Mike Boysza, Lifelong Union Carpenter

Mike Boysza Sr. (seated at left). Photo Credit: Montana Standard

Oral History Transcript of Mike Boysza

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: June 4th, 2021
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed: November 2022 by Clark Grant

Clark Grant: Now hit record here, so, okay. Are you ready, Mike?

Aubrey Jaap: They're really casual.

Grant: He's already asleep.

Mike Boysza: A little too much. Okay.

Grant: Okay. Ready to roll.

Jaap: Alright. It's June 4th, 2021. We're here with Mike Boysza. Mike, I would like you to first start off and tell me a little bit about your family's history. So like your parents or your grandparents.

Boysza: On my mother's side, I guess it would make me a second generation Montanan. My grandmother, or my great-grandmother, had five daughters and she left her husband in Leadville, Colorado and brought five girls on a covered wagon in around 1890. So my grandmother, and she had a twin sister - they were the two youngest. Anyway, she rode up here. And one of my grandmother's sisters married somebody from Alder, Montana. And when my mother was born, she was born in Alder, Montana. And I remember my uncle was - it would be her older brother - saying when my mother was born, he says, and they called my uncle Rube and he says, Rube, Rube, come here! He says, see the new baby, but it was just, you know, she was born, you know, literally a log cabin out in the middle of the field, just a little bit south of Alder, Montana.

So anyway, from that, part of the family, and then like I said, they, of course - being a mining city, you know, this [Butte] is where most of the work was at. I think that's why they came here is - I think most women at that time done laundry, and house -

Jaap: Like boarders…

Boysza: More like maid work, dishwashers. In fact, my grandmother's twin sister and her were some of the first members in the women's protective union.

Jaap: Really?

[00:02:13]

Boysza: So anyway, my grandmother was born in 1887. So that would've put her here around 1990 [read 1890] when she was just a youngster.

Jaap: So what was her name?

Boysza: Carrie - Theobald was her last name. They were German.

Jaap: Oh, I know that name.

Boysza: You do?

Jaap: I don't know why, yeah.

Boysza: Okay.

Jaap: I've just seen it around here. I know that.

Boysza: But anyway, I don’t know if there's too many Theobalds around. Her twin sister never got married, had a couple children, but you know, in that time that was kind of an unheard of sort of thing. And she adopted a boy. His name, the oldest of the three boys that my great aunt had, was Johnny Carey. Anyway, when he was about 13 years old, he disappeared, never heard from him again. Nobody knows anything about him, what happened to him - if he left down, got murdered, whatever happened, but nothing ever happened. So anyway, and her two natural sons, George Pierce and Rube Pierce, anyway - two pretty good athletes when they were in high school.

So, and then my mom met my father. She was a waitress at a place called the Beehive. The Beehive used to be right on the corner of Montana and Park Street. And when my father came here during the Army - he was a coal miner. And when he joined the Army because they needed minors. He came here to mine for the Army for a few months until he got dispatched overseas. And that's how he met my mother, as a waitress, when he was in the Army. Then he was sent off to the China-India-Burma theater, and when he got back - they got married before he left. And anyway, he got back. That's how they started their life.

My father's family - they came here to this country from just outside of Budapest, Hungary. That's how I got my last name Boysza. It's Hungarian. And they had a vineyard a little bit to the north and, I believe, west of Budapest. Anyway, the two brothers got here right around 1900 and they didn't come into through Ellis island. They came in through, I think, North Carolina, which was kinda odd, I guess, back then, because the majority of people came in through Ellis island. Anyway, the two brothers were here and - it’d be my grandfather's brother - after a year, had enough of the United States, and he went back to Hungary. Which, I think most people were clamoring to get her. He just wanted to get back home. So anyway, they settled in Windber, Pennsylvania, which is just outside of Johnstown. And same thing - they're all coal miners. Dad's one brother, when he was seven years old, they were climbing over a coal train and when they coupled the train, he fell off and the train took one of his legs off. But he became a mechanic, but all the rest of 'em started out in the coal mines. So anyway, they all come from the mining history. 

So, like I said, the reason my dad showed up here is because of the Army. And once you come to Montana, why the hell would you leave? [laughter]

Jaap: Is that what he’d say?

Boysza: Well, I don't plan on leaving here. And I've been to Pennsylvania and it's a beautiful state, you know, nothing against it, but why the hell would you leave Montana? So anyway, that's kind of where my family started from. And like I say, my dad, unfortunately, was killed in the Stewart mind in 1967 on the 1700 foot level. So I was just, I was just 15. I hadn’t quite turned 16 yet. So…in a cave-in. He was just coming off shift and they said about a five ton slab of rock come off the side wall. And hit him in the back and pinned him against the ore car…crushed his skull. So anyway, he was only 46 years old.

[00:06:37]

Anyway, then being in high school - I kind of went through that part of it until I graduated, with a single parent, you know. My sister had gotten married before that, before that death, and so it was just myself and my mother in the household. Well, being a junior and senior in high school, she kind of became my best friend. You know, we just - it was kinda weird, you know, we'd get up at two o'clock in the morning, get in the car and go for a ride. Just couldn't sleep. I don't know, just because of the circumstances, but you know, but we might wind up in Dillon or Helena - [laughter] it's hard to say. Just go for ride and when the sun was coming up, we were headed back home. Anyway. That’s kind of where I start. 

Jaap: When were you born Mike?

Boysza: Nineteen fifty one.

Jaap: Nineteen fifty one. Where'd you grow up? What neighborhood did you grow up in?

Boysza: Uh, in the Boulevard. Right, right across the street from the cemetery, which was our playground. There's a lot more homes down there now than there was when I was growing up. When you play hide and seek over in the cemetery and kick the can, that type of thing. Great place to vandalize cars going up Montana street. Because of the stone wall, you could kind of hide behind the stone fence. And in the wintertime, you threw snowballs at cars and in the summertime, you threw water balloons at cars or eggs or pieces of bread out of a bread loaf that you got nice and wet and it was almost like a snowball and it would splatter nicely on the side of a car.

The nice thing about throwing things when you're in the cemetery - especially at night - most people don't chase somebody through the cemetery at nighttime. And then in that particular cemetery where the office is - it sits in the middle of the cemetery - just beyond it is a storm sewer that goes in about six feet, drops down about two feet and then it goes out both ends of the cemetery. When somebody's brave enough to chase you through the cemetery at night and you disappear underground, that's pretty much the end of the chase.

Nobody's brave enough to chase you underneath the graves at midnight. So it became a safe space for us. And believe it or not, it's hard to find somebody when they’re hiding behind a tombstone and there’s so many of them to hide behind. But it was a great neighborhood growing up.

[00:09:15]

Like I said, a lot of kids. We had our own whiff - big thing then was whiffle ball. So we had - right behind what the house I'm living in now, still living where I grew up - we set up a baseball field that had this backstop. And our back fence, on my house, was the home run fence. So yeah. And we'd break up teams, you know, probably five or six or more on each team. And, you know, we spent a lot of time playing basketball with the neighbors. They had a basketball hoop. And playing whiffle ball and - up the block, the next block up, they had a big open field. So we would play softball up there and 500 or that type of thing. So anyway, had a lot of fun BB gun fights, which you're not supposed to do by the way. [laughter]

Jaap: But everyone does.

Boysza: But almost everybody in the neighborhood had a BB gun or a 22, but you don't shoot 22s at each other, but you do the BB gun. So anyway, we would break up in teams and have BB gun fights. And the other place we used to - Timber Butte, where the Oxo building is now. That was the old Clark mill. Like I said, when we were kids, it had probably been abandoned for 30 years when we were up there and the underground conveyors and everything - all those things were starting to fill in with dirt, from the weather, you know, rains that would fill them in. But you could still get inside the mill.

And there were two ore bins…and they had ladders in each one of the ore bins so you could climb to the top of it. And there's a little bit left of the railroad, not of the railroad rails, but the railroad ties and the timbers that held the train tracks, because that the trains used to actually drive over the top of that and dump ore into 'em.

[00:11:23]

And the top of that is about 30 inches wide. It's a little bit wider than you think. Anyway, as 8, 9, 10, or 12 year old kids, we would play tag on top of that, chase each other around the top of it, believe it or not. And I think it's 55 feet off the backside, which is the short side to the ground. So, you know, but nobody thought that we were in danger. [Laughs] We thought we were being kind of careful because -

Jaap: Playing on the short side.

Boysza: If you got a little - if your shorts started to tighten up a little bit, you would crawl over and get on the ladder and get off, you’d climb back.

Jaap: Did your mom know you were playing on the Clark mill?

Boysza: Well, they knew her up on the hill. I don't think they ever knew that we were playing tag on top of it. You know, some things you just don't mention. And there's actually a lot of prospect holes and diggings on the side of the hill up there. So there's a lot of tunnels up there from old prospecting. And we’d crawl in some of these tunnels and they might go back a hundred, 150 feet, you know. That in itself is inherently pretty dangerous for cave-ins, you know, but anyway. Nobody ever got caved in in one of the tunnels, but one of the neighbors - there were two twins - I call it glow in the dark park, copper [mountain] park, where the baseball field is. When it was the tailings from the Clark mill, and the same thing, when it would rain real hard, then it would cut huge gouges in the side of the tailings. And you could go in there and play. And there was like a clay material, like actual clay. And you'd go in there and grab and you'd make stuff with it. Just like you would playdough. Yeah. So anyway, these two twins were in there and one of 'em got caved in on and he didn't make it back out before they got hold of adults and got out. But he's - of all the kids up there, he's the only one that's succumbed to what should have been playing around, you know.

Yeah, for all the scars and things everybody acquired as you're a kid, that was the worst of it, you know? And I think I was probably only about 10 years old when that happened, so it kind of leaves an impression on you. So after that, you know, then everybody seemed like - we were all probably right around 11 or 12 years old. Almost everybody had a motorbike. Moped was the big thing back then. And I begged my father for a moped from the time I was probably six years old till I finally got one when I was 12 And I only had it two weeks before I wrecked it - didn't make him very happy. But those tailings were great to ride motorcycles on. Knievel used to ride up there. Everybody in the neighborhood used to ride up there. Some kids had a Honda 55 and the mopeds and tote goats - anything that had a little motor on it. We were up there, played around, chasing each other around.

And then the stockyard used to be out there. And on Tuesday was the sale day and the stock trucks would empty out all their trailers just north of the stock yards. And in the summertime, when they wash 'em out the crap and slop out there would be about a foot deep and we'd drive our motorcycles through it and see who could get the other guy covered mostly with manure. [laughter] Pretty tough to fall over in it because it got so deep and thick. But anyway, that's how we entertained ourselves instead of watching TV and playing on the computer.

Jaap: It sounds like a pretty good childhood.

Boysza: Playing it in a manure! [laughs]

Jaap: And tailings.

[00:15:22]

Boysza: And then when we could, everybody - on Tuesdays - we'd go to the stockyards and they needed kids to move cattle and sheep and pigs down through the alleys down there. And you'd get there early in the morning and, before the sales started, they would pick so many kids and tell you which alley you had to work in. So most of the neighborhood kids got at least one day a week to work at the stockyards.

Jaap: And then they’d pay you?

Boysza: Yeah, I think it was like 75 cents an hour or a buck and a - it might have been a buck and a quarter - but I don't think it was that much then. So anyway, but it didn't matter. We probably would've done it for nothing, just so you could work at the stockyards.

Jaap: Yeah. Well, I'm sure they loved it too. Why not?

Boysza: Yeah. And then it seemed like everybody in the neighborhood used to go to the show on Saturday, the Saturday matinee. That's when the Montana theater was there. Their Saturday matinee - you could get in for five Pepsi bottle caps. So everybody made sure that you had your Pepsi bottle caps and you’d walk from the Boulevard up Montana Street and go to the matinee. And if you're lucky, your folks would give you a dime or whatever, so you could get popcorn and a pop. I think that's all it was, that was pretty cheap.

