Frank Gardner, Mining Executive

Oral History Transcript of Frank Gardner

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: July 17th, 2020
Location: Frank Gardner’s Missoula Home
Transcribed: March 4, 2021 by Nora Saks

[00:01:17]

AUBREY JAAP: It's July 17th, 2020. We're here with Frank Gardner. Frank, I would like you first to start and tell me about your grandparents. Or kind of the earliest you know of your family. Can you give me some background?

FRANK GARDNER: Yeah, I can. My grandfather on my mother's side, the Banfields, he mined in Cornwall, England. In the tin mines there. I think he said he never corresponded after that with his family at all in Cornwall. And I always thought, and I don't know if it's true or not, but he sort of ran away. He was a young guy. And he went from Cornwall to Michigan and married his wife. And then they came to Butte and he started working in the mines in Butte. And that was the turn of the century, when he was here. And he mined, well he worked for the Anaconda Company. For 52 years. Mainly underground. So he was a tough old guy.

And after I graduated and went to work for eventually, Anaconda, they had this periodic paper going out. And there was two uncles and me, which had one or two years, and my grandfather, and there was a hundred years of mining in Butte, Montana. So he was quite the guy.

[00:03:03]

He got scarlet fever when he was young and it affected him. So he stuttered. And so he took advantage of that stuttering some. He got injured somewhat, on the sheets of the mine, you know, where you go down underground, that was the sheets. And this big, heavy pulse hit him. And it was just turn of the century. And so the ambulances were just coming out. They said, 'well you want to get an ambulance'? And he said, 'no, just call me a taxi'. And that's how he got his nickname. Taxi Banfield.

JAAP: Taxi Banfield. Oh!

GARDNER: His first wife had a stroke and she was bedridden, not talking or anything else, in Butte for about seven, eight years. And then she died. Then he went to live with my moth-er for a while. And then he got another girlfriend, and she died. And my mother said, 'Taxi, for Christ's sake. Leave the women alone and enjoy yourself'. And he says, 'well dear, what can you do when they chase you all the damn time'?

And then I had the two uncles, and they both worked for the Anaconda Company.

[00:04:49]

Then on my dad's side, who was a Gardner, he was a judge, John T. Gardner. Strong Demo-crat. Justice of the peace. And he also worked at the county hospital as a male nurse.

You know, where NCAT is now? That was called the poor farm. And also close to that was the pest house. And the pest house is where you had, I think smallpox and those highly con-tagious diseases. And they put them in a pest house until they survived or died, something like now. He was, I don't know how many years he was Justice of the Peace.

He came from Boston and that's about all I know. But his wife was from Anaconda. So Mary Gardner was from Anaconda. And so that takes care of the two parents.

[00:06:16]

Now my dad was adopted. And he knew, but they never did really tell him, the adoptive parents told him, he heard it from the kids. So he knew that he was adoptee, but that was about all. But then it came out that, well what happened is I was getting some sort of award up at Tech and this lady comes up and says, 'I know all about your father, and what hap-pened'. And so she said he was the father of your father is a father. So it was a priest.

JAAP: Pretty big.

GARDNER: Yeah. And eventually she came and stopped and stayed with us for a bit. She was going from the Diocese, or the priests in Anaconda, and she was gonna go to Townsend, and she stopped and spent some time with us. But that's about it.

But he was a very strong Democrat, a good friend of Mansfield. And he was a good guy. And like I said, he was a male nurse. And if you read some of the stories, I don't know which one it was - oh, Mile High and Mile Deep - the guy that wrote that book, Richard K. O'Mal-ley, was my father's very best friend. And when he wrote the book, Mile High and Mile Deep, my father had already died. So he didn't get a chance to ask him, you know, officially, can I use your name in the book?

So in the book, it's Frank Lardner, L A R D N E R. So it was Frank Lardner. But the book is, the first part of it's very typical Butte, Montana You know, going out to Lake of Avoca and canoes and riding out with the Finnish women, you know, shooting butts they used to call it. You know, the cigarettes people throw away, all that.

[00:08:47]

Then there's another part of the book about getting lost underground. And that wasn't true. But I did get a chance to meet him. He was in a correspondence during the war and that. And he got caught across the line in China, with North Korea, and had to spend some time. And then he was the correspondent for all the Europe and that, and he retired on Galway Lake, or Bay, in Ireland. And he had bought the land very early and then they put covenants on it, and he couldn't deal with it anymore. So he lived there. And then the new book - I'll show you the picture of - where is it, I wonder? Anyway, Chatham, they did a book, Mile High and Mile Deep, on the same thing. And he put his cover on it, which is pretty good. And he's got, I don't know if it's a daughter, or probably is, in Helena.

JAAP: Sid.

GARDNER: Is that true?

JAAP: Yeah, Sid. She's in Helena.

GARDNER: So that takes care of the family, I guess. Let me see, anything more you'd want...?

[00:10:15]

JAAP: Well, let's go into your life. So you were born in 1935?

GARDNER: Yes. And I was born in an apartment on Wyoming Street, South Wyoming. I got pictures if you want to see it. But anyway, like I said,1935. And I had a sister, that was 11 months older than I was. So there was the two of us. And we moved from that apartment out on the flats. And I was very young then. And what happened is, my sister died of scarlet fever. And she was, I think I can pull that out of the - let me see - she was April 1st, 1941. And she was born in '34. And that's one of the memories I remember. But see, we moved and I wasn't old enough and smart enough I guess, to remember.

So we moved down on the flats, close to the county hospital, is on Straight street and Han-cock. And it was a house, that was just a house, I'll tell ya You know, four walls and a well on the outside, and there was no running water, no toilets inside. I remember taking a bath in a tub in the kitchen, next to the coal stove. And they'd have these sidearms to heat the water and that.

[00:12:19]

And I remember, with my sister, we had one small little bedroom, and I didn't even know if we had beds, to be honest with you. It was cold, I remember. But anyway she died. I got scarlet fever first. And I was going out to the outside toilet. And my dad brought a cat home. And I don't think this is what happened, but he brought a cat home, and the cat got scared of the dog and jumped on my head. So they said, 'that's how you got scarlet, you know, the dis-ease'. But I don't think that happened.

So my sister went to live with the grandparents Gardner, while I had scarlet fever. And I think both my parents had it too. Then she came back and she got it. But I can remember, you know, you talk about significant emotional events that stay with you. And I remember her dead on the dining room table. And the doctors, you know, they had plaster on the door there, the big red scarlet fever, nobody could come in and out. With the doctors, there was no cure or anything, or protection. So doctors didn't want to come. They wanted to stay away.

So anyway, that stood with me. That, and about a block down on State Street, my mother's sister was living there, and she had some kids too, and I used to play with them. And I re-member running with a milk bottle, and falling down and cutting all my tendons there, in my arm.

And I ran home and there was the poor farm, you know, the county hospital, and this lady that lives by us, and she grabbed a towel and took me up there. And it would just happen that the doctor was leaving for lunch. He went back in and sewed me up, and I couldn't use it for a month or so. And I was the left-hand and they thought I'd always change, but I kept the old left-hand.

[00:14:48]

Because of that, and I can't remember, but we moved back up where I was born, up on Wy-oming Street. And what I remember there is, it was December 7th, 1941. You know what that was?

CLARK GRANT: Yeah.

GARDNER: That was Pearl Harbor. And we went to get a Christmas tree early in the morn-ing and went out on Harding Way, you know, the old road. And there was those drinking fountains there that everybody thought it was such great water until they started testing it. And giardia, and people would come out with big jugs. But anyway, we went up there and got a tree. And when we came back down, and we're driving down the alley, and our neigh-bor came and told us, 'hey, you know, we're at war now'.

And another thing I remember at the house on the flat, maybe I even pointed it out to you. The Zenith radio, we had? The old Zenith in the cabin there. I remember listening to Presi-dent Roosevelt talk about - he had those fireside chats, he used to call them. People would get around the radio. So he'd give the - I can remember that. And that was before we were in the war.

[00:16:26]

But as far as going on, once we got down on the flats there, there weren't many houses. So there was all kinds of places. And our pastime was shooting Japs. We'd dig fox holes and all this stuff. And get, you know, you'd find the two bean from maybe a carpet or something, just a great cannon. So we'd get those. And so we had a lot of fun doing that.

I don't remember up on Wyoming Street having any close friends at all. But there were. I'll tell you the story, maybe you don't want it. But anyway, we walked from the 700 block of Wyoming Street down off of Montana Street where the Silver Bow Creek and Blacktail - well, we went just below that. And we were out there wading around in the water. It was about up to here, my waist or so. And I see this thing go by me and - shit, that looks like a turd. Then I looked, and here comes some more, with toilet paper.

JAAP: Oh no!

GARDNER: So I don't care what you call it, but it's Shit Crick.

JAAP: You have the experience, yep.

GARDNER: Yeah. That was growing up and we, finally after being in the apartments Up-town, we went and bought a, my parents bought a house down on the flat again on Phillips Street.

And I remember, the house was $2300 bucks. And payments were $23 a month. And my mother, my dad died, but my mother paid it all off. But imagine, well, at that time you know, a day's pay in the mines was about a hundred bucks a week. So then you gave 10 to Uncle Sam.

So we went there, and then back up, when we were up on Wyoming Street, I went to the Monroe School, which is long gone. It's a Head Start now. So anyway, the Monroe School and it was the same as the Whittier, as far as the design and that, they're both long gone.

[00:19:31]

So I can remember a couple of things. One thing, talking about milk and these small bottles, they, you know, you could get a good deal, I guess. And parents always felt guilty if they didn't buy that nutritious milk, you know. It was pasteurized, but it wasn't homogenized, so then it'd freeze. And then they put it on the damn radiators, and I hated it. You know, I just hated that damn milk. I didn't want to drink it.

And then, I guess I talked a lot, you know. I think I was always talking. So for some reason, I got in trouble with another guy who, I don't know if we were fighting, this is in first grade. So they sent me up to the principal. And at that time, all of the schools, if you weren't a woman, you couldn't be a teacher. So the principal of the school was this little tiny lady and she whips out her paddle and pops me one. I thought she was going to kill me. I don't know what I did.

