home and told Mom I had a pretty good shift in and ate dinner and finally you’ve got to go to bed. So I went to bed and got up the next morning, went to work, reported to the time keeper and changed my clothes, put my lamp on and went out on the sheets and waited for the cage to come with the rest of the guys, got in the cage and went down to the 4200 and proceeded into the job and got in there and started using my shovel and pick and Joe come in and he said “hey, go get your time!” I said what do you mean go get your time. He said, “you’re fired, you’re through!” I said WHAT! So, anyway, that was it. So, he took me out to the station and got the cage and it was in the morning and I went in to shower and went back out and got in that hundred man line again, because you rustle at 12 o’clock. I finally got to the … Chuck Wise (?) and Vick O’Leary and he said “ we just hired you yesterday” and I said, yeah, Joe Bazer fired me this morning”. “Well, what did he fire you for?” And I said because I didn’t report on to him and they didn’t know where I was at!
If I was underground or if I was on the surface of if I stayed home. Anyway, they laughed about it; and by God he hired me back, and put me to work on what they call the fire field; especially away from Joe. And that’s where I proceeded to start my mining career, the day after I was fired, and I got hired back. That’s about the likes of the first day. Then when I got onto the fire field, I stayed for a couple of months, but I was overanxious, I went underground because I wanted to become a first class miner. I wanted to be the best in Butte; and that was a chore. But anyway, I went to work in the fire field for a couple of months and then I met a friend of mine, Jimmy Richards. He was stope’n at the time working on the south side of the 4100 for a boss on there, so I asked Jimmy, how about taking me for a partner? Sure, sure, I’ll take you. He did and I went to work in that stope and I stayed with Jim until I thought I had enough background, about three or four months and then I had to get out on my own. I wanted to do other things. I didn’t like stope’n and I wanted to become a miner, a real contract miner. That was what my dream was and so I did. And I got into some fixes at that time because I didn’t know what to do and it all panned out well and that started my career as a contract miner an I stayed a contract miner from that day on until I went into a supervisory position and then into the Berkley Pit.
[00:40:14]
Now, that’s the first day going into the first couple of months. Now, maybe we could go into the background of a miner and discuss just my feelings of what a miner really was and relate to some of the things that you had to know. Like a master of all trades but a master of none. But you don’t put the none in there because he had to be a master of a lot of things. When he completed, I was thinking about this morning when I was in bed. When a miner, you had a day’s paid miner and you had a contract miner and you had pipe men, and ditch diggers and motor men and repair men and all of them. And when those guys went home, especially the contract miner, those guys drove the drifts and did the raising. That’s what I did, drove the drifts and raised the raises.
You know I build everything in this house. Built this room, added an addition. Built all the cabinets, built the bathroom, built the bedroom, finished the upstairs; put a full bath up there. You know I did all that and I learned it by being a miner. That’s how you learn; that’s how I learned; it was through the mine. Because when you are in a position in the underground, you know you had to make some decisions and you had to plan because when you went home at night and you’re in a raise, you know it’s just you and your partner and when you set the round off for example, at quitting time you had to visually think what’s going to happen the next day. Did you get the butt blocks in tight, so you are not going to walk out and leave a timber so that you are not going to pick up a wreck the next day! Under you know, sixteen foot of ground above your head. You know stuff like that.
That you have them bored down yet. Are you going to be able to come in and the timbers aren’t going to be laying all over! So, you had to have a plan to be able to do this to be sure that the damn timber was blocked in good and the slide that was left after the blast and the bulkhead that was above that. And the grizzly that were up there, they were up in the shoot, because you knew what was going to happen if you lost that timber; it’s going to be a big wreck. And what happens then when you have that wreck; that’s the end of your contract for that week. If you got a good contract going for three or four days in the week, and you had a wreck in the drift or the raise, you couldn’t get your timber at the right time to put it in; something like that and you had a delay there, well that ate up your contract with the company. They didn’t, no forgiven. They took it back what they what they didn’t steal from you in the first place. You don’t measure …… I don’t know how you relate Clark to something like. So, I can relate it to you, talking to you. But I can’t, there are so many things. I think of the motor men, and you know he’s a day’s pay men.
But he has a hell of a job he’s has to do his duty. He has to make sure the rock is pulled, and the timbers are in and the tracks ok and that stuff so you can travel over it. And then you look at the ditch digger. He had a specific job to do that was important. Every job underground was important. It’s like the pipe men. If you were in a raise or a drift and you were running a hundred foot of hose behind you, you’d lose the volume and the pressure, and you know your drill slows down. Somethings going to happen. He’s got to be there to bring that pipe forward into the head so it’s close enough that you get the full use of it. You know, a timber, there’s so many god damn things that’s related. The Butte miner, the way I see the Butte miner when I was working in the mines, the Butte miner could go anywhere in the country and work.
[00:45:10]
Anywhere. I went out on strike in some shutdowns and stuff like that and you can go anywhere and go to work. You could even go overseas you know because he was a master of what he did. It’s just the Butte miner. I worked with miners across the country and there is no comparison.
There’s just a big difference and you take a look at the Butte miner and the people today and you never see any fat miners, you never see them, they’re all fit and trim from the use of their body they get all the exercise they wanted. You know, climbing a ladder, or walking or putting in track, or pour’n down you’re active all the time. Like the motor men, he sat on the motor and threw the switch. But he had to get off the motor and do other things. Always moving on off, going, pulling the shoot, string the shoots, he rocks the drums, all kinds of things. That’s just a motorman. But the contract miner, when he went in, well you blow con on the sheets on surface with the guys waiting to go underground, and then you get on the jack and somebody might be goosy on the deck and you jab him, you know how that goes, and then, once you got off that cage, like on the level you were work’n on the 4,200, that all stopped.
Clark: No more goofing around.
Al: Nothing. You know the guys that were going to work, you know in their working places. It was a stope, a raise, or a drift; the ditch digger, the motormen would get on their motor and there was no bull con, it was go to work guys. Now that’s how it was underground. I love the underground, I just loved it. I wouldn’t miss a shift unless Joe Bazer fired me. You know it’s just something that I wanted to do all my life. And I excelled in it. I got to be number one. And the way you got to be number one was you topped the board.
Clark: Tell me about the board.
Al: It was called Ouija board, it was called a measure board. It was called a hell of a lot worse than that when you looked at it. The measure men come down the mine on a Monday, a Monday morning. And he’d climb up in the raise and he’d measure the distance, the footage you broke the prior week. And the timber you put in and the butt locks and everything you’d think of that you’d get payed for toward the contract. Then on Tuesday, you came out of the mine on Tuesday night it was all posted on the board, the measure board, outside the office to see what you made. And if it didn’t come out right, you’d go in and bitch at the boss and you’d give them a hard time. I topped that board week after week after week. I was just a little guy, and my partner wasn’t any bigger than me. Some of them were. I can remember, I’m not bragging, but I can remember my being at home when I was young, late 20’s early 30’s. When I had people come to the house to ask me to go to work with them. And that’s what I wanted to be; I wanted to be like that. And we did, in fact I was making money when my mother-in-law died, and I didn’t even go to her funeral because I didn’t want to miss a shift. So, I didn’t.
[00:49:35]
You know that’s, we were making damn good money. Double day’s pay is when you were making good money. And that’s what we went by. How do you relate all that on this?
Clark: Oh, you are doing well. Did you have an apprenticeship? Like a formal apprentice program? Did you just learn like …
Al: No, no apprenticeship program for miners. That’s what you do, learn by working and you are with somebody who is older than you an already did it. The main way to learn was you learn through doing the job. It’s like a mucking machine. You know it’s a number 12 Finley, they called it. Then they had the 21. And I had to have a 3-inch board or a 4 inch board on the steps so that you could reach up on the 21 and see what was when I’m mucking out the drift. You had to learn that. And how I did that is we were working in a raise in an afternoon shift, me and another young guy, and they had a three-man setup … involved us in the drift and the third guy he come out on graveyard shift and he’d take his mucker and that and he’d muck to the head and I did that for 17 months.
But anyway, he go in and he’d muck that out and he was one hell of a mucker. He left his mucker parked underneath the raise where we were working and I told Pots, he was my partner, I’m going down and get on that mucker. And I did and I made a mess of it and when that guy came in for the graveyard shift, he had to clean up. But I didn’t care, I was up the raise; he couldn’t take it out on me. But that’s how I learned, and I got pretty good on the mucking machine. Well, I had my young brother run the motor for me and I was in a drift and cutting out for a raise, something like that, I forget now. We mucked 50 cars, 3-ton grands one at a time. Take it to the dump station and take it back. Mac 50 was pretty good I got pretty good at that. Then there is just so much that you learn. You learn by doing, you don’t learn by somebody’s there that’s going to hold your hand and say “hey, here go and you do this, or you do that”. You learn by actually doing it.