Carl's grocery - that's right where the interstate crosses Mount Montana street now - there was a small grocery store. There used to be the Main Tavern on the corner, where the off ramp comes now. And then, there was the Main Tavern and then a small cafe - I'm not sure what that is now - and Carl's grocery and neighborhood houses. And then on the end of the block was the rose garden, which, when it got bought out, turned into the Freeway Tavern. Muzzy Faroni and Judo Stanicich moved in and made the Freeway Tavern. So, same bar, different spot - not quite the same bar. Anyway, it was a neighborhood place at the time.

[00:17:25]

And then let's see what else was down there. Then when the interstate went through, it took out the fire station for the volunteers, which is now Baker Auto. That building had moved over to there - the big white building - that was the Boulevard fire department’s.

Jaap: I don't know if I knew that. Interesting.

Boysza: Yeah. I have a, I have a lot of useless information. [laughter]

Jaap: It's not useless at all! I was gonna ask what it was like once the interstate moved in, how that changed - did it change the area?

Boysza: Well, you know, it took out quite a few houses, but a lot of the people didn't move too far away. Some of the houses you seen moved in down by my neighborhood, you know. I couldn't tell you how many houses it actually took out because a lot of that interstate, where it's at now, it's a swamp on both sides.

So it kind of cut the swamp in half. So obviously not too many people lived in a swamp. It did displace a few families, but it's not - it wasn't like when the Anaconda Company started moving them out of McQueen and east Butte and that type of thing - Meaderville, you know. It wasn't that kind of a mass migration out of there. So yeah, in fact, all the way across town, if you look at the interstate where it comes, both ends of the town, it's pretty much through swamp covered ground, or low ground that's susceptible to flood, which I think caused a lot of problems when they were first building it. I think that's one of the reasons why they chose that location because they didn't have to spend a lot of money to buy people out.

Jaap: Right. It was empty anyway. Yeah. Alright, so you went motorbiking and you went to the movies. What else did you do as a kid?

Boysza: That pretty much occupied most of your time, you're either, you know, playing baseball or - when it got later at night - to play hide and seek or whatever - at that time, everybody used to sleep out at night. So when you slept out - there were some great gardens back then - so the big thing was to raid your neighbor's gardens. There'd be a half a dozen of us. The next door neighbor, they had a big tent, so everybody's sleeping out in the tent. About 2 o’clock - one of the kids I used to sleep out with - he had a paper route, so he had to be up at five o'clock in the morning to go deliver the paper. So you'd all pitch in and help deliver papers. I assume they all got to the right spot, but…[laughter] didn't matter. So sleeping out…

We were coming home from the theater one time, and where the Town Pump is now, there used to be a Union 76 station right on the corner. And right next to that was a bar called Kasne’s Grog Shop. I'm not sure what Mr. Kasne’s first name was, but he was kind of cantankerous. But when you're, you know, seven or eight years old, many adults were cantankerous I think.

Anyway, the beer truck made a delivery and he wasn't there to open up the side door to get all the beer in the basement. So I think there was eight or nine of us there. And a couple of the kids were bigger than me. I was the smallest in the neighborhood, but a couple of kids who were bigger than me happened to grab two cases of beer, but everybody else had at least one case and the cemetery was real close.

So across the railroad tracks at a corner of the cemetery, get it up on top of the stone wall. And not too far from that corner is a place where they shut the water off at night. It's a concrete, like vestibule, on the ground. So we stored all the beer in there - and this was like one o'clock in the afternoon or two o'clock in the afternoon. And everybody slept out that night. So when everybody slept out, then we all went down there, got the beer. And down by the stockyards, we had a dugout cabin that was underground and we all took all the beer down there. And the next day we all proceeded to drink a little beer. Like I said, I think I was not quite nine years old.

So anyway, a friend of mine - his girlfriend at the time - they started going together when they were in junior high school. Anyway, she eventually became his wife for a long time. Anyway, her and her girlfriend knew that we had all the beer there. At that time, it was all bottled beer - [they] went in there and broke it all…about nine cases of beer, what was left of it. Yeah. They broke every one of them. They were not very popular.

Jaap: That's what I was gonna say. [laughs]

[00:22:22]

Boysza: So, yeah. So anyway.

Jaap: Was that your first beer?

Boysza: Uh, yeah, I’d have to say it was probably my first beer.

Jaap: I love that. Steal it off the beer truck.

Boysza: Well, we didn't rob the beer truck. We just probably robbed the bar because the beer was - the beer was already delivered. It just wasn't in place yet. It was just kinda sitting out in the parking lot saying, ‘come here, help yourself, boys.’

Jaap: I mean he should have known.

Boysza: Yeah, yeah. We should have known better, but we didn’t, so. [laughs]

Jaap: Where'd you go to school?

Boysza: Madison school.

Jaap: Madison.
Boysza: Yeah, like I say, I was thinking about that when I was coming home today from the golf course. Before the couple of houses were there, you could stand at my back gate and look across, I could see the front door of the school. So it's only a couple blocks away. I do remember walking uphill both ways when it was 40 below, snow up to my waist. Well, as you walk across the railroad tracks, you gotta walk up to get across the tracks and down to get to the other side. So it's up and downhill. Both ways. [laughter]

Jaap: Well played!

Boysza: Yep. I didn’t say it was a long way uphill. It’s just up! All right.

Jaap: Alright, and then you went to Butte high, right?

Boysza: Yeah, junior high - I played a little football in junior high school and then didn't play when I was - when I got to Butte High I didn't play football, but I started running around with this fellow, a good friend of mine - became my best man. Guy by the name of Bill Brown. Anyway, he was playing football so I signed up for it. So I played my sophomore, junior and senior year. State champions, junior and senior year, by the way. Undefeated.

Jaap: What class were you?

Boysza: 69.

Jaap: Yeah. Okay.

Boysza: Yeah, the 67, 68 state championship teams.

Jaap: We've been looking for the film for the 69 championship and it's missing.

Boysza: It's missing?

Jaap: Someone, took it, you know.

Boysza: Uh, I think we played Great Falls for the championship. So maybe in Great Falls, they might have it.

Jaap: They probably burned it, embarrassed. [laughter] What'd you do after high school then Mike?

Boysza: I got married. I tell you, I met my wife when I was in high school, which, I actually ran into her long before because her and I were born in the same hospital, six hours apart.

[00:24:58]

So really I'm only six hours older than she is. So there's another little story. when we were in a hospital, there was three babies born: a kid by the name Mark Antinoli. And Mark’s mother and my mother-in-law were good friends. I think they went to nursing school together. And my wife's aunt was gonna take a picture of the two babies together, and there's only three babies in a nursery, and they were an alphabetical order. Antinoli, Boysza,and my wife's last name is Carol. So they were A,B,C.

When I first started going with my wife, looking through the family album and I seen that picture in her album. I said, oh look, I got a picture of me in the album. She said, yeah right. I said, no really. She says, how do you figure that's you? I said, well, if there's three babies in the nursery and that's Mark and you're there, who the hell do you think is in the middle? So anyway. And, and for the life of me, we cannot locate that picture. So I'm not sure where it's at, but it was kind of cool when we were in high school.

So anyway that was my first experience with my wife. [laughter] And anyways, we ran around with a lot of the same kids. She went to Central But when I played baseball - when I played baseball in grade school over at the Longfellow  ball fields, her neighbor a couple doors down, a guy by the name of John Reynolds, he was a pitcher on my baseball team. I was a catcher. He was a pitcher. And she used to go and watch the ball games. So, I mean, she was at the ball game all the time when I was a little kid, but like I say, when you're eight years old, girls are not your prime interest. Not for most anyway. So anyway, I dated a girl when we were in high school and we were at a basketball game between Butte High and Central and my friend said, oh, there's Nancy across there. I thought my wife was this other girl. So we went across. And so I got introduced to my wife at that basketball game. And it was probably about four months after that, before I ran into her again, and we started dating. So kind of a fluke. Anyway, got married right outta high school. I'd already joined the Navy.

[00:27:34]

So I had a reserve year. You’re out for a year before you go active. So right after, my daughter was born and I shipped off to the Navy for two years.

Jaap: So you're on for two years, right after your daughter was born?

Boysza: Yep.

Jaap: That'd be really hard.

Boysza:  And right outta high school, two weeks outta high school, I applied for a job at the Anaconda Company and got hired. I think they hired like 35 people that week, you know, mostly outta high school. I think probably they might have had quite a turnover. But anyway, my father always said, you know, he really didn't want me to work in the mines. You know, he said, ‘if I ever catch you underground, I’ll kill ya.’ [laughter]

So anyway, since he was already gone, I didn't have to worry about that part, but I just never had a desire to work underground. But I did go to work at the smelter over in Anaconda. Then when it was time to go in the Navy, then you get the sabbatical, whatever they give you. So when I got back out of the Navy, I went right back to work at the smelter. And I was over there for a couple months and then I got transferred over to the concentrator. I worked there for about eight months and I was working alongside guys that had been there for 30, 35 years doing the exact same thing I was doing, and I thought I'm not gonna be doing this in 35 years, shoveling mud underneath the ball mills at the Weed Concentrator. So I quit, went to California to look for an apprenticeship for the carpenters. Didn't have much luck down there and wound up back to Butte and started working as a carpenter here.

Jaap: Yeah, so what was the smelter like? What’d you do at the smelter?

Boysza: I worked in a place called flu solids. I worked with zinc calcine and they made - the one at the acid plant was arsenic. I'm not sure what they used it for, and I'm not sure exactly what the zinc is, if it's an additive, but it would come in a raw ore car. And one of the jobs - I worked straight graveyard there for most of the time I was there and that ore car would come in, they'd make a - the tram would come in and bring in your ore cars and they'd stage them for you. And you would let 'em coast on a slight downhill grade until they got inside the building. They had a 10 ton shaker that would sit on top of that car. You’d set it down on top, on a hoist, and then turn it on. And it would just vibrate, shake the car and all that, and the ore would come out of it, into a pit.

From there, it would go on a conveyor up into a reactor. They had two reactors there. And they added water to it, and then they would heat it up. And they had this slurry that had to be at a certain consistency. I remember the guys in the reactor room, you know, they had a lot of instruments that they had to keep track of and stuff had to be at the right temperature and that type of thing.

[00:30:38]

Anyway, but there was always a lot of spills. And actually kind of dangerous because about two weeks before I got back from the Navy, they were starting up a reactor and they were dumping the already-processed zinc calcine into an auger and it would go into the top of the reactor. And a couple guys out there were grab-assin’ and the top was off of that auger and one of 'em stepped back into it…and nobody knew how to shut it off.

And before they got hold of the foreman and got to him, he was up to his chest. He lived for…I don’t know…a couple hours, but he was beyond saving, you know, that's wild. It just, it just…that was kind of the end of the grab-assin’ in the flu solids for a while, you know, because that had left a pretty indelible mark on everybody.

Jaap: That's horrific.

Boysza: And I can’t even tell you the guy's name, you know, I have not a clue, you know. I just know they were all younger, probably in their early twenties, you know, just young guys, just fooling around. You know, grab-assing. So anyway, and then like I say, I went to the concentrator and I didn't see that as a career choice. So yeah.

Jaap: What made you wanna be a carpenter?

Boysza: I have an uncle in Pennsylvania that became a contractor. And he turned that business over to my cousin and they worked together. So, when I was in junior high school, in the carpenter class, I enjoyed that. When my folks bought the house where I’m living at now, it was fairly small, probably only about…maybe less than 500 square feet. It was like a walkthrough. We had a small front room, walkthrough, bedroom, kitchen, small bathroom in the back of it. You know, it's fairly small rooms.