But anyway, then in second grade, because I talked, the teacher would take those repro-cessed pan, pipe or tiles, those brown ones, you know, so she would put them in my mouth. And I could take three and I could still talk very good, you know?

[00:21:09]

JAAP: How many did it take to get you to stop talking?

GARDNER: That's it, it took about three. So then when I went to third grade, I was down at Whittier, and my teacher's name was Dorothy Derry. And I was getting criticized because I was calling President Washington, George, all the time. And she didn't like that. But this is high tech there, she just took the scotch tape and put it. So then we stayed, I did, going to school at the Whittier. And I remember very well the eighth grade teacher I had, her name was Angela O'Leary. And she just got out of college, and then she went to Butte High, but I think she died very young, but she was a great teacher.

And what I remember, she had taught us the 21st psalm or whatever it is, you know, through the valley of death. And you try that now in a public school... and the other thing that she did, she'd teach a few of us Latin at lunchtime. And we'd run home and hurry up and come back. But she was a great sport, and we could kid along with her. And I really admired her. They did have a principal there, Ken Jolson was his name. And he was another great guy that was a fishermen. So he'd take us kids out fishing, hunting. And I don't know if, they'd prob-ably frown on that too, now. Take a bunch of little kids out to go fishing. So that was that. Now where do you want me to continue on?

JAAP: You are doing great. If you want to talk about when you were in high school, or if you have any other stories that jump before that, but...

[00:23:32]

GARDNER: High school? Nothing outstanding. I did one thing, and I should emphasize that I had the best parents in the world. They did everything they could for us. My dad was a small guy, but he worked in the mines. He was what they called a nipper. You know what a nipper is?

JAAP: Mmm hmm.

GARDNER: Okay. But then he graduated into eventually becoming, working out at the res-cue station. He taught first aid, you know, they used to have those first aid contests on Min-ers Union Day, at Columbia Gardens. In fact, I won one, one time. But anyway, he did that. And they did that, plus they got the big tanks of oxygen and put them in small tanks for all the guys with the silicosis and deliver it to the houses and pick up mangled people out of the mine. But he didn't drink much, very little. If he had a pasty, he might have a can of beer, or two.

But then he went to the party after one of the first aid contests, and he was an instructor and a judge and all that. And they went to the country club, and there, they just dropped the bot-tles of whiskey on the table, and said, 'go ahead'. Well he got too much there, and we were maybe a mile, I think it was a mile from the country club to where we lived. And he comes home and I hear them honking all the way down the street, 'cause he's scared he's gonna kill somebody.

[00:25:33]

He always expected me to go to school, you know, I mean college. And so it was not - may-be. You're going to go to college, not saying, you know, in a derogatory way, but you're go-ing to get a good education. I graduated from high school. But before I did that, there wasn't gonna be much money, or any money. And I took the NROTC test and passed that. And that gave you a tuition, 50 bucks a month, all lab fees. And then my dad's - I could have gone, if I could be accepted, to all but 52 colleges, that I could go on the NROTC scholarships.

So we went and decided on Rice Institute, in Houston, Texas. Arkansas used to play them. Do you remember that - football?

GRANT: Yep, oh yeah.

GARDNER: Dicky Maegle, and a few others. But anyway, digressing. But, where was I?

JAAP: So you went to Rice...

GARDNER: Went to Rice. Well, before I went there, the day I graduated from high school, that next day I went working underground. Right out of high school. And it was at the Em-ma mine. So I remember, my dad told me how to get my battery and put it on my hat and all that, and then go to this boss. So the boss says, 'oh, okay'. And he says, 'you know how to run a motor'? I knew what a motor was. I said, 'no'. He said, 'how about a slusher'? I said, 'I don't even know what a slusher is'. So he said, 'oh, we'll handle that'. So he told another guy, he said, 'hey, take this kid down and go in that one spot'. And then you had to climb up the raise, like, and then you had to go across and then there's another place where the rock would come down through this chute.

And then they had a slusher there, which is a thing that had cables to pull the ore into another thing. So the guy told me how to do it. And then he left me. And the first thing you, you ev-er been underground?

GRANT: Just once.

GARDNER: Well, the first thing you do when you're by yourself is turn the light off and it's black. I mean, it's black. So I did that and good thing the guy came and got me because I couldn't figure out how to get back to the station. So that's on the job training, huh?

[00:28:40]

So I did that every year, during the summer. And then when I went to the School of Mines, we could go work Friday and Saturday nights. So that was a big help. A day's pay, you know, 20 bucks, 40 bucks in a weekend. So anyway, I don't know if I really had been out of the state at this time. We'd go camping up Miner Lake or, you know, at this place or that place in the state, on occasions. I don't know if we did. So I had to hop on a bus, with my little artificial hope chest, you know, the metal - that's what I had all my stuff, going on the bus.1900 miles, I think it was. It was a long trip, and it took about two days to get to the Texas border.

And I remember finally getting in the back of the bus and I was sleeping, I could sleep. That didn't last too long though, because here's this guy shaking me. He was a Black guy. He says, 'hey mister, we're both going to be in trouble. You got to get in the front of the bus. And I have to stay in the back of the bus'. So I couldn't lay down. So I got exposed to, you know, in those days down in Houston, there were drinking fountains were colored. You know, toi-lets, restaurants, same way. And on the city buses, their backdoor, you know, they had a back door there. And from that back door back, that's where they went. And all the Southwest conference football, there wasn't one Black guy, I don't think they had a Black student in any of the Southwest conference, you know. Texas Tech, TCU, SMU, Arkansas. So it's come a long ways and it looks like we're losing a lot right now.

But anyway, so I went there to Rice, and so I had to take, well the first year I didn't, but so that was 1954. '55 spring. And then I went on a cruise because of the NROTC and I was on the battleship, the Iowa BB62. We went from Norfolk to Portsmouth in England, and then from there to Barcelona. And then we caught a train and went up to Madrid and then we went to Cuba. Gitmo Bay, Cuba.

So when we went to Portsmouth, England, the people, you know, you could go to different places, they'd take you in. So we got a chance to go to Lord Moppet estate. Pretty neat.

[00:32:26]

So we go there and to begin with, there's tea and crumpets. We're a little disappointed, but here comes Lord Moppet and then he popped out the gin, you know and we'd...And he, the first rocket from Germany - they just fire these things out and hope they hit something in England - and it went through the wall at his estate. But he's the one that - great guy. And he's the one that did the partitioning of, at 1946, the boundaries between Pakistan and India.

And he had to do that. And it was very difficult, because no matter what you did, there was going to be a huge migration of Indians going back to India. And Pakistanians going, you know, so. Finally they just put in, sort of gave up and made the border. And he was there.

[00:33:32]

But the IRA got him. He had a place in Galway, and he had a boat and they put a bomb on it remote, and blew him up. Then from Portsmouth, we went to Barcelona. And that was the first time that they called it, I think it was the ninth fleet, you know, we had 28 ships with us. So we went from Barcelona by train, just an old steam engine - choo, choo, choo, choo, you know, going down. And seeing these farmers coming out of the fields and they have these bota bags. You guys know what a bota bag is? And those farmers would take those and do this, and then we'd try and get it all over us.

So then we went from there down to Cuba. And the thing there was, they just had a base and a lot of beer gardens. But no women, so all the sailors are always fighting down there. They didn't have anything else to chase. Then we did a lot of maneuvers through there, and I was the guy that was loading the big 16 inch guns as they would come up on an elevator, like with the shell and then the powder and that. And I asked what's her name, because about this time, let me see, it would probably be, let me see. '54, '55, '55, '56. The end of '56, probably, I got a letter from my mother saying my dad had a spot on his lung. And he was good friends with Dr. Hall from Butte. And because he was driving an ambulance, so he saw him a lot. So he said, 'I don't like your color’.

[00:36:01]

So he said, 'we're going to have to go in'. So I came home and we went to Great Falls to have him operated on. And they said that it was just the lower lobe that they're gonna take. Well, he came out of the operation and then we went into the recovery room. And what I remember there was the ether, you know, the smell, just turn your stomach, it's so horrible. And there he is. And the doctor said before we went in, he said, 'we had to take the whole lung. It's can-cer'. And my dad gets, he says, and he said, 'well, we won't tell him that'. Just keep quiet. And he comes to my dad and he says, 'well it cancer, wasn't it'?

The doctor said, 'yeah'. And he said, 'well, you took the whole lung too'. And he says, 'yeah'. And he says, well, I got three years to live then. And that's about what he had.

By that time, well then I couldn't go back school in Rice. I just couldn't make ends meet. So then I stayed in Butte and went to School of Mines.

And my grand father and uncles and all that said, 'don't go into mining. It's no good'. You know, they thought they got trapped in Butte because they made good money and they couldn't leave because of that. So guess what? The one thing I did do, I majored in geological engineering with a petroleum option. Yeah. You see it there. And that was our diplomas, right there.

GRANT: Oh nice.

GARDNER: Yeah.

JAAP: That is great.

GRANT: It's engraved.

GARDNER: I should clean it up a little bit. And that was about it. He was 46, 47, I think. He was 43. So he made it a little further, but the one thing he did say was he was going to come back and haunt me if I didn't graduate from Tech. So I had to graduate, but I had to go out, on the weekends, maybe more, to the bars in Butte. And he'd be home sitting in a chair, weighing about 80 pounds. And he'd be awake and we'd talk, he enjoyed that. But like I said, then my dad, then he thought he was going to get better, but then found out. But when he died, he was about 80 pounds, 90 pounds.

[00:39:13]

And the priest came along and spent quite a bit of time in there with them. And then he came out and told my mother that she couldn't sleep with him anymore. 'Cause we weren't married, you know, the Catholic church and all that. Like something was going to happen, you know, 80 year old guy, I mean, 80 pound guy. And I just hated that, and it upset my mother so much. She cried and cried. You know, how could they do that? But that's the way it was.

So finally, because I was going to school at Rice, I had a deferment. I didn't have to get drafted. But when I quit down there and didn't let them know I was going to school in Butte, then I got drafted, supposedly.

And I went and talked to them in Butte, and I said, 'I'm in school'. 'Well, we didn't know that'. So they said, 'when you graduate, the day you graduate, you gotta be in the service'. So I said, 'well, it doesn't matter where I go? You know, army, navy, marines, national guard'. They said, 'no'. So I said, 'okay, I'll go national guard'. So we did that.