There’s so much underground in Butte, Montana, what you had to be, to be a drift miner or raise miner, you didn’t have to be a stope miner because the ore was already blocked out. You had to know a little bit of geology. You know you are working on night shift and there is nobody telling you if the ore is good enough to be shipped as ore or d-ore, developmental ore or if it is actual waste material. So, you had to be able to look at it figure out that it would go for ore or waste or whatever. But you had to know how to timber. You know if you went into a drift; just started out with a set drift timber about a nine foot post, a 610 cap, and then like a 5 board girt And you had to know how to put that in and keep it on line, so that you were going in the right direction, naturally. And had to block it all in; it had to be blocked in tight because you are going to blast around it, right ahead of it, maybe 30 holes.
[00:53:47]
You had to gob it. You had to know how to keep that timber from losing it so you didn’t have to come in and muck it out of a muck pile so that you didn’t cut the contract back to where you’d be lucky if you made anything the following week. You had to know that you had to know everything.
You had to know if you had a pipe when you were on self-service; you had to know how to run the motor, you had to know how to swamp on it. You had to know how a switch is; how to put a switch in; put it on on lines that the engineering department came down and shot in. And if you are going to turn into a crosscut you know how to use a cross cutter, drive a land roller. Go up in a raise you had to follow the way you were going; or you could get off very easily. And if you didn’t know how to do it, you weren’t going to make any money. That’s for damn sure. I don’t know, I was raising kids at that time, and I had five kids and naturally I looked at the money because that’s what the name of the game was. That’s why you were contract.
But you know I really liked getting the job done. I liked being able to do it. So, I lost interest. I didn’t lose interest in the mine and money, but I always kept my interest in the mining end. I wanted to know everything there is to know about that underground mine. And I pretty well learned it. I spent a lot of time drift’n, driving drifts. I drove a brand-new main line on the 4500; that goes back to the 50’s, late 50’s. I told Suddy, John Suddy was a head honcho for the Mountain Con at the time. And I told him, I said John when I finish that drift, I’m out of the Mountain Con for good. I’m never going to work another shift here.
Clark: Why?
Al: It took two or three years to drive the drift and when it was done, I went up to the office I said Jack, I’m all through, just as old, and I’m outta here! He said, “wait a minute, where are you going to go?” I says right off I’m going to work for George Garrett up at the Badger, he’s got a good spot up there. “My God Al, you’re not going to go up to the Badger, you can’t even drive up there in the winter because of the depth of the snow”. He said, “It’s terrible!” I said John, that’s not a problem for me, I live up in Walkerville right across the hill I’ll walk to the Badger. He said “yeah, I think you are making a mistake, you know you’ve got real good air down here. You know that lateral you just finished you’ve got that cooler right outside where you finished and it’s going to be blowing cool air on you.” I said, John, I tell you what. When you talk about air, you go down to Safeway and tell them you’ve got good air.
Anyway, I did, I went to the Badger and worked in the drift up there, there was only two of us, one on each shift and we got driving the drift with what they called an under slinger. It was an old drifter on an air bar that had to be set up manually. And I worked in that drift on an opposite shift with a guy named Sig Kuopala. He is about the same size I am.
[00:57:48]
He was on one shift and I was on the other and we round in and out until we finished that drift. When you talk about round in and out, it’s when you go into the drift, you muck the drift out, you set up a machine, you put a ring of rock bolts around the top and the walls bar it down and you set up the drill with the air bar and you drill it out you load it and you shoot it. You do all that in a matter of six and a half hours. And it’s just you and the drift and I always tried to beat that guy on the other shift, and I never failed and I never did either. And when that drift was finished, Garrett was down to the Leonard, and I figured well I’m going to go down to the Leonard because they turned the Badger into a cave block system; and I didn’t want any part of that.
I worked in a cave block at the Kelley for a while and I didn’t enjoy it for one bit. But then I went down to the Kelley and drove a couple of raises and a drift down there then on day Roy called me into his office and said what do you think about going boss’n this was in 1962. I said I don’t know, I never thought much of it. He said well, we’ve got a boss’n position open. If you’d like to take it you can take a stab at it. I said I could try it. It was time I looked to settling down anyway, getting away from the miners. Anyway I went ahead to boss’n and said I was interesting things happened then I could line the guys up because I knew what had to be done in any working place there was in that mine. The Leonard was an old notorious mine to work in. It was very bad ground, it was hot, a lot of fire country and a lot of caves to pick up and just a lot of everything.
Anyway, I went down and took on the boss’n job and I had Ray Panisco was the opposite partner, he was the night shift and I was the day shift and we bent back and forth. And one day I was in the office and Roy came in and he was a hard-nosed mine foreman. And he come walking in the door in the morning about six thirty and he said the first thing that come out of his mouth was “good morning”. And he had snuff in his mouth, and you had a smile on your face and as soon as he closed the door the good morning shut off and the smile was gone. So, he come over to me and he said “you know that Panisco beat you on hauling rocks, didn’t he?” Well, that was all he had to say because it was not very long after that that I went into Roy’s office and said hey Roy, I happened to beat Panisco on the rock tally, didn’t I? We had a good relationship. He was a tough guy but I think he’s the best person I ever worked under in my life. He was, there was no bull with him, he’d get the job done. Hey, he was – in fact it wasn’t too long after that, maybe a couple of years, I was a shift boss, and it wasn’t too many years after that that there was a position at the Leonard for an underground assistant mine foreman. And it laid out at that time who was to get the position. Frank Gardner, graduate of the School of Mines, or Al Beavis, just a 17-year-old kid just started in the mines.
Well, I got it, and I think it was due to Roy because I understand I understood the mining and I worked for Frank in the pit, we were partners. But you know that made me feel pretty damn good. You know, to beat him out. Because for that he did too but I ain’t going to relate to that. We became real good friends after that. And during my time as an underground boss and mostly as the assistant foreman I was over bosses then, six or eight bosses under me in the beats. There was the chief assistant and there might have been another assistant at the time. But we had one thing that really sticks out in my mind on that, I never forgot about it.
[01:03:16]
I was in a couple of cave in’s. I had guys in there picking up bad ground. What it was it was fire country. One morning I went in, and I had the slime runners, and I can’t remember all their names. One was Slim Collins and Southerland and Mackie; and anyway they’re up in this raise top ‘in off the slime and this area is not a raise it’s a stope it’s been mined out and now they’re goin’ to pump some tailings from the concentrator which we called slime at that time underground they’re filling and they’re just topping it off and there’s a, we’re on an open floor where the mining is going to proceed to go on from here a couple more floors and then they’d fill it again. Well, they’re just top ‘in it off and it’s all back lagged heavy.
There isn’t a hole that you can see over your head that’s back laggin on it for support in case something fell out and it was gone completely, beautiful. And I was back standing in the manway and it was a raise and it was around 200 foot and we were in the 140 foot part of it and they shut the slime off and I was back by the manway, that was the only way out it was down, there was no pull throughs, it was straight down to the manway and I had a spot light and I happened to look out on the open area, the floor that was going to be the mining floor and I see some rock dribbling out of one corner there and then I looked out father and I see some rock dribbling, just a small amount of rock dribbling over here and then I hollered to the miners, they were close in, they might have been twenty or thirty feet away and I yelled get over here right now!
And I got them all in that group and I happened to look up over my head and I’d see a crack develop up there that just opened up, opened up like that; and when it opened up it put so much pressure on that working floor that it just poof, it just fell down the whole back that was above us it was 40 x 80 feet. This block of rock just came right down and crushed all the timber and the only thing that stayed open was where I was and I had the men with me was the manway and the hole was partly plugged with laggin that had fell partly out of the mess. And anyway, it dropped an it settled down, and so there’s nothing you can do you just want to get out of there. Now. And you don’t know if that manway is going to be open below you or not.
So, you get those guys together and you started climbing down. You got down on the sill and it was about 2 o’clock in the afternoon and I took those guys to surface, and I told them to go change your clothes and go home! I said that’s the end of it. And I walked into the dry with the bosses and I went in and changed my clothes and I walked over to the office and Roy Garrett came out and he said “where the hell are you goin’” and I said “I’m goin home” and I didn’t come back until the next day and once he found out what happened …. hmmm, that was one of the experiences working in the underground that I didn’t like very much. The other one was in the 2100 of the Leonard. I was still operating with Pinestco. Ray was day shift, and I was night shift on that beat, this was when we were bossin’ and we were driving the drift on the 2100 and we were opening up an old raise so that we could get back and it was more or less old field country – hot. I took one of the miners, but Ray had gone in there on the day shift and they mucked a pile off of the sill; that’s where you walk in and go up the raise, and it was just a four post and just a four post block, 7 ½ x 13 feet and it was up three or four floors and I took that guy up there and hole had run like this and you couldn’t see the back of it if you had spot lights and he had that off up to the sill and when he mucked that out it left the sill empty and it had filled up again where the rock had run up at the timber. Anyway we got back up there and we got to the third floor and I told him to get that breast boarded so that the rock will not run out of that hole and we will go on and see what we are going to do up there.