My dad added onto that house. When they were tearing out the - or moving everything out of Meaderville, when as pit was moving in, my father's boss at the time lived a couple houses down from the Leonard mine.The Anaconda Company come in and they gave everybody what, at that time, was fair market value for their house. And everybody was offered to buy their house back for a dollar, which a lot of people did. The stipulation was you either had to tear that house down or have it moved. So, Pete Castoloni was the guy that owned the house and he sold it to my dad for a hundred dollars.

And we dismantled that house and built the addition on the house where I'm at now. I spent a lot of time pulling nails when I was a kid. So we dug the basements out by hand alongside of our house and put the concrete in and yeah, all the walls in my house I'm living in now are sheeted with three quarter shiplap inside and out. So the inside of the walls are solid wood, so I can hang a picture any place in my house. [laughter] And my dad built all the trusses and, before that, he had built a garage next to it. I remember all the timbers for that garage out at Rocker - there used to be a mill out there - the Bluebird mill. And my father got the timbers off the ore cars, and they're called car stakes. And they’re the actual - they're like a three inch by eight inch by seven foot long piece of wood that they would sit on the edge of the railroad cars, hence the name, car stakes. And that's what he built that garage out of. But all the trusses in that are all hand cut with a hand saw and laminated together. My father done all that, you know.

Being a miner, they're pretty good carpenters, you know, timber framers, not so much carpenters, but like heavy timber framers. Anybody that's a good miner has to do all their timber work, you know. So that kind of - interested [me] in that.

[00:35:00]

Yeah and like I say, being a carpenter, I enjoyed putting my tool belt on every day when I went to work. I enjoyed being a carpenter. You know, I looked forward to it. I looked forward to going to work, and at the end of the day, you can turn around and see what you've accomplished. Sometimes not as much as you'd like, but you know, it's always something you can look back and say, yeah, well we got that done today, you know. And hopefully you didn't have to tear it out because it was done wrong. [laughs]

Jaap: That's a big part.

Boysza: Like I say, later I had become an instructor, a mentor, I guess, for people, for Habitat [For Humanity] and you teach people how to work on their own houses, and the same with the students at the Vo-Tech. And I always told the homeowners and the students, I says, what we try to do is build stuff, you know, right the first time I said, but everybody makes mistakes. If you're gonna have trains, there’ll be train wrecks, you know. And if it's done wrong, I said, there's nothing that you do that we can't fix. Literally nothing. Whether the homeowner wants to pay for that fix is another thing, you know, I said, but there's nothing that you do that you screw up that can't be redone, literally nothing.

Now you might have to go back a long ways and whether you - when you try, that's the reason you try to make the - if you're make a mistake, make it as minimal as possible, so it doesn't cost as much to fix it, and hopefully no mistakes. So then I told everybody, I says, ‘take your time. If you don't know how to do it, don't be afraid to ask a question. Not everybody is born with all the knowledge that you need to do stuff. I don't care what trade you're in. Be it a carpenter, plumber, electrician, mathematician, whatever. You don't have all the answers, you know, but you can always find the answers.’ So anyway, it can be fixed.

Jaap: I like that attitude. So what was it like when the Berkeley pit was expanding and all these neighborhoods and people are being moved out of their neighborhoods? Can you talk to me a little bit about just that time?

Boysza: I know a couple families that lived in East Butte. I think it was - that was the Harrison School that sat on just off of Park Street down  - might have been on Park. Well it would've been the highway down there then, but it was actually the end of Park Street, if you stayed on Park going all the way up Woodville hill. People knew, I think when they first started, people kind of knew it was coming, when they started the open pit, because they didn't start right in somebody's backyard, but it was probably close to it, as they started to expand. I think there was a lot of businesses - like you feel the loss of the M&M. You know it's gone away. There were places like the Aro Club and the Rocky Mountain Cafe. They were world famous Italian restaurants, you know, in the community.

But I think people at that time, because the Anaconda Company was pretty much all powerful, you know, and they were gonna get maybe not imminent domained at the time, but, you know, they had deep pockets and if your house was worth $10,000 and they offered you, at that time, offered you $11,000 or $12,000, you thought well, this isn’t such a bad thing, you know, I could move across town. So that's - I don't know if there's a lot of people that were bitter about it. You kind of feel that sense of loss, the places that you're used to going, but there's things like Osello’s, their furniture store - they started out as a gas station right before you get to the Leonard mine, at the entrance going into Meaderville. I think those kinds of things just went away.

There were things that people were always used to seeing. And one day they were just gone. I think the Meaderville fire department used to have these huge Christmas displays, you know, and they were all set up right there close to the Leonard mine, I believe. It was the entrance going into Meaderville. I mean, that was the kind of things that kind of went away. You see it now, down by the racetrack fire department, they put theirs up behind there. But it's not quite like it was when that one happened. But all those neighborhoods like up by where the Serbian church is - seemed like a lot of the communities, when they moved, they moved like in a cluster of people. If you were from Meaderville and your neighbors moved to a certain neighborhood, like over by the Serbian church or by where the McQueen club is now, those families tried to pick lots so that your neighbors were still your neighbors.

So they still had that sense of unity, of a neighborhood. Because the East Side Athletic Club, you know - that was off the end of East Part Street. The only place I can remember up there is a place called Luigi’s. When they bought them out, before they tore 'em down, and he moved down on Harrison avenue. He was there for quite a while before he finally closed his business up. And I'm sure it was just because of old age, you know, long time ago. [laughs] I’m old.

[00:40:33]

But, I remember the bar right next to it was called The Cave, and it was a bar and a restaurant. And I think I had my first T-bone steak in The Cave, you know, and I was pretty young. I remember eating dinner there with my folks and I ate, and after I finished my steak, he says, how you doing? I says, oh, I'm still hungry. He says, you are? He says, you want another one? You know, I says, can I? He says, I'll order you one, but you're gonna eat it. You know, you have to eat it. I said, okay. You know, didn't see no problem with that. Cause you know - but my father, like I said - I was pretty fortunate.

You know, he was a miner, but you know, if he could afford to eat steak, everybody in the house got to eat steak. If we had to eat hot dogs and macaroni and cheese, that's what - yeah and that's the way I grew up, you know. That whatever was on the table, you ate, but everybody got to eat the same thing. It wasn't like my father got the opportunity to eat steak and we had to eat rice and chicken, you know. That's not the way he was. My father was a contract miner and he was very good at it. He had a good reputation, you know. But one of the things I remember about my father, when he passed - he was killed on I think January 26th or whatever it was, early in the year.

And my mother got his earning statement from the Anaconda Company for those 26 days. In those 26 days, he had made just short of $1,400. In 1967, you know, he probably worked 22 days, maybe about three weeks, maybe more than three weeks, in that month of January, and had still made almost 14, no, almost $1,500…when a day’s pay miner at that time was only making - they were only bringing home probably less than $70 a week for a day’s pay miner. So as a contract miner, he was doing well, very well for himself. Yeah. You know.
He was a hard worker and he had a good reputation for being that. I remember him - as a contract miner, you get paid for how much track you put down, how much timber you put in, how far your workings go back in, how much ore you were taking out. And he had a way of marking where he started each day or each week and knew how much he had. And I know - almost on a regular basis, he was in the pay office arguing over how much work he had done. And they'd go down, you know, we'd go back up to their mine and he'd go down there with the foreman. And he'd say, this is where I started. And this is where I am today, you know? And you're gonna pay me for, you know, that 50 feet of tunnel and 50 feet of track. And you know, those 40 pieces of timber that are standing. Like I say, he was good at it, but he had to fight for every nickel he got, so. 

[00:43:58]

Jaap: What'd your mom do after he died? How did…

Boysza: Uhh, she got social security from him and then not too long after my father passed away - like I say, I was in high school - so between the social security and…I'm not sure what insurance she got, but some sort of a settlement. But she didn't work while I was in high school. Somebody that she met from her youth had come back to Butte and her and this fellow - as soon as I graduated, they got married. I think that's what she was waiting for - for me to graduate from high school. And they got married and he was drawing a disability from the State of Oregon. He got hurt in a cave-in in the Oxbow Dam.

But anyway, she had taken jobs at the hospital, cleaning. I know she hated that job. And then she worked at the - When Buttrey’s Suburban, where the mall is now - the Buttrey’s store was in there. And she started working in the bakery. She liked working in the bakery. And when she retired, she retired from the bakery outta Safeway.

Anyway, but she took those jobs because they were union jobs. [laughs] That’s something that was always instilled in me. You know, if you were gonna work, you know, you had to work union.

Jaap: Yeah, what does the union mean to you? And, you know, I think it was your grandmother or great grandmother that you said was one of the early members of the WPU?

Boysza: My great grandmother or my grandmother and her twin sister were, I believe, they were charter members of the Women's Protective Union. And at the time - there was a time in Butte when the unions weren't so strong, like after they blew up the Miners Union building and you know - there's probably about a 15 year span there where…

Jaap: Well yeah they didn't get it back until like ‘33 or something.

Boysza: Yeah. You know, but when they started coming on, I think it was the Women's Protective Union standing by the Miners, you know, that kind of helped the Miners get established with the Miners Union.

[00:46:19]

The Miners Union had started long before that, but I think they were struggling, you know. Every time they'd have a wage dispute or whatever, they were kind of on their own. But I think that the Women’s Protective Union - and I'm sure there were other unions that kind of supported the Miners at the time - but I think they had a lot to do with it because they done all the service work. If the service work isn't getting done, people aren't happy. So you withhold your labor for certain people and you get their attention.

Like I said, I always - when the mines went on strike, because my father was asked to be a boss or a foreman - and he wouldn't do that because if you were either a boss or a foreman, you went against the union. When they went on strike, being a foreman, you had to show up at the mine. You had to make sure that the pumps were working and that kinda stuff and my father would not cross the picket line. He came from coal mines in Pennsylvania and he just…just didn't do that. You just didn't work on the other side of a picket line. The fact that you were gonna be called a scab is just more than they would do.

So anyway, that was always instilled in me. You see a picket sign, you don't cross it for any reason. And I've tried to hold to that ever since. I've been on the - what I consider the good side of a picket line - several times. [laughs]

And then like I says - getting involved with the Carpenters Union, like I said, my first, probably 10 years in the union, you know, just a union carpenter. Don’t think much of it. You just gotta go to the union hall when you join the union and, you know, you pay your dues and you go to work. But to actually get involved with the politics of the union itself, it took quite a while before I started doing that, you know, to become a trustee in the union and start making all the meetings. When it first joined the union, you had to - they would accept your dues at the meeting. So, you know, you couldn't pay your dues any other way. The Treasurer - when you went to the union meeting, everybody’s standing in line and they got their - you had your workbook, you know, and when you paid your dues, they would put the stamp on it.

So that if somebody was out on the job and somebody asked you if you were a union carpenter, you better have that little book with you. And it showed that you were a member in good standing. That changed after a while - the business agent would come around. If you were behind in your dues, they would come down right on the job site and collect dues off you, right on site. So they wouldn't let you get too far behind. And if you were behind and didn't have the money, yeah. They were pulled off the job until you paid your dues - you were taken off the job. They would tell the contractor, you know, he says, ‘he's in arrears?’ No, he's gone. When he pays his dues, he can go back to work for you.

Some of the contractors didn't look kindly on that. They don't like to see their workers pulled off the job. So they would put a little pressure on you, make sure that your dues were paid. So that's probably how I got started. When you're 28, 29 years old, sometimes you're not overly responsible. [laughs]

Jaap: No, there's other things you'd like to spend money on.