[00:40:44]

But it just happened that at that time, there was a Berlin crisis, it was a big problem. And they froze the guard units where people couldn't go to six months training or leave the unit at all. So I had a job offer with Shell Oil, but I couldn't guarantee when I could go. So I just went back to work. I went to work on, what they call the cooler gang, and we're putting - it got so hot in the Steward mine on the 4,000 foot level, that's the lowest level at that time, you know - and it was something like every a hundred feet raised one degree Fahrenheit. It was so hot, they couldn't work. And then what they do is bring up these big coolers up on surface and drop the water, or something like a water cooler, and then take that fluid and go down and put it in these big radiators, and blow that out to cool down the thing.

So I got on that. And that was a graveyard job. 12 o'clock till eight, you know. Because the other shifts were gone pretty well there. And the pipe was extremely heavy. It had a heavy, big you know, because of the pressures that it handled. So I worked there.

And I don't know. I guess I just, well an offer came or something. I could work for Parsons Jordan, who was building the concentrator in Butte at that time. And this was, well it was '61, I guess. That's the year I graduated. And so I went to work for Parsons Jordan as a in-spector, bringing that big line in from Silver Lake, Georgetown, into Butte for the concentra-tor. The concentrator wasn't in Butte at that time. They were putting in a crusher and a con-centrator.

[00:43:17]

So I went to work for that. But I'd been working all the summers, from '54 till, you know, '60, '71 or so, in the mines. So they knew me. And I had a degree. And so the engineering department came down and said, 'hey, we want you to go work for us'.

And I said, 'well, I promised Parsons I'd stay on the job'. They said, 'well, they're doing it for Anaconda, don't worry about it'. So guess what? I went to work for Anaconda Company, after all that time. And I was an engineer. And engineering, there wasn't that much engineer-ing. You did measuring of the contracts. So the contract miner, he got paid so much for a cu-bic yard of ore, or timber, or rails and all that. So we had to go down and measure all that. And then we put it in what they called the stope books up on surface, the big stope books. And we did that, but there wasn't that much - or the guy that was heading us up was a sharp guy, but he'd been there 20 years or so in the same job. And I thought, I don't see myself wanting to do this forever.

So they used to - every year Anaconda, they had the research department, the ventilation de-partment, the mining, and the engineering. And they, if you wanted to go in some other one, you could go interview and get a job. So Vic O'Leary was the guy that was heading up Butte. And he came to Butte. He was a big guy, and tough. And the reason he came to Butte was because of the mines had football teams and that. And that's how he came to Butte. So I went and interviewed Vic O'Leary and ended up going bossing underground, shift boss. But it was a shock to the old foreman. most of those came up through the ranks, you know, from digging ditch up to being a pretty good miner. And then you're a shift boss.

[00:46:00]

So to have a kid come in now and threaten you, 'uh oh, you better watch out that guy', you know, and they called me a sheepskin artist, I remember. I wasn't accepted, but I wasn't - they felt threatened by me. My assistant foreman, his name was Mike Mihelich and we hit it off, but we really became good friends when he retired.

So I was there, and let's see, there was the '67 strike, which is the longest strike in the history of Anaconda Company. And it was like 280 days or something like that. And I was up at the Steward mine, and we'd go work every day and we'd do some work down, you know, what-ever, keep busy, keeping the ditches clean. The one thing Anaconda never did is produce dur-ing a strike. Because it's just about impossible to, you know, produce. It's not like sitting at a computer or something, so they never did. But so anyway, I skipped an important part. There was a 19 - we're talking about strikes - so let's talk about the 1946 strike.

[00:47:44]

And my dad was working as a nipper. We had the house on the flat and the '46 strike comes, and it was a violent strike. And we went looking at houses, and I remember we caught a bus, city bus, to go around. And I don't know if it was because my dad didn't have a car, or he didn't have race stamps for gas for it, or...Anyway, we caught a bus and we went and looked at the houses that they destroyed. And the one was an engineer that never worked under-ground or anything else. He was a planning type engineer, and no threat to anybody, but they went to his house. And it was a fairly new house and it was down around Silver Bow Street in that neighborhood, Locust and that. They left town, well it used to be Anaconda would send them out to Swan Lake, the families, to stay in during the strikes. So we went to the first house we saw, it was his. And he had a big bay window there and they took the baby grand piano and threw it out. Then they went and killed his ducks, pet ducks, you know. And we started looking, here comes his mob, seriously. A mob of people coming up the street.

I mean, they filled the street, something like typical what's happening now here. But then we went and looked at another house, where the woman had a, and he was a superintendent of the Tramway mine. Trudeau was his name. She canned a lot, and they had that thrown all over the house. And there were two people I know died during that strike. And nobody ever talks about.

One was they were rolling in tires down to a guy's house. And he got out in the yard or some-thing and the tire jumped and hit him and killed him. And the other one was shot. And I think one of the superintendent's wife shot one of the mob that were there. So to me, that was just horrible, you know. How can they do stuff like that? If I ever had a chance to change that, I would want to change it. Never thinking I'd ever would, but guess what?

[00:50:38]

So anyway, getting back, where were we? Oh, the '67 strike, '67-'68. You know, and they'd picket. They'd have pickets out there. And the first one that came with the picket line was the beer truck drivers, got the other beer suppliers in Butte to give him beer, make 'em happy.

Then they had to get wood for their barrels and that. Then we had to walk through that. And they were good about it and, you know, being out so long. But it was the first time they had pretty well, this coordinated bargaining with all the other mines that made it a heck of a lot harder to be more flexible. So it was a long strike.

Anaconda said, 'hey, we can't handle this. If we have to settle, eventually, there's going to be a lot of layoffs'. Okay, finally, they announced the strike was over. And guess what? There's 1500 fewer people in Butte working.

And the guys that were on the picket line, they stayed on the picket line, even though the strike was settled. And so I walked up to the picket line and I say, 'you know, it's over'. And they said, 'no, you're not going in'. I said, 'yeah I am'. They said, 'no'. I said, 'yeah I am'. Fi-nally I said, 'okay, they told me not to cause any problems. So I'm leaving. But if I ever see you downtown Shorty, I'm going to kick the shit out of you'.

And so then they let me in, huh. But there's these miners that spent 200 days on a picket, and they don't have a job after, but they really couldn't do it. So, let me see. Oh '70. Then right after that strike, because all of the lay offs, yeah people not working, they transferred me to the Berkeley Pit.

[00:53:01]

And I was a shift boss there, more or less. They had a crew up on top and there was a crew down lower on the mine and that, so I did that for awhile. Then I became the Roden dump foreman, and then the drill and blast foreman. And they were more responsible jobs.

But Anaconda at that time, first of all, it didn't have the equipment and that to understand what the hell they were making in a mine. You didn't have computers and all this stuff. And so the only way they could measure their success, or plans, was tons. But tons didn't buy their groceries. So, I remember the one guy saying, that was the head of the Pit, saying, 'we got to hire more people. Because our costs are so high and we have to get our ton costs down, you know'? And I said, 'well, don't you think it'd be better to try to cut back on the other things? You tell me'.

[00:54:36]

So, anyway from there, they had a small pit. And you know the story of the Columbia Gar-dens and all that. So the first pit, Continental East, before the Continental big pot, there was a small ore body that's called a super gene. And it's a lot higher grade, you know, it leaches down in higher grade. And it was right by the Columbia Gardens. Was. We had a small group of miners over there and I was in charge of them and they brought in these porta-camps, where you got showers and all that kind of stuff. And they said, 'he'll have to take out all those fancy faucets and that because the miners will steal it. And I said, 'come on'. So when I went over there, there was probably, you know, maybe 50 guys, at most. But I took them out. I showed them the dry. Said, 'look at it. It's good shape. Here's where you're showering and this is, you know, and this. And there's a closet over there, and there's a broom and a mop, and you guys keep it clean. And I won't change anything'. They wanted to put in, you know, old heavy duty type stuff. And then it was a big problem coming in early on a truck, at quit-ting time. And I said, 'and, you know quitting time. So if you come in early, you're gonna get dinged'. And then I said, they'd write on the walls and all that, so I got blackboards to put around. And said here, 'if you want to call me a name, write it on the blackboard, but not on the wall'. And then I had another one with, and this is the one that really sold them, was the tonnage we were getting. Every day we'd put it down. And they'd start looking and they were trying to improve on that.

So that's got me up to about that time. There was a few years left in that one, but I didn't see much future in Butte, at that time. So Anaconda, the CEO, I guess it was, of Anaconda Company, which is big company, you know. They were down in Chile, Chuquicamata, but they finally got expropriated outta there. And that was the beginning of the end. And so the CEO of Anaconda was friends of the Shah of Iran. So they wanted, Englishman discovered this big deposit, and they wanted to - so what Anaconda, with the Shah, we had made a technical assistance agreement where we would go over in the mine. And develop the mine, it's out in the boonies. And train your counterpart. So that's when I headed out.

[00:58:22]

But in 1974, not many people could go to a map and show you where Iran was. And the one thing I did, I did a good education job on my family. And we went to the library and studied up and everything. And they were delaying it. And I just about said, 'forget it'. But finally it came about. So March of '74, I headed to Iran. And there was three other guys with me. And we flew from Butte, and then we stopped, visited Rome a little bit, three or four days. And then Portugal. And in Portugal, they just had a coup there. What was spooky is these young kids with machine guns around. It didn't last long, but so anyway, we flew Iran Air. And when we started coming in close to landing in Tehran, and we're in first-class, you know. So the stewards or whatever they were said, 'you people have to move back there because we have to clean up first class'. So, okay. So we moved back and I start looking and they're walking by with towels and they got bottles of whiskey and wine and all of that. And they're taking that off the plane and that's my first exposure to Iran.

[01:00:11]

Then you get off the plane and the airports are crowded, just horrible. And women and... people, masses of smelly people. And it was just crowds and the rest of it. And no-body even came to meet us. So we had the address of - the office is in Tehran. And the hotel where we're going to stay. So we got to the hotel and I said, 'well, we'll wait, they'll come and pick us up tomorrow morning'. They didn't. So we talked to the hotel and they said, 'it's just down the street, their offices'.