[01:08:59]
Well low and behold the hole started to run and hey, you have got to make a decision RIGHT NOW. What are you going to do and I did - I jumped to the ladder and I started down off the first ladder and a slab come off and hit me in the back of the head and broke the helmet in half and took the light off of my waist and anyway I dropped from there and before I went up and pulled the laggin off of the stuff behind where the muck was running down and I hit the pile and slid off and went down on the sill and then I thought for a minute and I had no light or noting and I hollered up to the miner that “come on and get out of there right now” .. “Get down here” and he wouldn’t come down. And I started cussin’ and there was a big bump on the side of my head where the rock had hit me on the side and finally, I convinced him that he had to get out of there.
He quit runnin’ and he got out of there just in time because when he got on the sill that spilled up and was completely blocked up. You would have never have got out. You would have been buried alive, period. After that I spent two shifts in the hospital bed after that I got claustrophobia. And then I remember when I went down from one level to another they were pulling down rock out of the chute and I could just feel that claustrophobia And they kept that helmet for everybody to see in the bosses office at one of the windows that looked outside There was only half of it there …. That was the first I seen of it. I’ve been a few more of them tight spots, bad, but that is what you did when you were underground. A Butte miner had to know just about every damn thing he could drum into his stupid head. You know you had to deal with a lot of things you had problems with water, problems with heat, problems with bad ground, problems with fire country, unknown people problems. These are the problems you run into working underground.
You’ve got to give the Butte miner credit, he made Butte, Montana. I don’t care what anybody says, it was the guy with the pick and shovel that went underground that made Butte. And I’ll believe that until the day I day because I was one of those guys. I wouldn’t have traded it for a million dollars, but I didn’t want my kids to go underground. And I couldn’t stay away, I had to be underground. I could have lived under there, I guess I would have been a mole. I never got tired of work, I was underground and there is always something new to learn. You would go from one thing to the next and you think you know it all and then all of a sudden something else comes along and hits you. You know it isn’t that way today. You know you have underground mining, but it’s call long haul dump where you go in with rubber tire equipment and you get in there and you have big jumbos doing your drilling, and I did some of that during underground strike in different parts of the country. But it’s not mining, it’s not realistic. Mining in Butte, Montana was called selective vein mining. And there is an old story that a guy told me, Pete Biadock told me, he was an old-time miner and I was going to try some leasing. There was some ground that you could get off of the company. And when you look at selective vein mining, that’s just exactly what it means.
It’s not open pit mining where you go in with a 72-yard bucket and start picking up dirt but you go in with a rotary drill and drill and drill - selective vein. It’s what you do, you stay on the vein. And like Pete said, “when the vein pinches kid, you pinch too.” So, if it’s six inches wide, you have to mine it six inches wide and that’s a chore and you have to make it wide enough, so you get through it. But it’s been done, and it was done underground a lot. And that’s what you had to do. Selective vein mining. If you look at mining and you stop and think about it, you drove a shaft, sunk a shaft down there 4200 feet to go and mine a pound of copper, not to mine waste.
[01:14:12]
If you wanted to mine waste, you could stay on the surface and not have to sink that 4200 foot hole. Now that is what I think happened to the country today, bigger is always better. I think there is a lot to be said about the mines being shut down. One thing that I look at and I know who done it, but I don’t know I could ever live with myself if I would have been the one to pull the switch to shut the power off at the Kelley to fill it full of water, I don’t think I could get up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror and I don’t think I could sleep period. I don’t get a good night’s sleep now; I don’t think I’d sleep at all then. When you look at something like that, you’re thinking some of the books that you’ve read you think it’s all about money. You know, instead of doing it right and enjoy what you were doing. I never the pit as much as I enjoy working the underground. And the underground was mining and I don’t know they can call themselves miners and the open pit to me is more or less like a gravel pit. Where you have people from a construction company with large equipment and you can call it mining, I call it excavation of what they need. And they are sending up a product that they’ve got to mine three to one; you know two discard or three discard a pound. You don’t know what you’re doing, you’re destroying the landscape and you’re putting the people in a situation that society is just drastically changed. Now what else do you want to know.
Clark: What is fire country?
Al: That’s when it’s so hot underground that iron oxide, which will burn, gets oxygen and it’s a fire. The rock is actually burning.
Clark: The rock is on fire?
Al: The rock is on fire. Well how do you put a rock out. What you do when you are in fire country, the first, and I’ve been there, the first thing you do is know that you are in fire country – and you will know it immediately, I’ll tell you. In fact, that’s another story. When I was in the, we were opening an old crosscut down in the Leonard, naturally a fire ball and I took a mucking machine, I didn’t have the miner do it. I took that mucking machine and opened that door, it was a bulk head, and opened that door and when that air hit that slime fill it immediately became hot, hotter than you could imaging and I got that mucker and I took that mucker and I mucked one bucket and that handle on that mucker was so hot I didn’t think I’d have enough time to back it up to close that door and shut that thing off. That’s how hot it got underground immediately.
But you could tell, we were walking across, it was on the 1200 of the Leonard, myself and Roy, he was the mine super, and I just made my beat and we were walking over through this old work and he said “you know Al, I think I smell something. And I didn’t have a really good nose anyway. And we walk a little way ahead and he says “you know Al, I think it smells like fire.” And we walked a little ahead and happened to look under the rails, and it was burning right under us. The embers were so g-damned hot, so what you do then is you call the fire gang – they put in bulkheads, mud slime and brandishes and you get them up there and you build that wall and you close it and you call for the pipe fitters and you put the pipe in to run the slime, which is the tailings from the concentrator at that time and fill that block up between the two air doors so that you contain than fire so it won’t spread. And if you open that door it is going to come out of there; we was in fire country and I was telling you about the mucking machine that got into it but never backed out.
That laid in that old workings for years and years and years and years. And we had the same thing in the pit, you know. We’d dig into these old workings and they’d be on fire. But you’d muck them out with a big shovel, you know, you didn’t stop. It’s just like a coal mine, you know, coal is burning all the time, they just muck it out, and ship it. Now that’s what I say, there’s just so much to learn about underground. You had helmet training, you had to have helmet training, there’s always a fire in the Leonard, they was always calling for helmet crews. There’s nobody around now that remembers that stuff. I’m still here. And I remember (laughter).
[01:20:30]
It’s just too much to relate to about underground you know there so many different things to learn you know. Sinking a shaft, you know, putting in wall plates and this and that. Dealing with the damn jack hammer drilling down. Because now they’ve got the muckers, but they don’t even use those anymore they got big drills, rotary drills that will drill a 50-foot diameter hole and stuff like that.
But it all had to be done by hand at one time and you’ve got drifts and raises and stopes and you’ve got winces – there are so many damn things you can’t even imagine what goes on under that ground. How does it feel to be underground at 4,200 feet? I don’t know, probably what it is like when you are 6 feet underground. My guess is that you dwell on it. My God am I under 4600 feet of dirt? What’s the difference, it’s dark?
Clark: What about nippers?
Al: A nipper? Oh, that’s the guy that handed out the tools. A nipper, he had a – he was the guy with like picks and shovels and air and water hoses and anything that the miner needed. Round point, square point he took care of that. If you went into the boss in the line-up room and said you needed a new pick or a new shovel or a new ax, which you didn’t pack out and take home, he’d supply it. The nippers I remember, they were pretty cagey because when the tools came down from surface on a certain day, that nipper would be right there to grab it to take it into the nipper shack and get it into the nipper shack and lock it up before the miner went out on the station and sold some of them and he not only did that his nipper shack would be broken into and he’d take his tools and he’d stuff them over the top of the drift timbers somewhere off where you couldn’t find them, or you thought you couldn’t find them. That was the nipper.
They served a purpose you know if you went down there and you needed – like if you were drilling and you needed a first or second, third or fourth steel to complete the round and you didn’t have it, well you’d run down to the nipper and the nipper would go to his cache, naturally. The same with bits or anything. He had a hell of a job. That’s what I say you are thinking about something different every time.
Clark: Seems like the nipper would be a special kind of guy.
Al: Well, you know you learned to respect him if you needed something. He had to keep the supply because you are 4200 foot a ground and you’re not going up to get it. So he better have it and if he doesn’t your contract doesn’t go to hell.
Clark: Can you walk me through drilling a round. How deep does it go in?
Al: Oh, yeah. If you are in a drift, you have are the lifters, the bottom holes that’s to take up the bottom so you can put the track in level or on grade and you have a set of easers. Those are the ones just above the lifters. And then you have the breast, and you have another row above that, that are more or less like easers. And then you have the ring at the top which are the back holes. And you drill; now you are not going to make any money if you are going to drill three or four foot.
[01:25:03]
You are going to have to drill a starter steel you know could be like three foot. And then you take your second steel that had changed from a starter to another and that one could be five foot, then you had another and it could be six foot and then you had the money maker, the number four. That’s the one you wanted to get if you were going to make any money. And you know when you drill that round in that drift, you’d better pull it to the back, you don’t want it to have boot legs in there because if you have boot legs in there, why did you drill the hole?