Boysza: But you’ll become that way. You know? So anyway, after being in the union for a while and being a trustee…then I ran for president and I was the president of the Carpenters 112 here for a couple years. So then the regional council come in and I got on the executive board for the regional council. I was the delegate to the regional council. They’re outta Washington, but just, SEA-TAC is where their main office was. It still is, for the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters. And I became an officer for the regional council, and then eventually I was hired by the regional council to be a business agent. Never in Butte, but they took - the business agent out of Bozeman retired. I took his position, and he had Bozeman and Helena. And some of the work I done spilled over into Butte, you know, during negotiations and that.

[00:51:10]

So I was mostly in control of Bozeman and Helena. But it was Bozeman, Helena and Butte, and sometimes I’d make that loop three or four times a week, every day. [laughs] So a lot of traveling. Yeah. You know, I wore out four cars while I worked for him in five years.

Jaap: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Clark, do you wanna ask your questions?

Clark Grant: Sure. Mike, can you tell us about joining the union? You know what I mean?

Boysza: Well, when I first come back, I went to California to look for a job, mostly an apprenticeship. When I come back here, now I had already quit my job working for the Anaconda Company. At that time, they were building the Legion Oasis. It was built by - I think Bentley's - there was a co-contract on it. I think Bentley's, and I believe O’Connell construction, I think, were the two contractors on it. Anyway, I was out one night and there were some guys, they were here from Washington. They were the sheet rockers and they were looking for some help, and I thought, sheetrocker, that's kind of carpenter work. So they said, well, show up the next day. So I started out, not through the union, started out $10 a day, working for these guys, helping 'em hang sheetrock, trying to learn it.

I thought - apprenticeship trade. Not really sure how the whole union inception thing worked. So I remember seeing a guy say, oh, the BA's on the job. You, so everybody - we'd go to lunch or go to coffee. You know, you weren't on the job. When, when the business agent would walk through the job site. I mean, I know he knew somebody was working there, but nobody there to get caught up with.

So anyway, finished the Legion Oasis and that was all like subcontractor work. And from there went to Great Galls working for the same company. And that guy still owes me just short of $1,400 from work I'd done back in the day, working on - at that time it was the first Kmart in Montana, in Great falls. And then, he always had to wait for a draw. So on the weekends we would sheetrock houses. We’d sheetrock two houses each weekend, my partner and I. On a Saturday we'd stay in and in a 10 hour day we would sheetrock two houses. And I think they paid three and a half cents a foot at that time. At that time, that was like $80 a day, you know, and that seemed like pretty good money. But that was pretty much the money I was getting for the week too, because I was getting paid for the work I was doing at the KMart. You always had to wait for your draw and keep track of your - same thing, hanging sheetrock by the foot. But you had to wait till he got his money, so you could get your money.

[00:54:13]

So anyway, when I finally quit that and come back here and went to work  at - for a contractor out of Billings, Leo's Interior Construction - they were building Fairmont at that time. He was a union contractor. So when you went to work out there, [you had to] join the union to work there. So that's how I got in, that one. Started at Fairmont hanging sheetrock. That’s when I got in the union.

Grant: And you're one of the few carpenters I've met that actually joined the union in the union hall upstairs.

Boysza: Oh yeah. That was - like I said - I was kind of nervous because the carpenter's office is where your station is now, the office. And at that time, the business agent was Jim Caddigan, you know, very intelligent man. He could have been - if he wasn't a carpenter, he could have been a lawyer. He was very meticulous about things in the workings of how things happened. In fact, the pension that we have and the vacation pay that we have was him and a couple other carpenters of the time that put that together. You know, we were the first ones in the country to have the insurance that we have today and the pension that we have and the vacation fund - that was all started in Butte. And some of the other contractors - the only ones I can think right off hand is - well, one of them would've been Bentley. Joe Knuckey from Knuckey Construction…but Ed Bentley and his brother from Bentley construction at the time. 

There might have been Dick Taylor from Taylor McDonald Construction. But some of the older guys, they were contractors, but they were, first of all, they were union carpenters. You know, that's how they started, you know. Something I don't agree with the union on - say if you were a single carpenter and you wanted to go into business for yourself, you know, you could go and sign a union agreement, and you could be yourself, or maybe one other guy. You know, to become a union contractor, if that's what you wanted to do.

The way the union is structured today, they won't allow single employer contractors. You have to have, I think at least two people, working for you, you know, and I can't remember how many businesses started out with just one guy in the dream, you know, wanting to be a contractor. And as you establish yourself, if you can hire somebody else, then you become - you start growing your business from there. But it seems like the union kind of discourages that, entrepreneurship, per se, to be a one man contractor. So they force you into becoming a non-union contractor first.

And once you get yourself established as a non-union contractor, you think of yourself as - why do I need the headache of the union and their rules and regulations, just to continue doing what I'm doing? And don't get me wrong. There are plenty of advantages to belonging to the union. I mean, they have the best insurance company you can buy. In fact, you can't buy it on the street any better than - any of the trades and their insurance policies. Their retirements, although it's with the stock market, you know, the stock market has beat up almost every union in their pensions, but it's still the best game in town. It really is.

[00:57:52]

Because it’s still somewhat protected by the federal government, you know? The union has been very, very good to me, you know? So like I said, I don't agree with everything that they've done, but I'm sure not everybody agrees with what I do. [laughs]

Grant: So you had told me at one time that when you joined the union, there had to be a unanimous vote on you joining?

Boysza: Oh yeah. If you were joining the union, if somebody - what they called a black ball - if somebody black balled you, then you were not allowed into the union. It was literally a wooden box and it had white marbles and black marbles in it. And it's got a - like a little hole, just big enough for the marble to fit through. And it was like a two compartment box. And each member, at that meeting, would walk up and grab a marble and put it in the hole. And at the end, when everybody made their vote, when they opened up the box, if there was a black ball in that side of the box, that's how you got black balled from the union.

It was, it comes from the - the term black ball - because you had a black marble on your side of the box. If somebody had some kind of a disagreement or a beef with you, that didn't think that you were gonna be a good union member, they could blackball you. Not saying that you couldn't try it again, you know. Hopefully that guy was sick that night and didn't make the meeting, but yeah, you could be blackballed from the union. And that doesn't happen anymore. Almost anybody with minimal skills can walk in and, and join, you know. The optimal way to get into union is through an apprenticeship, because you'll learn the skill and you get paid to learn that skill. And they teach it to you hopefully, from the beginning of being a carpenter as an apprentice.

And when you're done with it, you're a journeyman carpenter. And if you stay in the trade long enough, hopefully you become a master carpenter. You know, you learn more than just your basic trade. Now, I consider myself a master carpenter because I can take a set of blueprints, you know, I can lay out the ground. I can put in footings, put in foundation, put in the floor system, build the walls, finish the inside of it, you know - to the point where you put the key in the door and turn it over to the owner.

You know, now there's a lot more than that to being a master carpenter than just being able to build a house. There's millwright work. There's all kinds of different parts of the trade and you'd be amazed. Casket builders, shipbuilders. That's all part of the carpenter trade. You know, ASME - when it was being built out there and they're setting a precast. The iron workers were setting a precast and that is not part of their part of their trade. Their part of their trade is to do all the iron work. Their complaint out there was there, the carpenters didn't - you had to be a certified welder to set the precast. And they said that at the time, there were no certified welders, but it only took the carpenters union about a month and a half to certify 30 or 40 carpenters, so they could set that precast.

[01:01:17]

One of the problems you have with jurisdictional things in the union - I'll give you an example - is insulation. Nobody likes to play with fiberglass insulation. It's a nasty itchy job. So when there's all kinds of work around, it seems like the carpenters don't mind if the laborers put in the insulation. Now, but it's not part of their trade. It's the carpenter's work traditionally, you know? So if you give away that work long enough, pretty soon, it's not your work anymore. You slough it off the other trade. Then all of a sudden when the work is real slow and the only work that's left to do is the insulation, now you're complaining because somebody else is doing your work. Well, guess what? You've given up that work.

One of the problems I had when I was a business agent is - one of the carpenters that was at the university system was complaining because the laborers were building scaffolding. Scaffolding is carpenter's work. This is the scaffolding. And I asked those guys - there's 17 carpenters, I think, in the shop, I says, ‘who's certified to build scaffolding?’ Nobody. I said, ‘I can go down to the laborers' shack down there and ask, and I'll betcha - half of the laborers in there have a card in their pocket that says that they're certified to scaffolding.

I said, ‘so if you're out there erecting scaffolding and OSHA comes by and asks you for your card and you don't have one, guess who's gonna get fined? Your employer, the university. They're not gonna put up with that. I said, ‘now if you want, over the course of the next three weeks, I can set up a scaffolding class and have everybody in the shop certified as a scaffold builder.’ I says, ‘when do you wanna start?’ Nobody. Not one carpenter in the shop would take the extra time to learn - or to get certified. They all know how to build it, but you need to have a certification that says that you know how to build it. They don't want to take the time, you know. I think a lot of carpenters have the misconception - I'm a journeyman carpenter, I don't need the training. There's nothing that you know everything of. There's always a day when you can learn something else or learn a better way to do it.

You know, don't think that you're so good at your job that you can't be taught something. I don't care who you are. But they - it's a stigma and it's tough to get by, to have a journeyman carpenter and tell him he needs to learn how to do something to get certified.

[01:04:00]

So anyway [laugh], that's what happens when you see something - jurisdictional problems - because one trade is for whatever reason is giving it up. And the Laborers are more than willing to have their people get certified to take over that work. And so be it, you know, if you don't want the job when it's available, then you're gonna lose it.

Grant: Having been on job sites with you - often in these trades it’s a bunch of tough guys. But you have never been afraid to tell someone they're doing it wrong or to shut up [laughter] or, you know… I was just wondering, I guess, that approach, you know, you're fearless really. That is what I've seen. And did that play into you wanting to take on leadership, be a business agent, be a President?

Boysza: Well, no, I think when it comes to that - you got 10 guys in a room and everybody's qualified, but nobody wants to take on the responsibility. I didn't mind taking on the responsibility. Like I say, it's not just unions, but like service organizations - be it any of the unions - the carpenters, plumbers, electricians. And then say service organizations like the Elks, the Eagles - if you can get 10% of your membership, just 10%, to show up, you've got a pretty successful union or service organization. 10%. That's all you need to run your organization.

It is a tough thing to do to get the general membership to show up for something. Now, if you have somebody and say, I need a hand doing something and I need you to show up here Wednesday night at seven o'clock, I need a hand. Almost anybody you know that's a friend of yours will show up to give you a hand. But tell 'em, ‘we're having a union meeting at seven o'clock. Can you be there?’

And if they're not already committed to it, you won't see 'em, be it the union or any organization. That's the nature of the beast. And I think probably the biggest thing that has hurt organizations and unions - to start out with it’s television…TV. You can't get people away from the front of the television. And now it's computers and iPhones, you know. You see somebody walking down the street - they haven't got time to look up and see if they're gonna step off the curb.They don't have time for other people and - it should be a society of we, not me. If everybody works together, everybody can do well. If all you do is look out for yourself, you're gonna starve to death. No, it can't be just me. That concept is harder to pass on all the time…because they don't see it.

If you think you can sit on a computer screen or whatever, and you can make things happen just by pushing a button. That's all fine. And well, you know, and I can't say that some people aren’t successful at it, but it's - I don't think it's good for society as a whole.

[01:07:41]

Grant: So what are the other factors in the decline of unions?

Boysza: Uhhh, I'm not sure. I think lethargic - I think over the years, unions gotten a bad rap. [someone says] Why should I pay money to have somebody give me a job? Well, I can tell you that my union dues that I've paid into the union have far exceeded - I've far exceeded any money that I've ever paid into my union dues. You know, like I said, over the 40-some years that I was in the union and the amount of money that I've gotten into my pension - I think I probably - all my pension investments are probably somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars over the years, my contributions towards my pension.