So, went down and there's this guy, Pete Woodbridge, who was ultimate introvert and could hardly say hello to ya. And he's the one that - so we had to make our own. If you were a Mormon now and got there, the Mormons would have somebody to meet you at the airport and take care of you. But we had to figure it all out ourselves.

[01:01:30]

So then you get on a plane. And fly five, 600 miles to Kerman, Iran. And then you get on a bus, and you go to Rafsanjan, which is a village of a hundred thousand plus. It was the pista-chio capital of the world. And then that was at 3000 feet, and then the mine was maybe 30 or 40 more miles up in the mountains. And it was about 10, 11,000. So when we first got there, we'd make that trip. So I go, and so they assigned me to - it was a double porta-camp. So it was really for four people But there were two in there and they drive everybody else out, be-cause they didn't want anybody in. And one was the superintendent of the warehouse. The other one was the superintendent of the garage. And one was in English, and the other one was a retired colonel. They didn't want anybody more in that thing. They had a great thing - the colonel could get food out of the PX up in Tehran and that. So first thing they do, I get in there and put my stuff in the room, and all of a sudden here comes this bagpipe music - just blaring your ears off, you know?

And I figured, well I know what's happening here. And he says, ' do you like it'? I said, 'it's not bad. I think I can handle that'. We became good friends, but they were trying to run me out of there. They didn't want me in there. So then, it took Arlis, God bless her, she stayed back and finished closing on the house, and packing, and three kids and two dogs, and went over.

But I had to go search for a house because the town site wasn't finished yet. It wasn't even started. So you had to go down to this village. And again, I had to do that on my time off. The company didn't do it. So I had to get a house and I got a house. And she said, 'you gotta get me here by June or something, or I'm not coming'. So she did. And when she flew over, at that time, Beirut was the big, crazy place in the world. And so they would have stopped at Damascus and Beirut on the plane. And the dogs are in, you know, in the back of the - but there's a woman that had a monkey on the plane. So she got water for the dogs. Then she flew into - and by the time she got there, I had a house. And it was a house, and all of them have courtyards around it.

[01:04:38]

A lot of them, there's one spot, part of that neighborhood of Rafsanjan, it's called Gringo Al-ley. And that's where a lot of the gringos were there. But I didn't want to do that. So I just got a house, with carpet. And she came and then we had to learn words like, for sheep and that, so we could order the meat. And we got goat mixed up with sheep, so we're eating goat meat, and didn't know it. There was a guy that used to come by on a little motorcycle, and the hind quarters of a hunk of beef that was maybe about 50 pounds or so. There were very few people there to begin with, and then we start getting more people in there. And this engi-neer Don Gill and his wife were the first ones there before I ever got there. And it was a good place. The natives were good, and no problems.

But then the ugly American comes, and we had a bus that would drive the women around to the places where they could pick up, the bazaar or wherever they'd want to go. Well, they started swearing at the Iranians, and pretty soon it became pretty tense. And I remember this Don Gill says, and his wife was heavyset and she'd ride a bicycle and they'd start making fun of her there. But he said, 'you got to get me up to the town sites', or whatever. But so any-way, we stayed in the house for probably two years. And some of the interesting things that happened, we formed a club and we'd meet once a month and have the, I don't know if we catered it or whatever, but we'd have a good time doing it. But I had one guy from Butte that went over there with me, and we drank. And John Mulcahy, and he was a rassler. And I told him, I said, 'if you get in a fight, you're outta here immediately'.

[01:07:28]

So it was one night there, and we had the party and Parson's people, they'd come with us to the parties. And this guy that was working for Parsons was very drunk, and two or three oth-er guys come in with them, and one was punching him. And John Mulcahy, he said, 'hey, that's sort of chicken shit. I don't think you should be doing that'. And the guy says, 'yeah, okay'. And he had a belt buckle that was a knife. And he pulled it, swung it, at John Mul-cahy. And he had a sweatshirt on, or a t-shirt like, and then a big sweater and that sliced it, but didn't get him at all. Then they jumped on this guy and said, 'he's got a knife. He's got a knife'! Got him and tied them up and put him in the kitchen. And the next day, the next morning, he was out of there. That was it.

[01:08:24]

But the neighbors - my wife got very sick and my son got very sick. Typhoid, I guess. They were down and out, but the people that we rented the house from wanted us to go to dinner at their house. We finally did, but we had to, you know, because my wife was really very sick. I guess I used enough - whenever we went out in the country where the natives were, they'd have this yogurt, you know - and I'd eat it. But I think that probably, that or the vod-ka, one of the two, saved my life.

But anyway, finally we got the house up in the mine and they made a big deal out of it. The Iranians were building the houses. So they had meetings of what color combinations, and you know, and all this. And we'd go on vacation and come back and I think the walls were or-ange, and I don't know the carpet, it was, you'd have to ask her, she'll tell ya. And so we fixed the house up, but then yeah, it start falling down. It was cement like this, on the roof, and there are bricks that they put in and it started going out. So they said, 'Mr. Gardner, you have to move'. I said, ;I've cleaned the last damn house in Iran that I'm going to, I'm not mov-ing'. But I started measuring it. And I knew that, you know, E equals MC squared. And if it's accelerating, then you better...Finally, I said, 'I'm going to go'. We moved.

[01:10:29]

But then we hired a guy from the States, he was an Iraqi though, and never became a U.S. So he's going to be the counterpart of me. And so we left the house and moved down, and I left something in the house, and I came back and the natives had gotten in there and they had their sheep in the house. And took the doors off the pantry and that, so sheep could stay in one room.

And I told Araj, he said, 'oh, that's not my people'. I said, 'yeah your people did that'. So, it got to the point where we - there was nothing there. There is power for the support of the you know, the porta-camp, and the rest at the mine. But there wasn't any power to the first shovels. And Iranians, you know, we had a garage and I don't know who built that, but any-way, it was there. And they'd sit on the floor to repair a piece of, you know, a battery or something. And so we built these tables like, so they could work on it. They'd hop up on the table and then squat there and do it.

[01:11:51]

They had good eye coordination, hand-eye coordination. They're good operators. And we had a lot of good times with them. So it was three years. We had by, I don't know how we did it, but we moved 30 million tons. And the mine was ready to go on the concentrator and that was years out.

So then I went to work in Canada. So how much time do you want me to spend?

GRANT: How much time do you have?

GARDNER: I got enough time.

JAAP: You're doing great. What you're doing is perfect. Yes. What you're doing is perfect. You're making our job very easy.

GARDNER: Okay, so I'm not - you know. And I have a daughter that was 12 years old, I guess that's about what she was, maybe a little older. And the mine wasn't any place for a family. So I just had to leave.

So I got a job up in Canada to a big mine, and I was superintendent up there for three years. '77 - '79, we were out there. But my wife didn't enjoy it up there. It was very British, she used to have to say, 'I have to make an appointment to go have coffee with my neighbor'. And they felt threatened, Canada, of U.S. culture overtaking them.

[01:13:41]

They made it a point that I was one of the few that went up there that was a ex-pat, you know, from the U.S., because they didn't want to hire anybody from out of Canada. And they didn't want the TV stations coming in to corrupt them and all that. So it was a good enough job. But in the meantime, I'm talking to this Dan Rovig. I don't know if you ever heard of Dan or not. But he was a head of, him and I graduated together, and he stayed and then I left. And then he was heading up Butte and we'd talk on the phone and say, 'what should we do here, Frank'? And I'd say, 'I'd do this and that'. And then finally he said, 'hey, would you like to come back to Butte'? And I said, 'not unless I had the authority to do what has to be done'. And he said, 'well, let me check and see'. So it was about six months later, he said, 'yeah, we can do that'.

So now I got to figure out when we left. Arlis!

JAAP: She'll set you straight. So while you're thinking, may I ask, when you say 'the authori-ty to do it has to be done', what, in your opinion had to be done in Butte?

GARDNER: I'll get into that.

JAAP: You'll get there. Okay.

GARDNER: That's the story. The story's coming up, you know as far as...Do you want any pop? Water?

JAAP: I'm okay, Frank. Thank you for asking.

GARDNER: Is it off?

GRANT: I can turn it off.

GARDNER: No, that's fine.

GRANT: Okay.

GARDNER: When did we come back from Canada?

ARLIS GARDNER: 1979.

GARDNER: '78? I came back late '79. Now I remember.

ARLIS GARDNER: Late '79?

GARDNER: Yeah.

ARLIS GARDNER: Yes, November.

GARDNER: Yeah. November. So do you want to sit down? You can.

ARLIS GARDNER: No.

[01:16:50]

GARDNER: Oh, okay. So anyway, we come back late '79 to Butte and start the mine. But I - or start the mine - go to work in the mine. And I couldn't believe it. 1980, '81, we lost, there was 1,306 employees in the Berkeley Pit. I couldn't, you know, I didn't know what I was get-ting myself into. And the two years, '81, we lost 65 million bucks. '82, we lost 35 million. And then in '83, we only worked six months and made 7 million. But we just started cutting back. I don't know where it came from, all this stuff in that.

And so I was, a lot of people don't believe this, but it's true. That I was the one that was say-ing we got to shut the mine down. It wasn't Denver. Here, as I said, 'we got to shut the mine down, and there's four or five things that had to be done'. The taxes are way out of kilter. The environmental issues are becoming more and more. And even Tommy the Commie from Billings was proposing a 35% severance tax. Then we had the hard rock impact and taxes and gross proceeds. When we built, you know, we'd sell our copper. But they'd value it at the price that it was in the car in Butte. But that copper had to go to a smelter - to Japan, or wherever, and get refined and transportation and everything. But the price that they would, or the taxes, they were gross proceeds out of Butte, not net proceeds.

[01:19:13]

And then there was the environmental issues. And contracts with Montana Power and smelt-ing and refining contracts. So, we just started laying off. 10%, you know, cut here, 10% there. And like I said, by the time we shut down - finally, they told, the agreement was, that we would shut down at the end of the contract in '83, June 30th. And we'd be down for a year to try to take care of this. Atlantic Richfield was going to start the molybdenum mine down in Nevada to supply the contracts in Europe on that part of it. So that's where we went. And finally they did. And so we shut down '83 with the idea we'd - in '84, we'd go back to work and have a lot of this...