Clark: What’s a boot leg?
Al: A boot leg is what you left when you didn’t pull the four steel, if you boot leg the four foot or two you might as well have drilled the third steel. Now to brake that in a drift you might have had decent ground, you might have been breaking for timber. That means you had to break enough room to put in an eight- or nine-foot post, 6-10 cap; that was about the limit of the cross section, and to get it ahead far enough to put in another lead of timber. They were about 5’4”. Laggin was about 5’4”. I talk laggin, this is boards. Laggin is 5’4” so it’s got to tie into the post back here and the post you are making room for. So you had to do that to break that and you are still talking about the hole that you’ve just drilled. Then soft ground you didn’t have to worry about too much. You just drill a three- or four-foot burn. The burn is in the center, and you shoot them holes. The burn could be a three-hole, four-hole, five hole, could be nine, whatever you thought it would take to break the rest of the ground. You had to pull the ground to the length of the fourth so that you don’t have any boot legs.
So, you’ve got a hole there so when you shoot the sides, and you shoot the back they can break to the back of that hole. The fourth hole, remember. Number four steel. And then when that’s all broke and it’s piled down, and you’ve already shot the easers to create the hole down toward the track then you have them lifters down there and then you shoot the lifters and that’s compacted down there where it’s going to break down, the holes are drilled on an angle for the lifters, and they’ve got to break here, see this is level and you put the track in here. See so you’ve got to learn something – everything – you’re learning something about drillin’ now.
Clark: Yeah, and dynamite.
Al: Well, yeah. It used to, when I was starting, we use to use stick powder. We used to have 45% then we went to 70% gelatin, and a lot of the guys use to figure well why do I pound that powder in until I can’t get any more? So you take your powder knife and you split the stick of powder so that it would compact father into the fourth, down in the bottom, you’re going to pull it.
Clark: Tap it light, right?
Al: Then some guys would break a stick in half so that could get it sticking out of the hole at the end. Though you didn’t have to do that because it’s going to break = you don’t have to stuff it like that, you just pick it up in the muck bung and get a headache. It’s called a powder headache and I had lots of them, and they are terrible. And that’s the drift, and then if you go into the raise
Clark: So when do you actually set it off? At the end of the shift?
Al: Yeah, what you do, they call it bunch blasting. Like if you had twenty or thirty holes, then you would tie them with your hand – the fuse, put it in your hand here and that would be the first hole to go. And you take the next fuse and that would be the second hole, so they didn’t all go off at once. A fuse burnt a foot in 40 seconds. So, that’s pretty fast. Anyway, you bunch them like that and you take one of them and tie it around like that and it’s like tying a fishing hook to a line. Pull it, then take your powder knife and you cut that off, right in half so you have a bunch here and a bunch here. This one here in this hand you slit it like that and take a match and light that one fuse. And when that one fuse lasts(?) you take it over here and you put it into that bunches; it’s going to do the damage. And you look in there and you make sure all of them are caught. You know, and you go around so you don’t miss a hole. You know, the fourth steel might be the hole that is setting off the berm. Any way that’s all.
Clark: Do you hide? Do you go down the drift?
Al: No you get the hell out of there, it’s quitting time.
Clark: So you set it off and walk away? You don’t go back and look at it:
Al: No, no. You figure when you set a blast off, you had to wait at least 20 minutes and I’ll tell you a story about that. But you set it off and then, usually quitting time, either that or you are late chasing the cage and you are late doing a day’s work. You’ve got to wait out the station or till the next shift comes down so you can go up.
[01:31:26]
Which made it better in the shower because you didn’t have 300 guys in there with you. Laughter. It was just a learning process. You know I spent a lot of years underground and when I come out of the underground and went into the pit I was still learning. You know after years there is always something new, something going to happen to make it exciting, so I guess that is why you work underground. I don’t know. I just loved it; I loved the underground.
Clark: What about silicosis? Or miners con? If you’re drilling 30 holes…
Al: Thirty holes, that was one day. You drill 30 holes every day. I don’t know, I’m still (cough) ….
Clark: But it was never -
Al: Well, you know, when I was underground, when my dad was underground, that’s when they had the silicosis. Because they were drilling dry. You know they didn’t have ventilation that went in and they had those old cranked liners and those old things. They didn’t have rotary drills and stuff like that, they came in later. They had it tough they had hand mucking they didn’t have mucking machines; they hand mucked it with a square point shovel onto a turn sheet that they pushed in. Can you imagine mucking out a drift on a turn sheet. Make room for timbers, 6-10 cap, them guys were like the picture you see on the baking soda package.
Clark: Yeah, yeah. They were tough.
Al: That’s what they did. They lived hard and they drank hard. They frequented the bars.
Clark: Your dad included?
Al: Oh, hell yeah. He had his share. If they had the money to do it. If they went on strike the old timers. That’s when I went into the mine they had the 1947 strike, that was the big strike. That’s when the union was strong and so was the company. And they the union had a lot of men, and the company had a lot of guns. They called them gun men. They patrolled the fence and mine yards and just keep damage away. The miners had a lot of miners and the guys that worked in the mines at that time, they went to work, most of them were shift bosses and stuff like that. When they went to work, they were called scabs.
In fact, we had two of them in Walkerville. And I’m not going to mention their name, but one guy just painted his house white. And I guess probably the next morning when he got up it was trimmed in black; scab written on it. Another guy down in lower part of Walkerville, they threw his furniture out the house. Another guy up in Walkerville he brought a gun to the door, and they didn’t bother him too much. It was a big time; it was a change of wages. The wages in 1947 were $10.59, I think, a day, and in 1948 after the strike the wages went to $11.11. So, you didn’t have any trouble figuring out if you were a day’s pay, they had no trouble what you were going to make that week. And $11.11 put in for five days is $55.55. So you made $55.55 a week. Now when you are drilling in a raise, you are drilling over your head, most of the time. Usually, you are going to get wet. Because you are drilling with water and the cuttings are coming out of the hole and their going to run all over your body and you are going to get lots of dirt on you and lots of water. And what you are doing in the raise is usually a six-post raise, 13 x 7 ½ feet. I wasn’t very big. It was room for two sets of timber; but to drill a raise out you didn’t have a burn in it, you had what they called an end cut. An end cut or a V cut. An end cut was off a line of timber over here and went in on an angle and as that angle come back to hit the other one it was vertical here. Or you had a V cut or if you had an 8-post raise in the middle and you had a V like that and it worked toward the end lines on both sides of the raise.
[01:37:00]
But that, you know, when you look at it is blocking a lead in a set of timber in the raise, you had to be damn tight because everything that was going to hit it would be coming out of the back over the top of it. So, if a gurt knocked out or a cap or whatever and you lost that one usually you are going to lose the whole floor of that timber. And you come in the next day and you’re at “Oh, well, what have we got here?” A big mess. Timber laying all over the place, laggin laying all over the place. Everything. And it was different in a raise because when you set the blast off in a raise, before you did it you had to put a slide in that slid over you manway over to this side so that the rock would slide into a chute here off of that slide. And above that slide you had to put a bulkhead, you build a bulkhead like that and a slide was back here and that was so the rock couldn’t get behind the slide and go down the manway. It would be directed toward the chute.
Well, when you come up the next day, everything was fine, so you send your band bag for your air, up in air for your ventilation up in the raise and you get all that fresh air blowing up there. And you climb over the slide and the bulkhead is right here; then you’ve got to get up over the back of the bulkhead. Then you’ve got your spin hole which is a bent round point, and you go up there and muck out the bulk head off. You muck that out before you pull the slide because if you pull the slide first then the rock that’s on the slide is going to fall on the manway. So, you’ve got to clean that stuff up and you get that all opened up and cleaned down, clean the manway down and you extend your timber slides and your manway and your ladder one set and get that all done and you are all set to put up the Jim pole which sets on top of the timber and goes into the back, it’s got a catch block on it up there and you bring up your hoist table that’s on the sill down here and extend that there over the top of the Jim pole and into the blocks, and that’s a wheel, and you bring it back down. And then your partner goes down on the sill or you do, whoever is going to run the hoist to bring the timber up. You’ve already got your manway in things are going fine and so forth, you hope it continues that way. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, and you get on top of the timber.
You’ve got a bell system there usually made out of old fish plates out of the rail. You take two of the them, one of them here and the other one here and the rope is here and when you peal the rope so you’re up there ringing that down there a hundred foot or whatever and letting that guy know or your partner that’s running the hoist that the timber is up there. The post is up there. And now you’ve got to land that post, so you’ve got the bell cord in this hand, and you’ve got the bottom of the post secured to whatever it is a laggin or whatever, and you give it a one two and he knows that two means to lower it down. So, he lowers it down and gives you enough slack and you stop him with one.