I've been retired for almost 14 years. Over those 14 years, I have probably gotten three times what I've invested. You know, that in itself is more than enough reason to be in the union. Like I said, their insurance plan - if you are a single, say you’re a family man, and you have a family of five and you go out and buy insurance for yourself and your wife and your five kids - full coverage. That insurance plan's gonna cost you probably $1,500 more a month. It makes it unaffordable. If you're in the union - and I don't know exactly what the cost is today - but because it's done with a group, it's probably right around $800 a month, but it covers everybody in your family, not just you. It covers you and your wife and all your siblings. And it has - some of 'em have an unlimited cap on them. A lot of insurances - once you get to your - once you’ve spent a hundred thousand dollars towards your insurance, then they cut you off. The union insurance doesn't do that.

So yeah, between the insurance and the pension - and today the pensions aren't what they were in the past, just because of the economic market and what the contributions go towards - but it's still, it's the best game in town. It really is. You can't buy that on the street. So, what the downside is, and people say - to get the younger generation to realize it's at their advantage to spend that money for the good of the whole - like I say, one will say that if you're a single man in the union, you pay the same amount for your insurance as the guy that's working next to you that's married and has seven kids. And he thinks he's being cheated, but you have to realize that's a good for everybody, not just you - for the we thing.

Now who's to say that you're single today? You might find somebody that you fall in love with next week that has six kids. All of a sudden you're covered, she's covered and her kids are covered. Now all of a sudden it's fair, but it's what has to be good for one has to be good for all.
Grant: What about a picket line? What's it like on a picket line?

Boysza: Well it can be a little contentious sometimes, because usually the people you have a picket up against think you're the worst thing that ever happened. It seemed like - if you're the person that you're - say a contractor, if you're picketing against a contractor, they think that you're lazy, sloven, and that you don't know anything. And if you're on the other side to picket line and you're looking for more wages, you think that the contractor is cheap, unappreciative of your hard labor and - just look at the contractor drive up in his new truck and headed out for the weekend with his new boat, going to his cabin in the mountains. [laughs]

That all sounds like everything’s - the contractor is this rich guy. But like I said, I've kind of been on both sides of the fence here being the labor end of it and the contractor end of it. The contractors have a lot at stake. They're the ones that stay up the extra hours every day, even though the person who's working for 'em - he don't see this - they have a contract that comes up. They have to go through all the blueprints and the paperwork and figure out all the estimate work. If you don't get that contract, you don't get paid to do all that estimate work. You know, you might have five or six hundred hours into putting in an estimate. And if you're not lucky enough to win that bid, all those hours are all for naught. You don't get paid for any of that. So that has to be taken into consideration - the responsibility that the contractor takes on.

Now, if the job doesn't come in on time, the person that's on the hook for that is the contractor. So if he's bonded and he doesn't satisfy that bond commitment, he's out that money. Where the guy that he's working for, you know, he says, ‘All I'm worried about is my paycheck on Friday.’ And the contractor's responsible for that. He's responsible for his wages and his benefits. And I can tell you that most of the trusts - the pension trusts and the vacation trust and the health and welfare trust - those payments are made every month by each contractor. And if they're not made, the trust is not kind, does not look upon you kindly for missing those payments. And they have some pretty severe fines. So the first thing the contractor has to do is make sure that all the trust payments are paid.

[01:14:22]

I mean, it's one thing to make sure that your wages are paid, but you know - I know from experience that if the trust isn't paid, they can put you out of business in a hurry. You have to - if you look at - the contractor would say, ‘God, I'm losing my ass on this job.’ And all I can say is, ‘well, you bid it wrong.’ The contractor needs to know his workforce and how much work they can produce for him on a daily basis, and what he's gonna get out of it. The contractor - if he can't make money on your labor, there's no sense in him being in business. So if you think you're gonna be, have a job, and just be a slobbing bum on the job and you wonder why you're getting laid off - well, you don't have to look too - go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. You'll know why you're getting laid off. 

Like I say, he's asking me about being on the picket line. I've been on some pretty extraordinary ones - it happened to be that - the contractor that was one of the subcontractors doing the work at ASME when it was being built, had a contract at Warm Springs. And that was one of their - they were double breasted, so their non-union arm was gonna do the work at Warren Springs and there was probably a little over 1500 union hands working at ASME when it was full strength. They decided to pull a picket against the subcontractor that was gonna be the general - hit the Warm Springs project. It's quite a thrill to come up to a picket line and see 1500 men standing at the gate with picket signs, pretty intimidating for anybody who wants to cross the picket. So anyway, that picket proved to be fairly successful only after three or four days - to get your point across that - you see all those - and they were from all the trades. I think when ASME was going, there was somewhere around 150 carpenters, but they were 300 plumbers and pipe fitters and electricians and sheet metal workers and insulators and laborers - it’s quite a group of guys, all with a common cause, to try and control the work market.

And that's basically what you're trying to do is so that everybody works on an even basis. To know that whether I go to work for contractor A, for X amount of dollars an hour - I can go to work for contractor B and still get that same wage and all my benefits, instead of having to work for $25 or $30 an hour on the A job, and you go to the B job and you're down working for $12 an hour without any benefits. That's why it helps us stick together to make sure that contractor B comes up to the same standard as everybody else.

And if he says, well, I can't make it at that, then you're not bidding your work - you're not bidding for jobs at the right rate. You know, that's reason you're getting the jobs - is because you're undercutting everybody else? Yeah. You pay everybody a decent wage. Then that's when it comes down - you're working on a qualified workforce, which is something that the unions try to do. If we have our people go to an apprenticeship and when they're out of their apprenticeship, they’re journeyman tradesmen, and they know what they're doing. So you can count on their labor, you know, that they know what they're doing. You don't have to - I said it before when I was working with the students - there's nothing that can't be fixed if you do it wrong. What you do when you hire a union tradesperson is - those mistakes are very minimal. Like I say, if you're gonna have a train there’ll be train wrecks. But the big thing is if you're gonna have a train wreck, just because a locomotive slips off the track, that ain’t much of a train wreck. If you tip over 90 cars of crude oil on the ground, there's a train wreck, you know? And hopefully it's the union tradesman that only has the wheels come off the track, not a 90 car oil spill. If you understand that analogy. [laugher]

Grant: For sure, yeah, absolutely. What about the term rat bastard? What is, where is the history of that?

[01:19:14]

Boysza: Rat bastard?

Grant: Yeah. You know? [laughter] he union has all these really insulting terms, you know?

Boysza: Well, everybody says, you know, if you work nonunion, you're a scab. That's not true. A scab is somebody who works on the other side of a picket line.

Grant: Okay.

Boysza: Okay. There's a difference between a scab and a rat. Okay.

Jaap: I like that.

Grant: Okay.

Boysza: Okay. The scab is a guy that will cross a picket line or work on the other side of a picket line. Okay. Like when the plant over in Three Forks - what, was it last year - and they had people come from outta state and they brought 'em in in the van - all those guys that worked on the other side of that picket line - those were all scabs, you know? And they deserve the scorn of anybody that sees 'em on the street.

Now a rat contractor is somebody who's working for a living and does not belong to the union. Now they're not crossing any picket line, but they're not a signatory. They're not - what they're doing as a rat contractor - they're probably not paying a decent wage, although some of them do, but they're not into paying any of the benefits. Some guy says, ‘oh yeah, I’m working for this guy and you know, he's got insurance.’ Well, he's got insurance maybe for you that you're gonna pay for. You see a lot of that here. I can pick on one of the pizza parlors here in town as an example. My grandson went to work for them. He says, ‘well, I get insurance.’ But okay, now the insurance is gonna cost you $250 a month, when you're already at a $10 an hour job. So you're paying that insurance rate - starting to lose my train of thought here, about the insurance, but as far as the rat goes - you're paying your own insurance instead of the contractor paying for it, and you're not paying the right wages and you probably don't have any kind of a pension. But he’ll say, ‘Oh I got a 401k.’

[01:12:27]

Well, 401ks - there's good and bad 401ks. There's some 401ks that the contractor will just say, ‘oh, I can match your wages.’ I mean, ‘I’ll match your contributions,’ on a 401k. If you're putting that dollar an hour into the 401k, the contractor will put a dollar an hour and match that 401k. That's all fine. Well, some of the 401ks - if you have a dollar and your employer is matching you a dollar, that 401k belongs to him as much as it belongs to you. So say you have a contractor. Say you've worked for this guy for 10 years or whatever. You've got $20,000 in your 401k and he's got $20,000 into the 401k. Okay. Now he bid a project and he starts losing money on it. Now he can borrow money against that 401k, because that part of that money is as much his as it is yours. So he has to borrow $30,000 out of that 401k so he can complete this job. So, now if he has no way to reimburse that - too bad. His $20,000 is - or at least $15,000 of his is gone and your $15,000 is gone, and there's nothing you can do about it. The union pension is protected by the government, where the 401k - that's not the case. And don’t get me - not all 401k plans are set up that way. There are different programs. But I would say the majority of them are set up on a - your contribution and the employer's contribution. And I think most guys don't realize that your 401k is as much theirs - and a lot of them are set up so that if you don't stay with that company for a year or two years, then you forfeit that 401k. The monies that you put in that 401k - say, if they know you're getting closer to your maturity date on your 401k, they can find a reason to make sure that you're laid off or make you quit, so that goes away, so that money reverts into their coffers, not yours.

Grant: Sounds like a rat.

Boysza: Anyway, so you wanna call somebody a rat bastard? That's the contractor that's the rat bastard.

Grant: Good to know.

Jaap: Now I know how to use it appropriately.

Grant: Yeah, exactly.

Boysza: Not just a rat, but…bastard. [laughter]

Grant: Well, Mike, I also wanted to go into the - just for the record here - the story of the carpenters union hall fight, the big lawsuit in the recent past. Can you give us the rundown on that whole episode?

[01:24:19]

Boysza: Yeah, well, like I said, the regional council, when they came in - probably everybody looked at it as a good thing because I think the first contract that they negotiated under the regional council, we actually got a pretty good return. There were times when we would be on strike for maybe a month, or a month and a half and only realize maybe a 20 cent raise on our paycheck, you know? Well, a 20 cent raise on our paycheck after you've been outta work for a month doesn't calculate very well. You've lost more money than what you're gaining. And it used to be - the big fight between the contractors and the carpenters, when we negotiated our own contract - when the regional council came in, they come in with guys who were professional negotiators. I mean, that was their job - to negotiate contracts and to kind of oversee it, and they have a format that they use.

And the thing is - to make sure you come to some sort of agreement. Everybody - you sit down and you have a cordial greeting. You have an understanding that they're the contractors group and you have the union group. Okay. So because - so you agree on that part of it there. You agree that the contracts starts on this date and it terminates at this date - you try to pick all sorts of things that you can agree on. And that's the format of it. You know, find as many common ground things as you possibly can. Now, the carpenters have their list of demands and the contractors have their list of demands. You sit down at the first time and you will read through - the union will read through their list of demands and the contractors will read through their list of demands. You exchange them and you'll come back to the table again. And the contractors will say, ‘you guys are a bunch of dingbats if you think we're gonna put up with this.’ And we look at the contractors and say, ‘you guys are a bunch of dingbats if you think we're gonna put up with this.’ So anyway, you try to come to a common ground.

What it all comes down, to no matter what you agree on during the negotiations, it seemed like the main thing you're gonna come down to is the money. The money controls everything. If you want an extra holiday on your side of the contract and the contractors don't want to give it to you, and you’ve got money on the table, you're willing to give up that paid holiday or that day off for X amount of dollars on the contract. You know, the almighty dollar is what controls 99% of that contract. Okay. And that's what your final agreement is gonna come to.