Well, guess what? Atlantic Richfield decided that they're getting out of mining completely. They had enough. And probably the biggest thorn then, probably their biggest worry was Butte, and it was already down. So they booked a billion dollars to get out of the mining business. And then a week later, they upped it to $1.1 billion dollars. So they threw another hundred million in there. So they want to get out of business.

So there we are, '83, you know, and all of a sudden, we're not trying to solve the problems. We're trying to sell the mine. And we had the big companies in the States, you know, Kennecott, Phillips-Dodge, ASARCO, and all of them. And none of them were interested. And the two things they mentioned was labor and the environmental, of course.

So anyway, who comes to the mine? Well, I met him earlier when we were in 1980, Denny Washington. And he comes to the mind to buy, we were trying to get rid of all this junk we had at the mine, you know. So many people now, we had all these old trucks. So he wanted to come to buy the trucks. Here comes Denny, and he's got a silk scarf on and a little fringe hat, you know, the tassel on it.

[01:22:17]

And I looked at that, and I said, 'I'm not going to meet with that guy'. So I told this Chuck Hollows, our finance guy, he had to. And yeah, so he had talked to Denny and Denny said he wanted always to make a better deal. And the trucks were cheap. And you know, we were trying to get rid of them. Then he said, 'well I can go back in Minnesota. And buy those trucks and bring them back to Montana'. And I said, 'tell him, go ahead. You're going to have to tear the damn trucks down. You have to haul 'em back here and put them back together again. So I guess they must be getting them for next to nothing'. So finally, we made a deal with him that we would - there was an old shovel there, that we would sell that at our asking price, but there was a bunch of inventory for parts. So it was two to 300,000.

So then he bought the trucks. So then, when we were out looking for somebody to buy the mine, he came in with, and Denny knew equipment. And he knew what the value was, you know, he's sharp. But he came with a friend of his, that they, the guy had scrapped out an iron mine in Wyoming and made a lot money. So he partnered up with Denny, and they came to Butte. And we still had a core group of people at the senior areas that could run a mine. And so, where was I now?

[01:24:21]

So anyway, he comes, and we put on our little dog and pony show and say that we think there's value in the rest of it. And Denny says, okay. So he said it easily, and he said, 'I might come back by myself in a couple of weeks'. I said, 'okay, that's fine'. Sure enough, he comes back. And we had one guy, Roy Willox, who was from Denver, that was heading up asset disposal, he was there. And Denny said, 'okay, I'll give you...', well I'd better not.

Anyway, he gave us a price. And first of all, we said, we can't make those decisions. They have to be made down in Denver. And he said, 'well, let's go'. And we did. I ran home, got a suitcase, and we went down to Denver. And that was in September of whatever. Septem-ber...anyway, we can...

When did Our Lady of the Rockies get put on the mountain?

JAAP: '84?

GARDNER: No, probably ’85. Let me see, how can I...we started, yeah, it was '85.

JAAP: Okay.

GARDNER: So, September of '85 and we went down to Denver, and Denny, we were ne-gotiating back and forth. And then we put Denny in the assets disposal room with all the rest of the stuff, and it was amazing how much stuff in Montana was there.

[01:26:40]

And so he starts looking, you know, and he comes back in, and he says, 'hey, let's talk about everything in Montana. Not only the mine, but everything else'. And Darren Parkinson, don't know if you've ever heard of him, but he was a president of Washington Corp here in Missou-la. And he pretty well turned white. So he gets Denny back and says, 'you can't do that. You can't afford it. Blah, blah, blah'.

So we came back in and we started haggling. And at one point, Denny threw himself, with a suit on, threw himself on the damn floor there and said, 'come on, walk all over me. You've been doing it all damn day here, you know'. So anyway, he got a hell of a deal. And the deal, well they made money, but what Denny paid was pittance. And you know, he borrowed money from the water company, which was part of the Butte water company.

They had a debt of 3 million at the - ARCO did. But then Denny said, 'can I get 3 million out of it'? And they said, 'yeah, we'll give you 3 million'. And then he paid the taxes, or the taxes were due in March or so. So he said, 'give me the money now'. And that was another 2 mil-lion. So it got down there.

[01:28:15]

He didn't pay much in tax. But the one thing that they did keep is net profits interest of 15%. So whatever that mine made for 15 years, 15% went to Denny. And at the last counting I re-member, it was 60 and 1 million. So you can see how profitable the mine was.

So anyway, we didn't talk about me... it was I understood, but we didn't talk about me going to work for him, or anything. We did that and the day that we settled up was the day, they put the head on Our Lady of the Rockies. I remember we flew out in Denny's plane, and we were standing in the office, back steps in the office at Montana Resources. And there goes the thing, you know. I should mention that someplace.

See, Bob O'Bill he was laid off. Let me see - no, he wasn't laid off at the time. But we were making all these big layoffs. But he comes in and asked me, he says, 'I got up question'. I said, 'what'? He said, 'will you help me'? I said, 'help you for what'? He says, 'my wife had cancer'. And he prayed Our Lady of the Rockies and said that promise to put this statue up on the Hill. And I said, 'what kind of statue'? He said it this way, 'oh, a statue about this big'. And he said, 'and it has to be lit. And it has to be up on that mountain there'.

I said, 'you're crazy. There's people that own that property up there and you can't just go in digging with a dozer up there and the rest of it'. And he got it done. But we gave him three pieces of work equipment, a dozer, a grader, and a loader to build the road. And volunteer guys from the pit built the road. And so it got done. And she lived and he died.

[01:31:06]

But Bob O'Bill was a great guy. And he wrote the nicest letter to me, all my family, not me, but my family, about how I got this deal for him and this and that. And he's a good guy. So how did I get there from mining?

JAAP: You were talking about the first day, and that's when they were putting the head on the lady.

GARDNER: Oh yeah, there but...yeah, that's started it. And then January 1st, I became general manager to begin with. And right away, we went out to negotiate contracts, power and you know, smelting and refining, and all those kinds of things. And so by June, we had a pretty good idea what we could do if everything worked out right. That we could start up.

And I went over with a guy by the name of Ron Kristovich. And he was our numbers guy. And we put together these numbers for Denny. And I said, 'well here it is. You know, you can make a few million bucks one year and might lose a few million the next year, but just hang in there'.

And we went through it, and it wasn't a well-prepared presentation. But Denny said, 'let's go ahead. That's the way it is. Let's do it'. What? It would've been ARCO there for another 10 years, you know. What's the price of copper going to be? And who's going to be? And there was more copper under the New York streets, blah, blah blah. Let's do it. I said, 'what'?

But now here's where the labor and the rest of it comes in, see. We decided that what we could have is, we had to have a wage of nine bucks an hour, from 13, as a 40% cut for every-body, including me. But the kicker was profit sharing. And we figured that we could do it with 340 people from 1300.

[01:33:54]

And then we had to figure out, how do you sell this? And in 1980, Barney Rask and I, he was the big labor guy, tough, mean. And it was St Patty's day 1980, when we come back, and you've probably heard that story. And I told my mother, or my wife, 'why don't you tell my mother to go get some corn beef and cabbage and we'll have dinner tonight'.

Okay. So I go down the M and M, and run into Barney Rask. And we got talking. Well I told him, you know, the negotiations with him, and there's going to be a hell of a lot different than it was before. And he got all flustered and he got, you know, blah blah blah blah. And then I forgot about - I called my wife, said, 'why don't you come up'? She said, 'don't you remember your mother'? She comes up anyway, Harry, or Barney, has this chew and he spit on my glasses and everything. Copenhagen, you know. My wife comes up and sees that. But Barney, we talked a lot. And Barney got sick. And I went to the hospital with him and he couldn't believe that the guy that was running Butte would come see a labor guy in the hospi-tal.

[01:35:36]

So we became pretty good friends. In fact, very good friends. In fact, when we laid off in '83, he came to Butte. And well, Jim Marvin came to Butte, who was president of Anaconda, came to Butte and gave a speech at the Butte chamber. I couldn't believe it. You know, we had just shut down, and we met with Barney the night before. And the guys from ARCO are scared that, they had body guards and every other damn thing.

But, so we had dinner that night and Barney made a statement and said, 'hey, years ago, a tree was growing in Butte. And this tree grew so far and then it branched out. And one was labor and one was management. And the longer that tree grew, the further apart'. And he said, 'it's time to chop the tree down'. And he's a good speaker.

So after we shut down, I got ahold of Don Peoples. And well I had to convince Jim Marvin, the president of Anaconda, that we'd opened the books, everything. All open, the books. So they could see that we're losing all this money. And I spent three or four days down in Den-ver trying to convince him, and he was retiring and finally he said, 'oh, go do it'.

[01:37:07]

So I got ahold of Don Peoples and told him, he's the one that should do it. Not me, because I don't have any credibility, you know, that we're going to do this. But you form the commit-tee, and you get your union guys. And you know, Barney Rask, and a couple of other union guys and businessmen, like Harp Cote. And you know, Finch from Tech, you know, and we'll lay it out so they understand that we were in a predicament, you know. So they did that. And they asked Barney at one of those discussions, you know, do you think that $9, you know, 40% cut in pay, what do you think of that Barney? And Barney said, 'I'll tell you one thing. They're not going to open this damn mine unless they can make some money. And if they're not going to make any money, you better listen to them, because... So you can thank Barney for, and this is the sad part about it was - when he died, I went to his funeral and there wasn't one union official at that thing.

[01:38:27]

So let me see, where are we at? So Denny said go ahead. And we started hiring people back and that's the story. That there was, you know, a hundred years of unionism in Butte and it went out with a whimper. And nobody, through all this time, I never really got any crank calls or threats or anything. My wife, I shouldn't even tell you this, but my wife, I got a, or a card came to me at Christmas. And I'm working, so she opens the card. And it said, 'Merry Christmas, you' - and you open it up and this penis pops up.

Okay. Pop! And she calls me. She says, 'you got to do something with that guy'! I said, 'what do you want me to do? Go beat the hell out of him'? I said, 'I fired him'. You know, I said, 'besides that, I admire the guy. Because he signed it'. And then I said, 'besides that, from now on, don't open my mail'!