Then you take that off and and put it back over the manway, pull it down and give him one, one two one, that means clear, and he takes that back down the counion weight on the weight to hold that cable and hold it down. It goes back down and then he ties on another piece of timber and you repeat that until you get your floor timber and everything you need up there and what you do you usually when you do that you, if you’re hep with it, by the time your partner gets up in that raise, you’ll have all that timber stood, staging bill off of it and ready for it to block in and when he comes up you start blocking it in. Now all that has to be done in six and a half hours. That’s a lot to do when you think about it. When you do that, you’re use to work, and you are in good shape. I don’t think when I was contracting, I ever weighed over 131 pounds. Never. And there weren’t any fat guys down there either.
Even the motor men were, well some of them, we had one guy, Pete (Clete) Farren, this is going way back, and Pete lowered timber, he was a heavy set guy. He had an old 36 Ford coupe and his wife would sit in the front, in the back and he’d sit in the front, that’s the truth. But Pete was lowering what was called Mitchell timber back on the lower 4000 down to a bunch of stopes on the 4200 and I remember him well, he wasn’t very energetic.
[01:43:31]
But this is going way back before I started the contracting and I worked with him on lowering the timber. Come time to eat, you had a laggin, a board 2 x 12 by 5 4 whatever, and you’d put a block under it so that it’s raised up like that so when you lay down for a while with a bucket under your head and maybe your coat and make it softer and you’re lay ‘in back on that. Well, Pete (Clete) had a glass eye, you know one of those eyes with glass, so Pete (Clete)would lie down on the laggin and he’d take that eye out and he’d put it over here and he’d tell it “watch for the boss”.
Anyway, the other story about or Pete (Clete), he’s a big heavy-set guy, and he got out of the mine and he went to Whitefish and he went to work for his brother up there. And it was during the strike, and we went to work in Townson at a mine over there, Bob McGary any a couple other guys from Butte. Pete’s (Clete’s) up in Whitefish and Bob’s talking on the phone talking to Pete, this really doesn’t pertain to mining, but it was something that I remember and Bob’s talking to Pete (Clete) and he’s telling Pete (Clete) “you know Pete (Clete) I got a to go and get some false teeth”. Pete worked for his brother and his brother was a mortician, so he told Bob “before you get a set come up here and I might have a set for you”. That’s how it was you know, joking and something was always happening. [Laughter]
Clark: Sounds pretty wild … [continued laughter.]
Al: That’s some of the stuff I remember. It just stays with you. Crazy stuff like that or stuff underground you know. And underground one time I was working for Haxby Holms out on the, there was a sloth in the drift farther ahead but the pipe, the 4- or 6-inch pipe went over the top of that sloth and there was an old Bohunk mucking on the other side of the aisle and we were working way over here on the other side. And it was dinner time and the pipe was broke there so Haxby got up there, he’s crazy, he got up and went to the end of the pipe and he said, he knew that old Bohunk was in the back and he said “hello in there.” [Laughter]
That rang out in there and the Bohunk was just looking around and “hello in there”. And the Bohunk must of said something and he said, “how long have you been in there?” Laughter I guess that when he got done that Bohunk got over the top of the pile and Haxby beat it. Twenty years…. You know the one interesting thing about the underground, when it came to like 12 o’clock or something, you know you could actually hear the timber pop and creak like the earth, you know was doing something. A special time like noon, crack…. spooky! Is that thing off?
[01:48:03]
Clark: No
Al: I was going to tell you about the bathroom underground.
Clark: Ok, sure.
Al: It’s call the honey bucket.
Clark: How did it get emptied?
Al: Now that’s interesting. It’s always being pushed out toward the station to take it up to empty it. Sometimes they made it to the station and sometimes they didn’t.
Clark: Where would it go?
Al: Down on the track! Anyway, they were a two seater, it was made of iron, no wood on it, no toilet lid, iron lid, and it had some kind of a mixture in there that jarred. I can see why some of them used old drifts heads. But they used to take it up and empty it every so often and the guy on surface …. You know I never did find out where he went when he dumped it. I never did. That brings it to mind, it had to be in the back of something to be hauled out of there, I don’t think he dumped it right over the dump. It would have been worse than the stock yards.
Clark: Yeah, real bad!
Al: Real, real bad Clark, real bad.
Clark: I’m curious about the water underground. And I know it reached the pumps eventually, but can you just tell me about the water or the ground water or how was it managed, how much of it was there?
Al: What are you talking about? Ground water? Ground water, well the way it was it came from the upper levels, it didn’t all come, just happen at once. You know it happens as you progress with the dig. Like you know you might not hit the water with the Alice up here, they never hit water until they got to the 600, and that’s when they were mining silver and gold. And when they got to the 600, that when Marcus Daly came in. And they didn’t know what to do and he figured he’s going to pump that water out and when you pump the water out that’s when you started hitting the copper. So you know the water lever varies in different areas and you might pick it up on the 20 foot or you 120 foot and you might not pick it up.
It all depends where the fault come through to lay it open for the source to the water but anyways when it ended up eventually on what they called the 36 or the 3800 of the, any of the levels it was transported from there in the earlier days to the Belmont, not the Belmont but the High Ore Mine that was located over on the Anaconda Road. It was, when it ended up on each station like when you had ground water on the 2000-foot level or the 2100 or the 3100 or the 4100 or the 4500 until you got to the bottom, they had what they called the catch basins and they were on each station. And when the water came out of the drifts it went into that catch basin. And the catch basin’s had a head down into the pipe about 8 or 10 inches and it was perforated all away around and that was to keep the chips and you know and somebody’s bucket left over and when somebody left the cellophane or wax paper or something that got into the ditch and I’ve got a good story about that, but I’m not telling it.
Clark: That’s too bad!
Al: It was caught there in one of those catch basins and the water was transported to the pipe down the shaft, they called it the pipe shaft. A separate compartment and it was transported through that all the way down until it got down into what they called the drain tunnel. That’s where all the water was collected there; and we’re talking about now, what they say then it is now, 55 gallons per minute. But there was a hell of a lot more water under that ground, but it was held back by bulkheads, or you could never have handled the water that was underground. Anyway, but the water underground was, it’s what was in the Berkley Pit right now. It’s high acid, high acidity because you can take a 20-penny nail … now that’s another thing.
[01:54:08]
To get back to the raise miner, he took his tools in the raise, that’s what he usually had. He had a pick and a shovel and a bar and nails. Well, you’d stuff nails in your back pocket that they kept in the raise, you needed nails to nail things together in the manway or the chute or ladder or something, so you always packed the nails in the bags. It was part of the equipment that you had to take, and you had a pipe wrench over here and now they’ve got all kinds of paraphernalia and no wonder they’re running around with bad backs. Anyway, getting back to the water, you can take a nail or anything and put it in that water and it wouldn’t take very long before it came out coated with the color of copper. It was high acidic, and none of it was – it was nothing to do with underground and when it hit the High Ore it went into stainless steel pipe, went into pumps, and was transported in intervals up the shaft like the 2800 of the High Ore was probably the main level for the pumps, big pumps and it was boosted up there and it was taken to surface. You know the story on that; that’s not the end of the story.
Clark: So the Kelley pumps came later?
Al: Yeah, the pumps at the Kelley were on the 3900 or 4000 or something like that, there’s a variance there the 3900 or 39 something. I don’t know if you’ve seen that picture on that, it was something to behold to see that pump station on the 3900. It’s huge, like you can’t even imagine what it looked like. I went down there a lot just to see them and hear the whirring and the noises (makes imitation sounds) moving that water. But like that come in later. That’s when the High Ore, well it transpired in a certain time like in the late 50s and part of the 60s but most of the 50s. When the Pit was going to be started, the Kelley was being excavated down and the reason for that, all that pump station that had to be put in so that you could get away from the High Ore off of the Anaconda Road. So that it could be contained and push back for the Berkley Pit. It had to be eliminated, they had to get it out of there.
Do what they did then, that’s a one lift from the 3900. It’s huge that station, the pumps were huge stainless, it was a beautiful area underground to see something like that. And you see something like that on surface but underground, 3900 feet deep? They put in about, I can’t remember if it was six or eight lines running off of that and then they’d run up the Kelley and at the surface they shot to the east or the northeast where the tailings pond is at? Well, in the meantime while the Kelley was being sunk, the Pit was getting ready to be developed, you know they went into the open pit and they started that. When they started the Berkley Pit, they didn’t need water because there wasn’t a concentrator. They were still hauling the ore from the Berkley to the BAP to the railroad to the smelter and they processed and concentrated it over at the smelter. That had to change so they started building a tailings pond because they knew damn well if they were going to have a pit, they were going to have to put a concentrator in. That concentrator was a Weed Concentrator, that’s what that that’s who build it, it was Weed. And I think they got that completed around the 60’s, the first part of the 1960’s. But the Pit was already starting. They had to have a period there that they could get enough water available to run the concentrator.