You can sit down and everybody's, you know, all sunny and rosy with all kinds of things. But when it comes down to the dollar, part of it - everything is left to be negotiated. What they try to do when they sit down with negotiations is once you agree on something, you'll sign off on that and the contractor will sign off on it. So that's off the table. You don't talk about that anymore. Then the next issue comes up and you'll talk about that. You know, whether you have to tweak it or not, but ultimately, when it all comes down to the dollar end of it, whatever you've signed or agreed to previous to that point, most all that stuff can be brought back on the table to - either you get it or it'll go away. But generally it's the money amount that controls the contract.

[01:28:00]

And that's mostly what people work for - what the union does for you is wages and benefits. What’s what unions do for the common man - decent wages and benefits. A wage so you can survive and benefits so you can stay alive either while you're working, through insurance or pension after you retire.

Grant: So when the regional council came in at first, it seemed like a good thing?

Boysza: Yeah. Because like I said, we were fighting for like - I think we were out for - the contract I was involved with before that - like out for 30 days for like 20 cents. When the regional council come in, I believe our first contract was a buck and a half and the contractors agreed to it. I couldn't believe it. You know, I thought, holy crap. We've been at the table here every two years for the last, I don't know, dozen years. And we've never - in all those dozen years together never come up with that kind of money, the total.

So it seemed like the first contract that the regional council was involved with was a pretty good thing. You know, I thought, well, this is alright. So then anyway - the international union, probably more so than the regional council, in  their restructuring, decided they're better off with what they can manage single unions. And not just the carpenters - a lot of the other unions have gone to statewide locals, where instead of having small individual communities with their locals, they all went to a statewide local. One thing - you're only paying one business agent. You only have one office that you have to maintain.

When we first started - when the regional council first come in, everybody in the state - all the locals that were left in the state at that time, that hadn't gone out of business - we all met in Helena, and there was an international representative, a guy by name of Jim Curley, that was at that meeting.

Anyway, they said, the big thing with the international was - you had to have a full-time business agent. I think the only one at that time that had full-time business agents was the Billings local, Butte local, in Missoula, and maybe Great Falls - were the only ones that had full-time business agents. All the other business agents were either working carpenters and then the business agent was kind of a sideline with them. So in order for all these locals to pay for a full-time business agent, they had to raise their dues. Well, some of these guys at the meeting say, ‘well, there's no way I'm paying $70 or $80 a month in union dues. You know, so we have a business agent.’ I get up and I said, ‘listen, when the regional council comes in, you're gonna have your regular base dues, $15 a month. But you're gonna pay dues checkoff, which is a percentage of your gross. No, that's your dues.’ Okay. So I said, ‘if you're paying 4% dues checkoff and figure out how much money you're making, you know, you're paying $60, $70 - depending on if you're working overtime, how many hours, but your monthly union dues are gonna be at $70, $80 a month.’ You know, I said, ‘what makes you think you're gonna get away from that?’

[01:31:35]

So anyway, this group of carpenters and business agents from around the state - finally, we're about three hours into this meeting - agree that everybody's gonna have to raise their dues base to around $45 or $50 a month for every member, every union in the state, to sustain full-time business agents. He said, ‘yep, well, it looks like those are gonna make this work.’ This Jim Curley stands up in the back of the hall and he says, ‘gentlemen, you have one decision to make here today. The international is taking over your union, your locals. The only decision you have here today is whether you want to be in the Rocky mountain regional council, or are you gonna be in the Pacific Northwest regional council, but you are going to be in a regional council. Now everybody had their own - the major unions at the time had business agents - we were gonna continue to have those locals, you know, at that time. But the regional council was gonna be the ones that took it over and you were gonna be paying dues checkoff to pay for the business agents.Okay.

And he said, ‘you can argue all you want.’ He said, ‘but I'm telling you, you know, your decision here today is two things, Rocky mountain or Pacific Northwest, that's it.’ He said, ‘everything you've talked about today is all for naught, because it ain't - because it's just not gonna happen.’ So we decided because the Pacific Northwest regional council only had one right to work state, which was Idaho, and the Rocky mountain was, [coughs] excuse me. They were all right to work states. So we decided with the Pacific Northwest.

Now, after we were involved with the Pacific Northwest, now the international comes in - we still had all our locals at that time - Anaconda had a local. Bozeman had the local. Believe it or not, Glendive had a local. That local was pretty small. It was kinda weird. I might be mistaken there. Glendive had a local union, but there was no carpenters in Glendive. They worked at a cabinet shop about 30 miles away. And the guys in Glendive, when they had a meeting, wouldn't move the meeting or anything. So I said, that's a problem that can be easily solved. If we have all the carpenters that work in the cabinet shop, show up at a union meeting and make a motion that the meetings be moved to - I don’t know whether it was Jordan or whatever. Heck I can't remember. It was Sidney Millworks - if you have all the carpenters at the Sidney Millworks show up at a meeting and make a motion that all the meetings be moved to Sidney - problem solved. Rather than doing that, they just decertified and pulled out of the union. So we lost the Glendive union. And then, the Anaconda local was down to, like I said, you talk about 10% of your membership - they were down to about 2% of their membership showing up. They just had just the officers. So they merged with Butte.

Missoula still had their local. We had ours. Bozeman had theirs, although they were down to probably 20 active members, most of them at the university. Helena had a local and they were in just about the same position as Bozeman. Great Falls done a little bit better because of Sletten Construction up there - they're a little bit bigger contractor. But for the most part, everybody was, you know, kind of struggling. So the international - and this is after I got out - the international decides they're gonna merge everybody into one local.

[01:35:48]

So they come in and close up all the locals and take all their assets. That's a big thing that that kind of sticks in my craw - because between, I think between the Butte local, the Billings local, Missoula local, Helena and Great Falls Local - the international comes in and probably siphons off right around a million dollars. And when they open up the new local - which I'm not even sure - the local 82, I think is the local now?

Grant: Yeah. 82.

Boysza: Yeah. Now they make that - Great Falls - the center of the carpenters union for the state, which I think was another mistake they made. But when they open up that local, all that money that they took from all the state locals - none of that money goes to that local to start up again. They start out with a clean slate, you know? So their union dues that are coming in is what supports that local right out of the box. I think that's another mistake.

I think the unions were stronger when they had more representation. When you could walk into a union office in Livingston or Red Lodge, Montana, and you had somebody there, a representative that could give you what information you wanted and ran business outta their local. That business agent that was, say in Red Lodge, he knew the contractors. He knew the work that was going on. He knew all the carpenters and he could take care of business. And you had something that was more personal. It was easier to keep the membership involved when you were on a one-on-one basis. The way it's set up now - even the meetings here are done on telecom. The general meeting - that's in Great Falls. You can sit in on it over television, but you don't get that personal feel to it, you know? So you've lost that connect. And then I think as a result, you start losing your membership, you know? And that's where your strength is, is in your members. When you lose your members, eventually it'll go away. Sorry to say.

Grant: Is that the plan?

Boysza: [laughs] And I don't understand the reasoning behind it, you know, why all that money has to - to the international - and they have a state of the art training center in Las Vegas. I've been there for training for numerous things down there. At the training center - all the housing that they have on site, the food services they have on site, there's none better. And the training itself is the best you can find anywhere in the world. And I don't care what classes they teach down there, you know, be it concrete classes, millwright classes, ceiling classes, drywall classes, metal set framing, forklift operators - all those classes - they’re as good as they are any place. And it takes a lot of money to run that facility, but I didn't see the reason to do away with all the independent locals in each state, just to have a single local.

Grant: So when they took the money, they also took buildings, right? Walk us through that.

Boysza: Like I say, because most of the offices were owned by the international or by the carpenter's union, which is basically the, say the mothership. [laughs] I think there's only two buildings in the United States that weren't owned by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, Butte being one of 'em and I'm not sure where the other one is at. And I think they fared kinda like we did.

[01:39:47]

When they came in, they were under the assumption that they owned our carpenter building. Our carpenter [building] was built by the - when it was first built - was built by the carpenters of Butte for the carpenters of Butte. And it was built by - they formed a corporation and that's how they built the building Back in the early 1900s, when the unions were struggling - they’re blowing up the minors union building and things like that. I think the carpenters wanted to make sure that they always had a home. So they built a labor temple, mostly for the carpenters. At one time, there used to be five meetings a week in the carpenter building [of just carpenters]. The carpenters were split up between the Anaconda company and the downtown carpenters, people that worked the general construction.

So you had uptown apprentices, which was Anaconda company, and downtown, which was other contractors. So you had two different apprenticeship boards. You had the uptown meetings to control that, and the downtown. And then your executive board meetings. So anyway, the building was set up under a corporation, and it was set up for convenience. So if you were a member - if you were on the executive board for the union, you were also the executive board for the corporation, and that was set up for convenience. So if you were the president of the union, you were the president of the corporation, and so on down the line. So when you went to your union meeting, you would have your trustees meeting, which is all your board members for the union. You would have that meeting. Then you would have your corporation meeting because they were all the same members, still again, your president, vice president, recording secretary. So all those people are still already in the room. When that meeting was done, then you go upstairs and have your general meeting with the membership. So everybody's - all your executive board was there for the trustee meeting, for the corporation meeting, and for the general meeting. When the international come in to take the building, and he says, ‘oh no, that's not yours. That belongs to the corporation.’ So anyway, we happened to be going by the building and we seen them emptying some of the furniture out of the building - there's three retired carpenters. And he said, asked them what they were doing. He said, ‘oh, what are you gonna do at the building?’ He said, ‘oh, we’re looking at our assets.’ I said, ‘well, it's not yours.’

[01:42:39]

Well, at the time the business agent for Butte, Larry Mayo, took it upon himself to sign away the carpenter building. He had no authority to do that. And how that got passed through the title company - that this all could be done with a signature, no verification, you know - and just turn it over to the regional council when he had no authority to do so. So we got a - the general membership, the corporation, got a lawyer to fight that. So we got 'em to stop,  put the furniture back in the building. The stuff that the regional council had purchased - they were able to load that up in their truck and take it to Tacoma or back to the Tri-Cities area in Washington, wherever it was going.

So anyway, that building came under litigation to see who was gonna get ownership of it, whether it was the corporation or the international. It took some doing and some research to show that the corporation were the owners of the building, not the international brotherhood. We had canceled checks from the international, the carpenters local 112 UBC, to the carpenters corporation for rent for their office in the building. Also not just the carpenters paying rent to the building - I happened to find a receipt from the telephone operators, from AT&T - the operators union paid rent to the building for the use of the building for the month, and it was written on a receipt that was a corporation receipt. And that was from 1927.

So we could prove that the corporation was the rightful owner of the building. Anyway, we went to a federal mediator - so that mediation - to determine who was the rightful owners of the building. So anyway, the mediator decided that we were the rightful owners of the building, but in that settlement, for whatever reason, they deemed that the regional council should get half of our assets, which amounted to almost $25,000, their half of it, at the time. We done that. We agreed to that so that we wouldn't have to continue the legal battle for the building. So we got half of our money and the building, and we were satisfied with that. It's not really overly fair, but anyway. And we had to offer an office space to the carpenters, should they so decide to rent an office in the building in the future, which is what they do today. They still - the carpenters UBC still pays rent to the carpenter's corporation. So I guess in that sense, the corporation won. And the building's not a parking lot, you know, and it's a viable entity. It was a viable entity when the regional council thought they were gonna come in and take it over.