So the guy...oh I can skip over that. But that's pretty well the story, I think. Anything else you want?

[01:40:21]

JAAP: Yeah. Do you want to start with your list of questions, Clark? You've got a list.

GRANT: Sure, I'll turn this up. What can you tell us about the pumps?

GARDNER: Pumice?

GRANT: The pumps.

GARDNER: Oh the pumps. You wanna, I can tell you about the pumps, but you can read what's her name's article in CTEC or whatever that is.

GRANT: Yeah, Rayelynn?

GARDNER: Yeah, and the idea was the pumps - that did come from Denver, the idea. And the idea was that there was a couple of things - they were spending a million bucks a year on exploration, deep in Butte. And then they asked, 'well you ever think you're going to get there'? 'Probably not'. So well, they cut that out. But then the pumps, it was about 10 million bucks a year. And so they decided it would be better to shut the pumps down. But it was al-ways that thing about those pumps, you know, because underground was not going to come back in Butte. And it was costing 10 million bucks, so it was a lot of money. And I don't know, I can't really remember if there, there was a lot of uproar. Because whenever there was a strike, we would want the guys to work, keeping those pumps running because that was the lifeblood. So it pretty well quieted down. And I don't know what else to...

[01:42:13]

JAAP: Did you have any personal feelings about shutting the pumps off?

GARDNER: I'll tell you what I did do. Because of Jim Marvin, I talked to other people, but it wasn't as massive as what we were doing, that had done that. Have gone in and, you know, flooded mines and come back in and pumped them out, and couldn't do it.

But when you're looking at 10 million bucks, you know, for one year, so you figure out how long would it take at how many billions of gallons and the rest of it? If I thought that there was a good chance, or even a slim chance, that we'd go to underground again, I'd probably resist it. But it was coming from Jim Marvin, so we did it. Go ahead.

GRANT: In some of the other interviews we've done, people talked about the, when Mon-tana Resources took over, they weren't anti-union, they were union-free. Who came up with that?

[01:43:26]

GARDNER: Good point, I'll tell ya. Where I was just telling Arlis again, you know, it's so negative, you know, anti-union. I'd go out and say we're - and the other thing is, I didn't pull any punches. I said, 'we're not going to have any unions. And we're going to be union- free'.

But I'll tell you, there's this Charles Hughes, a guy that when we were starting to startup, we were going shopping for people that handled this kind of stuff, you know. Like ARCO had somebody to do their negotiations for them, and they had human resources and all that. And then there was this guy called Charles Hughes. And he went around talking to people, either preventing being unionized or getting out of unions. And he made a, well, he formed a bunch of questions, you know, I can't remember all of them, but you know, safety, a big issue. Health, cooperation, pay, all these things. And every year we'd go with these questions. You start at the bottom, the foreman down on the floor with his people. And he would try to re-solve all those issues that he could. And then if there's anything else, it was bumped up to the next level, and there was a couple of other levels and it came to me, but depending on the scores that he had, he could tell you where you were in trouble or you weren't.

[01:45:16]

And whenever he went to some place, the unions used to follow him and picket him, because of his...but, you know, and he said that you know, miners are tribalistic. And they need one chief, somebody they can look at and they can trust and accept, and then they can, so...But we scored high in that all the time, but you know, when you cut back so much there, it just, but yeah. Then that's where he, I think it was, Charles - Google him one of these times.

GRANT: Sure. I'm curious, how did it feel to sell off a mine that you once worked in?

GARDNER: You mean, sell off -

GRANT: When you guys were trying to just sell all the equipment?

GARDNER: Hey, it was dead. Well no, a lot of the equipment was used equipment. But as far as the mine, you know, we went from asset disposal, from trying to cut back, you know, what was the options? Atlantic Richfield had stated that they were getting out of the busi-ness, lock stock and barrel.

And when the mining companies, or any business, I guess, that does that, they put a figure: $1,000,000,000, 1.1 billion dollars. Now they don't want you out there negotiating a price that's going to drag on. Just get rid of it. We bought enough problems, get out.

[01:47:18]

GRANT: What about the transition from Anaconda to ARCO?

GARDNER: See, I was, well like I said before, ARCO was not, they were not miners. That pretty well says everything. But it was about that time that they came aboard, first of all, An-aconda was in Chile, Chuqui, and then they were nationalized. And that was about the end of the Anaconda Company. You know, Butte could lose money, but a lot of the people that came up were from Butte, so they sort of, you...but yeah, it was...

GRANT: Was it just a totally different...

GARDNER: Oh, okay. Maybe, I don't know. Like I said, first of all, they had no concept of what they're doing. But what they were, all the oil companies were getting so much cash, and they're scared they're going to be taken over, or bought out, or something. So they decided they have to...and the thing they went to, is a lot of it, Exxon, you know, Anaconda, Chev-ron, and all those, got in and just about all of them lost their tail. Because there's a hell of a lot difference between drilling a well and running a mine.

[01:48:59]

When I went down and talked to Mike Boland, who come out of human resources, and he was president of Anaconda. So first of all, he had no experience. And he made the statement that they were going to make a major mine for the next five years. They're going to develop a major mine. And they just loaded it up, you know, and I'd have to go down once a month to Denver to report on the mine. And I'd have to get up there and drop my pants, tell them all the bad stuff. And that's the way I said it.

And this magazine, Pay Dirt, the guy that - he worked for Anaconda for quite a while. And then he was working for Pay Dirt. And we were out having a drink or something. And I told him all this stuff, and then he put in Pay Dirt, you know. Yeah, I said I'd have to go down there, and there would be 30 people at the damn meeting, and 90% of them never been in a mine. But they're going to tell me, you know. And one of the first things that happened is they would talk about price, you know? What's the price of metal going to be? Well, I don't know. Nobody knows, you know. What in the hell difference does it mean?

[01:50:42]

But then the geology, they spent 65 million bucks a year going out to find something and never did. But there would be these discussions and there were just too many people. And the other thing was when we negotiated contracts before, the money part of the contract was done by the people upstairs. And then, you know, they'd go to Las Vegas and boondoggle for weeks or two, have a good hell of a good time with the guys. And then they'd finally got tired of that. And then they'd come back and say, 'okay, that's done'. Then we'd have to come back to the mine and we'd have to talk about the local issues, you know, our time and half, my manpower, and the rest. And we had nothing to bargain. So the last year, in '83, Jim Marvin became a good friend of mine. And we did everything in Butte. But before, they didn't know what they were doing.

When they shut the smelter down, which we, you know, that came as a blow. But it was not unexpected. Because the smelter was old, and they start looking at putting money into it. And it costs about 400 million to get it in compliance, as far as emissions at that time. But there are no guarantees, something would happen the next day that they'd have to do more. And they, the smelter just seemed to not really realize what was happening.

[01:52:41]

In 1980 in December, they got the notice. And it shocked them. But it didn't shock me. And you know, then we had to go out, well they went out and negotiated the largest concentrate contract, Anaconda - because they had other mines - ever negotiated with the Japanese. And it was a horrible contract. One of the things that they had there was arsenic, which the mine, Berkeley Pit, the ores there were high in arsenic. Not like the pit.

Yeah. And so there's penalties on arsenic and if it got to a certain point, then the contract, the original one we had, was a certain one was, you got to a certain point, they wouldn't even take it. But Jim Marvin, somehow he settled that, but I think ARCO paid a ton of money. But then Jim went over with me to - what you did do, after then we had to go find the place to place our concentrates. So the one thing I learned early on, you don't go over to Japan to negotiate a contract. Because they'll tag team ya, and you're out every damn night drinking, like hell. And finally, you just give up and say...But they liked San Francisco. So we'd get going and the first contract that we signed with them, and Denny said, we're going to Japan. Just to sign it. Formality, you know. And so Denny said, 'okay, you handle the Japs and I'll handle Mansfield'. Okay. So I'm telling Nippon Mining, and that we're going to have this dinner, or whatever. Well, he said, 'No. Mansfield's getting too old to go to the bank. We'll have lunch with him. We'll go over to their offices and sign the contract'.

[01:55:25]

So I'm talking to Mansfield's assistant and he said, 'you can't do that. Mike will never ever go do that. He can't go to show that it's kind of a preference', and this and that. So I get a hold of Denny. He says, 'oh, okay. You tell the Japanese and I'll handle Mansfield'.

So when we get over there and Mansfield is nervous, he thinks that we don't have a contract. And then he loosened up. And his famous thing is making coffee for you. And it's Nescafe. He did! But then the next year, or the first contract, I think it was, we met in San Francisco at Charlie Pelaggi, he's dead. He was you know, all the operations. So we go in and there's, you know, four or five Japanese there. And Marvin went with us, but he didn't sit in the meetings. So they gave us this proposal that was just horrible. And they, I think they were famous for that. And then you know, bringing them closer together.

And then we met for dinner with Jim Marvin and he said, 'what are you going to do tomor-row, Frank'? And I said, 'we're going to go in there. And we're going to make one that's more ridiculous than their offer, on the other way'. Then Charlie said 'well, what'? I said, 'you watch me'. We had those metal briefcases, you know? I say, 'if you see me reach down and pick that up and put it on the desk, you do the same, because we're walking out'. And so this Arai became a good friend of mine. And Kitazawa, a good friend. I had dinner at his house and that, with these Japanese.

So anyway, we go in the next day and I put our proposal out. And this Arai was a very prop-er, a nice guy. He died young too. But their glasses, I don't know what they do. They just sparkle, you know. Always clean and mine are always dirty. And anyway, this Arai, I made the offer. And he goes, hmphh! And then he translates to this Matsumoto. And Matsumoto was a guy who ran around, but anyway. And and Matsumoto says, 'you know'... and Arai says blah blah blah blah blah. And Matsumoto says, 'Mr. Arai says he is shocked'.

[01:58:29]

And I said you tell Mr. Arai that we were shocked. And I picked up my briefcase, there was no...He said, Mr. Arai cannot do business with this. I said, 'I agree. Okay, we're leaving'. Got up and walked out. And Charlie Pelaggi says, 'you can't do that! Jesus, they'll never come back'. And before we got back to Butte, they wanted another meeting. And then we went down.