[01:59:39]
So, then they had to build a tailings pond which is now 270 feet above this house where you are sitting. And they had to build that tailings pond for an enclosure for water like a reservoir. Once that got up high enough where they could supply a concentrator, the concentrator was being build. But if they didn’t put the water, hold the water somewhere, they couldn’t run the concentrator because the concentrator works on a 70 to 80% water in the tails. So, they had to have that done and I think that was where the water from the Kelley shot, over the side of the hill and was then when the High Ore shut down and the Kelley took over that we were discussing the water from the High Ore that ended. That shut the water off and done the trick. Now it’s up here in the containment. It’s still up there today. So that all had to happen in a certain period of time. That’s why the Kelley was a cave block system. And the cave blocks were on the 1600 and the 1300, that’s as far as they got.
All the cave build blocks were, were just mine glob from the old workings. You know I don’t believe they made any damn money on it. They could have but they were lucky that the Anaconda Company was making money in Chile at the time. Because I worked in it and I didn’t like it and I had to get out of it - it wasn’t mining and I know how it was done and everything but when that Pit went in, it was the death warrant for Butte.
Clark: I want to talk about the Berkley, but I want to ask you about the Alice? Because that pit was first, wasn’t it? It came before the Berkley.
Al: I’m not sure. It was under F&S Contracting, they started it and they started the Berkley Pit. F&S was, you know Clark, I’m really trying to relate to that but no I think you are right. I think the Alice started before the Berkley. It was in the 50’s, I remember that now.
Clark: In all these oral histories that we’ve done, no one talks about any opposition to the Berkley Pit. Like no one put up a fight saying, “you’re not going to destroy my neighborhood!” But was there a fight in Walkerville?
Al: No, no. You know I can relate to that. You can look back into the 1800’s when Anaconda came. You know Anaconda, the name Anaconda, it was named Anaconda by Rockefeller, Standard Oil. That’s when it was named by Standard Oil, he named it. And if you go back into history and look at that you’ll see that the people, my dad was a migrant he came from England, and the potato famine in Ireland and Europe was in a bad, bad shape. And during, before and after the First World War, these immigrants came to work in this country in coal and everything and especially they came to Butte like my dad. And they didn’t have nothing.
So when the company come here, and they’re making two bucks a day or something, whatever, and they cried for a raise, HEY, you ain’t get’n it! That’s it, we’ll bring in the National Guard and we’ll do something, we’ll shut you down and you’ll have nothing to eat! Well, that was inbred into the people I think at that time and still today. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen it in the last takeover of the Pit down here in 1986. But that was inbred into the people; the company will pull up and leave out. Going clean back to the early part of the 1900’s when they were still you know, if you’ve seen that one picture he put out about the machine gun behind them and I told them that could have been my dad and if it had happened later in the 30’s I could have been one of the kids. That’s how it was. So that’s inbred into the person. It’s a company town.
[02:05:43]
Clark: So that’s why no one fought.
Al: It’s like Ernest Board singing that 16 ton of number 2 coal, what do you get, a day older and deeper in debt. You know that’s what it was, similar to that and people were living under that continually. They didn’t want no shit done, they didn’t want any strikes. They didn’t want to see the company moving or leaving. But they never would have left. They’re still here and they will be here for as many years as they’ve been here before. Butte is still here and still going. And that’s what it was, and people were living under conditions like that continually, they didn’t want to see a strike or the company leaving. But they never have left. Well lets go back 40 years to 1980, that’s when the smelter shut down. Hey, when that smelter went down, it affected not only Butte, it affected Anaconda, it shut down Great Falls, the refinery, and the spin off from them jobs, we’re talking about thousands just there. Now you take the pound of copper, the company didn’t shut down.
Washington came in and he took over. And what happens, you don’t have any place to smelt the ore. So concentrate it, we put it in a railroad car and ship it to a port up in Seattle and ship it overseas. That’s a pound of copper. But if you really look at a pound of copper and put it as it comes out of a refinery before it goes into fabrication and different things, that pound of copper has climbed to probably $50 or $80 a pound. It is fabricated into different chips and go into that. And what happened then, it come out of my backyard, my back yard it went into that concentrator down there and was concentrated and they took that out of my backyard and shipped it to China to have it refined. And then, what happened then you take a look at the businesses that went to China to make out. Well I don’t want to send a pound of copper to this country over to China to put in a car or a refrigerator so I’ll make the refrigerator and the car in China. Or the chip, and I’ll send it back to the guys in the United States for sale. That’s what I figure happened Clark, and I dare anybody to debate it. I’d love to debate it.
Clark: I think that’s what happens, that’s the way it goes. I want to talk a little bit about the Pit coming in. What did they call it, the greater Butte project? I think that’s what the company called it when it first started. But when was the first time when it started to affect your work? When did your work start to change?
[02:09:54]
Al: When did it first affect me? Well, it didn’t only affect me it did shut mines down. They curtained the mining at the Lexington up here, put the lid on it in 1957. I was working there and I know it was the year they did it. They shut the Anselmo down, shut the Badger down. You know, talking about shutting thing down, you know if you go back to what we were talking about just a few minutes ago, abut shipping it overseas to have it refined and fabricated and turned into a saleable product. That didn’t just affect Butte or Anaconda it affected Great Falls. That shut Phillipsburg down. You know because they use to have the or smelted down in the smelter. There’s no smelter. It shut all kinds of small operations down. But then in the state and our of the state, Idaho wherever they use to ship to a smelter so there’s no competition around anywhere anymore. They shut the country down mining anywhere in this area. And I contacted, I contacted Senator Daines, what I’d like to see, you don’t want all of this. Then what I’d like to see, this is an election year, so if a guy is running for Senator or Governor or an office, he might be wise to campaign a little bit on a custom smelter for this part of the nation. We don’t have nothing like that over here, we got to ship it over like we are a third world country, you know we are, if you really take a look at it we can’t do it on our own anymore like we did it before. Now where were we?
Clark: You know going from the underground to the pit, I’m curious about that transition.
Al: Well that’s what happens. It shut the … Everything that’s going on today had to happen. It was in the works, it had to happen. But it shut the mines down, so what do you do? You are talkin to Mule Moosine (?), what did he have to do, he worked on a hoist in the underground. He had to go on a shovel or something in the pit under the operation engineers. That’s what it did. That all transpired from that you know. You know the smelter, the concentrating use to be done, hauled by BAP to the smelter in Anaconda where they had a smelter over there. Seems to me it would be a lot cheaper to send it to the concentrator in Anaconda than it would be to take it over to China.
Well that’s what happened to the underground. And the underground came, you know there was plans for the underground the future that you can’t even imagine. You know, deep level mining. That was one of the main plans. It was called the Berkley Neck and it was meant to happen when we come to a point that it was no longer feasible to go up and start another push back to get back down here. It was just too expensive, it was cost prohibitive. So you had to curtail it then. And the underground, they didn’t move far enough ahead that put in the deep level system that they planned. And there were plans for that, it was like the Ryan up here. The Ryan was going to be a service shop, timbers and whatever you needed. The deep level hoisting facility was going to be down somewhere, I know they mentioned it but I can’t remember exactly where it was going to be because the Kelley, the Kelley mine even back in the 70’s, it was moving toward the Pit.
So that was going to be, you know you weren’t going to get any hoisting out or send man down in it, so a deep level mine was going to be done like what we talked about when the sink the deep level shaft with the rotary bit, that’s like 50 foot in diameter that would have been down there to transport about 50 thousand tons of ore per day to feed the concentrator. But I can tell you what is going to happen in the future is …. That’s another story.
Clark: What do you think’s coming?
[02:15:46]
Al: What’s coming? Well, the way I see it, Clark, is a there’s so much ore on the surface, you can’t even see it. Ok, their going to be mining that, but they’re going to mine it in a different way. It’s going to be taken from the water. I see the company, you know they are not like you or I. You or I look at the short range or maybe the medium range. You look at your kids going to college or something that may be your long range. These people think of a hundred, two hundred years and why not? You know what they do, what I think they do is it’s all in the family. Take care of the family first. Rothchild, you know they are still around. Rockefeller, they’re all still around. And what they do they look forward so far that they say, look this is my kids inheritance.
That’s the way I look at it. Butte Montana, the people out here don’t look at it like that. But you know under the long range that is what you look at. But what I look at is what is eventually going to happen and that is they are passin’ this and they got think tanks and if you go along when it’s been 6 or 7 days a week research, retreats, and you know they come up with these crazy ideas but some of them are really good ideas. That’s what a think tank is for and the ones I’ve been in are for … so they think way ahead in the future. And anyway getting into the future of Butte I see this Pit will shut down and so will the concentrator. The concentrator is wore out and is held together by duct tape. You know and the Pit, its either going to fall in on them or something will happen and they will just run out of ore. They can’t take no more without taking I-15 out.