[01:46:28]

And one of the other things is that we would not press charges against the business agent, Larry Mayo, which I think is a mistake, because I dunno how you can commit fraud and be able to walk away from it, which is basically what he did - to sign a document that you have no right to sign. And then, the title company to accept that without any verification.

Jaap: Wow.

Boysza: So anyway, we have a building [laughs] thanks to Clark Grant.

Grant: Right. Thanks to you, sound like. Who all was involved in the legal battle? Who was your lawyer?

Boysza: Well, when we were walking down the street - when I found out that there closed the local, it happened to be the day after my birthday. And it was a newspaper article. I was sitting in Gamers for breakfast, and I read the article tha that they closed the local 112. Well, that was kind of the first gut punch. And I thought, well, now what you know? And anyway, myself and Bob Lester and Miles Maloney were going down the street and we seen ‘em loading up the U-Haul truck. So we kind of split up. I went to find a police officer and believe it or not at the police station, that wasn't available immediately. And then I got a hold of our lawyer. And he come down to the building and then anyway, shortly the police showed up. So anyway, they come in and they says, ‘well, you know,’ says, ‘we got the building, you know, it’s going to Tacoma.’

And Wayne Harper said, ‘well, if, unless you can pick this building up and put it in the back of your truck and take it all the way to Tacoma,’ he says, ‘I'm pretty sure that the building's gonna stay here and all, everything that's in it.’ [laughs]

So anyway, it just happened to be that myself and Miles Maloney and Bobby Lester were walking by when they were trying to empty the building out. And just a couple weeks prior to that, all the paperwork, like the corporation paper that was kept in the union office at the time - he pulled a shredder up in front of the building and just started shredding all the paperwork. So the original bylaws to the corporation, to the best of my knowledge, got shredded. I don't know that anybody wound up with them. So without having the bylaws for the corporation - made it awful tough when we went to the federal mediator to prove ownership of the building. That was the hard part of that. If it had not been for the fact that there was a little squirrel hole in the building that had some documents in it that I happened to come across, and a bunch of canceled checks, you know, and some receipts from the corporation - that’s how we managed to sway the mediator that the building belonged to the carpenters corporation, not the local 112.

Jaap: Who ended up having to pay for that mediator. Did you guys or the regional?

Boysza: I think that it got split. When you go to mediation, you split the cost.

Jaap: Okay.

Boysza: Which, it wasn't very much, I think it's only like $500 a piece for the mediator. When the international come up here with their lawyers to fight the mediation, they let our lawyer know that they were sending three of their lawyers and another layperson, I guess, in their corporate jet outta LA. And they let us know that each one of those lawyers come at the cost of $1500 bucks an hour. And they said, ‘you're gonna pay for it.’ And our lawyer, Wayne, says ‘no, we're not.’ And we did not. So anyway, something else - the general membership of the UBC is who paid those corporate lawyers to fly up here on their private jets and send them back to LA with their tails between their legs.

Grant: To fight their own members.

Boysza: Yeah.

Jaap: That's wild.

Boysza: Because, I mean, they're gonna get paid, you know, no matter what. The only thing is that the local 112 corporation didn't pay 'em.

Grant: So, well, and how do you feel about the state of the union today? I mean, the 82 is in the building, you know.

Boysza: I think our union here is reasonably strong, you know, which is one of the reasons why I thought when they opened up local 82 for the state, why they picked Great Falls over Butte. Because at the time, and still today I think, Butte is probably the stronger union community in the state. And we've - over the last decade or so - we're losing our foothold on a constant. There's so much work going around - it's hard to police all that work. Like I say, when you only have one business that covers a third of the state, when you consider what the land mass is, it's almost impossible to control all the jobs.

[01:52:06]

You know, when the building boom was going, especially like in Bozeman, it's just - it's out of control. And everybody is listed as an independent contractor. You know, you might have a contractor that’s - the big one you see here, that's actually out of Billings - I can't think of their name now. I think they done the building right across from where the YMCA is today. They're listed as the general contractor - they're actually listed as the general contractor at the clubhouse at the golf course, although they don't actually do the work. They subcontract all the work. But that's the thing, you know, they're all subcontractors or 1099 contractors. I can't think of their name right now. Anyway, they started out in Billings, moved into Bozeman, and when the market kind of started falling off there, then they come over the top of the continental divide and here we got 'em, you know? So I tried to tell everybody, if it don’t stay strong here - they're coming our way. You know? Well, here they are. And once they get their foot in the door, it's almost like trying to stick your finger in a dyke, you know, just, you can't - you don't have enough fingers to plug all the holes.

Grant: Well Mike, I wanted to ask about you and Mickey. You've raised a lot of children, have you not? I mean, you guys have a very welcoming household.

Boysza: Yeah. Well, we have three of our own children. Like I said, my wife worked for the shelter workshop [BSW] for a time. She likes working with the handicapped. So anyway, we had a small house on James street, kind of up by the Anselmo mine. In case you don’t know, James Street is only about a hundred feet long. So anyway, she was going down the street one day on Excelsior and she noticed this house for sale on Quartz. And she said, ‘oh, I found our perfect house.’ I said, ‘okay’. And she drove by and she says, ‘I really - if you get a chance, go look at this house.’ I said, ‘whatever you want.’ I said, ‘okay.’ So we drove by the house and we - like I say, our house up on James street was one of these small little houses that they built for the miners back in the day that was only about 750 square feet. [We moved] into a house on Quartz street, which was a three story, five bedroom Victorian, just short of 3000 feet, you know, with a full basement.

So anyway, we look at it and believe it or not, it was somewhat affordable. And she said, ‘Then we can take in some, maybe a student or two, you know, from Tech, so they have the extra bedrooms to help make the payments.’ I said, ‘okay.’ So anyway, our first tenant that was there was a student, a Canadian student, that rented a room from us, going to school at Tech. An then the opportunity - because of Mickey working through the workshop - we had the opportunity to do some - this little gal needed some foster care. She said, ‘we could become a foster care.’ I said, ‘okay, I guess.’

So anyway, the first little gal we had had MS, on crutches. So we got her, and that was our first foster care. And she had braces on her legs and had been living with her grandparents and they were getting ready to retire,  and were looking to do their retirements. It was just a couple with their granddaughter. So anyway, we took in Shelly - that was our first.

And then later on, we had two brothers and a sister and they said, ‘oh, we need somebody to take on these kids.’ Their folks had basically abandoned them, left them for their older sister to kind of take care. One parent left the state and got married and the other parent just left the state, because, I think, just because, their spouse had been able to move on. So the school - noticing that the kids had been wearing the same clothes and were kind of unkempt after about seven weeks - they said, ‘we need somebody to take these kids on for a couple weeks until we find out what's going on.’ So Mickey said, ‘well, what do you think?’ I said, ‘well, you're the one that has to stay home with them mostly. You know, you're the one doing all the work, you know.’ I says, ‘if that's what you want, I'm okay with that.’

So we got Damon and Dustin and Trish. So anyway, that put us with four foster kids in the house and three of my own. So we got seven teenagers living in our house.

Jaap: Oh geez.

Boysza: And anyway, like I said it was a five bedroom - large bedrooms, three story Victorian house. And we had plenty of room - huge dining room and TV room, formal dining room and kitchen and everything. So we had room for them. So we took ‘em in.

[01:57:29]

And like I said - the brother-sister combination - when the youngest boy turned 18 - the thing that kind of bothered me about those kids is their mother was a nurse, LPN or whatever, I think - some kind of nursing. Anyway, those children's problem was PKU. They were lactose intolerant when they were kids and their mother knew that and didn't keep 'em off of the milk products to start with. So that's what caused their mental problems - that part of it disturbed me - and then abandoned their children when, I think - Damon was the youngest of the three. He was 11 years old when we got ‘em, 11 or 12. So anyway, when he turned 18, mom shows back up in the picture and convinces him to move to Wyoming with her. She only had 'em in Wyoming about a month, and when she realized that she wasn't gonna get the social security money, she abandoned him again. Because once they moved to Wyoming, they lost all their social security benefits.

So Damon done quite well for himself, well quite well if you call it having to take on two dishwashing jobs to survive and help his other two siblings to survive. But anyway, they’re doing well. And Damon, when he gets his vacation, usually comes back to Butte and visits us. His dad just passed away here about a year and a half ago, his real dad. And he would come and visit them. Anyway, they always - they keep in contact. The little gal, our first foster care, she met a student from Tech. He was a dwarf, an engineer. They got married and moved to, I believe, it's San Jose, California. When she moved away, never contacted - her aunt lives here. So we kind of keep tabs on her that way. But once she moved away, never has had contact with us. And she happened to be in a wheelchair. I think she ran a little newsstand, on a street corner type newsstand, and the wheelchair - in traffic - got hit and lost one of her legs. So instead of using crutches, now she's relegated to the wheelchair all the time now.

And then our last foster care, another one that we were supposed to have for a couple weeks - this is Danny Ramsey . So anyway, he moved in with us. He was - a little different situation with him. His mother had passed away. His mother passed away and his father married another - anyway, he was an over the road trucker. So he didn't have the ability to have Danny. I'm not sure what his mental condition would be called, but very introverted, a little bit slower. Functional. I mean, he can dress himself, eat by himself, do stuff, but very introverted, wouldn't hardly talk. And he got him. So anyway, we got a house full of teenagers and he was, he wasn't a kid. When we got him, he was 32 years old. So anyway, Danny - and my son's pretty vocal and he was a junior in high school. So he started kind of mentoring Danny a little bit and prodding him and getting 'em to talk. And now Danny, like I said, for somebody that you couldn't get two words out of - if you talk about cars, you can't hardly shut 'em up.

[02:01:14]

So, anyway after our son graduated from high school and the other four kids had gone, we thought we would kind of transition ourselves out of the foster care. So it took us about a year and a half to find a group home that we were comfortable with enough to let Danny stay in. So anyway, he's in a group home in Anaconda now. But my wife is still - whatever - she has to sign for all the medical work that he has done for him. And he comes over on all the holidays. We have birthday parties for him. He comes over for Christmas and Thanksgiving and 4th of July and Easter. And when we have parties here, Danny's part of that. So yeah, all our kids would - whenever we done things, we all involved all the foster kids. Like I said - the same thing I grew up with with my dad - if my dad ate steak, we all eat steak. Same way with the foster kids. If I was eating steak, everybody at the table got to eat steak. You know, if we had to eat macaroni and cheese, because I happen to like macaroni and cheese, everybody got to eat macaroni cheese.

So anyway, they were a lot of fun. We went on a lot of trips with them, we’d take 'em to Elitch Gardens in Denver and through the Black Hills on trips, up to Glacier and through Yellowstone. Yep. A lot of fun with our kids.

Jaap: I think that's wonderful. That's amazing. I think that's so heartbreaking. Someone would - I can't imagine, you know, - I can't imagine putting kids in that type of situation.

Boysza: Yeah. So, but when I see what your blood relatives do to some of these kids - starting out with Shelly, what happened there. She was abandoned when she was about two months old, literally left on a doorstep in Boulder. And it was one of the aunts that questioned where that child was at, that finally located her and they knew who she was. And they started to deinstitutionalize places around the state. And Shelly got moved from Boulder to Billings. While she was in Billings, she developed a kidney infection. They couldn't do an operation without a blood relative signing. So the grandparents had to become guardians so that she could have that operation. After she had that operation, then they deinstitutionalized that facility and forced the grandparents to take her. That's how the grandparents wound up with her. And Shelly’s only mental problem - although she was physically handicapped - her mental problem was being institutionalized her entire life, being around other handicapped kids. She was smart enough, but she just didn't have the ability or the opportunity to be educated because she was institutionalized for the first, over 13 years, of her life.

Jaap: That's a big deal.