But they would dwell on something like fluoride in your ore would eat their converters up and all this. And you'd talk for days and days. And then, like I said, they would tag team you too, going out and partying. Yeah, we had a good relationship with - you know, I had the guy that made the contract was - Kitazawa was his name. He - smart guy. But he majored or minored in American folk songs. So he you could sing, and every time we'd have a party, or dinner or whatever, at the end he'd sing Danny Boy to us.

He looked something like a monkey, but we took them through Yellowstone Park. And then his family came over and they were up at the cabin. And that was one, sort of, I thought I pushed it too far, when we negotiated the last contract.

[02:00:28]

Because we were getting out. ASARCO, see, they didn't understand any of this smelting and that. And this guy that was president got all upset and said, 'well, you go over there and have a big damn party, all the downtime with those Japanese'. And I said, 'next time I go on a Fri-day and come back on a Tuesday, I'll have you come with me too'. But he said, and the way he put it was, he said, 'just tell those Japs we're not doing business'.

So ASARCO, that's something - they bought for 49.9% of the mine. For a hundred million. And that hundred million, depending on the price - and the price went up - of copper, ended up being $125 million. So they had $125 million. And they were getting a 49.9%.

But their smelting and refining - Anaconda, just the same, you know. Same age. Their smel-ters were costing them $90 a ton, and then 9 cents to refine it. And we were doing the Japa-nese $40. So they wanted us to give them the feed for their smelter. And we said, yeah, but we're going to do it at $40, not $90. And so that was a big sticking point.

[02:02:10]

But eventually they found out and closed their smelter down, because they said they... But they didn't believe that we could get. And I had a good friend, Tony Berbarian is his name. You heard of Mark Rich? No?

He was a big trader in copper and oil and other things. And he got caught selling - well, he wasn't paying his taxes. And the company that we went to work, or we did business with in the U.S. was his company. But he did pay his taxes on that company. But he didn't the rest. And he lived in Switzerland. But the thing about it was he couldn't galavant to all the islands or all the countries there, because there was two places that didn't honor extradition. And Switzerland was one, and I don't know what the other one was.

And when Bill Clinton, his ex-wife...or whatever Clinton. And when he pardoned this Mark Rich, but he didn't want to come back to the United States. He just wanted to be able to be free to go to all those places. But there's Tony Berbarian became a good friend of mine. We did business 36 years together.

GRANT: Oh, wow. What about Dennis Washington? What can you tell us more about him, just as a person? Is he a modern day copper king? Do you ever think of him as that?

GARDNER: Why don't you ask him?

GRANT: You got his number?

[02:04:22]

GARDNER: No. I don't know. He's, I'll tell you what about him, one of the things. I told him after I saw how he - he was lucky. I told him, 'Denny, I don't want you ever to buy the mortuaries in Butte'. He said, 'what'? I said, 'I don't want you to buy the mortuaries'. He said, 'why'? I said, 'the next day, everybody in Butte will die'.

GRANT: Yeah.

GARDNER: He had a nice place up in Canada there, you know, put in a nine hole golf course. Are you a golfer? No, neither am I. But this Robert Trent Jones designed it and every-thing, you know, it was a beautiful place looking down on the water there. So he didn't know how to take me a lot of times, you know?

And I said, 'hey Denny, my wife and I want to put a place right here on this point. Up in Canada’. 'Oh, you can come up here, my wife said.' I said, 'I'll put it up. So you're not embar-rassed or anything, you know'.

But the one thing he did do, he told me that if we ever get this mine running, 'you won't see me. I won't, you know'...and he lived up to that. So he, right after we started up, the primary crusher had a big crack in it, and we had to shut down the mine. And I had to call him, he was on his yacht. 'Oh, that's fine. Okay. I understand. Okay.' But he said, 'Frank, if I ever get this going, 'you won't see me'.

And he did. He'd come to the mine very, very seldom. And sometimes he'd sneak there by himself, you know and go in? But I remember that one time we were going to the mine and what he wanted to do, he liked equipment. We painted everything white, which probably a good idea instead of Caterpillar yellow. And that pretty well, you know, psyched up the peo-ple. But he was worried about his flying W, you know, where there's red and two small ones. And we're out in the pit, and he says, you know, 'what do you think Frank? Should we put it over a little further, or does it go up'? And he looked at me, he says, 'you don't give a shit about this'. I said, ''no, I don't'.

[02:07:12]

But he got his picture taken on Forbes, you know, and he looked like Gaddafi in that picture. Did you ever see that?

GRANT: Uh-huh.

GARDNER: Well, get a Forbes and see it. And he brought his two kids, Kyle and Kevin. And Kevin, there was a science fair up at Tech. So my daughter's had a project, or my one daughter, making copper out of water or something, you know? So we went up and saw that. And he saw that microphone, he said, 'blah blah blah, Kevin Washington'. Then I get a call that I gotta get that over to him. So they dolled it up, and then he won something at state with my daughter's....

[02:08:09]

And the deal with those trucks, he went down to Denver where, you know, head office is. And said how poorly we treated him, up there in Butte. And he had to have some ore or something. There was, well, Tonopah was a mine just starting up in Nevada. And they didn't have power, so they had these port-o-power things that were run with the same engines we used in trucks. So they needed an engine for one of the port-o-powers, so we gave them one, with the idea once they got the power, they'd give us that port-o-power. Denny went down and got that, because we were driving through the fifth that one day and he said, 'yeah, you know, hey Frank, you remember that time you wouldn't deal with me? I went down and they gave me that'.

He's always thinking. And he'll think 10, 20 different things and probably 19 are just com-pletely out of hand. And, you know, you just tell him, 'Denny, forget it'. See he sold the mines in Butte, you know, the underground mines, to a British outfit. And he got so much money for them. And then he sold the surface, the buildings and that. Then he said, 'if you want the ore underneath, you have to pay for that'. So anyway, this company came in and they, it was during Margaret Thatcher's...then she was, everything was nationalized and she was getting rid of it. And there was a big time in there when they were making a lot money.

So they came to Butte and got all those small mines, you know, that Denny said, 'take'. I said, 'don't tell them to take them because they're just going to be problems for you'.

[02:10:27]

So anyway, they did one public offering and you know, it was oversubscribed, I don't know, 20, 30 million bucks. So one morning I woke up and what was it? No, it wasn't in one day. But anyway, I get a call from Helen Miller, his secretary, who says, 'Frank, you have to get over here right away. Denny wants to talk to ya'. So I said, 'Okay. What's it about'? She said, 'I don't know'. So I go, and he's in Milt Datsopoulos' office, and they're dealing with this Clive Smith from England. And he wanted to buy - his proposal was that he'd give Denny 50 million bucks. But it was in stock, and Denny didn't realize that, I don't think. But Denny would retain the equipment and do the mining. And I would be the president. And I'd get 400,000 shares of stock and a big raise.

And so I went over there and I said, 'they're not miners, Denny. They're promoters. And I won't work for them'. And Milt Datsopoulos, I don't know if you know Milt. But Milt and Darn Parkinson, president, were saying, 'take it Denny! Take it, you know, take it'. So like I told them right there, I said I won't work for them. So then he, next morning, they wanted to shake, it was on a Friday, I guess that's what it was. And Denny wouldn't shake.

Then it was Monday, and he called me in the next morning and said, 'hey, Frank, I'm going in there and tell them the deal's over'. And once he makes a decision that was it. Deal's over. He might stay up all night. I've been on trips where he would worry about something, but once he made the decision, that was it. The deal's done.

[02:12:35]

There was, what was the other one that - but that one, there, was he would have loved to, he just...anything else?

GRANT: Did you have some other questions?

JAAP: I don't know if I do.

GRANT: Okay. I have a couple, just a couple more. If you have time.

GARDNER: What?

GRANT: I have a couple more questions if you're up for it. Yeah. Okay. If you're up for it, I am. You know, you had talked about being a mine superintendent. And so I'm curious, what is a mine superintendent concerned with, most of all?

[02:13:24]

GARDNER: It depends on, well the mine superintendent is responsible for the mine opera-tion. And that's including, you know, the county and the contracts and everything else. And manpower, you know. See, when we finished, there was no contract after that. But you know, the union stewards would, when they go and negotiate a contract, with the mine man-ager or steward, they didn't go tell the workers that they got this or that. The union steward did. So they'd go and say, 'here's what we got for you'. So it was always like the company didn't do anything.

Then we had agreed to take out their dues. So, it was coming out of their paycheck and they see that and say, 'that goddamn company look, they're taking it out'. I went over one Sunday, because there were all these people laying around, and they just, I don't know, I just got mad. I went over there, in the pipe shop, and there was all these people sitting around. I said, 'you got a job? What're you supposed to be doing'? "Nothing'. 'Out. Go home. Go home. Go home'. Never said anything about it after that.

[02:14:57]

But at the time I came back, Carter was just leaving and Reagan was coming in. And as far as grievances, you know, like we had a wildcat strike. Right when I came back to Butte in 1980. And the way they always portray this wildcat strike is safety. That's an issue that you can, you know, sell - safety. So anyway, they usually don't last long, but with all the people in Butte and the new superintendents, they locked us in. We couldn't get out. It's our property, but we can't get out, you know? And that was always - then the guy Uptown and the man-ager of the human resources, you know, employment, we played games, you know. We could talk on the phone but we had to meet secretly, you know, so they'd come up to the fence and dodododo, you know, dodododo. What, you need anything? And the guy from employee, he had a pile of money, 'here, Frank, take this money'. I said, 'no, I don't need it'. 'Come on, take this money! Here. Come on. I'll give it to you'. And I said, 'what in the hell am I going to do? I'm locked in here'.

So then they hire a helicopter to bring food in, Hungry Man meals. Do you remember any-thing about M*A*S*H?

GRANT: Uh-huh.

GARDNER: Okay. You know, when those helicopters come - chop chop chop chop - so they make the secret deal up there. And we went up far north end of the tailings dam, away from anybody else. And here comes chop chop chop chop, and he's got a big one of those nets hung underneath, and it's full of Hungry Man TV dinners. I said, 'Holy Christ'. And I said, 'where's the freezers'? And he said, 'we didn't have enough room. We have to go back and get the freezers for it'. And so one of the foreman that didn't last very long, under-ground, but he wanted a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, you know, like we're going to stay there forever.