So when that ends, then they will go to a system where they will build a brand new precipitating plant capable of handling, well there are 10 cells in this one down here, I helped put it in. And they will take that water and they will , they can inject it if they want, into the surface material here, or they can heat bleach it like they are doing no. How long do you think, they haven’t even touched it yet, how long do you think it's going to take ore that’s available on the surface and let it run into the Berkley Pit; with some water it’s going to run into the Berkley Pit. It’s got the oxygen, hey lets add some sulfuric acid and we’ll decompose this material, draw the bugs out. The bugs will eat the damn until it’s down to the composition of the rock, that’s what we are worried about. Well on the north wall and everything else and you have some copper.
Now we’ll take that copper and we will pump that and we’ll put it in this plant and we will discharge it and put it through precipitation, we’ll build some holding ponds wherever down somewhere plat area like the Colorado tailings. Maybe three or four of them, whatever it takes. When the water comes out of the precipitation. And little polishing plants or whatever, we’ll put this water in a holding pond and clean it up and if it isn’t clean enough, we’ve added lime to neutralize it to give it 7, it’s 3 now … bad stuff and we’ll put it in that one pond and if it doesn’t clean it up, which it probably won’t we’ll have another pond ahead of it. And if that doesn’t clean it up we’ll have the third pond before it discharges into the creek - it will be clean and when we will be ready to clean them ponds we’ll have a drag line to clean the ponds.
[02:22:13]
Clark: How often will they dredge?
Al: That all depends on the size of the pond and the capacity of the water that it can hold. That’s my vision of it. That’s just a vision of that. You can look at this thing up here that’s got at least and they told me this, you know they’ve lost up to 20% of their tails coming out of that concentrator because they never put any money in the concentrator, they didn’t care. They’ve got that big pond over there, and that’s beautiful. That’s a holding pond and you know they didn’t build that pond up for discharge purposes. They built that pond up so they could contain water. And that’s what they are doing and when they did that, that’s another story. You don’t want to get me started on that one. That’s why they built it; I know why they built it. And I know why they got the big scare out saying that we’ve got to do this and stuff like that. That’s all part of the plan. And I don’t know where I come up with this stuff.
Clark: Well, what was it that made you want to get into politics?
Al: I didn’t. I you know didn’t like the way Walkerville was going at one time. That was back in 1982 or 83. Oh, I thought well why don’t I go down and attend a few meetings and see what’s going on down there. Well I did and they got, they use to have a reporter come to Walkerville, you know for the meetings and it got so ruff down there with me and the Mayor that the reporter put in the paper, forget about going to the commissioners meeting, go to Walkerville, it will be a fight up there. Fist fight, and you know he did choose me one time, “You got something against me?” and I told him just what you’ve done. [Laughter]
Clark: Well, what was Walkerville like then in ‘82, you know?
Al: Well, if you take it in 1983, that’s when the Superfund comes to town. I had a couple of meetings because I wanted to see what was going to happen to Walkerville at that time. So my two meetings over at the Blain Center, we started that when I was Mayor. In fact I was under the floor putting pipes together. But like you in the church over here. But I wanted to find out because we got this Alice Pit here and it was a danger, I was bad news, you know. Kids were climbing along that bank and if they fell off that bank, my kids even they were young then climbing on the banks along that hole and we wanted something done with that. And then when I was young, you know, you talk about mercury, and how bad it is for your health, well over here just a little bit west of the Alice Pit where the Alice mine was, was the stamp mill where they processed gold and silver and collected it through the stamp mill with mercury. And it burnt down before my time.
But when it burnt down all that mercury run, lots of it, lots of it and in the ash up there alone I watched the WPA when they was like the New Deal. They were up there with picks and shovels and I was over there watching because I wanted to see what happened and I saw mercury come out of the side of that hill over there the stream was about as big around as your thumb. It was big, pouring. I saw it pouring out. I saw WPA workers with glass jars trying to contain it part way filled and the bottom would fall out of the glass.
[02:26:55]
So I know about mercury because I use to pan it when I was a kid and then my older brother would take it down to the jeweler and sell it in Butte. And you talk about being in mercury, I had it all over my hand, I had it in my mouth, I was polishing a nickel or a dime and make it shine real good. And maybe that is what happened to my mind, maybe I would be smart.
So anyway I talked to the delegation the delegates from Butte. Powerful, powerful back in 83 in Helena. So I set up a meeting with them in the Blain in the auditorium and I called the EPA and had the EPA come up and I had Don Peoples, he was chief executive at the time and I had him come up and I had the head of the AFL-CIO I can’t think of his name, the labor and I had a whole bunch of them up there. In fact I talked over at the Blain about what we wanted to do and then we had a walk. Oh, and I had Dr. Drynan from the state health department out of Helena. And we walked up here and one of the guys from the EPA said “there isn’t no mercury up here”. Now this is in 1983 then, you know, and I said oh there isn’t. I said you know it isn’t the mercury that you can see that can hurt you, it’s the stuff that’s in the air that does it. And I said just a minute now and I went and got a pan and a shovel and I panned some for it. “My God, there is mercury!”
Anyway, Dr. Drynan was there and we were standing looking over the Pit and the hole and the country around it, what was dumped and such. I said to Dr. Drynan, “what do you think about it doctor?” He says “Al you know I think you’ve got something on your hands other than Mill Creek.” An you know it was in the paper. So, this hole up here was wide open and I’m Mayor of Walkerville and I don’t like it. So I went down to ARCO and who was ARCO in Butte and I told them, you’ve got a problem up there. You’re going to have to fill that Pit in! Ha he says, “we can’t afford to fill that Pit in, what else can we do?: So, I says “Well, to make it safer for a while, you can build a fence around it.” The fence is around it. But it’s still a big mess. I was still young then, when I retired I was 55, still a lot of energy, so I was offered a position down at Gold Creek at Montana Mining and Timber out of London. They wanted me down there to help run the mines. So I pulled my pin down here after three years of hell and went to work down at Gold Creek. And I was interested in our liquor store down here. So nothing was going to be done with the liquor store. The Helena Liquor Board figured hey, we’ve got to close one of the stores down.
There was three; one on Harrison Ave, one on Park and one in Walkerville. So a young kid was running it, Dan Falkner and so I said to Dan, let’s go over to Helena and see what’s transpiring over there. So I jumped in my car and took him and we went over to Helena. And John LaFever was head of the Liquor Control Board. Walkerville was showing a 6% return. The one on Park Street was in the red. The one on Harrison Ave was in the red. So I testified over there at two meetings. Trying to figure out why you were trying to shut down Walkerville when it’s in the black and you’ve got two other ones in the red. So anyway, after the third meeting, they settled it.
[02:32:17]
They said we’re not closing any of them down. So I still wanted to know why they wanted to shut Walkerville down and let the other two run. So I says why would you want to do that John? He said I didn’t. But he said that if I wanted to proposed that we shut one down in the Butte area, the Butte delegation would have thrown me out the window. Politics! So, I did some other things, I didn’t want to see junk vehicles all over the place so I passed an ordinance for that. Another thing, I sat down here on the corner and when speeders come and I had one of those radar lights and I’d tick it like so and they’d slow down right away. So anything you get in Clark, it seems there’s a certain percentage like 10% that like what you do to them but don’t do it to me. It’s like our body shop down there.
We had a body shop going. Billy Kelly was running it and so it was an eye sore. So I got Ray Flick, he was a cop, a great big guy, and he was from Butte Silver Bow. And I had him come up and I jumped in his car and I went around where people had parked wrecked vehicles their unlicensed vehicles and told them they’ve got to move it. I said there’s an ordinance, unlicensed on the city streets get it out of here. Made them mad. Then I went down to Billy Kelly’s, and I’ve known Billy and I still know him and Flick was with me and I said, Billy, I said you’ve got to do something. You’ve got all these goddamn cars down there, exposed, his body shop. I said you’ve got to clean it up. Build a fence around it. “Well, what the hell!” He said “if they want to live in the Country Club why the hell don’t they go down to the Country Club?” I said that’s a two part story, Billy. I said you know if you want to live in a junk yard, why don’t you go down to the Red Wrecker? [Laughter]
No arguments there. He build to fence. That’s the way it is. Another thing I didn’t like the maintenance guy who was doing a job he was incapable of doing it. But he’s a good friend down at Pissers Palace and you know I don’t hang out there so I fired him. Next thing I know people are coming up “why did you get rid of Rich, why did you do that?” It was because he couldn’t do the job. I said we need somebody up here, we’ve only got one guy. You’ve got to be able to do things instead of coming down sitting on a bar stool and having a beer with the boys. So that was my experience in politics. Laughter You know some of the people I stopped who come up here and dump their garbage, you know I have a big window in the living room there and my wife was alive and you know they’d bring their garbage up from down town take it out here and dump it in the hills. Well, then Allie would see them through the window, you know, and I’d jump in the truck or the car and go out and catch ‘em. Some I didn’t catch and when I didn’t catch ‘em I’d just pick up the garbage and took it down to their house and dumped it in their yard. You know I could go on and on about different stuff.
Grant: I just wanted to talk a little bit more about the Berkley and your roll there over the years. So by the time it shut down you were General Foreman?