Boysza: Yeah. And you can really see the effect on it. And just a sweet person, you know, just sweet as can be. In fact, all our kids - even our last one, Danny, our last foster care - just you can't ask for nicer people, you know, and they appreciate everything you do for ‘em. So yeah. I recommend it to anybody, being a foster parent. Yeah. It's cool.

Jaap: Wow. Wow.

Grant: That's powerful. Mike, I wanted to go back in time a little bit and just kind of go through this string of questions I had about your earlier life. Working towards the end of my list here. Your time in high school - were you a good student?

Boysza: [immediately] No.

Jaap:[laughter] That didn't take long.

Grant: Okay. Next question.

[02:05:23]

Boysza: I liked math and I'm still pretty good at it, but I don’t - you might call my math, the new math. My math teachers would say, ‘well, how did you come to that answer?’ Well, I said, ‘well, I've done this, this and this.’ He said, ‘no, that's not the way you were taught to do that.’

You know, I said, but I said, ‘I come up with the same answer and it's right. SO I dunno what to tell you, you know?’ So that was kind of my thing. So anyway, I had - when I had an algebra teacher, Mr. Doherty - and I believe he had a nuclear background and was a very smart band. And after my father had passed away and I was in math class and, after I lost my father, I really started sloughing off in school. And he, and he kind of took me aside. He said, Mike, and he looked at me, he says, ‘get over it.’ And I thought, really? He said, he said, ‘you're way, you're way smarter than this.’ He says, ‘you just gotta,’ he said, ‘I know it's hard, but you just gotta get this behind you. Get back to doing what you're supposed to do.’

So that seemed like kind of raw at the time, but probably one of the better things that ever happened to me, you know? And after I got married, he used to walk past mine and Mickey's house before we had all the kids. But I’d see him walking home after school, you know, and he’d always stop and I’d stop him on the sidewalk and bullshit with him. You know, one of my old teachers that I kinda had an affinity for, even though he was a - at the time you might call him a dick. [laughter]

Grant: You need that sometimes.

Boysza: Yeah, and I don't know how his family situation ever turned out, you know. Maybe he needed a kick in the ass too, so that's what I call it. And then, playing football - I think one of the good things - I like to swim. So I used to swim after school almost every day, at the end of every school day.

The guy that was in charge of that was Bill Hawk. He was a track coach and assistant football coach at Butte High. And his kids were good athletes and he was an excellent athlete at the time. But yeah, I think that swim class after school had a lot to do with helping me get through my depressions.

Grant: I wanted to ask about football cause I never knew that you played. And so what was like to be on the winning team?

Boysza: Like I tell everybody, I says I was end and guard. End of the bench and guard of the water buckets. When I played on a championship team, in high school, I weighed 143 pounds. After I got outta high school, I grew four inches and put on a few pounds. Most kids grow when they’re a senior, you know, but actually, after I got out of the Navy, I started to grow. You know, so I didn't get my growth spurt until I was 21, 22 years old.

So I was never a star athlete by any stretch of imagination. But I always looked at - it’s a championship team, but you still need to practice against somebody. In Butte high, they have, like the underclassmen, a meat squad. The job of the meat squad is to learn the plays of the team that you're gonna play on this coming weekend. So you would have their - the basic plays of the team that you're gonna play against. And the meet squad has to learn these plays and then run 'em against your own team. 

[02:09:14]

And that's how they would practice every week. You know? So the better you done your job on the meat squad, the better the team was gonna be. So even though I'm not a star player, I felt that me and the 20 other guys that I played with were instrumental in that championship as much as the Marty Seavers and Glen Welches and Marty Judds that were the star players and superb athletes. You don't win championships unless you got great athletes with you. But I think everybody along the line has their little bit to contribute to it.

Grant: We just touched on your mother very briefly. You know, you said she was waitressing. I just wanted to hear more about her in general.

Boysza: I think she was a little rebellious, more of a tomboy. Probably the hardest I was ever hit was by my mother. I was teasing her and giving her a bad time. One of the things I've learned not to do because I've done the same thing with my wife - is to suck my chin out and say, go ahead, hit me, hit me right there. And my mother did, only she didn't hit me in the chin. She hit me in the top of the collarbone and dropped me to my knees. And my wife - she didn't go for the shoulder. She hit me in the lips. In fact, I thought she dislocated my jaw when she hit me. So anyway, and it was well deserved. I was teasing her. [laughs]

But my mother - she liked to wrestle. She was kind of a ruffian. Not a very big woman, but didn't take any crap from anybody. When she was a girl, she jumped on the back bumper of a Model A to get a ride down the street. And hooking cars without any ice - fell off the back of that car and face planted herself in the street and lost all of her teeth.

Jaap: Oh no!

Boysza: That's how my mother wound up with the false teeth, hooking on the bumper of a car and falling off. So anyway. Yeah, she was - like I said, after I lost my dad, she was my best friend. When I was a carpenter and working - anything I never needed a hand with. If I needed an extra hand or a partner, I could always call my mother and she would show up. Being not a big person, but that extra hand - and she would work shoulder to shoulder with you, as long as you needed her.

[02:12:03]

After my father passed away, we kind of finished - my dad had built the addition on the house - the half of the house that I'm living in now was all new. But the kitchen wasn't done - that was contracted out. But like to finish the bathroom and the bedroom, that type of thing. Yeah. Myself and my mom  - you asked about being a carpenter - it was almost out of necessity to finish the house up. Yeah.

Grant: So, and is she buried in Butte?

Boysza: She is. Yeah. I live on Montana street and all my family's right across the street in the cemetery. So it's from  - my son's twin girls are there, my grandmother, grandfather, mother, and father, brother, and sister. So the whole family's there, all in the neighborhood.

Grant: You touched on this a little bit, but I, I just wanted to see - how did the household change when he died? You know, how did things change for you?

Boysza: Well, at the time my sister had gotten married and - the hunting season before my dad got killed, myself and my dad and my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, we were down the other side of Dillon. And he rolled his Jeep over and crushed his leg. So my sister and brother-in-law were living in the house when my dad died. So there was extra people at the house. I don’t know if that helps or not, but I know that after a while my mother had her fill of having extra people in the house that she didn't want there. So anyway - and then my brother-in-law's leg healed up. So he was a boilermaker and went on so he could go back to work and they could move on with their family.

But it was - I don’t know, there's always some - my mother always had something to do to the house. You know, like I say, it wasn't quite complete when my dad passed away. So there was always that little aspect of it that, you know - we're gonna work on this and work on that or whatever. So that's kind of what was done, you know, either painting or doing the actual framing, putting things together.

[02:14:43]

So, and because I had taken some shop classes in junior high and high school, you know - at least I could read the tape measure. [laughter]. And working - like I say, being little when my dad was working on the house - when he tore down the house in Meaderville for all the lumber for the addition, and pulling all the nails - the main structure of the house in Meaderville at one time was - it had something to do with the railroad, like a conductor's shack or whatever. But it was all rough cut lumber and all square nails.

And that house was tore down from the inside out, so that - because there was such, not vandalism, theft of the building materials. Because there's a lot of houses being tore down in Meaderville. And if you had lumber outside your house and had to leave it, you'd come back the next day and it might not be there.Somebody would come by and help themselves do it. So to avoid that, my dad took this house down from the inside out. So when it comes to the last of - and the curtains on the windows and everything until the shell. So in the last part of the house - like implode the exterior walls - it was basically about a four day process to collapse what was left of the house down to just the subfloor on it. And everything that we were taking off - that house didn't have lath and plaster in it. It had what was the beginning of Sheetrock and like a cardboard stuff they used to put on the walls in the day. We took the floor furnace out of that house, and everything went in the basement, no trash outside the house, all the scrap and everything that we had there all went in the basement. So when the house finally came down and the subfloor was there to be torn off, everything was basically cleaned up. Everything was outta sight.

But I was allowed to - my dad told me, you know, for pulling all the nails and stacking all the lumber that the lumber that I had was - I could do what I wanted with it. I built a cabin behind the house I live in now. Me and my friends in the neighborhood started with railroad ties and dug holes. That was the corner post - four railroad ties. But I had the lumber to sheet it, just like my house is now, sheeted solid outside and inside. And it had a roof - put a window in it. And the Sheetrock that we salvaged out of the house there, brought it and sheetrocked the inside of that cabin, with a wood floor. Dug a hole in basement. That had a wood floor with a basement in it, underneath that cabin. That cabin was about 12 foot square with about an eight by eight basement, about seven foot deep in it with a wood floor over it.

Another place where we used to be able to throw snowballs and water balloons at cars and - some place to hide. When they run in the cabin and there's nobody in the cabin when they come in the door, because we’re already in the trap door, down the basement, you know, with a carpet over it. We had a couch in it, a wood stove - didn't have electricity to it, but it was - a neighborhood kid come down from the Boulevard. They were on the north side of the tracks. We were on the south - we were on the good side of the tracks. He come down and I think he had about a ‘47 or whatever pickup. And he was gonna push our cabin over. And he drove up against the corner of it - it had cedar siding on the outside of it too, by the way. Anyway, he pushed up against the corners. He's gonna push it over. Well, the railroad ties were buried. They were switch ties, so they're in the ground about three and a half feet besides sticking out of the ground about seven feet. So when he drove up against it and pushed on it, the cabin didn't move. So he backed up about four feet and took a little run at it and hit it with the bumper - cabin didn't move. So he backed up about 15 feet and took a run at it - caved the front of his truck in and the radiator started leaking. And he limped his truck home. And that was the end of trying to tear our cabin down.

Jaap: Oh, that's great.

Boysza: Eventually, when the people bought the property where the cabin sat, they were gonna tear it down and they decided it was easier to burn it down than to tear it down, there were so much lumber in it. It was a well built - and it just - all the nails that I pulled out, I saved all the nails, put 'em in a bucket, straightened all the nails out. That's how we built the cabin, all the used nails.

Jaap: Oh my goodness. That's amazing.

[02:19:47]

Grant: I'm trying to imagine what it's like for your dad to go to work one day and then just be gone suddenly, you know.

Boysza: It's uh…I don’t know - there's a void there. And I think it's kind of hard to describe. I posted something on Facebook the other day - had something about memorializing your father. You know, I miss him every day. And there's not very many days go by that I don't think about him. You know, think about what would you like to have 'em now, or what he would think about what I've done with my life, my accomplishments, you know…satisfied, disappointed, whatever, and I try to live my life so it's not too much of a disappointment to either one of my parents. You know, to do good things for people and paid it forward.
Grant: Well, you've done that.

Boysza: God, I hope so. [laughs] You know, like I said - and the big thing is not to be selfish about that. If you give your time…and be glad to give you your time. If you have free time and somebody can use your talents, let 'em use your talents, no matter what. And if they want to compensate for you, that's one thing, but if they can't afford to compensate for you and they still need your help, help, 'em. It's not a big deal, you know.

And something - you're usually more satisfied by the giving of your time, than by the contracting of your time, I think. You can look back and say, I was a part of that, but not just a part of that because I'm a part of that. I'm a part of that because there's hopefully 20 or 50 other people that are trying to be a part of that, to help the collective, so to speak.

Grant: Did you have any other questions Aubrey?

Jaap: This is great. We could talk to you all day. I feel like, but yeah.

Boysza: I haven't even gotten into hunting and fishing and golfing. [laughter]

Grant: It's hard to encapsulate a life in two hours.

Boysza: Oh man. Yeah. 

Grant: So, yep. Well, thanks for sharing that Mike.

Boysza: Yep. Next week we'll get into the hunting and fishing part.

Jaap: There you go. Okay.

Grant: Yeah. Sounds good.

Boysza: That it?

Grant: I think so.

Jaap: Perfect.

Grant: Thanks Mike.

Boysza: Thanks guys.

[END OF RECORDING]