[02:17:45]

And we could sneak out of the mine, or the pit, by going through the Metro Sewer Channel. Go over to the bar, and I let them have beer, with no whiskey. But we could have beer. Cra-zy.

JAAP: How long did that go for?

GARDNER: Until the 4th of July. The 31st. What's June - the 30th or 31st?

JAAP: 30th.

GARDNER: 30th until the 4th of July. And they're going to have...

GRANT: What about old time miners, when you worked underground, first starting out?

GARDNER: There's good miners, and bad miners. But good steady miners, you know, were worth their weight in gold. And they were usually family men, you know, it wasn't a bunch of wild people. It was good family. They would get their check on a Friday and they'd go down to Packey's Bar in Butte there, and cash it. And might have four or five shots of beer and go home.And they never caused any problems and they were skillful. They could just about do anything underground. But then there were the bad miners too.

The families, you know, they were good.

[02:19:20]

In fact, well, my dad, you know, and those kinds.

GRANT: He died so young. Was it from drilling?

GARDNER: I never saw a picture of him without a cigarette in his hand, seriously. If there was a picture, he'd have it down, you know, here. And he had big stomach problems and that, you know, and I imagine it was that nicotine, you know?

GRANT: What about Butte nowadays?

GARDNER: Butte?

GRANT: All that's lost.

GARDNER: All what?

GRANT: What about how much of Butte is lost nowadays, is gone? How does that make you feel?

GARDNER: You mean the old Butte, or?

GRANT: Yeah, the culture, the mining...

[02:20:19]

GARDNER: Yeah, the culture. I don't know how - the one thing that surprises me is that people like to go to Butte.

JAAP: Why does that surprise you?

GARDNER: Missoula, you know, all the liberals there, I never heard anybody say that they didn't like to go to Butte. You know, the thing is, what is so amazing is that a hundred years of unionism, rock of Gibraltar, and all these battles and everything. And we are able to do it without a whimper.

There was no - the one time, to show you how much Atlantic Richfield knew, when we had that wildcat strike, you know? My wife is at home and I was talking to her and I said, 'how's everything going'? And she says, 'it's okay, but there's this colored guy that keeps driving up and down the street. I don't know what he wants, where he lives. You know, so I'm getting a little worried'. Well, what they did, they hired security guards to watch our houses. Now, a Black guy in Butte, driving up and down the street? Don't you think he'd be a little obvious?

JAAP: Yeah, you'd take notice.

GRANT: Opening the mines in Butte with no union, is that something you're proud of?

GARDNER: Yes.

GRANT: Why is that?

[02:22:03]

GARDNER: Well, like I said, when I saw what happened in 1945 and the violence, and the rest that uncalled for, I said if I ever got a chance to change that, I did. And there are so many - but it's a job, and it's a big job to keep a mine or whatever, union-free.And you have to be able to think on your feet. You know, they used to have the contract books and that, you know, the bosses, well it's in the contract.

But you know, a couple examples. We had this one guy and he had a 401K and he was a work in the pit. And I heard about him. But he was gonna cash in his 401K, or borrow from it, and if you borrow, you know what happens. You pay it back and interest, and all this other stuff. So I called him in and I said, 'what are you doing that for'? And he said, 'well, my son needs a kidney transplant. And my wife is the one that's going to do it. And we have to drive to Seattle to do it'. So he said, 'we need to get a van or something'. And I said, 'there's a van right there. Take it'. So, those kinds of things you can do. There was another guy, when they were opening the mine up, turned the wrong valve and just about flooded all these tunnels at the concentrator. And he was an older guy, and he just came back to work after being off all these years, you know, we start the mine up. And I talked to him and there wouldn't have been any problem at all. He said, 'I did wrong'. So he wasn't going to go out and make a big, you know, splurge. And he, oh where was I? What was I talking about the - oh, the older guy.

GRANT: It's okay.

GARDNER: Yeah, me, the older guy. So he came, and I told the superintendent of the con-centrator, wanted to fire him. And I said, 'well, before we do anything, I want you to send them to a doctor and see'. So he goes to the doctor and they find out that his high blood pres-sure medicine was screwing him all up.

And about a year later, there's a dentist and optometrist. And I was at the dentist and the op-tometrist, and this woman comes out there and says, 'hey, you're Frank Gardner, aren't ya'? I said, 'yeah'. 'Well I'm so and so's wife'. I said, 'oh, okay. Yeah'. She says, 'I gotta thank you. We're just getting back on our feet. And we thought he was just getting old, and this was a problem'. She said, 'I want to thank you'. So you can do a lot of stuff. And you can, you know, treat people like they deserve to be treated.

[02:25:37]

Like I said, I never had one crank call. When we shut the mine down the one time, I remem-ber, I was on the local development corporation and the Great Falls paper calls, at night, and I grabbed the phone, and said, 'hello'. 'Is this Frank Gardner?' 'No'. 'Do you know where he's at'? 'Yeah, he's at the local development annual meeting out at Gregson'. So that was in the paper next day. And the guy there thought, geez, I must have too much to drink. I can't re-member Frank being there. But the last time when we opened the mine was the time that real-ly everybody pitched in, you know. And it was just a great, the whole community.

You see those disks over there? Which one, on top there? Yeah, that one. I didn't do it, but it blows my horn because when we were thinking about starting the mine up, and who can we use to be the guy that does it, and we couldn't figure anybody out. And this Paul McHugh worked for me as an electrician, a good one. And his son is Tim McHugh. Have you met Tim? He came to work for us. But anyway, the mine had been down and Paul died and the church was St Anne's. And I went to the funeral and I looked and here's all these Montana Resources guys. They weren't sitting down, they were standing in the back, and they all see me.

[02:27:49]

And I told Arlis, I said, 'you want to spend another winter in Butte'? And she said, 'if you want to'. Well, we did. So I went and started the mine up. You know, like I said, it's tribalis-tic and you got to treat people, right. And normally they'll, and you can always pick out, I was good at picking out the bad people too, you know.

GRANT: Hm. Well, I just have one more question, I guess. Although I feel like we could talk all day. But what is the lifespan of this mine that Montana Resources is running?

GARDNER: I think there's, I can't really tell you, but it was around 20 years or so. But you're right. It's something that you have to think about and Butte has to think about. But I'm sure if they looked hard enough, there might be - you know, on the flats there, you know, under all that alluvium, that's the stuff that come off the mountain and filled up the valley there. You know, there's good ore bodies, it's similar to what's on the north end of the mining district. See, in the mining district, on the periphery, it's silver and manganese. Emma was a manganese mine, and those kinds of, zinc. Those three. Then you got in closer, it was like an onion, with rings. And then in the center was copper and high grade and even tin ore. But it's like this, but one end is truncated off and buried. So you don't know what's underneath there. But we did do drilling there and that was right about the end and we were going to do more and then we shut down. So. Yeah it's a great place.

[02:30:16]

How do you think about Butte?

GRANT: I think mining is what built it, but it is also in a way what has killed it.

GARDNER: In which way?

GRANT: Well, the Berkeley tore down half the town, you know?

GARDNER: Yeah, well.

GRANT: Yeah, you know, so there's that. But I worry about Butte. Especially when you see how busy Missoula is.

GARDNER: Oh yeah, well I agree with that. But what's the, you know, as long as the mines were there, nobody looked for anything in Butte. They thought they were going to be there forever and ever and ever. But you know, in it's high day, I guess you know, it'd be great to have lived in Butte. You know, when Al Jolson came and all that other stuff.

GRANT: But those days are gone.

GARDNER: Yeah, that's life, you know?

[02:31:33]

GRANT: Well, thank you, Frank.

GARDNER: Yeah. Anything else?

JAAP: I don't think so, unless you have any closing words, Frank. But I think we've taken a lot of your time.

GARDNER: No. I hope I pleased ya, or whatever.

JAAP: You did. We really appreciate you taking the time for us to speak with you.

GARDNER: Yeah, it's, you know, I take a lot of pride in - Butte was dead when I came back and not once, I came back three times. I retired, what in '97. And then 2000 with the power issue. And then I came back in 2003. And that, that was the greatest time. And we did more stuff getting that mine to where, it would blow your mind how much Denny made in three years or four years. I mean, just blow your mind. But everybody got behind us. Be-cause, and part of that tape or that CD, when they're thinking of you know, what to do, and then they said, 'oh Frank, yeah, we got to get Frank! you know, Frank'! So it sort of blows my horn. But you know, the gas stations had, you know, welcome back Montana Resources, go get 'em Frank. And Judy Jacobson was behind us all, and the two Judy's - Judy Martz, the governor - and we got, you know, tax breaks that you would, you know, we got - taxes were 50% of normal for the first five years after we started. And then it went to 10% a year until it got up to 10 years, it would be a hundred percent. And things like that. And the best smelting and refining and you know, it was...but it was a good time.

But I still got my feet on the ground because there's always something that'll happen. Like that guy with the big Merry Christmas cards.

[02:34:19]

I had another one, a guy - during this period of time, when we opened up - put in an applica-tion to go work in the mine, you know. And he took exception that he didn't get hired. So he sent me a letter, you know. And it starts out, 'oh, greatest guy in the world, you know, you're great. And best miner ever, you know. I've stepped over more shit than you've ever mined in your life, or something like that. And you go F yourself'. But I keep 'em.

GRANT: Oh, do you?

GARDNER: Yeah, I don't know if that's here or not. I think Raylene has. So, what did you do in Arkansas?

GRANT: I grew up.

GARDNER: Where at, though?

GRANT: Mountain Home.

GARDNER: Where?

GRANT: Mountain Home. It's like in the north central.

GARDNER: Okay.

GRANT: In the Ozarks. Yeah. I'm glad to be out of there, to be honest. I prefer Montana.

GARDNER: Yeah. And you're from?

JAAP: I was born in Washington state.

GARDNER: Hmmm. Seattle?

JAAP: No, not Seattle. Moses Lake.

GRANT: Well, I'll turn this thing off.

[END OF RECORDING]