Al: No, I was Assistant Foreman, underground. That was in ‘67
Grant: But at the Berkley, what was your roll there?
Al: Well, I didn’t go right to the Berkley. The Badger was down and they needed a Foremen over there to oversee the men who come to make sure they would activate the moose, for the air, the discharge from underground. So, I went up the Badger for a while and when I went to the Pit, I went in as a Drill Foreman, on the drills. And we were runnin’ 18 drills and I don’t know nothing about open pit mining and didn’t want to learn anything. In fact I went back to the 6th floor and my old buddy Vic that revived me on the second day, he was on the 6th floor, he was a manager, he run the company. And I told him, I said Vic I don’t like that hole down there, I just don’t like it! Take me, put me back underground. Oh, he said “you don’t want to go back underground, you just stick and stay and make it pay down there. Stick with the Pit you’ll get use to it.” I never did get use to it. And it was a bad time anyway, we were doing work East Berkley in the alluvium and the in mud and water, taking that down. Anyway, I stayed on as a drill foreman, I don’t know, maybe two or three years, not over that, and then I went as Blasting Foreman, because I knew all about blasting, I worked underground, well you know I had to know something….they didn’t.
[02:38:42]
Anyway, I went into blasting and after that I advanced to Assistant General Drill and Blast Foreman. Then I overseen the blasting and the drilling on the three shifts. We were running 120 haul trucks a shift. So you had to have lots of drilling and lots of blasting. And overseeing that for a period and I become General Drilling Blast Foreman. Jesus, all of this for a seventeen year old kid? Only one that ever did it. And then, Bill Thompson was manager and he wanted to make some changes. So I’m up on the dump seeing what’s going on with some drivers up there where they’re dumping and looking at the dumps because I had a whole bunch of people under me as General Foreman then. And he said “hey Al, --- he called me on the phone and they transferred it up there and he said, “ I’d like you to take over being Assistant Operations Superintendent.” Shit, I didn’t want that job. Anyway that’s another story. That was real interesting, I could have been Operations Sup but I was Acting Operations Sup, but I was made Superintendent and that’s another story. There is something there that transpired between me and others that I don’t want to relate to right now.
And anyway, they put somebody in that position with my permission, asked me if it was alright if they put him in as Operations Superintendent. And I told the guy this is something that transpired before this and I told him “you’re the boss, you can do whatever the hell you want.” I said “I’m not here to tell you what to do, you tell me what to do.” Anyway, it transpired and another guy came in and took it over and I retired, well I went out in 1984 because all we were doing was pulling security. They offered me a good package, you know I’m still on it today 34 years later. And I took it. But if you go through the Pit it’s different. The underground and the pit are two separate, no way you can compare it. You don’t run big haul trucks, 170 ton trucks, and shovels and picks and tractors and you don’t do in the underground what you do in the Pit. So there was a learning session when you walked in there and I learned it and got it down pretty pat and did a lot, a lot of different things. But you’re going to talk about the Pit and that’s another story.
Grant: Yeah, I understand.
Al: Well, it’s getting interesting to me now. I’d like to tell you all about it and I relate to some stuff that I’ve been holding in so that I could give to you that you could use as future reference.
Grant: Feel free to share.
Al: I’d like to have you look back on stuff that I’ve said and say “by God, he was right!” Because it’s happening every day with Rich. He’s saying, by Jesus everything you said is coming true. Yeah, I said it’s the truth, you could take it to the bank, remember?
Grant: Do you think ultimately - was the Berkley pit bad for Butte? Ultimately?
[02:43:40]
Al: Well, it had to happen you know because the underground was getting on the deep levels and that. Like I’ve always said, I knew the guy that threw the switch and no way would I ever want to be in his shoes today. He’s still around.
Grant: And who’s that?
Al: That’s you know, that’s …
Grant: I’ve heard of a number of people claim that it was this guy
Al: It only took one person to do it.
Grant: It’s not John Coates is it?
Al: Oh, no. John was a pumpman. No. John went to work that next morning, I know John, he lives right up the street up here. He went to work and he was told, no you’re not going underground. And that’s what you have to do. It’s the same with the smelter. You don’t go to work now, go home. You don’t go underground to pick up your personal items. We’ll pay you for ‘im. You aren’t going down there to get them. That’s how it has to be to do it. I think when they did do it I was the first guy in the operations to know that they shut the smelter down. I was the first guy when the guy comes busting in the yard I happen to be standing outside the door and he says, “get the bosses together, get the bosses together. We’ve got to tell them they’re shutting the smelter down.”
If I had been smart I would have known it was he who shut the smelter down. No, it’s just the way you look at Butte and the way we’re mining it just, it more or less had to happen. Because you know in the underground, there was so much dilution going on, like it took two things that kept the underground going at that time, New York. It was controlled out of New York at that time the Anaconda Company. And you had to keep the grade up so you had to sacrifice the tons, so if you let the grade go down the tons went up. So you had a dilution problem and there was no way you could keep the two even. You know you couldn’t, one is here, one dropped here, ones here and it was hard because you couldn’t change 50 thousand ton that you shift when the concentrator started up, it started up running with 50 thousand ton and it kept running even though it was all bandage. Duct tape. That’s what the guys say. And you know Clark, if you look at it sure it was bad for Butte, you know it’s, take a look at the landscape, you know, alone. And what happens when you do something like that you know its society, social instability goes you know to hell and leaves the people impoverished and the landscape scarred forever.
When you walk out that door look over that Pit and see what it has done. And look back at the Berkley, it did that in two phases. And that, I don’t know, it’s really hard to say what you should have done. The Pit kept people working for a long time, from the ‘50s up until today and it’s still going. But it’s going to shut down. And when it shuts down, there won’t be any need for a concentrator if we were talking like we were talking about pre-sale. You need a concentrator, it’s all ready 90% copper. You know you dry it and put it in a railroad car and ship it the hell out of here. Yeah, and that’s what I think it will be and I won’t be here that’s for damn sure. I see in the future, I see the water’s making all kinds of “God damn” money. All kinds, and what do they have to do?
Reduce work force, there’s no more trucks and there’s no more shovels, no more drills, no more concentrator, no more primary, no more secondary, and when you take a look at putting a creek down there …. If you take a look at a creek in the long run why didn’t they put a creek there?
[02:49:15]
The reason, all you’ve got to do is say well a guy in the parrot tailings a guy went over there and that’s what started it and he had a bucket that he had in his hand and he had a submersible pump with a hose on it and he pumped copper sulfate into the bucket. Woooo, look it’s 15 times more powerful that the water in the Berkley! They go down on Montana Street on the west end of it, next to the Butte reduction works … well lo and behold, they take a backhoe down there and “look at that bucket, it looks like it’s made out of copper!” They got it there. Why they don’t want to come in and do any work there, it’s future. You know, why? I don’t know but if you’ve got it on the Montana Street end you got it on the Parrot end what is in the middle here? What is it? Who’s to say, that the Parrot tailings is what they claim it to be.
Because there’s another one, smelter, 10 times bigger than the Parrot called the Pittsmont that sits right east of it. You had this creek that’s run in the 1920’s, and 1930’s, nothing that what they got today. What 1,500 gallons a minute of high acidic water running down to Meaderville, winding down through the Texas Avenue bridge that they want to clean up from there down to Montana Street, down to the Colorado tailings to the Pole Plant…..egh give me a break! Give me a break! You I’d make fools out of it if they wanted to debate it. I’d love it, right up my alley. I’m getting too old, I won’t be able to stand up long enough to go debate it with them. You know, that’s, “God damn it”, poor old Fritz, you know, “why-why-why I want a creek through there. You know we’re not going to see a creek in there”. And I’m not going to let them pump water from Silver Lake over there to put it down. You know it’s like Washington, “God damn him”. MRI is in bed with Washington, MRI’s in bed with ARCO, ARCO’s in bed with BP and BP’s in bed with Rockefeller
Grant: And the EPA.
Al: I don’t know, the EPA guys, I really can’t blame them. They came in here blind, they don’t know what to do. You know they’ve got a education of 4 to 6 years that tell them what they think they should do but they don’t have any common sense about it. I found out when I was mayo. No, I don’t know, I think I will stick with the dogs.
Grant: There you go again. That’s a dog fight.
[02:53:05]
Al: Yeah, and the shelter. Yeah, and this guy up here. You didn’t know that he lived up here did you?
Grant: No, that’s interesting.
Al: For years and years and years. That’s what a conflict of interest isn’t it? You know your Chief Executive of Butte Silver Bow and you’re living in Walkerville, we’ve got a mayor down here.
Grant: What’s with that?
Al: I don’t care.
Grant: Well Al. Thanks for your time today.
Al: You coming back?
Grant: I ought to! There’s always more to cover. That’s what – well, I will go and pause this here, it’s almost three hours.
Al: Maybe you will get 10 minutes out of it. Yeah, it’s just like refining.
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